The question of the week, and likely for weeks into the future, is what did the President know? And when did he know it. The Administration is trying to side-step this, and is having a prety godd time of it. People simply don't want to believe that the President of the United States knew an attack was coming and did nothing.
I've seen four main tactics:
1. We thought the warnings were about "traditional" hijackings -- as if those are ok, and we should allow them to happen. Nevere mind that people get killed during them. I guess that Navy Seal that was beaten to death and tossed onto the tarmac was an "acceptable" loss.
2. Criticism of the President is entirely political. You people are forgetting who is in charge here. We're fighting a war. How dare you questions us. No we won't tell you anything about anything.
3. The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming! Rumsfeld, by way of Robin Williams, "We don't know where, we don't know when, but something bad...is going to happen".
4. It's all Clinton's fault. Yeah, the Clintonites chased Ossama all over the globe, and Sandy Berger gave Condi Rice a long briefing about the dangers of al-Qaeda, and there was the Rudman-Hollings report (which we scrapped), and we took $58 million away from the FBI's counter-terror guys, but it's all Bill's fault.
Let's take a look at these thoughtfully:
We thought the warnings were for traditional hijackings.
And we still did nothing. Sure the FAA may have gottena warning, and they claim to have passed that on to the airlines, but no one told the airports. Having worked at an airport with some dedicated people, I can say that at least in some places, changes would have been made. It would've been hit or miss, but some extra actions could have been taken.
If you accept that we first started getting warnings in April 2001, we still had six months to implement security changes at the nation's airports. And we didn't. You can claim that six months wasn't enough time for sweeping changes (and you might be right), but we did nothing.
It turns out that we had warnings that al-Qaeda hijackings would be different a lot earlier earlier than April of 2001.
Consider:
* Yossef Bodansky, director of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare in the US House of Representatives, said in 1993, "The training of suicide pilots started in the Busher air base in Iran in the early 1980s with some 90 Pilatus PC-7 aircraft purchased from Switzerland."
* According to a former trainee in Wakilibad, one of the exercises included having an Islamic Jihad detachment seize a transport aircraft. Trained air crews from among the terrorists would then crash the airliner into a selected objective -- Bodansky
*In December 1994, terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden hijacked Air France Flight 8969. They loaded the plane with explosives and extra fuel, with the intent of ramming it into the Eiffel Tower. Commandos stormed the plane and killed the hijackers. -- NBC News
* Ramsey Youssef, who masterminded the bombing of the WTC, had detailed plans to hijack and crash commercial airliners into buildings in the US, and destroy 12 airliners during international flights over a two-day period. This plot was discovered by Philippine intelligence agents in 1995, and to the FBI. The plot was disclosed during the 1997 trial of Youssef. -- Boston Globe
* A 1999 US intelligence report said that, Osama bin Laden would hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon, CIA Headquarters, and the White House. -- AP
* During the investigation into the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, intelligence officials and FBI were alerted that two bin Laden associates had been trained as pilots. The FBI was warned in August 2001 that Zacarias Moussauoi was only interested in steering a plane-and specifically asked about New York City air space.
* David Shippers, who led the impeachment case against Bill Clinton, warned Attorney General John Ashcroft and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert that he had proof regarding a plot to use hijacked commercial airliners to ram the White House and Capitol. -- Info Wars radio program
All criticism is political
Well, yeah, some of it. This is where the Democrats get to remind people that the supposedly national defense oriented people in power were more or less responsible for the failures to stop the attacks, with the hopes of getting their guys back in office. This is how power politics is played. Hopefully, they'll be able hold themselves to scoring their points in a civilized manner, while at the same time holding those responsible for dropping the ball on this responsible.
This means that the Attorney General must be held accountable for telling DOJ employees to avoid public transportation starting in July, but not warning anybody else that there may be a problem. If I'd had the warnings Ashcroft's boys got, and for some reason decided not to warn the public, I'd have wanted more FBI and ATF agents on planes, not less. Then they get the opportunity to show that they're on top of things by breaking up hijackings. I can hear it now, "We're so good, we didn't need to warn anyone".
It also means that the middle managers at FBI that decided not to pursue the flight school angle should lose their jobs. With the years of notice they had, and specific pilots in training to keep an eye on, there is no excuse for not doing so.
Condoleeza Rice should also be on the block. I usually like her, and in her area of expertise she's really talented and knowledgeable, but she totally discounted all existing information and analysis on al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If nothing else, the nonsense about "traditional" hijackings should see her on the way out.
The leadership at both CIA and FBI should be removed. In fact, we need to clean house at both institutions. They all dropped the ball. If this means bringing people out of retirement, new recruiting, and getting help from the UK and others to create organizations where the warnings we had aren't discounted again, so be it.
The President. Sure he's popular. Sure Cheney is worse. But he was up to this to his eybrows. Even if he didn't know, the people he put in place did. This is one of those "the buck stops here" situations. He provided the direction for a lot of the folks who dropped the ball. The successes are his, and so are their failures.
Dick Cheney. Do I really have to explain this one? Oil ties. Power behind the throne. Refusal to release information. Court Orders to release energy documents. Despite what Howard Fineman said on MSNBC.com, Cheney is more like Darth Vader than Yoda. Or should that be Emporer Palpatine? That's Lord Sidious for people who've been to Attack of ther Clones.
Terror Warnings
How better to keep people from howling for your head over the above issues than to scare them to death?
At lunch today, I found a note tacked to the door with the new warning about bombs in apartment buildings, along with FEMA's sample Family Disaster plan. While it's nice to know that the management cares enough about their insurance liability to warn me, I live more than twenty miles from anywhere. Why would anyone blow up a small apartment complex in Longmont?
Add to that Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfield's vague "it's not if, it's when" warnings, and the sudden Statue of LIberty, Brooklin Bridge, Northeastern banks, and 4th of July warnings, and we're wagging the dog so hard that its tail may come clean off.
Give me some real warnings not these piddly, unsubstantiated attempts to cause me to live in fear. Seriously, does anyone really pay attention to these things? Do they work to scare people enough that they forget about all other issues? I sincerely hope not.
It's Clinton's Fault
Although the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress would like this to be true, it just isn't. The last (legitimate) Administration to hold office lived in deadly fear of Ossama's crowd. They used satellites and submarines and cruise missiles, and covert ops teams to try to get Ossama bin Laden (or his head). They even wanted to freeze assets of groups supporting him --- back in 1997. Yeah, they didn't do enough.
This coming from the people who cut the counter-terror budget at FBI by $58 million dollars, and scrapped every piece of Clinton information o planning related to terrorism or al-Qaeda. I hope everyone else is as impressed by the work the Bush Administration accomplished to combat terroris before September of 2001.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Chin051902/chin051902.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Ruppert051902/ruppert051902.html http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/05/22_ashcroft.html