Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- Not specific? He's told they have numerous cells in the US, are planning an attack involving hijacking passenger jets and that a giant attack was expected in the very near future, an imminent attack...how specific did he need it to be to reach the level of a threat, the flight numbers and names of each hijacker, the actual date and hour? If terrorists acting independently hijacked the planes on 9/11 all the government would have had to do to stop them was increase airline terminal security."The P.D.B. was no indication of a terrorist threat," Mr. Bush said. "There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?" <http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040411/D81SRPN00.html> Bush Was Satisfied on Pre-9/11 Probes Apr 11, 5:46 PM (ET) By PETE YOST CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - President Bush insisted Sunday he was satisfied that federal agents were on top of the terrorist threat after reading a pre-Sept. 11 briefing detailing Osama bin Laden's intentions on U.S. soil. For two years, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice left Americans with the impression that the memo from Aug. 6, 2001, focused on historical information dating to 1998 and that any current threats mostly involved overseas targets. Yet the release, under public pressure, of the briefing showed that Bush had received intelligence reporting as recent as May 2001 and that most of the current information focused on possible plots in the United States. "I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into" and had any specific intelligence pointed to threats of attacks on New York and Washington, "I would have moved mountains" to prevent it, Bush said Sunday during a visit to Fort Hood in Texas. But he said the document, which the White House released Saturday night, contained "nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America - well, we knew that." Should the memo - a leading topic of the Sunday talk shows - have raised "more of an alarm bell than it did? I think in hindsight that's probably true," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He said the Clinton and Bush administrations bear responsibility for Sept. 11. The existence of the president's briefing memo was disclosed to the public at a news conference in May 2002. The "overwhelming bulk of the evidence" before Sept. 11, Rice declared, was that any terrorist attack "was likely to take place overseas." Most of the CIA reporting during the summer of 2001 did focus on possible overseas targets. But the memo specifically told Bush that al-Qaida had reached American shores, had a support system in place and was engaging in "patterns of suspicious activity ... consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." In May 2002, Rice said "there was specific threat reporting about al-Qaida attacks against U.S. targets." She did not mention that it was in the report sent to the president. To accentuate the potential domestic threat, the memo told Bush the FBI had 70 investigations related to bin Laden under way. The president's memo mentioned two current threats: suspected al-Qaida operatives might have cased federal buildings in New York and that, according to a phone call to an American embassy in the Middle East, a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States to plan attacks with explosives. The FBI later concluded the two Yemeni men photographing buildings in New York were tourists. Slade Gorton, a member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, said the memo "did talk about potential attacks in the United States," but "it didn't give the slightest clue as to what they would be or where they would be." "The FBI has more questions to answer than Condoleezza Rice or (former presidential anti-terrorism adviser) Dick Clarke or anyone we've had testify before us so far," said Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington state. Gorton said the reference in the memo sent to the president about 70 FBI investigations "would be sort of comforting to the person who read it the first time around." Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, saw as significant the memo's references to May 2001 intelligence about a possible al-Qaida explosives plot inside the United States. The "leadership at the top," said Ben-Veniste, should have "butted heads together, get them in the same room, and then pulse the agencies: 'What do you know?' Get all of your agents out there with messages to say, 'Tell us everything you know at this moment.'" But Richard Perle, a former Pentagon adviser who was an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration, said there was "not enough specificity to take any action." "What could a president have done under those circumstances? Shut down the United States? Grounded all aircraft? Gone into a panic mode?" Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said it is easy to "go back now and pick out a clue here and a tidbit there ... but we have to keep in mind the environment. We have to keep in mind the volume of reporting that the president and his advisers are dealing with each and every day." To Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., however, the memo should have created a sense of urgency at the top levels of government. "If you are having a brief that is entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.,' and then it lays out specific things ... you would think that that would raise enough caution flags that you would haul in the FBI, that you'd put out an all-points bulletin," he said. New York Times Bush Says Brief on Al Qaeda Threat Was Not Specific By ADAM NAGOURNEY and PHILIP SHENON Published: April 12, 2004 WASHINGTON, April 11 - President Bush said on Sunday that the intelligence briefing he received on Al Qaeda one month before the Sept. 11 strike contained no specific "indication of a terrorist attack" on American soil. He also defended the adequacy of his response to the warnings that terrorists in the United States might be planning hijackings. Mr. Bush, in his first public remarks since the release of his top-secret briefing Saturday evening, played down the urgency of the information he was given at his ranch 36 days before terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. In doing so, Mr. Bush echoed the testimony last week by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, before the commission investigating the attacks, which had pushed for the release of the briefing. "I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America - at a time and a place, an attack," Mr. Bush said after attending Easter services in Fort Hood, Tex. "Of course we knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what." Still, Mr. Bush for the first time suggested that others in his administration may not have done enough to head off the attacks. "That's what the 9/11 commission should look into, and I hope it does," he said. Mr. Bush said he understood in the summer of 2001 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into domestic terrorist threats, adding, "That's what we expect the F.B.I. to do." The bureau's counterterrorism efforts are the focus of hearings this week by the independent commission. Mr. Bush's remarks came after a week in which the president had remained largely out of view, even as violence was escalating in Iraq and as his terrorism policies were being challenged. His comments were part of a White House effort to quell the storm about the briefing he received on Aug. 6, 2001. Democrats and Republicans said on Sunday that the release of the document - combined with images of American bloodshed and the disorder in Iraq - was threatening the central pillar of the president's re-election campaign, his record on managing national security. The Aug. 6 report to Mr. Bush that was released Saturday evening was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It cited evidence of active Qaeda cells in the United States, as well as reports that members of the terrorist organization had conducted recent surveillance of a federal building in Manhattan and could be preparing to stage hijackings. The briefing cited threats logged as recently as May 2001. Nonetheless, Mr. Bush, like Ms. Rice in her sworn testimony, said the Aug. 6 report, the President's Daily Brief, or P.D.B., contained no new information that merited a stepped-up response by the White House. "The P.D.B. was no indication of a terrorist threat," Mr. Bush said. "There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?" His comments came as the chairman of the independent commission, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview that he would push for public disclosure of a second highly classified presidential briefing, this one provided to former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Kean said that document also involved Qaeda threats and was "very pertinent to our work." In a sign of the potential impact that the commission investigation could have in the fall, Rand Beers, the senior policy adviser to John Kerry, Mr. Bush's likely Democratic opponent, said on Sunday that the White House had failed to pay proper heed to warnings included in the briefing. Mr. Beers noted that he had worked in the National Security Council under four presidents, including Mr. Bush, a post that gave him access to such briefings. "To the knowledgeable reader of the presidential daily brief - and I read it for a number of years when I was in the Clinton White House, and I read it again when I was in the Bush White House, although just the terrorism portions of it - that document was intended to tell the president of the United States that there was a serious problem," he said on the ABC news program "This Week." "The title, `Osama bin Laden Determined to Attack the U.S.,' was not a lightly chosen title," Mr. Beers said, adding: "It said there was an intent to attack. It said there were cells within the United States, and they had been there for some time. It said that Al Qaeda was very deliberate in its planning process and would take the time necessary in order to attack the United States. And then there were several pieces of information which suggested that there was some current activity within the United States." Mr. Kerry himself continued to step carefully around the issue, offering reporters an Easter greeting as he left church in Boston, but declining to answer any questions. Some Republicans have also questioned whether the White House did enough in response to the Aug. 6 report. "Should it have raised more of an alarm bell?" Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who is often critical of the Bush administration, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think in hindsight, that's probably true." In a telephone interview, Mr. Kean said he was pleased that the White House had agreed to the commission's request to release the briefing, and said he did not see its finding as "a smoking gun." "I don't think there's a lot of new information in it," Mr. Kean said, adding: "It's time the public saw it. It has been characterized and mischaracterized. There's nothing in it that I've seen that in any way jeopardizes security." Mr. Kean, who has been allowed to read large portions of the daily briefings that were provided to both President Bush and President Clinton, has said before that he did not believe any of the briefings before Sept. 11 contained information that would now suggest government malfeasance before the attacks. Mr. Bush's appearance at Fort Hood came at the start of what could be a critical week in his presidency. His administration faces more hearings, questions generated by the release of the Aug. 6 briefing and challenges by some Democrats to Ms. Rice's credibility based on her characterization of the report. A Newsweek poll published on Sunday showed that just 36 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the way "things are going," a finding that members of both parties said was reason for concern for Mr. Bush. But Republicans close to Mr. Bush said they were confident that he was surviving this storm, and suggested that challenges to Ms. Rice would be dismissed by most Americans as partisanship. "I actually think that the commission has not changed people's opinion," said one senior Republican official, who would only discuss the political ramifications of the investigation on the promise of anonymity. "If anything, Condi's testimony has reinforced everything this administration has done for terror." Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, disparaged Republicans who had grown nervous over the turn of events. "Let's face it: The president's campaign depends upon him - over the course of time, not in a one-week time span - showing that the situation in Iraq is improving, that we are winning, and we do have a strategy to get out," he said. "He has seven months to show that," Mr. King said. "I'm positive that in the fullness of time, the president is going to show that it works. But he's chosen a tough road to go down." Still, Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University, said Mr. Bush was in a difficult spot. "The cumulative effect for Bush of just everything that is going on - the seeming hemorrhaging in Iraq, as the hearings - is very painful," Mr. Greenstein said. "I think the administration might have well hoped that by this time in the election cycle, things would have settled down in Iraq and they would have been busy defining Kerry as soft on national security and building on triumphant images of Bush on aircraft carriers." And Samuel Popkin, a professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego, said that Mr. Bush's first response on the subject would not do much to staunch what he, too, described as a significant threat to his re-election. "Truman said, `The buck stops here,' " Mr. Popkin said. "Bush is saying, `The buck never got to me.' " www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
--- End Message ---
