Posted on 08/11/2005 8:29:22 AM PDT by bobsunshine
A group of 9/11 widows say they are "horrified" over reports that the 9/11 Commission ignored evidence that the Clinton administration had identified the two 9/11 hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center as terrorist threats two years before the attack.
"We are horrified to learn . . . . that the 9/11 Commission failed to fully investigate all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks," the group Sept. 11 Advocates said in a statement late Wednesday.
A separate group of 9/11 widows, known as "the Jersey Girls," is also expressing outrage over the 9/11 Commission's decision to ignore testimony that military intelligence had identified Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi in 1999 as terrorist threats operating inside the U.S. - but was ordered not to share the information with the FBI.
"This calls into question the credibility of the [9/11 Commission] report because this is not an insignificant piece of information," Kristen Breitweiser told the Asbury Park Press.
"The idea we didn't know this is quite disturbing," she added.
"People have been led to believe that the hijackers were in the country undetected, but this information shows that is not true," said fellow Jersey Girl Mindy Kleinberg.
"Now the truth is our intelligence agencies did not fail," Kleinberg told the Press. "They were tracking them. Now the question is why did we perpetrate that myth and why were we not able to unravel the plot, especially in light of the fact that we had Mohamed Atta in our sights."
Rep. Curt Weldon, who first revealed the 9/11 intelligence blunder on Monday, blamed the "firewall" erected by the Clinton Justice Department that prevented sharing intelligence with law enforcement.
"There was no reason not to share this information with the FBI," he complained in a radio interview Wednesday night, "except that the firewalls that existed back then were so severe that they wouldn't let these agencies talk to one another."
Jersey girls want to know why. Well so do I. Why is it that they don't knee jerk blame the president(Clinton) who was in office at the time like they blame GWB for the actual attack? Could it be that the political leanings of the members of the group (before) the attacks are keeping them from asking tough questions of their own party now?
With this story having come out, do not tell me that our national security can be trusted in the hands of a Democrat, it's already been proven that that is not true.
The cover is finally starting to be blown now, but in the long run I expect nothing will happen, which is typical. There's no real accountability or representation in our government anymore, and it's disgusting.
Notice all the public rage of these groups is directed at the 9-11 commission, not the architect of the policy that made 9-11 possible.
Of course they ignored it. Name 'Gorelick' mean any thing to these dimwits?
If Weldon found this out, then why didn't the 911 Commission?
Written July 22, 2004 10:50 AM @ http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/001490.html
The Berger Follies: The NYT Has No Shame
Rarely have I seen a major newspaper play a story in such brazenly partisan fashion.
It truly beggars belief.
Check out today's lead NYT story on the unfolding Sandy Berger scandal by Eric Lichtblau and Dave Sanger.
Boy, is it a whopper...
Let's take a closer look, graf by graf, because it is well worth the time.
Here's the lede:
The White House said Wednesday that senior officials in its counsel's office were told by the Justice Department months ago that a criminal investigation was under way to determine if Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser under President Bill Clinton, removed classified documents about Al Qaeda from the National Archives.
Talk about a disingenuous lede!
You see, the main story here isn't mostly about whether/why Berger surrepetitiously stole away with classified documents from 9/11 committee chambers.
No, it's about whether the Justice Department should have clued in the White House regarding the investigation.
The White House declined to say who beyond the counsel's office knew about the investigation, but some administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they believed that several top aides to Mr. Bush were informed of the investigation. President Bush himself declined to answer a question Wednesday about whether he had been told, saying: "I'm not going to comment on this matter. This is a serious matter, and it will be fully investigated by the Justice Department."
Bush, not Berger, is not answering Qs right now!
I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up folks.
Howell Raines himself would blush.
Next:
The disclosure of the investigation forced Mr. Berger to step down as an informal, unpaid adviser to Senator John Kerry's campaign on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the campaign accused the White House of deliberately leaking news of the investigation and said that Vice President Dick Cheney was involved in strategies to divert attention from the Sept. 11 report to be issued Thursday.
"Informal." "Unpaid."
Certainly not one of three finalists for the job of chief diplomat in a prospective Kerry administration!
Just some random campaign flak...
Sandy, er, who???
And, of course, evil Dick Cheney might be trying to divert attention away from the 9/11 inquiry--the NYT helpfully showcases as well.
It wouldn't fit the W. 43rd St. narrative, of course, if Cheney didn't have some hand in the Washington scandal du jour (energy, Halliburton, 'Kenny Boy,' Iraq intel, and so on)...
More:
"The timing of this leak suggests that the White House is more concerned about protecting its political hide than hearing what the commission has to say about strengthening our security," a statement issued by Mr. Kerry's campaign said.
Scott McClellan, the president's press secretary, denied Wednesday that the White House had anything to do with the leak, or was seeking a diversion from the report.
Your baffled NYT readers might be excused, at this juncture, for thinking George Bush himself was stuffing docs down his socks and trousers....
The report is expected to criticize the Bush administration's handling of intelligence about terrorism, but it will also contain significant criticisms of the Clinton administration and the National Security Council that Mr. Berger ran, in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.
Gee, ya think?
More:
The chief mystery surrounding the mishandling of the documents is the motive. Republican leaders and the Bush-Cheney campaign have suggested that Mr. Berger sought to pass classified information to Mr. Kerry. Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, called on the Kerry campaign to provide "clear assurance to the American people that the Kerry campaign did not benefit from classified documents that were removed from the National Archives by one of their advisers, Sandy Berger, now subject to a criminal investigation."
But that's just a red herring.
The White House hasn't been going heavy on the theme that Berger did this to help Kerry.
Here's Scott McClellan yesterday:
Q The other partisan charges being leveled is that Berger, as an informal advisor to Senator Kerry, may have been using documents that would ultimately inform Senator Kerry's thinking on developing policy. That view has been expressed by the reelection campaign. Does the White House share that concern?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sure that all those matters will be looked into by the people overseeing the investigation.
Q As part of the investigation?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sure that they will look into all those issues that would be related to this investigation.
Q You just don't want to have a piece of this story, do you?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I think it's -- Bill, you've asked me about other criminal investigations, and I've always said that, because it's an ongoing investigation, it's best that we let the investigation proceed, and that those questions be directed to the Department of Justice. I understand your desire for information, but this is a serious -- this is serious matter.
This is hardly mega-cheerleading that Berger did this on Kerry's behalf, no?
It's simply the standard, when someone is self-destructing, step aside and let the meltdown occur as the "investigations proceed(s)"...
But by making it look like the Republicans are going all helter-skelter on that front (Berger did it for Kerry!), the NYT adeptly defines the scandal up--allowing this next:
But Mr. Kerry himself, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, would probably have access to any such documents, and the clearances to read them. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Berger's spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said: "Mr. Berger never passed any classified information to the Kerry campaign. Any suggestion to the contrary cannot be supported by any facts."
At the Kerry campaign, officials say they were taken by surprise by the accusation. It appears that Mr. Berger did not disclose the investigation to Mr. Kerry's aides. Mr. Lockhart said that was because "we were dealing in good faith with the Department of Justice on this matter for many months, and part of our agreement was that this was not to be discussed beyond Sandy's legal team."
"Taken by surprise"!
Is it just me, or are you more "surprised" that a former NSC Advisor stands accused, at least by some, of stuffing hugely sensitive documents down his socks?
That, at least, is what's got me all curious over here in London.
But the Times relentlessly churns on regarding, not what Berger did or didn't do, but the ginned up "who in the White House knew?!?" meme:
On Tuesday, after the information about Mr. Berger emerged, Mr. McClellan referred questions to the Justice Department and said, "What we know is what has been reported in the news media." That seemed to suggest no early knowledge of the investigation inside the White House.
On Wednesday, however, Mr. McClellan corrected himself, saying that the office of Alberto Gonzalez Jr., the White House counsel, had been informed about the case.
"The counsel's office is the one that is coordinating with the Sept. 11 commission the production of documents," Mr. McClellan said. "And since this relates to some documents, the counsel's office was contacted as part of that investigation."
Mr. McClellan did not specifically cite the Justice Department as the source of the information, but administration officials said it was the department that had informed the White House of the investigation.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Ominous, huh?
Ashcroft is stone-walling again....
Finally, towards the end of the article, we come to this:
The department is investigating whether Mr. Berger broke federal law on the handling of classified material by removing from a secure government reading room a handful of documents related to an after-action report on the 1999 millennium plots, as well as notes he took during his review.
In preparing for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, Mr. Berger viewed thousands of pages of intelligence documents. He said he removed the documents by mistake, but Republicans accused him of stashing the material in his clothes on purpose. They have offered theories about what that purpose may have been, like an effort to withhold information that reflected badly on the Clinton administration.
Note the vivid language re: "stashing the material in his clothes on purpose."
That's, er, not a judicious portrayal of what Berger stands accused of by many.
There's the treatment of his notes, for instance, rather than the documents themselves.
Or he might have stashed them in his clothes, er, not on purpose (that credulity-straining careless thang).
What's my point?
That the NYT wants to make the Republican accusations look as dramatic as possible--so, in case Berger was merely careless, the GOP looks bad for all that slanderous talk about Berger doing it on "on purpose", "stashing" the docs, etc. etc.
The larger point?
The big issue in all of this, what did Berger do or not do, is just worth this slight, passing mention.
And this in the lead (at least on the web) NYT article on the matter today.
Moving on, we swiftly return to the Bushies role in all this, and end the article, thus:
Traditionally, law enforcement officials have sought to maintain a firewall of sorts between criminal investigators and political appointees on politically sensitive cases.
Several legal analysts said it would not be unusual or necessarily improper for the political appointees at the Justice Department to have let the White House know of the investigation's existence. But they emphasized that such communications should be closely held at the White House, should not involve criminal investigators and should not be allowed to influence the outcome.
"There may be a legitimate explanation here because the White House counsel had responsibility for handling these documents," said Beth Nolan, White House counsel under President Clinton.
"But the better path might have been not to provide the information to the White House at all,'' she said, "because of this exact situation - if you have information that was shared and was then leaked, it creates a whole set of political problems."
Talk about diverting attention away from the main show.
Breathtaking, really.
But, of course, not suprising is it?
Compare all this with the Washington Post's handling of the story.
The contrasts are, shall we say, vivid.
It's like they are covering two different scandals--which, in a way, they are--one real, one fictive.
Posted by Gregory Djerejian at July 22, 2004 10:50 AM
When Ashcroft exposed the Gorelick memos, she should have been dismissed from the 9/11 Commission. The failure to do so fatally wounded their work. We are now seeing the fallout.
They did NOT IGNORE THE INFORMATION. They intentionally and with forthought COVERED IT UP.
This just goes to show how much the STAFFERS of a congressman matter. (ie look at Specter)
Sandy Berger did not do this by accident.
I also bet that their "review" of notes was yet another effort to "clean" the notes from the file.
The Clintons, the Democrat party, and the MSM are all part of the same gang of good-time rock & rollers. The MSM has no interest in these revelations and they will laugh in their back news rooms as they gleefully ignore or discredit this story.
The question I have to ask is why were y'all so ignorant as to believe that Democrats could protect you better than Republicans?
Everybody, including pubbie Commissioners, ought to feel very embarrassed that they let themselves be bamboozled by Gorelick. The charade has been obvious to me from the day I first Gorelick on TV. How they could trust her is beyond me.
I don't understand how when such important info was available about these terrorists, why weren't they able to go around this 'wall'?? It makes no sense.
Jersey Girls are shocked to find out Clinton might be involved in a coverup of 9/11....what is this scrappleface
They're horrified but probably too stupid to know that Clinton was President at that time.
"I wish they would be as horrified at the Clinton administration for not acting on these facts."
Mr. No-Pants President had other things on his mind.
Thanks for posting this.
Below is maybe the best summary of this treason.
The American Thinker
Spy Valerie and the rogue CIA July 18th, 2005
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4656
Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that [the new] CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs.
Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?
Clearly the CIA managers who failed the United States so terribly on 9/11 should have been fired four years ago.
Others now worried about their careers include officials who have long resisted the onerous task of building a topnotch human intelligence capability in the most dangerous parts of the world.
Porter Goss's new broom should also sweep away:
1) personnel who utterly failed to thwart critical technology theft by China during the Clinton years;
2) those who constantly undermine the war on terror;
3) the ones who make a regular habit of dropping media stinkbombs against the White House.
4) Finally, there is the faction that supported Saddam Hussein's hold on power, as Joe Wilson did.
It could be a bloodbath, and the Permanent Establishment knows it.
The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House.
The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon.
The charge against Rove is based on a blatantly forged document, purporting to show that Saddam tried to buy Niger yellowcake uranium. We now know that the document was forged by the French government to embarrass Secretary Colin Powell, and undermine the American case against Saddam at the UN.
It was classic disinformation bait.
Powell flourished the Niger forgery at the Security Council, and the very next day "European intelligence agencies" leaked word that it was a laughable fraud.
Months later, the London Telegraph published the fact that it was all a French disinformation ploy.
The CIA has to know all about the French forgery, just as it knows that Joseph Wilson's famous trip to Niger was pure bilgewater.
Nobody sends a has-been diplomat to Africa to drink mint tea with corrupt old President Tandja Mamadou, expecting to discover whether Mamadou has secretly been selling nuke materials to Saddam.
That's pure Inspector Clousseau.
Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr. Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time.
As Joseph DiGenova, former US Attorney for DC, recently said, "The CIA isn’t stupid. They wanted this story out."
It was a publicity stunt from the get-go.
Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.
What Karl Rove apparently did was to hint to reporters about the fraudulence of the whole Wilson stunt, and for that the media mob wants him drawn and quartered. No good deed goes unpunished.
Everything else Wilson has been saying on his two-year speaking tour around the country has been shown to be lies, but well-designed lies --- lies that fit right into the mad-dog world of the Democrat Left.
Telling lies to confirm somebody's paranoid beliefs is a classic disinformation gambit, right out of Spy School 101.
But such gambits would be far more usefully employed against al Qaeda, our opponent in war.
If the United States is attacked again by terrorists, one reason will be that our CIA has wasted time fighting the White House rather than the enemy.
Given Wilson's Niger trip, set up by wife Valerie for Joe Wilson to publicly show that a blatant forgery was, well, a forgery, the current media attack on the White House was completely predictable.
The Permanent Establishment had a perfect dress rehearsal last year with the uproar about Richard Clarke, who also worked in the Clinton White House, possibly next door to Joe Wilson. The barely-disguised message to George W. Bush was: if you try to get rid of us, we may pull a Deep Throat on you. J. Edgar Hoover would have seen through it instantly.
When the Twin Towers exploded in 2001, President Bush did not touch the FBI or the CIA.
By comparison, after the Japanese decimated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR and George Marshall churned the commanding ranks of the Army and Navy, elevating talented officers like Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton. They created Wild Bill Donovan's OSS, the seed of the CIA. Donovan in his turn brought street spooks to the top, political correctness (of the day) be damned.
A lot of careers were broken, and the new talent skyrocketed. It worked like a charm. The infusion of new blood into a stale bureaucracy was the key to victory in World War II. The old crew had allowed a deplorable situation to develop, and were obviously incapable of recognizing what needed to be done.
So why didn't Mr. Bush clean out the dead wood at CIA?
A reasonable guess is that his father warned against it. George Bush, Sr. is a former CIA Director, after all, and is intimately familiar with its ways. He was a GOP Congressman during Watergate, when Mark Felt destroyed Richard Nixon for thwarting his lifelong ambition to succeed J. Edgar Hoover.
Paraphrasing LBJ's immortal words, it was smarter to keep the CIA inside the tent pissing out rather than the other way around.
So George Tenet wasn’t fired, and as far as we can tell, neither was anybody else. Instead, the President met with Tenet every day for five years to get the latest about al Qaeda, and surely gained a deeper understanding of the intelligence maze at the same time.
The White House has played a very careful poker game since then, picking its cards one by one until it was ready to make the big move.
Today, George Tenet is out, State and Defense are in the hands of Bush loyalists, the House and Senate have GOP majorities, and the new CIA Director is not an insider.
The CIA itself is now subordinate to the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte, a no-nonsense diplomat in the Kissinger mold.
When Goss became Director, Agency bureaucrats complained bitterly to the press. Mr. Bush now holds all the cards, and it is time to play them.
All this isn't just fun and games.
It casts a deadly light on internecine warfare in Washington at a time of great national danger.
We know that Hoover blackmailed four successive Presidents by threatening to reveal confidential FBI secrets.
We know that Hoover's fair-haired boy, Mark Felt, destroyed the Nixon Presidency – a virtual coup d'etat that the media tell us was a victory of Democracy over the Secret Government. With the media as destiny’s servant.
We know that Nixon taped visitors to the Oval Office without their permission, but that FDR, LBJ, and Kennedy did the same, without facing media exposure.
And during the unbelievable Clinton years we know that Bill and Hillary abused presidential power in a dozen egregious ways, and may still control copies of raw FBI files to use against their domestic enemies.
But it was Richard Nixon alone who got caught by a rogue FBI bureaucrat.
Deep Throat showed how a president can be destroyed by a bureaucrat.
The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media.
The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power.
Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.
The sneering media mob is on display on C-SPAN whenever the White House holds a press briefing. The Left is apoplectic: "Karl Rove + traitor" brought up 97,000 entries on google three days ago, and 124,000 this morning.
But Karl Rove is merely today's target for a permanent state of rage so deep and hot that it is always seeking new witches to burn.
As for the failed CIA spooks who are now living in fear of losing their perks, one can only imagine the steam blowing from their ears, as the day of reckoning draws closer.
I'm cheering for the good guys.
James Lewis
20 posted on 08/10/2005 9:09:28 PM PDT by Matchett-PI
Nothing to see here. Move along.
This just in: New Accusations of Bush-National Guard-AWOL.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.