Posted on 05/17/2002 9:04:21 AM PDT by nimc
Key CIA Task Force Leader Moved
May 17 — As the Bush administration defends its actions over information it had on possible terror attacks before Sept. 11, ABCNEWS has learned that the chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center has been moved out.
The center, led by Cofer Black for the past three years, is the lead CIA team tasked with finding indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Sources tell ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman there will be more changes coming among the top figures in the CIA but President Bush still has faith in both George Tenet, the head of the CIA, and FBI director Robert Mueller.
The White House acknowledged this week that it had received intelligence in the weeks before Sept. 11 that terrorists might try to hijack U.S. jets, but said the information was too vague to act upon.
At a briefing with reporters Thursday, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice said the threats did not mention a specific time, place or mode of attack, and officials believed any such attack would be a "traditional" hijacking — not the Sept. 11 suicide mission that would turn passenger jets into missiles.
"It is always a question of how good the information is and whether putting the information out is a responsible thing to do," Rice said. "You would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized information. You would have to think five, six, seven times about that, very, very hard."
Rice stressed that there was no way anyone could have predicted that terrorists would use hijacked planes as missiles and attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"Had this president been aware that terrorists would have used airplanes as missiles and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he would have acted on it," Rice said.
However, one man whose wife died on one of the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Stephen Push, the co-founder of Families of Sept. 11, said he and many members of his organization are having a hard time accepting that explanation.
"I was very disturbed when I saw Condoleeza Rice's press conference yesterday," Push said today on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "In 1995, al Qaeda confessed that they were planning to slam planes into the United States. In July an FBI agent in Phoenix was concerned about the number of Middle Eastern men who were coming to the United States learning how to fly and they were concerned that they were connected with [Osama] bin Laden. In August, an FBI agent in Minneapolis was concerned that Zacarias Moussaoui was learning to use planes in this manner. … Did the president not have this information in front of him when he made decisions?"
Also...If WJC had gotten tough with Saudi Arabian young men in the US, he would have antagonized the Arabs, and he might have jeopardized his chances for the Nobel Peace prize.
He needed to keep the Arabs happy while he tried to force a solution on the Mid East.
You're right! I hadn't thought of it that way.
CNN script T.V. says, BRITISH NOW (duck-n-cover CYA) getting a NEW "Intelligence" DIRECTOR......female type
Haven't seen/heard any further information......maybe she's an Arab??
Maybe it will be Moneypenny.
(P.S. YOU are beautiful!!)
:-)
I'll go you one better over this ENTIRE flap. I'd like to see President Bush call for a nation-wide vote of cofidence in his presidency. He should tell the people that he needs them to be behind his efforts to fight this war and if they are not, he will step down. The results would look very much like his poll numbers have looked and it would reverse all the nonsense of 'illegitimacy' and provide him a mandate. He should call for the vote to take place at the time of the general election in November which will turn voters out in droves and also aid the R party candidates.
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