Schneider: Memo 'could be seriously damaging'(CNN Spins the 08/06/01 Memo)

cnn.com ^ | 04/09/04 | CNN

[KQQL]

CNN) -- The White House has released part of a key intelligence report on Osama Bin Laden that says the head of al Qaeda had been determined to conduct terror attacks in the United States since 1997. CNN's Carol Lin talked to senior political analyst Bill Schneider about the implications of the memo's contents.

[MindBender26]

It's not spin, it's outright lies!

[KQQL]

NEW YORK TIMES

April 11, 2004
Pre-9/11 Secret Briefing Said That Qaeda Was Active in U.S. By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER

ASHINGTON, April 10 — The classified briefing about Al Qaeda that President Bush received a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks reported that the terrorist network had maintained an active presence in the United States for years, was suspected of recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York, and could be preparing for domestic hijackings. But the briefing did not point to any specific time or place of attack, and did not warn that planes could be used as missiles.

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/11INTE.html?ei=5062&en=9e7f143b787872cc&ex=1082260800&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

[holdonnow]

Let me try it this way -- this is recycled crap.

National Review Online
By Mark R. Levin, Contributing Editor
June 3, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Who Blew It?
The recriminations press.


During the last three or four weeks, we've seen a cycle of leaks and spin intended to assign blame for supposed intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At first, the culprit was President Bush, then the FBI, and most recently the CIA. But how credible are these news stories?


CBS NEWS: BUSH BLEW IT
The first attempt was a leak to CBS News about an August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing in which Bush received generic information about the possibility of terrorists hijacking U.S. airliners. Upon receiving that information, the relevant federal agencies were put on alert.

Immediately, members of Congress, in particular Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle and House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, claimed that Bush had not shared this information with Congress.

On May 21, 2002, Human Events asked Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham whether he'd received this information prior to Sept. 11. He said: "We've had, we had had reports of hijackings. As to the particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing for that day was about three years ago. It was not a contemporary piece of information."

There was nothing to this story. And to the best of my knowledge, there are no news reports even suggesting that Bush (or for that matter, Congress) had information predicting, with any specificity, the Sept. 11 attacks.

WASHINGTON POST: FBI BLEW IT
Next, the partial contents of a July 10, 2001 memorandum from Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams was leaked to the press. The media spin at the time was that FBI headquarters failed to act on Williams's warning that suspicious individuals from the Mideast were training at U.S. flight schools, and that the FBI should investigate.

During closed-door testimony ten days ago, some of which was leaked to the Washington Post (May 23, 2002), Williams said he had marked his memorandum "routine" because he didn't expect an immediate response from FBI headquarters, and he never imagined the kinds of attacks that occurred on Sept. 11. That wasn't exactly what administration critics wanted to hear.

TIME: FBI BLEW IT AGAIN
Then came the 13-page, May 21, 2002 memorandum authored by FBI lawyer/agent Coleen Rowley, the media's new darling. Rowley had sought a search warrant to examine the contents of Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop computer. Dare I say, Rowley's memorandum raises a number of questions — about Rowley's actions:

Why did Rowley wait over eight months to write and distribute her memorandum to the FBI director, Time magazine, and Congress? Neither she nor her fawning press provide any explanation. She could have sought whistleblower status on Sept. 12 just as easily as she sought it on May 21. In fact, if she was so certain that the country was in danger, she could have written her memorandum prior to Sept. 11. That would have taken no more courage then writing it on May 21. She did not, and I'd like to know why not.

Item 4 of Rowley's memorandum offers a possible answer to my first question. She writes, in part:

In one of my peripheral roles on the Moussaoui matter, I answered an e-mail message on August 22, 2001, from an attorney at the National Security Law Unit (NSLU). Of course, with (ever important!) 20-20 hindsight, I now wish I had taken more time and care to compose my response. When asked by NSLU for my "assessment of (our) chances of getting a criminal warrant to search Moussaoui's computer," I answered, "Although I think there's a decent chance of being able to get a judge to sign a criminal search warrant, our USAO [United States Attorneys Office] seems to have an even higher standard much of the time, so rather than risk it, I advised that they should try the other route."

Rowley doesn't provide us with some key information. For example, we don't have the full text of the e-mail message she received, in which she's asked why she doesn't pursue a search warrant through the usual channels. We don't have the full text of her e-mail response. And we don't have all the information she provided FBI headquarters in support of a search warrant under the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The point is that by May 21, 2002, Rowley knew that investigations of events surrounding Sept. 11 had been initiated by congressional committees, with more to follow. In fact, Attorney General John Ashcroft revealed yesterday that the FBI has already turned over thousands of documents to Congress. It's likely that Rowley's e-mail exchange would soon become known. And when it did, it would suggest that there was no sense of urgency by Rowley, and, in fact, that the NSLU lawyer's inquiry to her was dealt with in a rather dismissive manner.

Rowley's memorandum also states:

The truth is, as with most predictions into the future, no one will ever know what impact, if any, the FBI's following up on those requests would have had. Although I agree that it's very doubtful that the full scope of the tragedy could have been prevented, it's at least possible we could have gotten lucky and uncovered one or two more of the terrorists in flight training prior to Sept. 11, just as Moussaoui was discovered, after making contact with his flight instructors. ...

Rowley doesn't say which of the 19 hijackers might have been apprehended, and for good reason. It appears from public reports that the would-be hijackers had completed their flight training by the time Moussaoui was captured on August 16, 2001. In fact, it appears they had already completed their flight training by the time the Phoenix memorandum was written on July 10, 2001. Moreover, while apparently identifying several suspicious Arab flight-school students, the Phoenix memorandum doesn't name any of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In addition, Moussaoui's laptop computer, the ostensible subject of Rowley's memorandum, contained information about airliners, crop dusters, and wind currents, but apparently no information about the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In other words, rather than — or in addition to — bureaucratic bungling at FBI headquarters, it seems quite possible that Rowley failed to make the case for a search warrant, in which she was required to meet the constitutional probable cause standard.

Indeed, when you cut through the rhetoric and guess work, the Rowley memorandum is far from the bombshell claimed by members of Congress and the media. And the fact that neither Ashcroft nor FBI director Robert Mueller took issue with Rowley speaks more to their political survival skills than to the merits of the memorandum. Both men are under daily assault and undoubtedly thought better of engaging in a public debate with the media's favorite FBI agent.

NEW YORK TIMES: ASHCROFT BLEW IT
Next, Saturday's New York Times (June 1, 2002) reported that

A top secret report warned the director of the FBI in the months before September 11 that the bureau faced significant terrorist threats from Middle Eastern groups like Al Qaeda but lacked enough resources to meet the threat ... [V]irtually every major FBI field office [was] undermanned in evaluating and dealing with the threat posed by groups like Al Qaeda ...

The Times added: "On Sept. 10, Mr. Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau's counterterrorism programs."

There are at least three critical facts the Times ignored:

First, if funding for the FBI and its field operations were inadequate "in the months before September 11," the budget and management decisions that created this situation would have been made by then-attorney general, and current Florida gubernatorial candidate, Janet Reno. Ashcroft had nothing to do with them. Yet, Reno's name doesn't appear in the story.

Second, as for Ashcroft's purported Sept. 10 decision against the $58 million funding increase, how could that possibly have had any consequence since the terrorist attacks occurred the next day — on Sept. 11th?

Third, if Ashcroft had approved the increase on, say, August 10 or July 10 — "in the months before Sept. 11 — "that wouldn't have mattered, either. Ashcroft can only make funding requests. Congress appropriates funds. There's no indication of any kind that prior to Sept. 11 Congress would have acted, let alone approved, a $58 million increase. In fact, as late as Sept. 10, Daschle was still playing politics with the Pentagon's appropriations, claiming that increased defense spending would drain money from the (nonexistent) Social Security trust fund.

NEWSWEEK: CIA BLEW IT
In its current issue (June 2, 2002), Newsweek alleges that the CIA, which had been monitoring the activities of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers as far back as Jan. 2000, failed to track two of them, and failed to inform the INS and the FBI about the suspicious activities of these terrorists. In Newsweek's own words:

[CIA] officials didn't tell the INS, which could have turned them away at the border, nor did they notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find our their missions. Instead, during the year and nine months after the CIA identified them as terrorists, [the two terrorists] lived openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining driver's licenses, opening bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools ... [T]he CIA's Counterterrorism Center — base camp for the agency's war on bin Laden — was sitting on information that could have led federal agents right to the terrorists' doorstep. [The two terrorists], parading across America in plain sight, could not have been easier to find.

Let's see if I understand. If the CIA told the INS about these terrorists, they might have been turned away at the border? Is Newsweek talking about the same INS that revealed several weeks ago that it can't locate over 300,000 illegal immigrants in this country, several of whom are suspected of having terrorist ties?

And the most laughable point is Newsweek's assertion that if the FBI had tracked these terrorists, the government may have learned of their mission. Perhaps Newsweek is unaware that in 1995, the Philippine police had already informed our government about a plot to fly U.S. airliners into U.S. buildings; in 1996, the president of the United States deliberately and knowingly refused the Sudanese government's offer to help us capture Osama bin Laden; in 1999, that same president was provided with a federal report reiterating what the Philippine police told us four years earlier, which as recently as two weeks ago he dismissed as opinion and not intelligence information; and in 2000, that same president again ignored an opportunity to capture or kill bin Laden.

Let's get real. Bill Clinton wasn't moved to deal effectively with bin Laden despite his 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, 1996 bombing of U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia, 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. The problem wasn't an intelligence failure, but a failure of leadership at the highest level of our government.

In any event, as Newsweek itself reports, by August 23, 2001, "the CIA sent out an urgent cable, labeled immediate, to the State Department, Customs, INS and FBI, telling them to put the two [terrorists] on the terrorism watch list. The FBI began an aggressive, 'full field' investigation." Of course, the FBI didn't apprehend them. This suggests that Newsweek's earlier claim — that the two terrorists "could not have been easier to find" — is false.

I make no excuses for bureaucratic screw-ups or bad decisions. Nor do I accept at face value information from selective leaks, and the accompanying media spin. We deserve the facts ... just the facts, ma'am.

[oceanview]

Mark, what do you think of this "next salvo" from the 9/11 commission that John Loftus from the Batchelor WABC radio show is predicting - that some FBI memo about Moussaoui got to Cheney?

[AndrewC]

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.

So let's get this straight. The intel guys are telling the president that one of the more sensational threats, i.e. a hijacking to gain the release of an individual, has not been corroborated for three years. Now in order to gain the release of someone using a hijacked airplane as a bargaining chip, one does not contemplate that crashing said possessed hijacked airplane into any object is a sane employment of that possession. So what crystal ball described in that briefing did the president fail to use in the divining of Sept 11?

[KQQL]

CNN BEFORE THEY CHANGED THE HEADLINE:

---

Key document warned of possible al Qaeda scenarios

---

CRAWFORD, Texas (CNN) -- -- The president's daily intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush a month before the September 11 attacks warns of various ...

---

[Benrand]

Good stuff...let's let the MEDIA run the government. Bill Schneider would wet his pants if he had to make some of the decisions Bush has had to make.

What a buncha tools.

[Hibernius Druid]

Schneider is such a bitter, whiny little man. Always looks like he's sucking a lemon.

[clintonh8r]

Exactly. If the drumbeat keeps up (and it probably will) without an equally aggressive and relentless response from the White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign, get ready for President Kerry.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

This is all so sickening. Where will it lead? To a better defense against radical Islam and any of a number of other enemies?

Of course not. The only purpose is political advantage.

This is part of the war within the "war on terror." This inner war is to see who gets to define 21st century America.

Had there been enough reasons to act the President would be under intense pressure now for being an anti-Muslim bigot by arresting the nineteen. The "issue" is not the issue. There is only one issue and that's power for dem Rats and the end to our sovereignty.

The Democrat Party hasn't been a traditional, patriotic political party for years. It is indeed the party of dem Rats. Most of its leaders and stalwarts have "moved beyond being Americans."

There is no peaceful solution. It's part of the bigger war. IMO.

[AndrewC]

CNN BEFORE THEY CHANGED THE HEADLINE:

The troubling thing is, that Goebbels would probably not be hired by CNN for being too honest.

[holdonnow]

I'm certain they will try to point to various pieces of information and claim dots weren't connected and Bush didn't do enough. But this is a political fight they are waging on behalf of John Kerry. Facts mean nothing. We must continue to hammer them on their appeasement records, their hypocrisy -- and especially John Kerry's pathetic record.

[SuziQ]

I think it could be seriously damaging. What this says is, the White House knew what bin Laden was capable of planning, where he intended to do it, which was New York or Washington, D.C., how he was going to do it. There was only one thing missing, which was exactly when he was going to do it, which turns out to be September 11.

The memo says nothing of the sort. It only says that binLaden WANTS to strike in the US. HELLO? Most everyone knew that at that point! There are NO specifics in that memo, and I hope that President Bush has people out IN FORCE on the Sunday shows to refute the lies of the partisan media.

[SuziQ]

I read the memo. It read like a history lesson.

Was the text of the memo posted anywhere on FR? We need to ALL read it so we can educate our fellow voters, pointing out that the media told LIES about the memo when THEY reported on it.

[paulsy]

"There was only one thing missing, which was exactly when he was going to do it, which turns out to be September 11."

Wow. I'm only a few sentences into it and I'm already seeing the bullshit. "There was only one thing missing" - What's also missing is how, who, when, in addition to the where. lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie. lie.

[SuziQ]

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.

Think about this for a minute. Given that the memo says this, what should have been the response to it? Do we screen passengers getting on to airlines? Yes, we did that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and there was nothing carried on board those planes by the hijackers that was not allowed at the time by all airlines.

What we did not know at the time, and that is no one's fault, was that when those planes were hijacked, that those taking over the planes did not intend to LAND them! There was no historical precedent for their actions, so no one considered that threat.

Reading the memo, one would assume that the nation should be on a level of alert to spot possible hijackers. All the evidence points out that we were ready for that, we were just thinking that the hijackers were going to do what they had always done in the past, negotiate for the release of someone. There is nothing in the memo, from what I understand to suggest any OTHER action by the hijackers.

[alnick]

Rush summarized it best on Friday. This is just going to go on and on, its not going to stop, the Democratic plan is to make as many ignorant people believe that Bush himself was flying those planes in the WTC. The media is complicit in this, and unfortunately, the WH PR strategy is not good. This memo is out, Bush should be addressesing the nation directly next week to make the record clear.

And what would happen if the president addresses the national to make the record clear? The media will do exactly what it's doing now. Petah and the gang will look at the masses through their TV screens and tell them that Mister Bush is in full damage control mode, that he's desparate to mitigate the damaging contents of the memo, yada, yada.

No matter what the president says, no matter what he does, the mainstream media will twist it into something very dark and sinister.

[WOSG]

Just keep in mind the vast majority of people aren't gonna ever see any part of the memo. They're just gonna go by what Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather tell them to think..."

Given that the media are lying about the memo to make the President look bad, this is a depressing thought.
They'll believe that the Pres was told the A-Q "plot", when in fact the memo has a parade of useless hypotheticals that are of no use in planning anything Except Preemtive Responses.

[MeekOneGOP]

Jeez ! These arseholes. They think Bush is SOOoooo stupid, but think he would know in advance about this coming:

SCHNEIDER: I think it could be seriously damaging. What this says is, the White House knew what bin Laden was capable of planning, where he intended to do it, which was New York or Washington, D.C., how he was going to do it. There was only one thing missing, which was exactly when he was going to do it, which turns out to be September 11.

Talk about SPIN ! 'Bush KNEW' !!

This guy is HOPING to spin it into damage to the Bush Administration.

And I'm sure that the devoted viewers of the Communist News Network will buy it too !

_______________________________________________________

Even the AP admits in their 'Bush Knew' article (title = Bush memo included possible plot warning), that there was NOTHING specific to prevent the unknown attack:

None of the information in the president's briefing or the August reports involved the eventual Sept. 11 plot.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1115209/posts?page=681#681

[dalebert]

I still think Gores report deserves more press time.