Comments on The August 6, 2001 Memo and Bush.

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I guess you didn't read my response previously.

MJ: I said that Bush should have called all the important department heads together (CIA, FBI, FAA, etc.) and "shaken the trees" as Richard Clarke said he should have!

If he had done that, we might have learned that two of the hijackers were known to be in the USA by the CIA, he might have learned that the FBI knew where these two hijackers were living and what their telephone number was and that they could have been put under surveillance, he might also have learned from Kathleen Rowley, an FBI agent who was screaming about an Arab named Moussaoui who was taking flight lessons on jetliners in Minnesota without wanting to learn how to land!

With enough smart people in the room, they might have connected the dots and prevented 9/11. I know it's a long shot but we might have had a chance. The reality is that Bush did nothing! He went fishing and golfing all of August. He was derelict in his duty and there's no two ways about it!

posted by spyinthesky on April 15, 2004 at 7:05 AM | link to this | reply

Spy . . .

You're absolutely right that the August 6th memo was part of a larger context of alerts . . . and given that President Bush commissioned that memo I think that it's safe to say he was aware of the problem. Oh, sure, it's all nice and damning of the president when you only list his vacation time . . . but you still have yet to provide me with any concrete policy he could have adopted that would have made us more secure in the run-up to September 11th . . . you say that "at least he could say he tried." . . . denying that he did try can be nothing more than willing ignorance of facts that are all too plainly in existence. The fact that he was the very first president to commission his national security staff to construct a concrete plan for taking out al Qaeda (NSPD-9, partially declassified, released in classified form 9/4/2001) shows that he was trying to do something!

. . . give me something . . . anything concrete, that the president could have adopted as policy, given the information he had in hand at the time, that would have made us more secure against al Qaeda.

. . . given your apparent lack of ability to do so (along with any of his other critics) I'd say that an attack on the President for this tragedy is indefensible, rather than, as you assert, the reverse being the case.

posted by mjdaniels on April 15, 2004 at 5:49 AM | link to this | reply

Context is always everything.

Dear mj & dum & evil:

Your defense of president Bush's dereliction of duty prior to 9/11 is truly indefensible. What could Bush have done? He could have taken the warnings given to him all summer of 2001 seriously. The PDB wasn't something that suddenly appeared without any foundation, it was part of a CONTEXT of alerts that were so frantic that the CIA Director was described as having his "hair on fire" when he delivered them!

Bush has gone on vacation more than any other president in three plus years in the WH. He went fishing after reading the PDB of August 6, 2001 and he went golfing the next day. Given what was going on, he should have been back in Washington, DC and called a meeting with the heads of the CIA, FBI, FAA, Immigration and other effected agencies. It maybe that 9/11 still would not have been prevented, but at least he could say he tried. The truth is, Bush did nothing!

posted by spyinthesky on April 15, 2004 at 4:24 AM | link to this | reply

Very nice rebuttal, Dems . . .

. . . I would love to hear one person . . . just one . . . give an example of a specific policy action the President could have made at any time in the first 8 months of his administration, based on the information he had in hand at the time, that would have had a demonstrable effect on the events of September 11th.

posted by mjdaniels on April 14, 2004 at 10:04 PM | link to this | reply

NY Times lies about PDB FACTS

To wit, here’s a rundown of the PDB:
 
 
*Near the top of the briefing, Bush was told, “Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US.”  Sounds “historical.”
 
*Soon after is a morsel that Bush critics, which obviously includes the Times, have chewed endlessly: “Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington.”  But as the briefing notes just before, this threat was made “[a]fter US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998.”  In other words, a “threat” that was three years old by that point, or if you will, “historical” in nature.
 
*The briefing then runs through al Qaeda’s role in both the foiled “millennium” plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in 1999 and the successful bombings of the U.S. Embassies in East Africa in 1998.  Again, “historical.”
 
(So “historical” was most of this information, in fact, that Bush wouldn’t have needed a top-secret briefing; a newspaper would have sufficed.)
 
*Near the end of the PDB, two references have received the extraordinary media attention: that “Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft” and that the FBI had detected al Qaeda activity suggesting “preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”
 
 
But the kind of hijacking suggested in the briefing was one in the mold of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from decades past, specifically “to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ ‘Umar’ Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.”
 
And the only suspicious activity highlighted in the document was “recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”  Yes, it mentions “New York,” but that’s an awfully big place, chock-full of ripe targets—and the World Trade Center was not a “federal building.”
 
So, looking at what the Times claimed was in the August 6, 2001 PDB and then what was actually in it, the natural question is: Where is the retraction?

After all, it is clear to anyone who reads the briefing that there was sadly nothing specific in it that Bush could have acted on in order to prevent 9/11.
 
Anyone, that is, except the New York Times

posted by DEMSareEVIL on April 13, 2004 at 11:08 PM | link to this | reply

FRANTICALLY?, IMMINENT?

How WRONG can you possibly be? The PDB had neither of those words in it. You libs are really reaching and distorting the truth. In other words, you're lying.

FACT: Clinton had 8 years and the same info and did nothing!

FACT: The real blame of our governments lack of readiness goes to the one on the commission who insisted that the FBI and CIA remain divided and not share their information in the years leading up to 9/11, as Attorney General John Ashcroft pointed out during his testimony on Tuesday. Ashcroft didn't say who that person was, but my immediate gut feeling was that it's either democrat attack dog, senator Ben-Veniste or that lawyer woman, Jamie Gorelick. And I was correct that it is Gorelick, a democrat bitch who has no clue about reality and has tried to blame everyone else in denying responsibility.

The "simple fact" of Sept. 11 was, Ashcroft continued, that "we did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to its enemy because of Clinton's bad policies."

Plus, he said that "walls," or barriers between intelligence and law enforcement agents helped create the kind of culture that allowed Sept. 11 to happen.

He noted that on March 7, 2001, he met with President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and recommended that since there was no Clinton-era covert-action plan to kill bin Laden but only to capture -- and even that was proving difficult -- a new tactic be taken.

"'We should end the failed capture policy,' I said. 'We should find and kill bin Laden,'" Ashcroft said he told Rice, who agreed and put Tenet on the task.

All facts will come out, and the democrats will be finished forever... guaranteed!

DEMSareEVIL

posted by DEMSareEVIL on April 13, 2004 at 10:21 PM | link to this | reply

I'm sure more could have been done. The same sort of complacency doomed us at Pearl Harbor, but everything look easier in hindsight. Who will be the Mad Eye Moody of the next decade, demanding "constant vigilence"?

posted by aardvark on April 12, 2004 at 12:56 PM | link to this | reply