"I cannot verify the veracity of this..."
(from the video)
"On July 28, 1945, a B-52 bomber, lost in the fog, crashed into the 79th floor of The Empire State Building..."
Um...okay..
Posted on 05/21/2006 7:50:06 AM PDT by yoe
Judith Miller, The New York Times reporter at the center of the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby case, reveals that she received advance word about a terrorist plot that turned out to be 9/11 - but the Times spiked the story.
Miller spent 85 days in jail before finally disclosing that Libby was the source who confirmed to her that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative.
Miller - who's no longer with the Times - never wrote a story about Plame. But she's more troubled by another story that didn't run - the one about 9/11.
Miller began investigating al-Qaida after the terrorist group's October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in the harbor of Aden, Yemen.
Over the weekend before July 4, 2001, there were strong indications that terrorists were planning to attack the U.S. or a major American target elsewhere, Miller said in an interview with Scott Malone and Rory O'Connor that appeared on the Web site NavySEALS.com.
The attack never materialized. But that weekend "I did manage to have a conversation with a source," she told the interviewers.
"The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up. The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation between two members of al-Qaida. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the Cole.
"One al-Qaida operative was overheard saying to the other, "Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'
"I was obviously floored by that information. I thought it was a very good story - the source was impeccable, the information was specific, tying al-Qaida operatives to, at least, knowledge of the attack on the Cole, and they were warning that something big was coming, to which the United States would have to respond. This struck me as a major Page 1-potential story."
However, when Miller met with her editor Stephen Engelberg, he was critical, noting that Miller didn't know who the operatives were, where they were overheard or what attack they were planning.
"At that point I realized I didn't have the whole story," Miller said. She continued to probe, but couldn't turn up enough information to satisfy Engelberg.
The story never ran. And two months later came al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attacks.
Engelberg, now managing editor of The Oregonian in Portland, told the Columbia Journalism Review: "More than once I've wondered what would have happened if we'd run the piece. A case can be made that it would have been alarmist and I just couldn't justify it, but you can't help but think maybe I made the wrong call."
Said Miller: "Sometimes in journalism you regret the stories you do; but most of the time you regret the ones that you didn't do."
Here is the article this article from NewsMax is based on from a few days ago:
The (Other) Story Judith Miller Didn't Write
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1634323/posts
If you google "Osamas declaration of war" you'll find among the several declarations one where Osama talks about the contempt he feels for Clinton because he was so soft. As you read it, you realize that these people have nothing but contempt for "diplomacy" and anything resembling kindness--these they view as weaknesses. The only thing they understand and respect is brute force.
With the Islamofacists, we need to remember that we'll never make them LIKE us. We can, however, make them RESPECT us, and that is what we should be doing. Afghanistan and Iraq was a good start--but we're losing ground with how we're handling terrorists in our courts and trying to deal with Iran diplomatically. They're laughing at us, trust me on that one.
Well, I'm sure the NYT has their fair share of things they didn't report, but should have. And we all know the twisted brats have a perverted sense of loyalty. But, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that our buddy, Clinton, was in office when the WTC was first bombed in '93, I think. Anyway, he did nothing short of slap them on the wrist and say, bad boy, you shouldn't do things like that, it might hurt somebody...
This makes one take a stronger look at the, 'Bush Knew' headline. Sounds like, 'The Times Knew' is more appropriate.
So, Judith Miller learned that al Qaeda was trying desperately to carry out a "big" attack on the U.S. in an unspecified manner, at an unspecified place at an unspecified time.
In other breaking news, the Sun rose in the East this morning and my dog licked his crotch.
Nah, this is just a new variation on the "it's Bush's fault" - it says that Bush would have had the information Judith Miller needed to make it a story - and didn't act on it. First we don't know if someone who would tip off Judith is also part of the inner circle - of if this person just tips off the media - that might be a story... But stories about who leaks and why are rare.
There's probably hundreds of "warnings of suspicious" behavior every week. Reporters hear of some - and after the fact it's easy to point to the significant ones - before? Not so easy...
Give me a break. That coulda - woulda - shouda thinking is worse than useless. Hindsight being 20/20. And what precautions could have been taken, that Americans would have submitted to?
Good post and thanks for the heads up on that speech.
I was on a five-hour cross-country flight last week where there was a problem with the restroom-occupied light at the front of the plane, so from your seat you couldn't tell if the restroom was occupied or not. Of course people ended up "loitering" near the front of the plane so they could get a chance at the restroom. At the point that the flight attendant put her foot down (as required by "federal regulations"), the two people waiting in a very short line were a female senior citizen and a dwarf.
On the return flight a couple of days later, I was honored to sit next to a Marine major, in camo, who hadn't slept since he left Baghdad 52 hours previously. He had just finished his third tour in Iraq and was headed home for some downtime. He told me he wanted to sleep, but then we had a 3-hour conversation about the war, Middle Eastern politics, and U.S. politics. I gave him every chance to beg off, but he said he really enjoyed the conversation because I asked so many intelligent questions. He said most people he runs into want to tell him what's going on over there, for example, that we're in the middle of a civil war -- which we're not.
Although he was adamant that we were winning, he had some complaints about military bureacracy. One problem that aggravated him was a problem they had in paying local translators. They desperately need Arabic speakers who understood the local culture, and were willing to pay them well, but the bureaucrats wouldn't release the money without a signed, physical timesheet. Faxes wouldn't work. Scanned PDF's signed by a colonel wouldn't work. They would send a courier out through the Red Zone in the middle of the night (the safest time) to get the timesheets to where they needed to be.
Be careful, what you wish for. And if Judith Miller said "I was tipped off about 9/11", she's even more of an idiot than she seems and that's saying alot. She was given info on a conversation between two Al Qaeda's, which may or may not have meant anything, but that's not being "tipped off" to 9/11.
Very interesting article/book promotion.
Two "rocket scientists" who knew better than the entire US intelligence services that a source was/was not credible.....
More amazing that it took some 5 years to come out?
Good grief!!!!! I can't help but think of Red Greene's quote: We're all in this together" and how it does not apply to the media.
Thanks for letting me vent.
jos
The question that arises in my mind is, did Miller and the NYT notify the FBI? If not, then they need to be pointed out to the world for the traitors they are.
"This seems to say that if Clinton had responded to the USS Cole, then Al-Qaeda might not have brought down the World Trade Center towers."
Clinton couldn't respond to the Cole bombing. At the time he was trolling for $$ for his trailer trash monument library in Little Rock and the only funders he could find were fronts for terrorist groups!!
Yeah, Kathleen Parker wrote about what such "precautions", taken in a pre-9/11 world, would have gotten us:
----
New York — President-elect John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.
Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the U.S.
Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. United Nations (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on Larry King Live, said the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal likely would bring charges of genocide against the president.
Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose "crime" was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against both Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest, and illegal search and seizure.
Kerry's campaign mantra - "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to" - clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's September 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9/10 Commission" hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry.
The commission's purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified?
The main target of the attack was bin Laden, friend to Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime, as well as al Qaeda training camps in that war-ravaged nation. Al Qaeda, an international terrorist network, has been blamed for numerous attacks on U.S. interests, including the USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors.
Even though Bush's military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped and al Qaeda continues to flourish.
Some intelligence sources speculate that bin Laden's operatives may be trying to secure weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Even though Saddam continues to send money to the families of Palestinian terrorists and is believed to have programs for developing WMD, Kerry says he is committed to containing Saddam through continued sanctions and the U.N. oil-for-food program.
In any case, experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program are just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al Qaeda was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton.
In a January 25 memo to Dr. Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al Qaeda, and a response to the USS Cole.
At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots," decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter" that hinted at "something big."
With no other details on the "big," and by weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.
Under questioning by the "9/10 Commission," Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly." The bi-partisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush's "dot-connecting" had destroyed American credibility and subjected the U.S. to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world.
Last week, Saddam Hussein and Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat joined French and German leaders in condemning Bush and urging American voters to cast their ballots for regime change in the U.S. Kerry was the clear response to that call.
In a flourish of irony and the spirit of bon vivant for which president-elect is widely known, Kerry gave his acceptance speech from Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Tower One.
Awwww, nobody's been paying attention to poor Judith Miller lately.
.
BILL CLINTON,
...who actively supported our Communist terrorist enemy North Vietnam Dictator HO CHI MINH during the Vietnam War...
...personally refused 3 free offers from the Sudan in 1995, 1996 & 2000 to give us our new No. 1 terrorist enemy OSAMA bin LADEN on a Silver Platter before OBL could hit us real hard here at home.
The Enemy is now Within...
...and always has been.
*The day after 9/11 MONSOOR IJAZ was on The FoX Channel telling America about these OBL Offers he had brokered with the Sudan only to be were refused by the CLINTON White House.
**Later on BILL CLINTON's own 1990's White House political advisor DICK MORRIS confirmed his former Boss' PERSONALLY refusing 2 of these Offers in 1995 & 1996. The only reason the 2000 OBL Offer refusal by BILL CLINTON was not also confirmed was because DICK MORRIS was no longer in the CLINTON White House by then.
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