Condoleezza Rice evades charges over 9/11
Bill Van Auken | 07.10.2006 20:59 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | World
The fixation of both official Washington and the mainstream media on the emails of Congressman Mark Foley (Republican of Florida) and the Republican House leadership’s cover-up of his pursuit of teenage male pages has served to divert public attention from a far more significant cover-up of a far greater crime.
The Foley story has highlighted the official corruption and hypocrisy that characterize the political establishment as a whole in America. The spectacle of a party that has made “family values” its battle cry and sought to exploit homophobia and religious backwardness for political ends being caught up in such a scandal has undoubted popular appeal.
For the Democrats, it provides a useful political club, without compelling this second party of corporate America to advance a single substantive difference with the Republicans on domestic or foreign policy.
But the time and resources—not to mention prurient interest—that the media has devoted to the exposure of Foley’s emails and instant messages stand in sharp contrast to its virtual silence on the revelations—first reported September 28, the same day that the emails from Foley surfaced on ABC News—in the new book by Bob Woodward, State of Denial.
Most damning among them is the revelation that former CIA Director George Tenet and the CIA’s chief of counterterrorism, J. Cofer Black, sought and obtained a July 10, 2001 emergency meeting with Condoleezza Rice to discuss the imminent threat of a major terrorist attack by Al Qaeda on US targets, and were “brushed off” by the then-national security adviser.
In the relevant passage, Woodward writes,
“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 called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away... He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action...”
Woodward writes that Tenet hoped to “shake Rice” and that Black “emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy... They needed to take action that moment—covert, military, whatever—to thwart bin Laden...”
Woodward continues, “Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn’t want to swat at flies...”
The damning implications of this reported conversation are self-evident. The chief adviser on national security to President George W. Bush was given an explicit warning, just two months before the hijacked passenger jets crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, claiming nearly 3,000 lives, and nothing was done.
Black is quoted in the book as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”
In a subsequent report, the McClatchy Newspapers quoted an official who had helped prepare the briefing describing it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10” in terms of the seriousness of its warning of an imminent attack.
The revelation of this meeting follows the similar exposure, during the hearings held by the 9/11 Commission two years ago, that on August 6, 2001 Bush was given a Presidential Daily Brief (PDA) from the CIA, entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the United States.” As with the July 10 meeting, the PDA provoked no action by the administration, and Bush remained on vacation for the next three weeks at his Texas ranch.
The Bush administration has unceasingly invoked the events of September 11 as the justification for all of its policies—from wars of aggression abroad to the destruction of basic constitutional and democratic rights at home. Yet the revelations concerning the July 10 meeting only add to the mounting body of evidence that the administration was, at best, criminally negligent in failing to take action to prevent attacks that had been widely predicted or, at worst, directly complicit in allowing them to take place.
More than five years after the attacks, one thing is certain: no one in the US government has ever been held accountable. Even if one takes the official version of what happened on September 11 as good coin, the inescapable conclusion is that it represented the greatest single failure of US intelligence and national security in the country’s history. Yet, not one official in the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon or any other agency suffered so much as a demotion.
Woodward’s book suggests that tensions over who bears the blame for 9/11 are continuing to generate internecine struggles within official Washington, and Tenet is determined not to be made a scapegoat for the administration’s policies. A new book by Ron Suskind, entitled The One Percent Doctrine, quotes Tenet as saying he wished he “could give that damn medal back,” referring to the Medal of Freedom bestowed upon him by Bush when he resigned from the CIA in 2004.
The administration’s reaction to Woodward’s book is every bit as damning as the book’s contents. The White House has sought to discredit the author’s credibility, a difficult task given that the Bush administration had previously turned the veteran Washington Post reporter into a virtual court chronicler, providing him with unprecedented access while he wrote two previous and largely laudatory volumes on Bush: Plan of Attack and Bush at War.
As a measure of its alarm, the administration issued a detailed response to Woodward’s account, posted prominently on the White House web site. The thrust of this attempted refutation was to claim that there had not been a cover-up of the July 10 meeting, and that Rice had responded seriously to Woodward’s claims.
However, after excerpts from the Woodward book were first published, Rice initially feigned ignorance about the conversation with Tenet and Cofer, referring to it as a “supposed meeting,” while adding that it was “incomprehensible” that she would have ignored such warnings. Soon after, the State Department was forced to admit that a review of official records revealed that the encounter had indeed taken place.
As a fallback position, Rice’s spokesman at the State Department, Sean McCormack, declared, “The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks.”
This alibi echoes almost precisely the tack taken in response to the revelations concerning the August 6 presidential brief, which Rice similarly insisted contained nothing new and was “historical” in character. It was only after the administration was compelled to release the document that it became clear it contained a clear and stark warning that Al Qaeda was actively preparing an attack within the US, singling out New York and Washington DC as likely targets.
Before the title of this document was made public, Rice had insisted—as she now claims in relation to the July 10 meeting—that the presidential briefing did not make any warnings of attacks within the United States. She was lying then, and it is clear that she is lying now.
McCormack continued to insist that his boss could not specifically recall the July 10 meeting in which she was told that a massive terrorist attack on the US was imminent.
Rice was not the only one suffering from selective amnesia. Coming to the aid of the beleaguered administration, former Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a statement clearly aimed at discrediting Tenet. “It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn’t come to me with this type of information,” he told the Associated Press October 2. “The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism.”
But no sooner had Ashcroft made this claim than the State Department revealed that the ex-attorney general had indeed been given the same CIA briefing less than a week after the meeting with Rice. Once again, nothing was done. Actually, one step was taken—Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines.
Woodward’s revelations prompted protests and comments from various members and staff of the September 11 commission. Philip Zelikow, who served as the panel’s executive director, told the press that no witness who testified before the commission had ever mentioned such a meeting, including Tenet and Black, who made both private and public statements to the panel.
“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he told the New York Times. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”
Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, likewise told the Times that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.” He added, “This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about.”
Subsequently, however, the Washington Post and other sources revealed that Zelikow and Ben-Veniste were both told about the meeting in secret testimony given at CIA headquarters by Tenet, who provided them with a detailed outline of the briefing he had given Rice. Clearly, Tenet wanted to make his warning part of the record.
Zelikow, an administration loyalist and long-time academic colleague of Rice, has since been appointed to a top job at the State Department. No reference to the July 10 meeting ever appeared in the 9/11 commission’s reports.
McClatchy Newspapers has quoted Ben-Veniste as acknowledging that Tenet did give him and Zelikow the Rice briefing in secret testimony, but said that Zelikow would have to answer as to why it was not mentioned in the commission’s report. Zelikow failed to respond to inquiries on this issue.
Several of the commissioners seemed genuinely shocked and outraged that the meeting had been concealed, indicating that they were not informed of Tenet’s secret testimony.
“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former member of the House of Representatives from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”
These latest revelations leave not one shred of credibility to the Bush administration’s repeated claims that the 9/11 attacks could not have been anticipated. What has emerged is that not only were they foreseen, but explicit warnings were made that were deliberately rebuffed by the White House. Moreover, the very existence of these warnings was then concealed through an elaborate cover-up that culminated in a white-wash by the 9/11 commission.
The fixation of official Washington with the Foley affair in the context of these revelations constitutes a continuation of the cover-up. The detailed parsing of statements by the Republican leadership as to what they knew about Foley’s sexual behavior and when they knew it stands in sharp contrast to the indifference of the media and politicians of both parties to contradictory statements, evasions and outright lies related to a crime that resulted in the greatest loss of life on American soil since the Civil War.
A crime, moreover, that has served as the pretext for a global eruption of American militarism that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The evidence points inexorably to one conclusion: The attacks of September 11 were facilitated by powerful elements within the government itself, which engineered a “stand-down” of the US intelligence and security apparatus. That a terrorist attack was coming was known and welcomed by those seeking a casus belli for long-planned wars to secure US hegemony over the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia.
If there is no great impetus to probe these matters, it is because every section of the American political establishment, including the media and the Democratic Party, is so thoroughly implicated.
By Bill Van Auken
7 October 2006
For the Democrats, it provides a useful political club, without compelling this second party of corporate America to advance a single substantive difference with the Republicans on domestic or foreign policy.
But the time and resources—not to mention prurient interest—that the media has devoted to the exposure of Foley’s emails and instant messages stand in sharp contrast to its virtual silence on the revelations—first reported September 28, the same day that the emails from Foley surfaced on ABC News—in the new book by Bob Woodward, State of Denial.
Most damning among them is the revelation that former CIA Director George Tenet and the CIA’s chief of counterterrorism, J. Cofer Black, sought and obtained a July 10, 2001 emergency meeting with Condoleezza Rice to discuss the imminent threat of a major terrorist attack by Al Qaeda on US targets, and were “brushed off” by the then-national security adviser.
In the relevant passage, Woodward writes,
“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 called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away... He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action...”
Woodward writes that Tenet hoped to “shake Rice” and that Black “emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy... They needed to take action that moment—covert, military, whatever—to thwart bin Laden...”
Woodward continues, “Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn’t want to swat at flies...”
The damning implications of this reported conversation are self-evident. The chief adviser on national security to President George W. Bush was given an explicit warning, just two months before the hijacked passenger jets crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, claiming nearly 3,000 lives, and nothing was done.
Black is quoted in the book as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”
In a subsequent report, the McClatchy Newspapers quoted an official who had helped prepare the briefing describing it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10” in terms of the seriousness of its warning of an imminent attack.
The revelation of this meeting follows the similar exposure, during the hearings held by the 9/11 Commission two years ago, that on August 6, 2001 Bush was given a Presidential Daily Brief (PDA) from the CIA, entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the United States.” As with the July 10 meeting, the PDA provoked no action by the administration, and Bush remained on vacation for the next three weeks at his Texas ranch.
The Bush administration has unceasingly invoked the events of September 11 as the justification for all of its policies—from wars of aggression abroad to the destruction of basic constitutional and democratic rights at home. Yet the revelations concerning the July 10 meeting only add to the mounting body of evidence that the administration was, at best, criminally negligent in failing to take action to prevent attacks that had been widely predicted or, at worst, directly complicit in allowing them to take place.
More than five years after the attacks, one thing is certain: no one in the US government has ever been held accountable. Even if one takes the official version of what happened on September 11 as good coin, the inescapable conclusion is that it represented the greatest single failure of US intelligence and national security in the country’s history. Yet, not one official in the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon or any other agency suffered so much as a demotion.
Woodward’s book suggests that tensions over who bears the blame for 9/11 are continuing to generate internecine struggles within official Washington, and Tenet is determined not to be made a scapegoat for the administration’s policies. A new book by Ron Suskind, entitled The One Percent Doctrine, quotes Tenet as saying he wished he “could give that damn medal back,” referring to the Medal of Freedom bestowed upon him by Bush when he resigned from the CIA in 2004.
The administration’s reaction to Woodward’s book is every bit as damning as the book’s contents. The White House has sought to discredit the author’s credibility, a difficult task given that the Bush administration had previously turned the veteran Washington Post reporter into a virtual court chronicler, providing him with unprecedented access while he wrote two previous and largely laudatory volumes on Bush: Plan of Attack and Bush at War.
As a measure of its alarm, the administration issued a detailed response to Woodward’s account, posted prominently on the White House web site. The thrust of this attempted refutation was to claim that there had not been a cover-up of the July 10 meeting, and that Rice had responded seriously to Woodward’s claims.
However, after excerpts from the Woodward book were first published, Rice initially feigned ignorance about the conversation with Tenet and Cofer, referring to it as a “supposed meeting,” while adding that it was “incomprehensible” that she would have ignored such warnings. Soon after, the State Department was forced to admit that a review of official records revealed that the encounter had indeed taken place.
As a fallback position, Rice’s spokesman at the State Department, Sean McCormack, declared, “The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks.”
This alibi echoes almost precisely the tack taken in response to the revelations concerning the August 6 presidential brief, which Rice similarly insisted contained nothing new and was “historical” in character. It was only after the administration was compelled to release the document that it became clear it contained a clear and stark warning that Al Qaeda was actively preparing an attack within the US, singling out New York and Washington DC as likely targets.
Before the title of this document was made public, Rice had insisted—as she now claims in relation to the July 10 meeting—that the presidential briefing did not make any warnings of attacks within the United States. She was lying then, and it is clear that she is lying now.
McCormack continued to insist that his boss could not specifically recall the July 10 meeting in which she was told that a massive terrorist attack on the US was imminent.
Rice was not the only one suffering from selective amnesia. Coming to the aid of the beleaguered administration, former Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a statement clearly aimed at discrediting Tenet. “It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn’t come to me with this type of information,” he told the Associated Press October 2. “The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism.”
But no sooner had Ashcroft made this claim than the State Department revealed that the ex-attorney general had indeed been given the same CIA briefing less than a week after the meeting with Rice. Once again, nothing was done. Actually, one step was taken—Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines.
Woodward’s revelations prompted protests and comments from various members and staff of the September 11 commission. Philip Zelikow, who served as the panel’s executive director, told the press that no witness who testified before the commission had ever mentioned such a meeting, including Tenet and Black, who made both private and public statements to the panel.
“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he told the New York Times. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”
Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, likewise told the Times that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.” He added, “This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about.”
Subsequently, however, the Washington Post and other sources revealed that Zelikow and Ben-Veniste were both told about the meeting in secret testimony given at CIA headquarters by Tenet, who provided them with a detailed outline of the briefing he had given Rice. Clearly, Tenet wanted to make his warning part of the record.
Zelikow, an administration loyalist and long-time academic colleague of Rice, has since been appointed to a top job at the State Department. No reference to the July 10 meeting ever appeared in the 9/11 commission’s reports.
McClatchy Newspapers has quoted Ben-Veniste as acknowledging that Tenet did give him and Zelikow the Rice briefing in secret testimony, but said that Zelikow would have to answer as to why it was not mentioned in the commission’s report. Zelikow failed to respond to inquiries on this issue.
Several of the commissioners seemed genuinely shocked and outraged that the meeting had been concealed, indicating that they were not informed of Tenet’s secret testimony.
“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former member of the House of Representatives from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”
These latest revelations leave not one shred of credibility to the Bush administration’s repeated claims that the 9/11 attacks could not have been anticipated. What has emerged is that not only were they foreseen, but explicit warnings were made that were deliberately rebuffed by the White House. Moreover, the very existence of these warnings was then concealed through an elaborate cover-up that culminated in a white-wash by the 9/11 commission.
The fixation of official Washington with the Foley affair in the context of these revelations constitutes a continuation of the cover-up. The detailed parsing of statements by the Republican leadership as to what they knew about Foley’s sexual behavior and when they knew it stands in sharp contrast to the indifference of the media and politicians of both parties to contradictory statements, evasions and outright lies related to a crime that resulted in the greatest loss of life on American soil since the Civil War.
A crime, moreover, that has served as the pretext for a global eruption of American militarism that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The evidence points inexorably to one conclusion: The attacks of September 11 were facilitated by powerful elements within the government itself, which engineered a “stand-down” of the US intelligence and security apparatus. That a terrorist attack was coming was known and welcomed by those seeking a casus belli for long-planned wars to secure US hegemony over the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia.
If there is no great impetus to probe these matters, it is because every section of the American political establishment, including the media and the Democratic Party, is so thoroughly implicated.
By Bill Van Auken
7 October 2006
Bill Van Auken
Homepage:
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/oct2006/rice-o07.shtml
Comments
Hide the following 10 comments
Conspiraloon Nonsense
07.10.2006 23:12
Yes, that 9-11 deniers have absolutely no substantive evidence that supports their case (cf, by way of example, wtc7 collapse or arguments about mini-nukes).
"That a terrorist attack was coming was known and welcomed by those seeking a casus belli for long-planned wars to secure US hegemony over the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia. "
Yes, well, there's a hell of a difference between knowing someone's going to attack you (after all, we'd been bombing and opressing the poor devils for years) and actually doing it yourself, isn't there?
Architect
The real “state of denial”: 9/11 red herrings
08.10.2006 00:38
Undeniable fact: all of Washington “knew” about 9/11
It is an amply documented fact -- no news whatsoever -- that the Bush administration had absolute foreknowledge of 9/11, and deliberately ignored warnings received within the US and from officials and intelligence agencies outside the US.
As written by Michel Chossudovsky, “the foreknowledge issue itself is a red herring, a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue . . . Of course the Bush administration knew." Of course Washington “knew” about its own false flag operation. Of course Washington “knew” about using its own covert intelligence network. Of course Washington “knows” that 9/11 was an intelligence “success," not an intelligence “failure."
The media’s spotlight on “foreknowledge” and “lapses” serve to distract public attention from the deliberate cover-up of these facts:
1. 9/11 and the “war on terrorism” was and is a long-planned US operation carried out and sponsored by Washington consensus; official US geostrategic policy, carried out by the Bush administration, with unanimous bipartisan involvement from the US Congress, and with support from Wall Street.
2. “Islamic terrorism," including Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, is a creation of Anglo-American military intelligence. These networks have functioned in this role for the past two decades, and continue to carry out this role today.
3. Al-Qaeda is an apparatus that is supported by Pakistan’s ISI, which is itself is connected to the CIA.
4. Pakistan’s ISI chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad, who wired funds for the 9/11 operation to alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, met and dined with members of the Bush administration, the CIA (George Tenet), and key members of the US Congress, Republicans as well as Democrats. In other words, Washington in its entirety is implicated in 9/11.
And this is just the bare tip of the iceberg of evidence.
Michel Chossudovsky’s America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ and Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire At The End of The Age Of Oil exhaustively detail why 9/11 happened, how the Bush administration carried it out, who has benefited, and what has happened to the world since. The case material contained in these two books alone, and at their related web sites (Center for Research on Globalization and From The Wilderness), leave no doubt that Washington is engaged in a massive and ever-more sophisticated cover-up, designed to smash remaining criminal evidence, destroy investigations and criticism, selectively eradicate history, and dispel and manipulate public discourse.
Against these undeniable proven facts, the current Washington disinformation circus is all the more cynical and contemptible.
Foreknowledge: irrelevance, regurgitated
The new book, State of Denial, written by infamous Washington insider, opportunist and disinformation asset Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, has set off a new media circus over 9/11 foreknowledge and “ignored and missed warnings” on the part of key members of the Bush administration. The “Bush incompetence” lie is the centerpiece of the neoliberal faction’s “war on terrorism” agenda, the central deception favored by the Democrats and “progressives."
The latest “fire storm” merely underscores the long-proven fact that the malignant Condoleezza Rice committed perjury about 9/11, and that Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft knew of the coming attacks in the summer of 2001. (CIA Director George Tenet, of course, “knew," and has lately done his best to recast himself as one of the “good guys.")
In turn, this is sending members of the 9/11 Commission cover-up, such as Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie Gorelick, scrambling to defend their own malfeasance with their own set of conflicting lies.
The new stories simple prove what is already known: the consensus is engaged in an obvious political cover-up, with players from both neocon and neoliberal factions reading from the same script, dancing to the same tune, taking turns playing “good cop/bad cop” -- lying every step of the way.
Clinton vs. Bush redux
The opportunistic Woodward book comes in the wake of a new attempt by the Clinton and Bush camps to reinvent a “rivalry." Clinton’s “blistering” TV tirade against the Republicans, and the Bush administration’s counterattack adds to the false debate -- the red herring -- over who could have “stopped Osama bin Laden."
This is public posturing to fool the American people into perceiving one side or the other of being stronger “anti-terrorists" and which side is more capable of “making us safe."
In addition to hiding the historical fact that the Bushes and Clintons have deep and long-standing criminal ties (taking turns heading criminal Washington for decades), this campaign deliberately clouds the fact that “Islamic terrorism” is an intelligence apparatus fully supported by Washington consensus for over two decades. Both wings of the American Empire are intent on expanding the “war on terrorism," and making America itself an overt police state.
New level of cover-up of Pakistan-US connection
Bob Woodward is not the only insider with a 9/11 book. Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf has come out with his own book, a cynical manipulation accusing former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage of threatening Pakistan with a “bomb you back into the stone age” threat that “forced” Pakistan’s cooperation with the “war on terrorism."
As exposed by Mike Ruppert of From the Wilderness, this bombshell of cooked half-truths and lies is a massive deception and sheer political smoke and mirrors that provide political cover for “adjusted” American Middle East geostrategy, recasting Pakistan (and its CIA-affiliated ISI) as a “reluctant” ally of the US, while hanging out Armitage (as the bully and war criminal that Washington already knows he is) -- in full knowledge that the American public doesn’t know and doesn’t care anyway.
The Bush administration is so threatened about this “bombshell book," that the giddy George W. Bush stood at the podium with Musharraf and encouraged people to buy the book. Peals of laughter are surely echoing through the halls of Langley, and Capitol Hill.
Denial and cover-up by consensus
While the players of one faction or the other tell bald-faced out in the open, one brands the other incompetent or inattentive in the “war on terrorism," the Washington/Wall Street consensus has been unshakeable and ironclad: Lie about 9/11, a fully bipartisan atrocity. Cover it up permanently, adding new layers, and limited hangout versions to suit political expediency. Continue and strengthen the “war on terrorism” in any way that expands Anglo-American geopolitical resource interests. Cook the American populace slowly and surely.
As pointed out by Michael Kane of From The Wilderness, “the American Republic is long dead, and fascism is no longer creeping in this country -- it is solidified and documented as the law of the land."
Both factions of the American elite hold the American populace, and the world, in contempt.
The true “state of denial” is one that fails to recognize this, five years and a world war later.
Larry Chin
Homepage:
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1287.shtml
States of Denial
08.10.2006 00:40
Bob Woodward's revelation that Condoleezza Rice was warned by George Tenet and two other top CIA officials, on July 10, 2001, that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was imminent continues to reverberate – auguring potentially devastating consequences for the Bush White House. While Rice initially denied it, her spokesman confirmed that a meeting took place on that date, although Rice continues to plead a memory lapse. And as the news that Rice wasn't the only one privy to this briefing leaks out, a veritable epidemic of amnesia seems to be breaking out in Washington.
Less than two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped taking commercial domestic flights, and started chartering government jets for all his travels. Now why was that? In the wake of the attacks, so-called "conspiracy theorists" immediately glommed on to this information and hailed it as evidence that 9/11 was "an inside job." Now we know that the conspiracy theorists were on to something, although not exactly what they imagined.
According to a report in the McClatchy newspapers, within a week of Rice's brushoff of the CIA's alarum,
"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaeda strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."
Although Ashcroft is telling the media "that it was 'disappointing' that he never received the briefing, either," Rice's office, besides confirming she'd been briefed "on or around July 10," also confirmed passing it on to Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. Both were presented with an explicit warning – described by one CIA officer present as "a 10 on a scale of 1-to-10" – "by July 17." A week or so later, as CBS reported at the time, Ashcroft's office announced that he would henceforth abjure traveling on commercial airlines. A week earlier his office had leased a jet, and the authorities were explaining his decision in terms of a "threat" that went unspecified:
"'There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,' an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected, or who made it."
Ashcroft himself explicitly denied any knowledge of imminent danger:
"'I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes,' Ashcroft said.
"Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, 'Frankly, I don't. That's the answer.'"
Ashcroft was lying then, and he's lying now when he denies receiving Tenet's warning. He knew everything about the threat and who had made it. The McClatchy report describes the Tenet briefing as a PowerPoint presentation that "connected the dots" and urgently predicted al-Qaeda would strike soon. Woodward writes that Tenet and Black tried to impress upon Rice that "al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself."
Tenet and Black were given "the brush-off," as Woodward puts it, but as the CIA duo's dire premonition of what Tenet called "the big one" was communicated to Bush's inner circle, one doubts that only Ashcroft took precautions. While the rest of us peons went about our lives in ignorant bliss, the warlords of Washington ducked and covered.
What is illuminating about this developing story is that it reveals the essential context in which 9/11 occurred, and how it contradicts the "it-came-out-of-the-sheer-blue-sky" explanation that frames the official narrative. The Tenet briefing, of course, never made it into the report of the 9/11 Commission. Both Richard Ben-Veniste, a top Democratic member of the bipartisan Commission, and Philip Zelikow, the author of the Commission's report, met with Tenet and saw the same PowerPoint presentation viewed by Rice, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld. According to the McClatchy report,
"Tenet outlined to commission members Ben-Veniste and Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters. The State Department confirmed that the briefing materials were 'made available to the 9/11 Commission, and Director Tenet was asked about this meeting when interviewed by the 9/11 Commission.'"
Tenet, however, tells a different story. Citing multiple sources within the intelligence community, the McClatchy piece avers that
"Tenet raised the matter with the panel himself, displayed slides from the PowerPoint presentation, and offered to testify on the matter in public.
"Ben-Veniste confirmed to McClatchy Newspapers that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004. He referred questions about why the commission omitted any mention of the briefing in its report to Zelikow, the report's main author. Zelikow didn't respond to e-mail and telephone queries from McClatchy Newspapers."
Surely Zelikow has some explaining to do, but this yawning gap in the official narrative isn't so inexplicable given his ideological background. A strong supporter of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, Zelikow is very close to Rice, having co-authored a book with her. She had him rewrite the original National Security Strategy authored by Richard Haass, to emphasize the neocon commitment to the principle of brazen aggression, otherwise known as "preemption."
Zelikow's closeness to the administration was immediately seized on by the families of 9/11 victims as a gigantic conflict of interest. A serious academic, he is also a bit of an odd duck who has been unusually candid about what he calls the real "unspoken" agenda behind the Bush's administration's rush to war with Iraq: the "defense" of Israel. Unlike others who have made this same observation, however, he has not been accused of hatching "conspiracy theories" or smeared as "anti-Semitic." In a piece he co-authored for Foreign Affairs in the winter of 1998, Zelikow wrote of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that, if it had succeeded on a larger scale,
"The resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently."
Having anticipated well in advance the judgment of negligence, incompetence, and worse pronounced on this administration, Zelikow did his best to cover up the evidence. It wasn't good enough, however, and the official story is rapidly unraveling. The question now is, what did they know, who knew, and when did they know it?
The level of "chatter" picked up by our intelligence agencies prior to 9/11 kept Tenet up at night and energized him enough to go charging into Condi Rice's office, without notice, with a warning so urgent it couldn't wait a moment longer. Yet he and his fellow CIA officers ran up against a brick wall of, at best, indifference on the part of Condi, as well as Rumsfeld's outright obstructionism. Rumsfeld is said to have disdained the idea that a serious plot was afoot. Woodward writes:
"Tenet has been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Rumsfeld has questioned all the NSA intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses. Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts. They concluded they were genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30 a TOP SECRET senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined, 'Bin Laden Threats Are Real.'"
Incompetence on this scale is hard to imagine. Aside from the pigheadedness we have come to know and loathe in Rumsfeld and our commander in chief, and the tendency of government officials – and any sort of bureaucracy – to move slowly and uncertainly, preoccupied by questions of turf and intramural politics, there is perhaps another and more troubling explanation for why we didn't catch on to what was happening.
Yes, the administration was indeed distracted from real threats, focused as they were on the nonexistent "threat" from Iraq. However, these factors alone do not fully explain how, with all the "noise" emanating from intelligence sources – relayed directly and urgently to the White House by Tenet and others – they managed to miss the rising flood tide of indications that something wicked this way comes. The long trail of "errors" and "intelligence failures" smacks just as much of willful blindness as it does of monumental incompetence. An element of deliberate obstruction, on some level, of Tenet's lonely crusade to get the administration to do something, makes a certain amount of sense: after all, the sheer mass of evidence that something was afoot suggests a considerable effort to downplay or suppress it. There were forces working against Tenet, Black, and the CIA – but who were they, and what were their motives?
What all this suggests is that the U.S. government had been successfully infiltrated on some level. And it wasn't some obscure "conspiracy theorist" but New York Times columnist William Safire, who, two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, first reported al-Qaeda's success in penetrating the most closely-guarded secrets of the U.S. government:
"A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that 'Air Force One is next.' According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible.
"(I have a second, on-the-record source about that: Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, tells me: 'When the president said "I don't want some tinhorn terrorists keeping me out of Washington," the Secret Service informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.')"
Although the White House later backtracked and tried to claim that no such threat was made, I'd go with the first story simply because such an elaborate lie seems unlikely – especially one that makes them look bad. And if al-Qaeda could gain access to super-secret code words and acquire specific knowledge of the security procedures attending the president as well as his exact whereabouts, then surely they had penetrated the U.S. government in some way, shape, or form – perhaps with the aid of a cooperative foreign intelligence agency. At any rate, in this context it is not unreasonable to posit a fifth column operating inside the U.S. government, feeding vital information to the terrorists – and fiercely obstructing Tenet and the CIA from gaining the favorable attention of our addled president and his inner circle.
In this sense, then, it could be said that 9/11 was an "inside job," not because the WTC was felled by "controlled demolition," as the wackos assert, and not because we bombed ourselves on 9/11, but because the plot couldn't have succeeded without some form of outside assistance. Whether this was from a foreign intelligence agency, al-Qaeda spies placed deep inside the national security bureaucracy, or perhaps both, is a matter of pure speculation, but it seems to me that, when it comes to 9/11, the whole question of foreknowledge is now becoming a vitally important question.
This opens up a fascinating investigative trail that leads directly to all sorts of interesting reports – in particular this four-part report from Carl Cameron of Fox News – just as credible as Woodward's journalism, that bear some looking into. Antiwar.com has been in the lead on this issue from Day One, and I have even written a short book on the subject of which intelligence agencies were likely to have stumbled across the 9/11 terrorist plot in the making – and might have been sympathetic to the conspirators' aims, if not their motives. This is the great unexplored aspect of the biggest terrorist attack in our history. When the report by the joint Senate and House Intelligence Committees on intelligence-gathering efforts was released in highly redacted form, Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee, told PBS' Gwen Ifill:
"Yes, going back to your question about what was the greatest surprise. I agree with what Senator Shelby said the degree to which agencies were not communicating was certainly a surprise but also I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States."
Sure, the Bush administration was in a state of denial when it came to realistically assessing the terrorist threat, and they are in a similar state when it comes to the effect our foreign policy – specifically the Iraq war – has on our fight to eradicate that threat. The real problem, however, is that we are all enmeshed in multiple states of denial, blocked from going down certain paths of investigation by taboos against "conspiracism" and "revisionism" that preclude all but a highly sanitized – and unsatisfactory – version of the 9/11 story.
Yet "revisionism" is inherent in the study of history, or, indeed, the study of anything: as we do not have perfect knowledge, we are constantly revising and updating our views in light of new information. Revisionism is the opposite of dogmatism, which carves the "accepted" version in stone even before all the facts are in.
In any event, the cause of 9/11 revisionism, which I have touted in the past, has been given a major boost by Woodward's chronicle of the pre-attack struggle between the intelligence professionals who tried to prevent disaster and those politicians and apparatchiks who stood in their way. He has given us plenty of fresh clues as to where the bodies are buried, and the debunking of the "official" story proceeds apace.
Justin Raimondo
Homepage:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9807
terminally dull Architect
08.10.2006 09:52
... don't read all about it ...
... conspiraloon!?!
You f**k*** loser. Invent a new insult already, your ability to distract with that one is lost.
jsl
queens award for crap
08.10.2006 15:47
housing, like crap housing stuff they built in the 60's, architects get queens award, er falling to bits in the late
seventies. Of course we need people like architect to tell us how to live our lives and that G.W yankkkee doodle had nothing to do with raping the planet and causing millions of people to live in misery.
No just pull the wool well down over yer eyes and wait for the pub to open/close .
Architect should jump off the end ot it's slide rool >> innit
anti professional classes
Aha....rabid conspiraloon nonsense
08.10.2006 17:05
Oh, just a minute....I see.....you haven't produced any.
Architect
Irrefutable Proof
09.10.2006 14:37
They promised this to the Governments of the countries which followed them into the pre-planned/staged war in Afghanistan, but five years later, still nothing.
That's the lack of evidence which necessitates a real investigation, lest we reward those responsible, and punish the innocent.
911=PNAC, CIA, Mossad
Previous Post: Edited for Accuracy
09.10.2006 19:46
They promised this to the skeptics who questioned then but five years later, still nothing.
That's the lack of evidence which necessitates a real rubbishing, lest we reward those responsible, and punish the guilible.
Architect
Focus Is Interesting
10.10.2006 13:43
No, "Architect The Plant", what damns the Official Conspiracy Theory - the singular act which the LIARS telling it claim makes them the "victims", as opposed to the Aggressors, pursuing an agenda penned in 1992, and awaiting a "Useful Crisis" - is the fact that the Bush/PNAC Regime has been completely unable to produce the independently-verifiable and compelling pieces of evidence which would not only exist, but be forthcoming, if their story was true.
They promised this to the Governments of the countries which followed them into the pre-planned/staged war in Afghanistan, but five years later, still nothing.
That's the lack of evidence which necessitates a real investigation, lest we reward those responsible, and punish the innocent.
Why don't you demand it from them ... ?
911=PNAC, CIA, Mossad
Wait for it.....yup, more conspiraloon nonsense
10.10.2006 20:17
Architect