President Bush’s August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo.
The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 – a month before the Sept. 11 attacks – said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press.
[…]
The sources said the presidential memo included a series of bullet items that brought Bush through a history of mostly uncorroborated intelligence that cited al-Qaida’s interest in hijacking planes to win the release of Islamic extremists who had been arrested in 1998 and 1999 as well as the travelings of suspected al-Qaida operatives, include some U.S. citizens, in and out of the United States. It suggested al-Qaida might have a support system in place on U.S. soil, the sources said.
The document also included FBI analytical judgments that some al-Qaida activities were consistent with preparation for airline hijackings or other types of attacks, some members of the commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks said earlier this week.
The second-to-last bullet told the president that there were numerous – at least 70 – terror-related investigations under way by the FBI in 2001 involving matters or people on U.S. soil, the sources said.
And the final bullet told the president of a recent intelligence report indicating al-Qaida operatives were trying to get inside the United States to carry out an attack with explosives, the sources said. There was no specifics about the timing or target, the sources said.
This finally explains why just 5 weeks later, one day after the attacks, Bush dragged Richard Clarke into a room and insisted he investigate Iraq’s possible involvement. You wouldn’t have wanted him to go off half cocked and blame the wrong guy…
If anyone still doubts that politics has left the realm of reality and entered the world of show business, I would suggest that they tune into “Hardball” where television critic Tom Shales is critiquing Condi Rice’s “performance” yesterday. He rated the hearings for drama and suspense and reviewed the various exchanges between the commissioners and Condi as dramatic scenes and sequences.
Personally, I didn’t think there was enough sex and violence in that show. Thankfully there was the gory Iraq footage of bloodied marines and iraqi civilians later in the day to sate my bloodlust. It’s almost as good as Survivor. And that footage of the Japanese hostages is just super. “Will they be rescued or will the bad guys burn them alive?” Stay tuned….
As for sex, I’m just glad that President Clinton testified in secret immediately after Condi, so we can assume that some press ho will report a breathless account of his “testimony” at some point (they always do.) All I can say is those commissioners emerged later in the day looking downright limp with satisfaction:
HAMILTON: Well, it was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. And I think every commissioner would agree with that. He was exceedingly generous with his time, very candid in his discussions of even the most delicate kinds of relationships … I think the commissioners were all favorably impressed, both Republican and Democrat, and very appreciative of the amount of time that he gave to us.
KEAN: And he was just totally frank — totally frank, totally honest, and forthcoming… he said, “I’ll stay just as long as you all want me to.”
As if there wasn’t enough trouble already, Sean-Paul has an interesting item this morning about the shaky state of Iraq’s finances:
Ahead of a deadline for the transfer of power, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s reporting of Iraqi finances falls short of international standards of accounting and transparency, said a report by the Open Society Institute’s Iraq Revenue Watch project. The report, Opening the Books: Transparent Budgeting for Iraq, urges the CPA and the Iraqi Governing Council to make further improvements in accordance with these standards before a new Iraqi government is elected in 2005.
[…]
Iraq’s 2004 budget, produced by the CPA and Iraq’s Ministries of Finance and Planning, is the country’s first full-year financial plan since Saddam Hussein’s removal. However, it lacks key information about state-owned enterprises, financing for sub-national governments, and contingencies that pose significant risks to Iraq’s public purse. There is no contingency planning for what Iraq will do if oil prices fall or exports are disrupted, if hostilities resume, or foreign aid fails to materialize
Well, convicted felon Ahmad Chalabi’s crony Kamil Mubdir al-Kaylani is the minister of finance and his nephew, Ali’Alawi, is the Minister of Trade, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
However, since Ken Lay was unavailable, the CPA installed right wing nut and GOP hack David M. Nummy as the senior advisor to the treasury so it can be asumed that all of the safeguards and transparency we have come to expect from the Bush administration are being employed in the new Iraqi economy. There’s nothing to worry about.
Atrios points out that it’s a little bit cheeky of some people to preface their criticisms of the current situation in Iraq with “as a war supporter” since that designation automatically makes their judgment suspect:
One should not have to have been “pro-war” to be a critic of what’s going on. I’m tired of people prefacing their criticisms with phrases like “as someone who supported this war…” Well, you were wrong. Why should we listen to you now?
Plenty of us knew that this neocon claque was going to screw this thing up and said so at the time. Suddenly realizing that Bush is incompetent and that his advisors are living in a dream world is a year late and 200 billion dollars short.
One of Rice’s answers today caught my attention. She was excusing why the Bush administration hadn’t acted on what she considered a “vague” threat:
…when you cannot tell people where a hijacking might occur under what circumstances I can tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think about what you could do, for instance, to harden cockpits. That would have made a difference. We weren’t going to harden cockpits in the three months that we had a threat spike. [emphasis added]]
Granted, it’s unlikely that they would have undertaken this job based upon vague threats, but it certainly was possible to achieve it if they had. And, today we found out that Norm Mineta didn’t even know there was a threat spike.
I realize that the airline industry was dragged into fixing those doors kicking and screaming and short of catastrophe they were unwilling to budge. Regardless, it’s a bit rich that Condi thinks that previous administrations should have done this, but not hers. Sadly for all of us, 9/11 happened on her watch, not theirs, and she was the one getting the highjacking warnings and had the head of CIA and her counterterorism chief running around screaming bloody murder.
Being a wholly owned subsidiary of US Industry made the Bush administration more able to accomplish this task than the previous one. Like Nixon and China, Bush should have been the guy to force the industry to bite the bullet. And it certainly makes you wonder why Condi and Company still haven’t done anything about this:
Even though small commercial aircraft are more likely to be lost in a shoulder-fired missile attack, two of the jet aircraft most familiar to American travelers have proven surprisingly vulnerable: Of the five Boeing 727s and 737s that have been hit by shoulder-launched missiles, three have been shot down, and in one of them 130 people died just after takeoff in Angola.
Despite the demonstrated risk that these missiles pose, no meaningful changes have been made to commercial aircraft design or flight operations to reduce it. While the president and other officials travel on aircraft equipped with countermeasures systems that protect them against a missile attack, most Americans do not. “The threats are real and the countermeasures exist,” a retired government anti-terrorism expert told Salon, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Some of us are perplexed as to why a greater sense of urgency hasn’t been demonstrated in securing our airspace.”
This has been bugging the hell out of me as well. It’s one thing for Kerry to allow Bush to swing in the wind on the pre-9/11 stuff. Let the widows and the whistleblowers take that on. The less partisanship the better. But, Iraq is something else entirely.
Iraq is a crisis and an ongoing problem and it isn’t enough for it to be seen blowing up on television. Kerry has got to convince people that Bush is the problem and that he can fix it. Instead, he’s acting clueless and disengaged.
I sincerely hope that they are not planning to re-run the 2002 midterm campaign because we will lose again. A tie goes to the codpiece. You can’t ignore national security. Not only is it a more glamorous subject for the news media to cover, it is also a clearer demonstration of presidential leadership. With a war going on, a presidential candidate simply has to meet it head on or look like a sissy even if the other guy is self-destructing.
The Salon article linked above says:
A Kerry spokesman told Salon on Thursday that it’s incumbent on Bush — not Kerry — to address the crisis in Iraq. “What has the president said about this?” the Kerry spokesman asked. “He needs to explain what his policy is, what his plan is to address what’s going on right now. But he’s been down on his ranch in Crawford. The spotlight isn’t on John Kerry. The spotlight needs to be on Bush. He’s the president, and he’s the person who has carved out these policies.”
Bullshit. The spotlight may “need” to be on Bush, but Americans want to know what the alternative thinks is the problem and what he thinks needs to be done. This is a total pussy response and it is simply not good enough. And it isn’t just the campaign flack. Check out Kerry himself on Judy Woodruff yesterday, and note how she used his dramatic line from his congressional testimony against him. It was a terrible moment:
WOODRUFF: …Well, as we know, the would-be presumed Democratic nominee for president, Senator John Kerry, has often criticized the Bush administration for what he says is a unilateral approach in Iraq. I spoke with Senator Kerry just a little while ago and I started by asking for his reaction to Bush advisers who say they are already doing much of what Kerry advocates and that his criticism amounts to what they call phony politics.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KERRY: They’re doing it in such a frankly, inept way, Judy, that they’re not really inviting anybody sufficiently to the table. People don’t want to go to work for Paul Bremer and the provisional authority. What you need to do is have a transfer of authority for the reconstruction and for the transformation of the government to a legitimate international entity. Every day that goes by that this administration has refused to do it has complicated the doing of it. They, in fact, have made it much harder to accomplish what could have been accomplished and should have been accomplished a long time ago. I refuse to accept that logic from them, and I laid out this plan months ago. They’re trying to do it through the backdoor, through almost through the keyhole rather than openly coming forward and acknowledging they need help.
WOODRUFF: So Senator…
KERRY: The Arab countries have an interest…
WOODRUFF: What exactly right now would you do differently?
KERRY: Right now, what I would do differently is, I mean, look, I’m not the president, and I didn’t create this mess so I don’t want to acknowledge a mistake that I haven’t made. The president needs to step up and acknowledge that there are difficulties and that the world needs to be involved and they need to reverse their policy that countries that were not involved in supporting us are not going to be part of the reconstruction.
I mean, that’s a terrible message to send to countries. They need to go to the world and say we’re not going to have an American authority that is — creating this new government. We’re going to have an international authority that will help develop the new government and absent a legitimate effort to globalize this presence, they’re going to continue to have the very problems they have today.
This was predictable, and there are many of us who have said that this is exactly the kind of thing that will happen absent a legitimate kind of international presence.
WOODRUFF: Senator, you said it was a mistake, not your mistake, but you called it a mistake and also said you wouldn’t cut and run. You’ve acknowledged there may need to be more troops. If there were a President Kerry, he might have to send in more troops. I want to ask you the question you asked during the Vietnam war. How do you ask a man and today that would be a man or a woman, to be the last to die for a mistake?
KERRY: Well, the mistake that I’m talking about, Judy, is not the effort to fight and have — not the effort to have a stable Iraq. The mistake is in the way that they are going about it. So I would change the way you’re going about it. I mean again and again, I have said, I laid out with great specificity months ago the steps that they should have taken, and I believe that those people who have been in touch with people in the international community know there is a different and better way to put together an effort that could legitimize a government in Iraq. If we insist on doing this through our provisional government authority, if we insist on being totally in control the way we are today, we’re going to having an impossible time legitimately bringing people to the table.
Just shoot me now. This is going to be a long campaign.
Why can’t he say, “I’m not sure what George W. Bush could do to help the situation other than delay the June 30th date until after the election so that another president can be elected to replace him. Because the problem, Judy, is that nobody in the world believes a thing George W. Bush says anymore and that includes the Iraqis.
If I were in office, we wouldn’t be in the mess because I would never make it a policy to unnecessarily alienate the entire world. Nor would I trust those who only feed me optimistic scenarios. I would never allow our military to operate at anything less than the levels that are needed to achieve the mission, and I would listen to the military experts, not unqualified ideologues like Newt Gingrich, when making those decisions.
I’m afraid, Judy, that George W. Bush has gotten himself into a mess that he cannot resolve because of his previous actions. I trust our military to hang on and do the fine work that they always do. They will do what is necessary to ensure that the country is secure in the short term. But this crisis untimately requires a political solution and George W. Bush has run out of political options. A new president and a fresh start is what’s required to fix this problem. Only then can rebuild the trust of our allies and go back to the drawing board with all the parties and set a proper course for a free and democratic Iraq.”
I’m sure he and others can come up with better langauge. But, the message is that the problem is George W. Bush. When he is replaced a whole range of options become available that are now foreclosed because of the world’s mistrust of his intelligence, his motives, his integrity and his ability.
Or he could ignore it and keep talking about the budget deficit while CNN is showing marines getting picked off by the dozens, live and in color. That looks to me like the campaign equivalent of Junior reading that story about the goat to the second graders while the WTC was collapsing. It doesn’t show leadership. And that’s the theme of this election.
According to this article, “Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia are filled with young volunteers eager to fight the US-led occupation forces.”
Outside, hundreds of young men chanting “Allahu Akbar,” or God is the Greatest, listened to another cleric shouting vows to fight the occupation from the rooftop.
A Mehdi Army spokesman, Amer al-Husseini, said the militia had orders to stay calm, but warned that “after they bombarded our headquarters and prayer room with Apache helicopters and tanks, we are ready to resume combat until the last drop of our blood.”
“We will never let anyone arrest our leader Moqtada Sadr,” he added, alluding a coalition arrest warrant for the firebrand in connection with the murder of a rival cleric after Saddam Hussein (news – web sites)’s regime was ousted last April.
Following several days of clashes with the US-led occupation forces across the country during which the Mehdi Army seized police stations and government offices, the coalition has vowed to destroy the militia.
“We will attack to destroy the Mehdi Army. Our offensive operations will be deliberate, they will be precise, and they will be powerful and they will succeed,” said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.
Sadr, who is only in his early 30s and whose father and great-uncle were killed by Saddam’s regime, formed the Mehdi Army last summer after the US-led military coalition invaded Iraq (news – web sites).
[…]
A steady flow of new volunteers have been presenting themselves to mosques and Sadr offices in defiance of the coalition’s ban on militias.
Its ranks are largely composed of desperate and unemployed young men from poor Shiite areas — notably Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City which switched its name from Saddam City after the fall of the deposed regime to honor the firebrand’s slain father.
Many are also from southern Shiite cities which suffered brutal repression at the hands of Saddam’s Sunni Muslim-dominated regime.
The militiamen often wear black pants and shirts, as well as green headbands symbolizing Islam. They are fiercely attached to Sadr’s guidance and his family’s lineage of revered clerics.
Their recent fierce battles with the coalition revealed they mostly have access to light weapons, including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns.
“We have light weapons, but our most lethal weapon is our faith in God. Nothing can defeat God’s will,” said one militiaman, Ali Hussein.
“We started new training last week. But we don’t really need to train the new recruits. Saddam had built a militarized society over decades. So we were trained by the best killer,” he said.
Let’s hope that this does not become a fraternity of aimless young men because there are a huge number of them in Iraq. The demographics of Iraq are not heartening:
Iraq is a young country: Sixty-six percent of Iraqis 15 and up are under age 35, compared with 36 percent of Americans age 15 and up.
After today’s revelation that Condi and Andy didn’t follow up with the FBI after the July “domestic threat” meeting, next week’s testimony by Louis Freeh, Thomas Pickard and John Ashcroft should be much more interesting. The commission obviously has homed in on a serious weakness:
Commission officials said their evidence showed that Mr. Ashcroft had taken little interest in counterterrorism before Sept. 11 and, days before the attacks, had rejected pleas from senior F.B.I. officials for more money for counterterrorism even as intelligence agencies warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attack.
They said the commission may make public a series of internal memorandums written by Thomas J. Pickard, who was the F.B.I. acting director in the summer of 2001, criticizing what he perceived to be Mr. Ashcroft’s disinterest in counterterrorism. Mr. Pickard, who did not return phone calls seeking comment, is also expected to testify next week.
But, of course, there were those structural problems, so nothing could have been done.
I don’t know if anyone got this subtle point in Condi’s testimony, but it appears that there were structural impediments in the US government that meant that no one could have prevented 9/11. She did everything possible, but the structural problems meant nothing could be done. Because of the structural problems. If they had known that the terrorists were going to attack Washington and new York, they would have moved heaven and earth to stop them. But, there were these structural problems. So there was nothing they could do.
Oh and also, the August PDB was not a “warning” it was an “historical assessment.” So, even though this “historical assessment” entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States” was undertaken during the very time that George Tenet was running through the White House with his hair on fire about an impending terrorist attack, there was no reason to be alarmed. The president wanted to stop swatting flies, so they put this little bug in his ear. It was no big deal.
If only Richard Clarke had tried to “buck her up” before his September 4th memo (in which he raised the spectre of hundreds of dead Americans) about how the bureaucracy would fight implementing the terrorism policy. Maybe then she would have been more aware of how to deal with the national security bureaucracy. But then, that whole “shaking the trees” thing is bs, so probably not.
Besides, the Clinton administration should have fixed the structural problems and locked up the cockpit doors long before the Bush administration came into office. They couldn’t possibly have done anything about all that in only 233 days. They had tax cuts and missile defense to take care of.
I can’t even grasp that we lived through it. I don’t think it’s hit me yet.
What makes it worse was that we kept trying to get reinforcements and air cover and evac, and eventually we had to do it ourselves. We called up around 1500 because it became apparent that we weren’t going to get out, requesting air cover. We thought it would be over by 1700. By then, though, we realized something else was going on—darkness falls at seven. We heard that the whole province was under control, and that Sadr’s representatives had offered a cease fire while they negotiated. No other government building in the province was not under his control. Our little force, outmanned and outgunned, held him off for better than twenty hours, and then slipped out under his nose. He wanted to keep us there, be his bargaining chips while he tightened his fist around the province. And that fucking governor went along with it. We eventually found out the governor was contacting the command and telling them, no, no Evac behind our backs. He wanted US Marines dropped off and the civilians put in the helicopters while they secured his villa and offices. His own people were running around trying to arrange Evac, and kept counter-manding him. Then he’d go on the air and countermand them. I kept overhearing conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear.
I can’t describe what it’s like. You’re wearing twenty pounds of gear in helmet and vest, and the sound the bombs make screeching in seems not so much audible as it sensory. You feel it first. You know what sound a bullet makes going through the air? SWWWWWiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhh. It seems to burrow through the air with an odd slowness, as if it were greasy and that makes it slip through the air. If I were 11 Bravo, I’d have earned my combat infantrymen’s badge, except of course the fact that I’m a woman means I don’t get stuff like that. The way the Army has it set up, it doesn’t matter if you do the job, if you’re a woman—-you’re not supposed to do it, so you don’t get acknowledgement if you do.
We didn’t sleep last night. The cease fire lasted seven hours. The attack resumed at one AM with RPGs and machine guns opening up on us from across the other bank of the river. We kept calling to Higher for Air Support, for Evac, for reinforcements. They’d say, “Sure, they’re on their way…” Twenty minutes later, we’d find out–not be told—that in fact they weren’t. This happened about eight times. During the time they weren’t reinforcing us, the enemy mined the bridge that’s the sole way out of there with IEDs. Then Higher ordered us to Evac our way across that bridge. It was explained to them over and over that the bridge was mined. They’d listen, then issue the order again.
This must be that hi-tech third wave electronic battlefield that Rummy and Newtie are so proud of. I didn’t know it was faith-based, too.