Government Complicity and Intelligence Breakdowns
The first wave of evidence pointing to Government complicity in 9/11 lies in the massive, systematic intelligence breakdown leading up to September 11. Individual stories of 'intelligence failures' have appeared throughout the mainstream media over the past five years - detailing the repeated failure of top-level government officials to heed the pre-9/11 warnings of intelligence officers regarding a looming terrorist attack on American soil. Taken individually, these specific breakdowns have been dismissed as unfortunate casualties of the oppressive web of government bureaucracy. But when considered collectively, evidence of intentional suppression and disregard of pre-9/11 intelligence information is overwhelming.
A. Able Danger
Able Danger is one egregious individual example. In August of 2005, Army Intelligence Officer Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer went public with information that he told staff members of the 9/11 Commission that he was part of a military unit that identified Mohammed Atta, and three other alleged 9/11 hijackers, a full yearbefore the September 11 attacks. But military lawyers stepped in at the time and "stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI. (Shaffer) was directed several times (by a two-star general) not to look at Mohammed Atta" any further. According to Louis Freeh, former FBI director, if this information had been properly shared, the events of 9/11 would have easily been prevented.
Why would high-level Pentagon officials not want information regarding terrorist suspects and details of their hijacking plot to be shared with the FBI? This is the type of question the 9/11 Commission was supposed to have been formed to answer. But even though documented evidence supports Shaffer's assertion that members of the 9/11 Commission clearly knew of the Able Danger military unit at the time, they failed to mention any aspect of its existence in their 585-page Report - flatly lying that American Intelligence Agencies had not identified Atta (et. al.) as a terrorist prior to the 9/11 attacks. Why would the 9/11 Commission not want Congress or the American people to learn about these facts? Who is making these policy decisions, why is the 9/11 Commission still referenced as an authority on the subject, and why is no one being held responsible to answer these crucial questions?
For his efforts to bring the disturbing news of Able Danger to light, Lt. Colonel Shaffer, a 23-year decorated veteran, was fired, publicly humiliated, stripped of his pension, and had a legal gag order placed on his right to speak out to the public and Congress. Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, the first U.S. public official to blow the whistle on Able Danger, has rushed to the defense of Anthony Shaffer. He has blasted the U.S. Government's pre-9/11 involvement in suppressing Able Danger's discoveries, blasted their subsequent cover-up detailing their involvement in the suppression of Able Danger, and blasted the government's treatment of Lt. Colonel Shaffer. Video excerpts of his impassioned speech to the House and his scathing interview with Lou Dobbs can be viewed here or here.
Both Weldon, Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, and Lt. Colonel Shaffer, a 23-year military veteran, believe certain government officials suppressed, lied about, and covered up details of Able Danger in order to thwart efforts to prevent 9/11. In fact, Weldon has called for a criminal investigation into what he says is 'the most important story of our lifetime'. But the story has been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Another in a long line of alarming revelations systematically disregarded by the public framers of debate and discussion in the U.S. Why?
WATCH VIDEO
CBS and CNN interviews with Curt Weldon
B. Zacharais Moussaoaui
Another high-level, critical intelligence breakdown occurred in the case of Zacharais Moussaoaui, the so-called 20th hijacker. Moussaoaui was arrested in August 2001. A full month before the 9/11 attacks. When arrested, he had in his possession a laptop computer filled with information and details regarding 9/11. Enough information to easily thwart the impending attacks. But when the FBI agents in charge of his arrest requested a search warrant to investigate his computer, top-level officials within the government denied the warrant. Why would government officials deny the search of a computer of a suspected terrorist? FBI agents Coleen Rowley and Harry Samit together sent more than 100 requests to their superiors attempting to search Moussaoaui's computer and ring the alarm bells about his terrorist connections. Each time they were denied. And the results are now well-known history. "In the hours after September 11th, FBI agents in Minneapolis (Samit and Rowley included) shared a macabre joke. For weeks prior, they had tried to interest FBI headquarters in Washington in Zacarias Moussaoui, now known as the 20th hijacker. They had begged FBI Headquarters to give them permission to seek a search warrant of Moussaoui's computer. They were denied. In their frustration, they joked that headquarters back in Washington must be infiltrated by agents of Osama Bin Laden. Why else would their work have been thwarted?" A fundamental question that Time Magazine logically asks, then bizarrely refuses to pursue or answer.
READ TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE
Why Didn't the FBI Fully Investigate Moussaoui?
C. July 10 Meeting
In the fall of 2006, Bob Woodward, no enemy of the Bush Administration, in his book 'State of Denial' brought to light a third, and perhaps most glaring, intelligence failure of the Bush Administration in the months immediately before the September 11th attacks. On July 10, 2001, CIA director George Tenet telephoned then National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice to set up a meeting in which he told Ms. Rice of an impending terrorist attack:
"On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately…..Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden…..Tenet and Black, however, felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off."
READ WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE
Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice
Rice, with her brush-off, was most likely parroting an official and consistent Bush Administration policy of being wholly and systematically uninterested in any intelligence reports from the CIA citing a gathering al Qaeda threat in 2001. As early as May of that year, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were leading the charge of constantly questioning and downplaying the veracity of gathered Central Intelligence information regarding Bin Laden and an al Qaeda threat. "Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence." This now familiar stalling, hemming and hawing, and vague rhetorical questioning tactic of the Bush Administration ostensibly served to shift attention away from the actual gathering storm, and onto whatever agenda Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et. al. at the Pentagon had in mind. It is widely known that the Cheney/Rumsfeld Pentagon cabal was at fierce odds with the CIA and George Tenet - a democrat and Clinton-era leftover that VP Dick Cheney had no intention of sharing power with. And if, as this paper suggests, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their closest allies knew very well about the plans of 9/11 long before they happened, surely they would have no interest bringing an untrusted adversary like Tenet and the CIA into their fold. See PBS's Frontline expose on Dick Cheney for more info on this topic.
PBS'S FRONTLINE
PBS's Frontline expose on Dick Cheney
When news of Rice's July 10 meeting with Tenet was first made public with the release of Woodward's book, Rice initially denied the meeting ever took place "Rice has denied that such a meeting took place, citing the 911 Commission Report, which never mentioned any such meeting." Presumably she was trying to avoid getting involved in the messy questions about her and the Administration's behavior in the summer of 2001 that would naturally arise if the press got wind of the details and timing of the meeting with Tenet and Black so soon before 9/11, swirling amidst all the other reports of intelligence breakdowns around that time. And, technically, Rice was correct. The 9/11 Commission Report did not, amazingly, make any mention of this crucial July meeting and subsequent brush-off.
READ ARTICLE
9/11 widows blast Bush Administration over Rice, Tenet meeting
However, when transcripts from the testimony given before the 9/11 Commission were actually reviewed by a number of intrepid reporters, it was proven that the meeting HAD taken place. It was just never written into the 9/11 Commission's official report. Caught in a lie, Rice then changed tack, saying that, well, yes she supposed the meeting did take place, but at no time in that meeting was the warning about the impending al Qaeda attack specific as to where that attack was to take place. "Speaking to reporters late Sunday en route to the Middle East, Rice said she had no recollection of what she called 'the supposed meeting.' What I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack and I refused to respond," she said."Rice vehemently denied that she ever received a special CIA warning about an imminent terrorist attack on the United States, angrily rebutting new allegations about her culpability in U.S. policy failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al Qaeda."
All of this allegation and counter-denial and reframing begs the question, if Dr. Rice does not even remember a meeting between she and Tenet ever happening in the first place, how can she suddenly know and detail what was or was not discussed in that unremembered meeting? And why, yet again, is NO ONE in the media or in the public discourse asking such basic questions regarding the absolute absence of logic in the official statements and storyline of the federal government and the 9/11 Commission in regards to September 11?
Soon after Rice's second attempt at denial regarding the meeting and/or the contents of the meeting with Tenet and Black, reporters and the public naturally became suspicious of the Administration's version of the story, and they started to turn the heat up on Rice. She again claimed that no information was given to her specifically about an impending attack on U.S. soil, despite the fact that she had recently not remembered the meeting even taking place. Woodward, who until then had been lauded by the Bush Administration for his intrepid and fair reporting, stood by his assertion that Tenet and Black were quite explicit about an impending attack on U.S. soil. And since Rice had already proven herself to be, at best, unreliable, and at worst a flat out liar, more and more credence was given to Woodward's rendition. He was, after all, privy to all sorts of classified documents and knowledgeable contacts within the Administration itself.
Suddenly cornered and in real danger of having to answer an array of alarming questions regarding her lack of adequate response to Tenet and Black's ominous reports, Rice, without any kind of intended irony, abruptly changed tack again. Flip-flopping 180-degrees, she now began to defend herself with a new strategy by saying that, in fact, not only had the meeting she originally denied actually taken place, but she had taken the meeting so seriously that she specifically ordered Tenet and Black to brief Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft about the gravity of the news she had just been given. Rice's press Secretary, Sean McCormack, held a press conference to inform the media of this new revelation about how seriously his boss had taken the meeting she, up until the previous day, hadn't actually remembered even happening. "Mr. McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet's warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general." And this request for a meeting between Tenet, Black, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft was fulfilled, as confirmed by a number of public reports on the subsequent briefing.
So, to review, in response to Bob Woodward reporting that Condaleeza Rice and the Bush administration did nothing in response to a crucial meeting Ms. Rice had with CIA Director Tenet on July 10, 2001 warning of an impending catastrophic attack by al Qaeda on American soil, Ms. Rice first denied the meeting ever took place. Then when that story didn't hold water and was proven false, she suddenly remembered the unremembered meeting and proceeded to clarify for us what was and was not discussed at said originally unremembered meeting. Then when people were still alarmed and critical of her lack of understanding of the gravity of the unremembered meeting, she finally decided to fully defend herself by saying, well, listen, don't blame me, I did take that unremembered meeting seriously, so seriously, in fact, that I ordered Director Tenet to pass on the specific information of this unremembered meeting to my superiors. A long and tiresome diatribe of double speak and blatant contradiction which begs the question for Ms. Rice, which one was it?
If a child behaved like this, that child would be immediately sent to their room and asked not to come out before detailing a more logical narrative. When the National Security Advisor of the United States behaves like this, and her already suspicious looking behavior is suddenly revealed to be, at the very least, criminally negligent, we make her the Secretary of State. A brash kind of Orwellian lack of logic that, though unexplainable to a five year old, we readily accept with an almost grateful relief. Because to pursue the absurdity of the narrative offered by the Bush Administration would, perhaps, unravel a world of which we are unwilling to let go.
The truth, of course, is that this July 10 meeting between Rice and Tenet did take place. Rice both gave the brush-off to Tenet and ordered the information passed on to Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. A seeming contradiction unless you consider one thing - that the Bush Administration was not interested publicly in the CIA's version of intelligence reports because they had no intention of doing anything in response to them, but privately and in-house they wanted to know exactly how much was known and exactly by whom.
If this seems a cynical stretch in analysis, consider that while no policy adjustments were made with this new intelligence information provided by Tenet and Black to protect the American people, John Ashcroft did make some new personal policy adjustments for himself. In July 2001, immediately after being briefed by Tenet about the intelligence reports Rice had quickly and officially brushed off, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft suddenly stopped flying on all commercial airplanes. A chilling and startling revelation when seen in context and within this structured timeline of meetings and intelligence discoveries. "Like most of the Bush cabinet, Attorney General John Ashcroft took commercial jets when he traveled. But on July 24, 2001, he changed that practice and began flying in chartered government jets." If the perceived threat in the information given by Tenet and Black was significant enough to convince Mr. Ashcroft to make changes in his own personal life, why did the federal government not do anything to further pursue and/or fully investigate the provided intelligence in order to protect the American people? Including 3,000 innocent civilians in NYC who would soon unnecessarily die. So far, no coherent, nor adequate response has been given to this crucial question.
A last crowning and confounding aspect to the story of the July 10 intelligence breakdown is the fact that this meeting between Tenet and Rice, and the whole debacle around who said what, reacted when, delegated resources where, and responded how - details so wholly critical to the overall narrative of 9/11 - never made it into the official 9/11 Commission Report. As mentioned above, allusions to the July 10 meeting were made in the testimony of a number of principals before the Commission in hearings, but these allusions were wholly ignored and written out of the official narrative published for the public's consumption. Why? Cofer Black, of all people, has taken this guess.
"The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about. Philip D. Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting, but it was not clear to him what immediate action really would have meant. In 2005 Rice hired Zelikow as a top aide at the State Department."
Many skeptics, with no knowledge of the mountain of facts and data involved, often dismiss questioners of the official story of 9/11 by calling them 'conspiracy theorists' who don't respect the fact that any real conspiracy or foul play would have been uncovered by the diligence of the 9/11 Commission Report and its investigators. What these people fail to recognize, however, is the fact that the 9/11 Commission Report, if one is familiar with the overall picture of the government's official narrative of 9/11, reads like a 585-page farce. Not only is the July 10 meeting left out, not only did its executive director become a Bush Administration member and advisor, not only did it fail to mention the fact that a 47-story building in Manhattan not hit by an airplane somehow fell down, it systematically ignores whole swaths of data and information that do not serve to uphold the government's official timeline and story. And not only is the 9/11 Commission Report not proof against the findings of the so-called conspiracy theorists, but an honest rendering of its contents serves to wholly back up their skepticism and allegations. (The absurd findings of the 9/11 Commission are beyond the scope of this paper, but one of the country's leading scholars, Dr. David Ray Griffin, has picked apart the 9/11 Commission Report page by page in his seminal book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.
As of yet, no one in the media, nor in the government, has answered any of the critical questions raised by the disastrous intelligence failures detailed above. Instead, officials and government agents gloss over the details with vague assertions that the charges of systematic intelligence breakdowns raised are 'serious' and 'interesting' and 'in need of further investigation and inquiry'. Often, bureaucratic stagnation is blamed for the breakdowns in communication. Excuses are given that the FBI had intra-department squabbles. That the FBI didn't like to talk to the CIA who didn't like to work with the Pentagon who was at odds with Congress - a supposedly contentious archipelago of loosely connected government agencies.
But this is an incredibly weak argument. If these agencies were so at odds and incapable of communicating with each other, if they had no prior knowledge of 9/11 and its perpetrators before 8:46 a.m. on September 11, how did they pull so suddenly together to detail the narrative and the names of the 19 hijackers? How did they suddenly detail their addresses, personal histories, photographs, backgrounds, and al-Qaeda connections within hours of the attack? How in the world were DNA samples eventually collected from the crash sites that positively identified the hijackers? Against what existing records were these DNA samples compared? How did the U.S. government have existing DNA information on these men that they had supposedly never heard of? Did the future hijackers, upon entering the country years before, hand over a blood sample each, saying to the customs official, "In a few years time, I'm going to fly an airplane into a building, so here is some blood for your records to identify me after I'm dead." How could these various agencies claiming to be so at odds with one another suddenly connect dots so fast? When, before, they were described as a collection of individual organizations in supposed ill-communication with each other? And why am I, a relatively uninvolved, unconnected tax-payer, on my own free time and at considerable personal and financial risk and loss, the one asking these basic, crucial questions that any amateur investigator of even the simplest crime would normally grind to a pulp?
continue reading »
A. Able Danger
Able Danger is one egregious individual example. In August of 2005, Army Intelligence Officer Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer went public with information that he told staff members of the 9/11 Commission that he was part of a military unit that identified Mohammed Atta, and three other alleged 9/11 hijackers, a full yearbefore the September 11 attacks. But military lawyers stepped in at the time and "stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI. (Shaffer) was directed several times (by a two-star general) not to look at Mohammed Atta" any further. According to Louis Freeh, former FBI director, if this information had been properly shared, the events of 9/11 would have easily been prevented.
Why would high-level Pentagon officials not want information regarding terrorist suspects and details of their hijacking plot to be shared with the FBI? This is the type of question the 9/11 Commission was supposed to have been formed to answer. But even though documented evidence supports Shaffer's assertion that members of the 9/11 Commission clearly knew of the Able Danger military unit at the time, they failed to mention any aspect of its existence in their 585-page Report - flatly lying that American Intelligence Agencies had not identified Atta (et. al.) as a terrorist prior to the 9/11 attacks. Why would the 9/11 Commission not want Congress or the American people to learn about these facts? Who is making these policy decisions, why is the 9/11 Commission still referenced as an authority on the subject, and why is no one being held responsible to answer these crucial questions?
For his efforts to bring the disturbing news of Able Danger to light, Lt. Colonel Shaffer, a 23-year decorated veteran, was fired, publicly humiliated, stripped of his pension, and had a legal gag order placed on his right to speak out to the public and Congress. Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, the first U.S. public official to blow the whistle on Able Danger, has rushed to the defense of Anthony Shaffer. He has blasted the U.S. Government's pre-9/11 involvement in suppressing Able Danger's discoveries, blasted their subsequent cover-up detailing their involvement in the suppression of Able Danger, and blasted the government's treatment of Lt. Colonel Shaffer. Video excerpts of his impassioned speech to the House and his scathing interview with Lou Dobbs can be viewed here or here.
Both Weldon, Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, and Lt. Colonel Shaffer, a 23-year military veteran, believe certain government officials suppressed, lied about, and covered up details of Able Danger in order to thwart efforts to prevent 9/11. In fact, Weldon has called for a criminal investigation into what he says is 'the most important story of our lifetime'. But the story has been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Another in a long line of alarming revelations systematically disregarded by the public framers of debate and discussion in the U.S. Why?
WATCH VIDEO
CBS and CNN interviews with Curt Weldon
B. Zacharais Moussaoaui
Another high-level, critical intelligence breakdown occurred in the case of Zacharais Moussaoaui, the so-called 20th hijacker. Moussaoaui was arrested in August 2001. A full month before the 9/11 attacks. When arrested, he had in his possession a laptop computer filled with information and details regarding 9/11. Enough information to easily thwart the impending attacks. But when the FBI agents in charge of his arrest requested a search warrant to investigate his computer, top-level officials within the government denied the warrant. Why would government officials deny the search of a computer of a suspected terrorist? FBI agents Coleen Rowley and Harry Samit together sent more than 100 requests to their superiors attempting to search Moussaoaui's computer and ring the alarm bells about his terrorist connections. Each time they were denied. And the results are now well-known history. "In the hours after September 11th, FBI agents in Minneapolis (Samit and Rowley included) shared a macabre joke. For weeks prior, they had tried to interest FBI headquarters in Washington in Zacarias Moussaoui, now known as the 20th hijacker. They had begged FBI Headquarters to give them permission to seek a search warrant of Moussaoui's computer. They were denied. In their frustration, they joked that headquarters back in Washington must be infiltrated by agents of Osama Bin Laden. Why else would their work have been thwarted?" A fundamental question that Time Magazine logically asks, then bizarrely refuses to pursue or answer.
READ TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE
Why Didn't the FBI Fully Investigate Moussaoui?
C. July 10 Meeting
In the fall of 2006, Bob Woodward, no enemy of the Bush Administration, in his book 'State of Denial' brought to light a third, and perhaps most glaring, intelligence failure of the Bush Administration in the months immediately before the September 11th attacks. On July 10, 2001, CIA director George Tenet telephoned then National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice to set up a meeting in which he told Ms. Rice of an impending terrorist attack:
"On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately…..Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden…..Tenet and Black, however, felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off."
READ WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE
Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice
Rice, with her brush-off, was most likely parroting an official and consistent Bush Administration policy of being wholly and systematically uninterested in any intelligence reports from the CIA citing a gathering al Qaeda threat in 2001. As early as May of that year, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were leading the charge of constantly questioning and downplaying the veracity of gathered Central Intelligence information regarding Bin Laden and an al Qaeda threat. "Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence." This now familiar stalling, hemming and hawing, and vague rhetorical questioning tactic of the Bush Administration ostensibly served to shift attention away from the actual gathering storm, and onto whatever agenda Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et. al. at the Pentagon had in mind. It is widely known that the Cheney/Rumsfeld Pentagon cabal was at fierce odds with the CIA and George Tenet - a democrat and Clinton-era leftover that VP Dick Cheney had no intention of sharing power with. And if, as this paper suggests, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their closest allies knew very well about the plans of 9/11 long before they happened, surely they would have no interest bringing an untrusted adversary like Tenet and the CIA into their fold. See PBS's Frontline expose on Dick Cheney for more info on this topic.
PBS'S FRONTLINE
PBS's Frontline expose on Dick Cheney
When news of Rice's July 10 meeting with Tenet was first made public with the release of Woodward's book, Rice initially denied the meeting ever took place "Rice has denied that such a meeting took place, citing the 911 Commission Report, which never mentioned any such meeting." Presumably she was trying to avoid getting involved in the messy questions about her and the Administration's behavior in the summer of 2001 that would naturally arise if the press got wind of the details and timing of the meeting with Tenet and Black so soon before 9/11, swirling amidst all the other reports of intelligence breakdowns around that time. And, technically, Rice was correct. The 9/11 Commission Report did not, amazingly, make any mention of this crucial July meeting and subsequent brush-off.
READ ARTICLE
9/11 widows blast Bush Administration over Rice, Tenet meeting
However, when transcripts from the testimony given before the 9/11 Commission were actually reviewed by a number of intrepid reporters, it was proven that the meeting HAD taken place. It was just never written into the 9/11 Commission's official report. Caught in a lie, Rice then changed tack, saying that, well, yes she supposed the meeting did take place, but at no time in that meeting was the warning about the impending al Qaeda attack specific as to where that attack was to take place. "Speaking to reporters late Sunday en route to the Middle East, Rice said she had no recollection of what she called 'the supposed meeting.' What I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack and I refused to respond," she said."Rice vehemently denied that she ever received a special CIA warning about an imminent terrorist attack on the United States, angrily rebutting new allegations about her culpability in U.S. policy failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al Qaeda."
All of this allegation and counter-denial and reframing begs the question, if Dr. Rice does not even remember a meeting between she and Tenet ever happening in the first place, how can she suddenly know and detail what was or was not discussed in that unremembered meeting? And why, yet again, is NO ONE in the media or in the public discourse asking such basic questions regarding the absolute absence of logic in the official statements and storyline of the federal government and the 9/11 Commission in regards to September 11?
Soon after Rice's second attempt at denial regarding the meeting and/or the contents of the meeting with Tenet and Black, reporters and the public naturally became suspicious of the Administration's version of the story, and they started to turn the heat up on Rice. She again claimed that no information was given to her specifically about an impending attack on U.S. soil, despite the fact that she had recently not remembered the meeting even taking place. Woodward, who until then had been lauded by the Bush Administration for his intrepid and fair reporting, stood by his assertion that Tenet and Black were quite explicit about an impending attack on U.S. soil. And since Rice had already proven herself to be, at best, unreliable, and at worst a flat out liar, more and more credence was given to Woodward's rendition. He was, after all, privy to all sorts of classified documents and knowledgeable contacts within the Administration itself.
Suddenly cornered and in real danger of having to answer an array of alarming questions regarding her lack of adequate response to Tenet and Black's ominous reports, Rice, without any kind of intended irony, abruptly changed tack again. Flip-flopping 180-degrees, she now began to defend herself with a new strategy by saying that, in fact, not only had the meeting she originally denied actually taken place, but she had taken the meeting so seriously that she specifically ordered Tenet and Black to brief Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft about the gravity of the news she had just been given. Rice's press Secretary, Sean McCormack, held a press conference to inform the media of this new revelation about how seriously his boss had taken the meeting she, up until the previous day, hadn't actually remembered even happening. "Mr. McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet's warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general." And this request for a meeting between Tenet, Black, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft was fulfilled, as confirmed by a number of public reports on the subsequent briefing.
So, to review, in response to Bob Woodward reporting that Condaleeza Rice and the Bush administration did nothing in response to a crucial meeting Ms. Rice had with CIA Director Tenet on July 10, 2001 warning of an impending catastrophic attack by al Qaeda on American soil, Ms. Rice first denied the meeting ever took place. Then when that story didn't hold water and was proven false, she suddenly remembered the unremembered meeting and proceeded to clarify for us what was and was not discussed at said originally unremembered meeting. Then when people were still alarmed and critical of her lack of understanding of the gravity of the unremembered meeting, she finally decided to fully defend herself by saying, well, listen, don't blame me, I did take that unremembered meeting seriously, so seriously, in fact, that I ordered Director Tenet to pass on the specific information of this unremembered meeting to my superiors. A long and tiresome diatribe of double speak and blatant contradiction which begs the question for Ms. Rice, which one was it?
If a child behaved like this, that child would be immediately sent to their room and asked not to come out before detailing a more logical narrative. When the National Security Advisor of the United States behaves like this, and her already suspicious looking behavior is suddenly revealed to be, at the very least, criminally negligent, we make her the Secretary of State. A brash kind of Orwellian lack of logic that, though unexplainable to a five year old, we readily accept with an almost grateful relief. Because to pursue the absurdity of the narrative offered by the Bush Administration would, perhaps, unravel a world of which we are unwilling to let go.
The truth, of course, is that this July 10 meeting between Rice and Tenet did take place. Rice both gave the brush-off to Tenet and ordered the information passed on to Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. A seeming contradiction unless you consider one thing - that the Bush Administration was not interested publicly in the CIA's version of intelligence reports because they had no intention of doing anything in response to them, but privately and in-house they wanted to know exactly how much was known and exactly by whom.
If this seems a cynical stretch in analysis, consider that while no policy adjustments were made with this new intelligence information provided by Tenet and Black to protect the American people, John Ashcroft did make some new personal policy adjustments for himself. In July 2001, immediately after being briefed by Tenet about the intelligence reports Rice had quickly and officially brushed off, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft suddenly stopped flying on all commercial airplanes. A chilling and startling revelation when seen in context and within this structured timeline of meetings and intelligence discoveries. "Like most of the Bush cabinet, Attorney General John Ashcroft took commercial jets when he traveled. But on July 24, 2001, he changed that practice and began flying in chartered government jets." If the perceived threat in the information given by Tenet and Black was significant enough to convince Mr. Ashcroft to make changes in his own personal life, why did the federal government not do anything to further pursue and/or fully investigate the provided intelligence in order to protect the American people? Including 3,000 innocent civilians in NYC who would soon unnecessarily die. So far, no coherent, nor adequate response has been given to this crucial question.
A last crowning and confounding aspect to the story of the July 10 intelligence breakdown is the fact that this meeting between Tenet and Rice, and the whole debacle around who said what, reacted when, delegated resources where, and responded how - details so wholly critical to the overall narrative of 9/11 - never made it into the official 9/11 Commission Report. As mentioned above, allusions to the July 10 meeting were made in the testimony of a number of principals before the Commission in hearings, but these allusions were wholly ignored and written out of the official narrative published for the public's consumption. Why? Cofer Black, of all people, has taken this guess.
"The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about. Philip D. Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting, but it was not clear to him what immediate action really would have meant. In 2005 Rice hired Zelikow as a top aide at the State Department."
Many skeptics, with no knowledge of the mountain of facts and data involved, often dismiss questioners of the official story of 9/11 by calling them 'conspiracy theorists' who don't respect the fact that any real conspiracy or foul play would have been uncovered by the diligence of the 9/11 Commission Report and its investigators. What these people fail to recognize, however, is the fact that the 9/11 Commission Report, if one is familiar with the overall picture of the government's official narrative of 9/11, reads like a 585-page farce. Not only is the July 10 meeting left out, not only did its executive director become a Bush Administration member and advisor, not only did it fail to mention the fact that a 47-story building in Manhattan not hit by an airplane somehow fell down, it systematically ignores whole swaths of data and information that do not serve to uphold the government's official timeline and story. And not only is the 9/11 Commission Report not proof against the findings of the so-called conspiracy theorists, but an honest rendering of its contents serves to wholly back up their skepticism and allegations. (The absurd findings of the 9/11 Commission are beyond the scope of this paper, but one of the country's leading scholars, Dr. David Ray Griffin, has picked apart the 9/11 Commission Report page by page in his seminal book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.
As of yet, no one in the media, nor in the government, has answered any of the critical questions raised by the disastrous intelligence failures detailed above. Instead, officials and government agents gloss over the details with vague assertions that the charges of systematic intelligence breakdowns raised are 'serious' and 'interesting' and 'in need of further investigation and inquiry'. Often, bureaucratic stagnation is blamed for the breakdowns in communication. Excuses are given that the FBI had intra-department squabbles. That the FBI didn't like to talk to the CIA who didn't like to work with the Pentagon who was at odds with Congress - a supposedly contentious archipelago of loosely connected government agencies.
But this is an incredibly weak argument. If these agencies were so at odds and incapable of communicating with each other, if they had no prior knowledge of 9/11 and its perpetrators before 8:46 a.m. on September 11, how did they pull so suddenly together to detail the narrative and the names of the 19 hijackers? How did they suddenly detail their addresses, personal histories, photographs, backgrounds, and al-Qaeda connections within hours of the attack? How in the world were DNA samples eventually collected from the crash sites that positively identified the hijackers? Against what existing records were these DNA samples compared? How did the U.S. government have existing DNA information on these men that they had supposedly never heard of? Did the future hijackers, upon entering the country years before, hand over a blood sample each, saying to the customs official, "In a few years time, I'm going to fly an airplane into a building, so here is some blood for your records to identify me after I'm dead." How could these various agencies claiming to be so at odds with one another suddenly connect dots so fast? When, before, they were described as a collection of individual organizations in supposed ill-communication with each other? And why am I, a relatively uninvolved, unconnected tax-payer, on my own free time and at considerable personal and financial risk and loss, the one asking these basic, crucial questions that any amateur investigator of even the simplest crime would normally grind to a pulp?
continue reading »