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It is quite clear that the agencies of government who should have been protecting us in these circumstances had not even barely contemplated this sort of event and therefore were not prepared to execute against any kind of plan and so you had massive miscommunication and failure to execute on what they needed to do. This is a persistent question that we have had. There seems to have been an enormous disconnect between the intelligence community and what it thought the threats were and the individuals who had to plan against given threats. So you see the FAA utterly unprepared for--uh--not taking any steps to prevent hijacking of this sort, and you hear NORAD--that is, our military--who are supposed to protect the domestic air space, saying they were focused completely outward and had almost no capacity to protect us internally. JAMIE GORELICK |
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I would just say, though, Pete, and you've been at the Pentagon, too. You know this. The military is pretty good as a--an intelligence consumer. And my question today for General Myers and others was, why didn't you pull into yourselves and into your own planning process a government-wide assessment of what the threats were? And you know, John [Lehman] is right. They didn't get intelligence which said, "Focus inside." And so they were focused completely on the perimeter. And that has an enormous impact in what you're seeing in this report.... I mean, you can't fault the FAA here at all. I mean, the FAA did not have the right intelligence either. I mean, it was not exercising against this. It had protocols as we just discussed that were not remotely appropriate to the kind of hijacking that we had, to an airplane used as a missile. This is not the FAA's problem. This is the way in which intelligence, which was someplace in the intelligence community, did not find its way to policy makers and certainly to implementers like the FAA and like the Pentagon. JAMIE GORELICK |
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This story merits its own book, but what deserves immediate comment is the willingness of the Clintons to risk everything to keep the cash pipeline open. Schwartz kept it open and full. Before he was through, Schwartz and Loral would donate roughly $2 million to the Clinton cause. Whether Schwartz gave additional money or favors off the books is a question that deserves asking. A second question that deserves asking is just how much damage Schwartz, Berger and the Clintons did to America's national security. A third question worth asking is whether Ron Brown's very real threats to expose these machinations led to his death. Some dare call it treason: |