Posted on 04/12/2004 11:41:47 AM PDT by BJClinton
CRAWFORD, Texas - On the defensive, President Bush said Monday there was no warning in a pre-Sept. 11 intelligence memo that "something is about to happen in America" before the nation's worst terrorism attack. He said U.S. intelligence services may be due for reforms.
"There was nothing in there that said, you know, `There is an imminent attack,'" Bush told reporters. "That wasn't what the report said. The report was kind of a history of Osama's (bin Laden's) intentions."
Democrats have suggested there was more to the memo, the center of an election-year skirmish over the president's anti-terrorism policies before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. He said he would answer more questions at an East Room news conference Tuesday night. It will be the first formal news conference of the year.
Bush is coming under intense scrutiny for his anti-terrorism policies before the 2001 attacks. The criticism threatens Bush's political standing seven months before he stands for re-election, with the war on terrorism his strongest selling point.
At the center of the brouhaha is an intelligence memo from Aug. 6, 2001, showing that Bush received reports from as recent as May 2001 about possible terrorist plots in the United States.
The memo specifically told Bush that al-Qaida operatives had reached American shores, had a support system in place and were engaging in "patterns of suspicious activity ... consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." It did not provide specific times or places for potential attacks.
Standing alongside Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at a joint news conference, Bush minimized the importance of the memo.
"There was nothing in this report to me that said, `Oh, by the way, we've got intelligence that says something is about to happen in America,'" Bush said.
Citing statements by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush said: "Now may be the time to revamp and reform our intelligence services."
He said the memo brought him some comfort when it outlined efforts by the FBI to prevent attacks. "Had they found something, I'm confident they would have reported back to me," Bush said.
The president has been on the defensive since the White House, under pressure, released the memo Saturday.
The document has "nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America — well, we knew that," Bush said Sunday.
"I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into" and had any specific intelligence pointed to threats of attacks on New York and Washington, "I would have moved mountains" to prevent it, Bush said during a visit to Fort Hood, Texas, 50 miles from his ranch here.
A Republican member of the Sept. 11 commission backed that up Monday.
Former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson told ABC's "Good Morning America" that "no reasonable American could hold the president responsible for the attack."
"If I'm the president and I get a special briefing that I've asked for, and he asked for this, and said the FBI is conducting 70 field investigations about this, then I assume the FBI is on top of the job," Thompson said. "The president is not an FBI agent."
Commission member Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, told NBC"s "Today" show "there is a major game of finger-pointing going on around here. Our job is to get to the bottom of it."
Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., said public figures "shouldn't be scapegoating" and said he believes serious questions must be raised about whether the FBI is equipped to deal with terrorism.
Bayh said most Western governments have separate counterterrorism departments. "We don't. We need to ask ourselves, maybe the time has come to do that," he told CBS's "The Early Show."
The memo's contents are somewhat of a surprise because for two years, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice starting with a May 2002 news conference left the impression that the document focused on historical information and that any current threats mostly involved overseas targets.
Rice first outlined the then-classified memo's contents at a news conference in May 2002. The "overwhelming bulk of the evidence" before Sept. 11, she declared, was that any terrorist attack "was likely to take place overseas."
The 500-word document mentioned two current threats: suspected al-Qaida operatives might have cased federal buildings in New York and that, according to a phone call to an American embassy in the Middle East, a group of supporters of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was in the United States to plan attacks with explosives.
The FBI later concluded that two Yemeni men photographing buildings in New York were tourists.
To accentuate the potential domestic threat, the memo told Bush the FBI had 70 investigations related to bin Laden under way.
No bias here. None at all...
All the media worth anything is owned by just seven corporate entities now (Clear Channel Communications isn't on the chart).
If he is going to mention "partisanship" in the committee, he need go no further than Gorelick. Why is someone who was an ASSistant AG in the previous administration even on the committee? Is she really trying to"get to the bottom of it", or merely cover her tracks?
It took all of the first three words for Yost to spin this story.
On the defensive, President Bush said Monday there was no warning in a pre-Sept. 11 intelligence memo that "something is about to happen in America" before the nation's worst terrorism attack."On the defensive"?
How about: In response to incessant media yammering on the subject...
The Dem imminence front attack never stops. Bush never said the threat from Iraq was imminent, but the Dems continually claim that he did. And this memo claims no imminent threat from al Qaeda ... but the Dems claim it did.
Get Bush
Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US
Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997' has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."
After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [deleted text] service. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [deleted text] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.
Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.
Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.
Al-Qa'ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.
A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar' Abd aI-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.
Subtle ?
From Joseph Farah's "Jihad in America" in the November 2001 issue of Whistleblower magazine.
The country is united politically right now, so I'm sure I'll be accused of divisiveness, partisan sniping, maybe even being unpatriotic by raising this issue.
But, heck, I've been accused of worse. Last week the Wall Street Journal called me a "purveyor of obscenity." I'll let you be the judge of whether that description suits me.
I never let those criticisms bother me – especially not from uptight, corporate media establishment mouthpieces and spoiled, little, ivory-tower reactionaries.
So, today I'm going to tell you how Al Gore may have contributed, in his own politically ambitious, selfish way, to the deaths of some of the victims of the terrorist attacks Sept. 11.
Following the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, Gore was entrusted by President Clinton to investigate airline safety. He was named chairman of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety.
The Gore commission produced what most observers considered to be a tough preliminary report unveiled Sept. 9 of that year – one that included tough counter-terrorism procedures.
But within days, according to an insider on the commission, the airline industry jumped all over Gore. As a result, 10 days later, Gore sent a letter to airline lobbyist Carol Hallett promising that the commission's findings would not result in any loss of revenue.
In what can only be seen as a pure political payoff, the Democratic National Committee received $40,000 from TWA the next day. Within two weeks, Northwest, United and American Airlines ponied up another $55,000 for the 1996 campaign.
But the money trail didn't stop there. In the next two months leading up to the November elections, American Airlines donated $250,000 to the Democrats. United donated $100,000 to the DNC. Northwestern put $53,000 more into the kitty.
Following the election, in January, Gore floated a draft final report that eliminated all security measures from the commission's findings, according to the insider. Two commission members balked, as did CIA Director John Deutch.
Fearing more political heat, Gore pulled back the draft report. A month later, the final report was issued – one that included requirements that would cost the airlines some money, but, perhaps, save some lives in the future.
The report's requirements included: high-tech bomb detectors;
more training for airport security;
criminal background checks for security personnel;
increased canine patrols.
Only one thing was lacking from the report, said the whistleblower – there was no deadline by which those requirements would have to be met. It was open-ended. In other words, it wasn't worth the paper on which it was written.
In a meeting with other commission members Feb. 12, 1997, Gore said he would leave room for a dissent by those who opposed the report. But within minutes, Gore was announcing to the president and the public that the report was the work of a unanimous commission. In other words, he lied – again.
In Washington, that might have been the end of the story. Scandals like this often go unnoticed. But one courageous lady, the dissenting member of the commission, Victoria Cummock, filed suit to gain access to files she was denied and for the right to file her dissent.
Who is Mrs. Cummock? She was appointed to the commission by Clinton because her husband was killed in the terrorist downing of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland. She's the insider. She's the whistleblower. She's the heroine of this story.
All this was chronicled in a Tony Blankley column a year ago – a year and five days before the latest terrorist attack that killed all passengers and all the crew on four airliners as well as thousands on the ground at the World Trade Center and Pentagon Sept. 11.
Would any of that death and destruction have been prevented had Gore not crawled into bed with the airline industry thinking only in the short term about potential financial losses, not realizing it might be saving itself from much bigger losses in the future?
I guess we'll never know for sure. But remember this story the next time Al Gore rears his opportunistic political head on the national scene.
But do these liberal morons know what "shaking the trees" means? It means arresting people. Seizing property. Intercepting information. And this is all stuff that they say we're doing too much of right now, after 9/11.
On the long list of hysterical webpages on the ACLU website devoted to the dastardly Patriot Act, there's this page: Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Assault on Civil Liberties (Updated September 2003).
And on that one page (one of many pages), is a long list of the horrible dastardly crimes of John Ashcroft (not labelled "shaking the trees" though that's surely what he's doing).
And in the middle of the list is one hugely dastardly horrendous crime of the attorney general. Check it out:
Has asked Neighborhood Watch groups to work with the federal government to identify terrorists.This, to the pin-head liberals, is a great affront to liberty. Asking folks to watch out in their own neighborhoods for suspicious activity that might not be related to burglaries!
Pin-head Estrogen is moaning and whining that we weren't out "shaking the trees". What in her teeny, tiny brain does she imagine such activity to entail, if even asking folks to keep an eye out in their own neighborhood is a horrible, dastardly John Ashcroft crime????
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