Posted on 12/18/2003 9:43:58 AM PST by fight_truth_decay
CBS on Wednesday night provided a forum for the Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, to complain about access to documents as reporter Randall Pinkston hyped his story: "For the first time, commission chairman Tom Kean is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented." Pinkston added: "Appointed by President Bush, Kean is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame."
Specifically, complaining about trouble getting to see "top-secret daily briefs, documents that may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration." That was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's assertion that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
Pinkston moved on to a 9/11 widow's complaint about a failure to connect the dots, but Pinkston's story presented pre-9/11 issues as if it were a simplistic world in which if people had been warned about threats to planes the terrorist attacks would have been avoided. In fact, it would have set off a panic and caused a myriad of problems economically. And he ignored how a concern of the Bush administration is that if the public learns there were reasons to believe planes were threatened people will assume that means 9/11 could have been prevented when, in fact, there were threats to all kinds of things and only in retrospect do we know which threat was real.
Pinkston did raise President Clinton's name -- but literally not until the very last word of his story.
Dan Rather set up the December 17 CBS Evening News piece: "The head of the independent commission investigating the 9-11 terror attacks in the United States is out with some strong accusations about what the panel is finding. The final report is due out officially in May. CBS's Randall Pinkston has tonight's story."
Pinkston's story began with video of Tom Kean walking down street with Pinkston as Kean maintained: "This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right."
Pinkston: "For the first time, commission chairman Tom Kean is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented."
Kean: "I do not believe it had to happen."
Pinkston: "Appointed by President Bush, Kean is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame."
Pinkston to Kean as the two sat in an office: "Do you think someone or someones should have been fired?"
Kean: "There are people certainly if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed."
Pinkston: "To find out who failed and why, the commission has navigated a political minefield, threatening a subpoena to gain access to the President's top-secret daily briefs, documents that may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration."
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow: "How is it possible we have a national security advisor coming out and saying we had no idea they could use planes as weapons when we had FBI records back to '91 stating that this was a possibility."
Pinkston: "Kristen Breitweiser is one of four New Jersey widows who lobbied Congress and the President to appoint the commission. The widows want to know why government agencies didn't connect the dots until September 11th, on tips like warnings from FBI offices about suspicious student pilots."
Breitweiser: "If you were to tell me that two years past the murder of my husband on live national television, I still wouldn't have one question answered, I wouldn't believe it."
Pinkston: "Kean admits the commission also has more questions than answers."
Pinkston to Kean: "To date, we don't know whether the same people who were sitting in the decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions."
Kean: "That's correct."
Pinkston: "Shouldn't we at least know whether-"
Kean: "Yes. Answer is yes. And we will."
Pinkston concluded: "Kean promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton."
The Web site for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: http://www.9-11commission.gov
...Very true in what you say; but lets announce all the findings when the investigation is over and there is credible evidence to announce at that time too..as I said what has been said by Kean that hasn't been said for the past 2 years from Rumsfeld, for example:
"Should we have known? Yes, we should have.
Could we have known? Yes, I believe we could
have because of the hard targets [CIA operatives were tracking].."
or those on the Senate intelligence committee for the past year.
What has Kean said that has not already been said? And who is Kean directly pointing to? How and why does CBS play into this?
On such a national security issue, why would CBS be a platform to announce the findings. Kean's credibility (Poof!) just went out the window for me in his appearance on network TV. Is Oprah next or The View?
We all know, no matter what our politics, that the CIA, FBI did not do their job in working together. We have not been hit again since 9-11 ! Does that mean anything? This story was put out there by a biased news media network that is desperately trying to fill the public with fear and loathing of Mr. Bush. They clearly have shown a biased political agenda, not supported our troops and as a result have placed them at more risk. In their blind hated of the President, they have only succeeded in supporting our enemies with their own self-serving style of yellow journalism.
My view
fight_truth_decay
Hardly that. It is an investigation on Monday morning into why the quarterback allowed himself to be sacked by a blitzing linebacker on Sunday.The wrong question is being asked, so a useless answer is all that can be expected. If the question is, "Could anyone have known?" the answer is the FBI agent who resigned in frustration, and went to work at the WTC as chief of security. He knew. And died in the aftermath of the kamikazi strikes.
Did you know the stock market was going to go back up to 10,000? If you knew, you bet every dime you had on it. Otherwise, you just thought it would. Look at the flak the Administration has had when it put out its "yellow alerts". Actually acting--when your information is incomplete--has costs. And we know how dynamic the Clinton Administration was when it came time to take risks.
Clinton never would learn that it was time to take a risk. After 911 at least, Bush has known that, and the very last thing the country needs is to vindicate ben Laden by condemning the president who can take action in favor of another Monday morning quarterback who is as interested in a bike path as he is in eternity.
Yet ten years after the first rumor of threat, Bush was supposed to know that this lingering threat was about to be implemented?
Fact is, the president is informed of multiple various threats each and every day, most of which have no substance and require no special attention. (Though I suspect that many threats are thwarted, but that we never hear of them).
And if Bush had received intel of an imminent attack (which I seriously doubt that he did), what could he have done without knowing exactly who and when? As another poster pointed out, the libs don't allow profiling Arabs even after 9-11. They would have had Bush's head on a block if he had attempted to profile Arabs before 9-11.
And I seriously doubt that any intel he received would have given him names and dates.
Kean made this report a complete joke by what he did with CBS
Typical. Pitiful. Shameful. Democrat.
Paul
Well, look who sits on the committee...
THE IRAQ CONNECTION
Blood Baath by R. James Woolsey R. JAMES WOOLSEY is a partner at Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C. He served as director of central intelligence from February 1993 to January 1995.
In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, attention has focused on terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible. But intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the case would do well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks--whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others--were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein. To this end, investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A few years ago, the facts in that case seemed straightforward: The mastermind behind the bombing, who went by the alias Ramzi Yousef, was in fact a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Basit. But late last year, AEI Press published "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," a careful book about the bombing by AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie. The book's startling thesis is that the original theory of the attack, advanced by James Fox (the FBI's chief investigator into the 1993 bombing until his replacement in 1994) was correct: that Yousef was not Abdul Basit but rather an Iraqi agent who had assumed the latter's identity when police files in Kuwait (where the real Abdul Basit lived in 1990) were doctored by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation of Kuwait. If Mylroie and Fox (who died in 1997) are right, then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center last time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again. According to the theory of the 1993 bombing embraced by federal prosecutors and the Clinton administration, Yousef/Abdul Basit was just another Middle Eastern student who became radicalized in his early twenties. But it is worth noting that the only two publicly reported items suggesting that Yousef and Abdul Basit are the same man could very easily have been products of Iraqi tampering with Kuwaiti police files: a few photocopied pages from earlier Abdul Basit passports that had clearly been tampered with, provided by Yousef in New York in 1992 to get a Pakistani passport in Abdul Basit's name, and fingerprints matching Yousef's found in Abdul Basit's police file in Kuwait. It is also worth noting that Abdul Basit and his family, who lived in Kuwait, disappeared during the Iraqi occupation, and the family has never reappeared. Was this a random tragedy of war or part of an effort to set up a false identity for Yousef? Moreover, the Fox/Mylroie theory--that Yousef, via Iraqi intelligence, stole Abdul Basit's identity--would explain a number of troubling differences between Abdul Basit in the summer of 1989 (when he left the United Kingdom after three years of study) and Yousef in September 1992 (when he arrived in New York). If the two are indeed the same man, then, over the course of three years, he would have: (a) grown four inches (from five foot eight inches to six feet) in his twenties; (b) put on between 35 and 40 pounds; (c) developed a deformed eye; (d) developed smaller ears and a smaller mouth; (e) gone from being an innovative computer programmer to being computer-challenged; (f) aged substantially more than three years in appearance; and (g) changed from being a quiet, smiling young man respectful to women to a rather different one (a sound file in Yousef's computer, for example, includes his voice saying "Fuck, fuck, fuck" and "Shut up, you bitch"). What incentive would the U.S. government have had to overlook these changes, stipulate that Abdul Basit and Yousef were the same person, and turn away from any suggestion that Saddam was behind the first WTC attack? One can only speculate. But by arguing that the 1993 WTC bombing and a separate, FBI-thwarted plot to bomb New York tunnels and buildings were connected as parts of a common conspiracy, prosecutors made convicting the participants, under the very broad seditious conspiracy law, far simpler. As for the Clinton administration itself, there would be less need to confront Saddam, and perhaps less need to make hard choices, if it didn't finger him as being behind the WTC bombing. And indeed, ever since Fox's ouster, federal prosecutors and the White House have hewed to the line that most terrorist attacks on the United States are either the products of "loose networks" of folks who just somehow come together or are masterminded by the mysterious and unaccountable bin Laden. Explicit state sponsorship, especially by Iraq, has not been on the agenda. The Clinton administration, meanwhile, treated Saddam--in former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's famous metaphor--like the mole in an international version of the "Whack-a-Mole" carnival game: If you bopped him on the head, he'd stay in his hole for a while. But what has he been doing while he's down there? If Fox and Mylroie are right, quite possibly planning, financing, and backing terrorist operations against the United States. As of yet, there is no evidence of explicit state sponsorship of the September 11 attacks. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Does it not seem curious that bin Laden issues fatwas, pushes videotapes, quotes poems, and orders his followers to talk loudly and often about his role in attacks on us? Does someone want our focus to be solely on bin Laden's hard-to-reach self, and not on a senior partner? If we hope to answer that question, the 1993 WTC bombing is a good place to start looking. No one other than the prosecutors, the Clinton Justice Department, and the FBI had access to the materials surrounding that case until they were presented in court, because they were virtually all obtained by a federal grand jury and hence kept not only from the public but from the rest of the government under the extreme secrecy requirements of Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Now a new administration, a new attorney general, and a new FBI director should investigate the materials that Abdul Basit handled while in the United Kingdom in 1988 and 1989, which were taken into custody by Scotland Yard. If those materials have Yousef's fingerprints on them, then the Fox/Mylroie theory is likely wrong. But if they don't, then Yousef was probably a creature of Iraqi intelligence. Which means that Saddam still considered himself at war with the United States in 1993. And, tragically, he may still today.
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