Bush was told of Qaeda steps - Pre-9/11 secret memo released

Boston Globe ^ | April 11, 2004 | Charlie Savage

[Cincinatus' Wife]

................ Titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," the briefing told Bush that the FBI was conducting "approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related," and that the CIA and FBI were investigating a tip that Osama bin Laden's supporters were planning attacks in the United States.

The memo also said the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks."

The document, a little more than a page long, summarized a series of indicators that bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader, was trying to hit the United States. It also said that Al Qaeda members "have resided or travelled in the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."

It did not mention using hijacked planes as missiles. And it did not give specific times or places for any attack.

"There is nothing in here we could show was tied to the 9/11 plot," a senior official said on condition of anonymity via a telephone conference call.

"The presence of individuals associated with Al Qaeda in the US was not new information. This had been well-known for years."..........

[Cincinatus' Wife]

FLASHBACK: May 27, 2002 Graham: We Had Same Info as Bush***Sen. Bob Graham (D.-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told HUMAN EVENTS May 21 that his committee had received all the same terrorism intelligence prior to September 11 as the Bush administration.

"Yes, we had seen all the information," said Graham. "But we didn't see it on a single piece of paper, the way the President did."

Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen earlier. "The particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing that day was about three years old," Graham said. "It was not a contemporary piece of information."

Graham's comments contradicted combative statements made recently by the Democratic congressional leadership, and confirmed White House assertions that the only specific threats of al Qaeda hijackings known to the President before September 11 came from a memo dating back to the Clinton Administration.***

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize***President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.

I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.

From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Sudan's president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.

Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.

The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.***

[Texasforever]

Let someone bring you a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle without the final picture on the box. It would be almost impossible to complete the puzzle. Now, we had the thousand pieces on Sept. 10 and the picture on top of the box on Sept 11. What the media is doing is assuming we had the top of the box all along.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Early speculation about who might serve as Kerry's secretary of State centers mostly on candidates who fit that description: Richard C. Holbrooke and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, former top officials in the Clinton administration; Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee; and, more distantly, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), whose commitment to traditional alliances now places him much closer to the center of thinking in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.

"I think the mantra of the Democratic thinkers is, 'Together if possible, alone if absolutely necessary,' " said James P. Rubin, a former senior Clinton official who is joining the Kerry campaign as a top foreign policy advisor.

"That's a key difference between the Bush foreign policy and the Democratic foreign policy: Do you get enough benefit out of the [argument for] international legitimacy and burden-sharing in order to justify adjustments in tactics and timing in what you are trying to achieve? More often than not, [Democrats think] the answer is yes. Clearly, in Iraq, the answer should have been yes."*** Kerry More Inclusive on Ties Abroad

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The partisan media is twisting with headlines.

[BJungNan]

I read the memo. What is the shocker here? He was given this one month ahead of 9/11 and was supposed to have been able to prevent that attack?! Is this what someone is trying to say (I know, not you. Your jig saw puzzle analogy is a good one).

The memo does say we knew about Da Bin Laden as early as 1993/1997. So why is not the question, what they heck were we doing long before August 2001?

Can I believe what I am hearing? A president that had some dubious information a month ahead of time is taken to task while a President that had the benefit of 8 years of classified briefings is not at all culpable?

Forget 2001, 1997, 1993. This is 1984

[Texasforever]

To any rational person the answer is obvious. There is only one objective for the media, democrats, Europeans, and terrorists, and that is to defeat this president. It will be a miracle from God if Bush is able to win re-election. I have never in my 6 decades of life seen this full frontal assault on a US president.

[weegee]

Some breaking "news" item this was. It made the Washington Post back in 2002.

Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S. Lack of Fresh Information Frustrated Bush (2002/PDB) Washington Post | May 19, 2002 | Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen

The media has their boy selected for the 2004 presidential election and must trot out old news to scare the sheeple.

[Flyer]

I hope all that all that are insinuating President Bush could have prevented 9/11 are giving 100% for the Patriot Act.

[Mike Darancette]

The only two actions that Bush could have taken in response to the memo was to arrest all parties under investigation in the 70 cases and round up all Islamic men 15 to 35 years of age that may have been contacted by Osama's recruiters.

Of course he would have been impeached and rightfully so.

[Flyer]

are giving 100% support for the Patriot Act

[Chunga]

I can't find the words to describe how much I despise the Democratic Party.

[weegee]

I have never in my 6 decades of life seen this full frontal assault on a US president.

What's more revolting is the pass that Bill Clinton got for doing nothing about National Security for 8 years (except demonize right wing talk radio listeners after the boost he got blaming them for OKC). I'm not saying the pass in "hindsight"; I'm saying that all along the way the media never blamed the president for attacks by terrorists.

A major domestic attack by global terrorism and the media tells us (A) to hold back against profiling muslims (when even American muslims have been found committing acts of terrorism from fragging the military to shooting at civilians in DC) and (B) President Bush didn't act fast enough and didn't do enough.

The competing candidate won't indicate how he will make a single American safer (and those who say the war in Iraq didn't make us safer may want to talk to Qadaffi about his WMDs).

[Texasforever]

I can't find the words to describe how much I despise the Democratic Party.

I have felt that way going all the way back to the cold war. They have CONSISTENTLY sided with the communist regimes. They have NEVER found an enemy of the United States that they don't embrace. They care not if it is an atheist USSR or a rabid fundamentalist religious cult called Islam. The only criteria they have for their support is that they hate the United States.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

.....What's more revolting is the pass that Bill Clinton got for doing nothing about National Security for 8 years (except demonize right wing talk radio listeners after the boost he got blaming them for OKC). I'm not saying the pass in "hindsight"; I'm saying that all along the way the media never blamed the president for attacks by terrorists.,,,

Add to that Clinton's pardoning of criminals and terrorists.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/09/08/congress.faln/

LINK to Clinton's FALN pardons

[Travis McGee]

I'm sure the left wing media would have supported grounding our airlines and rounding up muslim men in August of 2001.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The loyal partisan media will always take the opposing position; they advocate the LIBERAL mantra.

[bellas_sister]

bump for later reading

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Everyone got it wrong before 9/11
By Jeff Jacoby, 4/11/2004

WE'LL GET TO last week's big Washington story -- Condoleezza's Rice's testimony before the Sept. 11 Commission -- in a moment. But first, a short quiz:


1. Identify the following list of topics:
"The World Bank's mission creep"

"Getting debt relief right"

"Russia's unformed foreign policy"

"Japan, the reluctant reformer"

"With a friend like Fox"

"Caspian energy at the crossroads."

No clue? Don't feel bad. You would have to be suffering from acute foreign-policy wonkishness to recognize the table of contents from the September/ October 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council of Foreign Relations. Like the "curious incident" described in the Sherlock Holmes tale -- that the dog didn't bark -- the significance of these headlines is not in what they say but in what they don't say: The nation's leading journal of international relations was paying no attention to the threat from Islamist terror even as Islamist terrorists were planning the deadliest attack ever committed by foreign enemies on US soil.

2. Which US senator admitted on 9/11, "We have always known this could happen. . . . I regret to say -- I served on the Intelligence Committee up until last year. I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it -- but not really doing the hard work of responding."

That was John Kerry on "Larry King Live," ruing his and his colleagues' pre-9/11 failure to give the threat from international terrorism the attention and "hard work of responding" it deserved.

3. President Clinton's final national security policy paper, submitted to Congress in December 2000, was 45,000 words long. Yet which international menace was never mentioned? Al Qaeda. The document referred to Osama bin Laden just four times, and its discussion of terrorism spoke not of wiping out the killers in their nests but of extraditing "fugitives" to make them "answer for their crimes."

Which brings us back to Rice's appearance last week.

If anything has been obvious since 9/11, it is that the government of the United States, like the foreign-policy establishment generally, was grossly derelict in its understanding and handling of Islamist terrorism. That was true during the first eight months of the Bush presidency and it was true during the preceding eight years of the Clinton presidency. For all the atmospherics of the Sept. 11 Commission, for all the partisan skirmishing of its Democrats and Republicans, there was no important difference between the two administrations prior to that terrible day. Rice's efforts to prove otherwise were largely unconvincing. So, a week earlier, were Richard Clarke's.

The simple truth was put bluntly by Rice in her opening statement: "The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them. For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient." Democracies rarely face up to the worst dangers they face until disaster strikes. Until then, political leaders find it much easier to do nothing than to press for unpopular reforms.

Imagine the backlash the administration would have faced, for example, if it had reacted aggressively to the CIA briefing in August 2001 that warned of possible terrorist hijackings -- the one ominously titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." If the Transportation Department, on the strength of that warning alone, had ordered air travelers to arrive at least two hours before their flights, banned a long list of common household objects -- knives, knitting needles, scissors -- from airplanes, and authorized pilots to eject "Middle Eastern" ticketholders they deemed suspicious, the public would have reacted with fury. And the administration would have backed down.

Prior to 9/11, no president from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush properly understood the swelling danger of Islamist terrorism. None recognized that we were under attack by a ruthless enemy bent on global conquest and the destruction of Western liberty. Neither did leaders in Congress, nor elite opinion makers in the media.

Far more significant is what has happened since 9/11: The Bush administration went to war. It destroyed Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan, toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, turned Pakistan into a terror-war ally, and intimidated Libya into ending its hunt for nuclear weapons. Crucially, it has demolished the perception of America as -- in bin Laden's words -- a "weak horse" that bolts at the first gunshot. And it did it all in the face of withering political fire at home and abroad.

How you regard that performance -- as invaluable wartime leadership by the president or as a fraud "made up in Texas" -- is likely to decide how you vote this November. For what matters now isn't who was wrong before 9/11. It is who has been right since.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.



http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/04/11/everyone_got_it_wrong_before_911/

[L.N. Smithee]

I hope [all that are] insinuating President Bush could have prevented 9/11 are giving 100% [support] for the Patriot Act.

Ay, there's the rub. There wouldn't have been a dadblasted thing the Feds could have done to prevent the attacks without violating the "rights" of Atta et al. Heaven knows that the Clinton Admin wouldn't want to surveil them before they did anything illegal -- that would be racial profiling!