Her Most Royal Highness:"Fortune favors the prepared, Little one.
Go fetch me our stolen FBI files quickly and phone numbers of our mercenaries and hoods
or else Sandy Berger will end up in a cage in Guantanamo."
Posted on 07/20/2004 3:51:58 PM PDT by ScaniaBoy
Terror-threat paper at center of criminal probe not shared with incoming Bush administration
In testimony before the 9-11 Commission in April, Attorney General John Ashcroft pointed to a National Security Council document now at the center of the FBI's investigation of former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, urging the panel to ask why its warnings and "blueprint" to thwart al-Qaida's plans to target the U.S. were ignored by the Clinton administration and not shared with the incoming Bush security staff.
Drafts of the sensitive NSC "Millennium After Action Review" on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are reported to be among the documents still missing from classified materials Berger removed from a secure reading room.
Ashcroft said the review – which he was not shown prior to 9-11 – recommends, 17 months before the attacks, "disrupting the al-Qaida network and terrorist presence here using immigration violations, minor criminal infractions and tougher visa and border controls."
Ashcroft told the commission, "It is clear from the review that actions taken in the Millennium Period should not be the operating model for the U.S. government."
The March 2000 review, Ashcroft told the panel, warns the Clinton administration "of a substantial al-Qaida network and affiliated foreign terrorist presence within the U.S., capable of supporting additional terrorist attacks here."
Ashcroft said the "highly-classified" review "was not among the 30 items upon which my predecessor [Janet Reno] briefed me during the transition. It was not advocated as a disruption strategy to me during the [2001] summer threat period by the NSC staff which wrote the review more than a year earlier."
Millennium plot
The millennium plot involved planned attacks on Israeli and U.S. tourists in Jordan, on the USS Sullivans in Yemen and the Los Angeles airport.
On Dec. 12, 1999, Jordanian authorities thwarted plans to bomb the Raddison Hotel in Amman and Mount Nebo, the site on the Jordan River where John the Baptist is said to have baptized Jesus. Twenty-two of the 28 suspects were tried, including Boston cab driver Raed Hijazi, who was sentenced to life in prison.
The bomb-laden boat deployed to attack the USS Sullivans was overloaded and sank before detonating.
Algerian terrorist Ahmed Ressam was arrested Dec. 14, 1999 trying to enter the U.S. from Canada at Port Angeles, Wash., when he was found to be in possession of nitroglycerin.
During his trial, Ressam revealed he had been trained in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan run by bin Laden. At the camp were jihadists from Central Asia, the Philippines, the Middle East and China who learned how to blow up a nation's infrastructure and conduct rocket-launching, urban warfare, assassination and sabotage.
Berger is the focus of a Justice Department investigation for removing the documents and handwritten notes from a secure reading room prior to the Sept. 11 Commission hearings. He had been serving as a national security adviser to John Kerry's campaign but announced his resignation today.
The officials said the missing documents included critical assessments about the Clinton administration's handling of the millennium terror threats as well as identification of America's terror vulnerabilities at airports to seaports.
Berger had ordered his anti-terror czar, Richard Clarke, in early 2000 to write the after-action report.
Berger testified that during the millennium period, "we thwarted threats and I do believe it was important to bring the principals together on a frequent basis" to consider terror threats more regularly.
Defenders of the Clinton administration testified at the 9/11 commission hearings that the White House's high-level meetings kept the nation on alert, foiling the Los Angeles airport plot.
But the customs agent who stopped Ressam at the border, Diana Dean, says it was her gut instincts, not an alert White House that prevented disaster.
No one had told her to be on a special lookout for terrorists, she said in an April interview with NBC News.
Commission member Timothy Roemer declared April 13 that the Clinton administration had a "great deal of success during this time period. My theory is, because of this small group that is meeting at the top levels of government."
But Dean said Roemer's story "didn't make sense to me."
Recalling the incident, Dean said she had a hunch something wasn't quite right and asked Ressam to open his trunk. Big bags of white powder, first thought to be drugs, were found, but the tests came back negative.
When further probing uncovered timers, investigators realized the powder was explosives.
"My heart dropped right into my toes when I realized what it was," Dean told NBC.
She says didn't remember any warnings of specific threats, adding, "I don't recall anybody saying watch for terrorists."
Who's to blame?
During the Sept. 11 hearings in April, commissioner Jamie Gorelick, former assistant attorney general under President Clinton, tried to put National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the spot for the Bush administration's purported failure to heed advice from the previous administration.
Gorelick pointed to a report from 2001 that indicated, in her own words, that "we have big systemic problems. The FBI doesn't work the way it should, and it doesn't communicate with the intelligence community."
In the ensuing dialogue, however, Rice apparently implicated Gorelick in the allegation.
Gorelick: Now, you have said that your policy review was meant to be comprehensive. You took your time because you wanted to get at the hard issues and have a hard-hitting, comprehensive policy. And yet there is nothing in [the policy review] about the vast domestic landscape that we were all warned needed so much attention. Can you give me the answer to the question why?
Rice: I would ask the following. We were there for 233 days. There had been a recognition for a number of years before – after the '93 [World Trade Center] bombing, and certainly after the [thwarted] millennium [attack in Los Angeles] – that there were challenges inside the United States, and that there were challenges concerning our domestic agencies and the challenges concerning the FBI and the CIA. We were in office 233 days. It's absolutely the case that we did not begin structural reform at the FBI.
In his testimony before the commission, Ashcroft pinned blame on Gorelick for issuing a 1995 memo that established a "wall" between the criminal and intelligence divisions, hindering the ability of the U.S. government to detect the Sept. 11 plot.
The document by Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general under President Clinton, helped establish the "single greatest structural cause" for Sept. 11, which was "the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents," Ashcroft said in his prepared statement.
The article contains some very good quotes - both from Ashcroft's and Rice's testimony in front of the 9-11 Commission.
PING to Gorelick thread!
Bump!
I have been extremely LMBO at work today. I can only imagine what Coulter will have to say about this tonight...that is, assuming that Colmes and his flaming liberal sycophants let her speak...
Someone light a match...FIRE! FIRE!
Keep me posted - on this side of the Atlantic she is not shown (sigh!).
If someone in the military pulled the stunt that Sandy Burglar (a Rushism) did, they would be prosecuted in a heart beat.
However, I think the Republicans should let it slide. It will hurt Dems more if we take a high road approach.
If your political position on this terrorism business already looks a little suspect, like you weren't keeping up with the job, you want do to all you can to hush up and soft-pedal your shortcomings. If this includes suppressing and filching documents, well, that is just one of a few extra things you don't make too prominent on your job description. And normally, it would not be part of your resume. But Sandy was taking one for the team.
The documents in question did seem to have a purpose, not necessarily related to what was revealed to the 9/11 commission, and part of the information on them may have been revealed in several of John Kerry's campaign speeches.
It is time to get a statement from Reno, but would she tell the truth?
Her Most Royal Highness:"Fortune favors the prepared, Little one.
Go fetch me our stolen FBI files quickly and phone numbers of our mercenaries and hoods
or else Sandy Berger will end up in a cage in Guantanamo."
It feels quite nice to see so many of the bad guys implicated in one and the same scandal: Berger, Gorelick, Reno, Clarke, and indirectly Clinton himself - and of course Senator Kerry.
Of course there may have been other documents stolen as well, not only those directly connected with 9/11 Commission, but that doesn't make it any better for Mr Berger/Burglar.
Shudder! You really want to give me nightmares!
(Who's the guy on the left?)
"but would she tell the truth?"
Would Janet Reno tell the truth. After mulling that for about 1 second, I think not.
I can't believe that Berger had the audacity to stand in front of the media and claim he made "an honest mistake."
Do these people have no shame??????/ Apparently not.
Security lapse??? Don't blame this on the government. Berger and Kerry are crooks.
Writing this spot down.
I am only just beginning to catch up on this matter.
However, it appears that the Klinton administration purposely ignored terrorist threats, generated recommendations to discontinue their lax policies, and then purposely with-held such recommendations from the incoming administration.
We could let it slide. Or we could identify those who are guilty and hang them for treason. I am leaning toward the latter.
As long as the whistleblower is anonymous, the Donks will run with their *suspicious timing* bit.
We need a right-wing Woodward to do this one.
I don't think the high road helps anyone at all, except the Donks. William Tell's suggestion has merit.
Ashcroft said the "highly-classified" review "was not among the 30 items upon which my predecessor [Janet Reno] briefed me during the transition. It was not advocated as a disruption strategy to me during the [2001] summer threat period by the NSC staff which wrote the review more than a year earlier."
Now, I could easily make a few cynical comments about how, three years later, those recommendations don't make a difference anyway, at least with regard to border control and immigration violations.
But I won't.
Hey, I'm going to Switzerland for a week in mid August. I will be in Lucerne. Any suggestions for travel, within a few hours by train?
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