-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: May 7, 2007 6:57:51 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: Tenet-Bush Pre-9/11 'Small Talk'
After reaching the White House, a C.I.A. briefer started his [June
2001, pre-9/11] presentation by saying: "There will be a
significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!"
He then displayed a chart showing "seven specific pieces of
intelligence gathered over the past 24 hours, all of them
predicting an imminent attack," Tenet wrote. The briefer presented
another chart with "the more chilling statements we had in our
possession through intelligence."
These comments included a mid-June statement by Osama bin Laden to
trainees about an attack in the near future; talk about decisive
acts and a "big event"; and fresh intelligence about predictions of
"a stunning turn of events in the weeks ahead," Tenet wrote.
Rich B. told Rice that the attack will be "spectacular" and
designed to inflict heavy casualties against U.S. targets, Tenet
wrote.
When [Condi] Rice asked what needed to be done, the C.I.A.'s Black
responded, "This country needs to go on a war footing now." The
C.I.A. officials sought approval for broad covert-action authority
that had been languishing since March, Tenet wrote.
Despite the briefing, senior Bush administration officials
continued to pooh-pooh the seriousness of the al-Qaeda threat.
Leading neocons at the Pentagon -- Cambone and Wolfowitz --
suggested that the C.I.A. might be falling for a disinformation
campaign.
See what's free at AOL.com.
From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: May 6, 2007 5:51:42 PM PDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Tenet-Bush Pre-9/11 'Small Talk'
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/050607.html
*Tenet-Bush Pre-9/11 'Small Talk'*
By Robert Parry
May 6, 2007
In late August 2001, when aggressive presidential action might have
changed the course of U.S. history, C.I.A. Director George Tenet
made a special trip to Crawford, Texas, to get George W. Bush to
focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack only
to have the conversation descend into meaningless small talk.
Alarmed C.I.A. officials already had held an extraordinary meeting
with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10 to
lay out the accumulating evidence of an impending attack and had
delivered on Aug. 6 a special "Presidential Daily Brief" to Bush
entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
"A few weeks after the Aug. 6 P.D.B. was delivered, I followed it
to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events,"
Tenet wrote in his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm." "This was
my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously
driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make
small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native
to Queens," where Tenet had grown up.
Tenet’s trip to Crawford -- like the July 10 meeting with Rice and
the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush -- failed to shock the
administration out of its lethargy nor elicit the emergency steps
that the C.I.A. and other counterterrorism specialists wanted.
While Tenet and Bush made small talk about "the flora and the
fauna," al-Qaeda operatives put the finishing touches on their plans.
It wasn't until Sept. 4 -- a week before 9/11 -- when senior Bush
administration officials, including Rice and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, "finally reconvened in the White House Situation
Room" to discuss counter-terrorism plans "that had been lingering
unresolved all summer long," Tenet wrote.
Tenet's memoir also provided new details about the emergency July
10 meeting that Tenet had demanded with Rice to lay out the
startling new evidence of an impending al-Qaeda attack.
By July 10, senior C.I.A. counterterrorism officials, including
Cofer Black, had collected a body of intelligence that they first
presented to Tenet.
"The briefing [Black] gave me literally made my hair stand on end,"
Tenet wrote. "When he was through, I picked up the big white secure
phone on the left side of my desk -- the one with a direct line to
Condi Rice -- and told her that I needed to see her immediately to
provide an update on the al-Qa'ida threat."
'Significant Terrorist Attack'
After reaching the White House, a C.I.A. briefer, identified in the
book only as Rich B., started his presentation by saying: "There
will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!"
Rich B. then displayed a chart showing "seven specific pieces of
intelligence gathered over the past 24 hours, all of them
predicting an imminent attack," Tenet wrote. The briefer presented
another chart with "the more chilling statements we had in our
possession through intelligence."
These comments included a mid-June statement by Osama bin Laden to
trainees about an attack in the near future; talk about decisive
acts and a "big event"; and fresh intelligence about predictions of
"a stunning turn of events in the weeks ahead," Tenet wrote.
Rich B. told Rice that the attack will be "spectacular" and
designed to inflict heavy casualties against U.S. targets, Tenet
wrote.
"Attack preparations have been made," Rich B. said about al-Qaeda's
plans. "Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible, and they
will occur with little or no warning."
When Rice asked what needed to be done, the C.I.A.'s Black
responded, "This country needs to go on a war footing now." The
C.I.A. officials sought approval for broad covert-action authority
that had been languishing since March, Tenet wrote.
Despite the July 10 briefing, other senior Bush administration
officials continued to pooh-pooh the seriousness of the al-Qaeda
threat. Two leading neoconservatives at the Pentagon -- Stephen
Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz -- suggested that the C.I.A. might be
falling for a disinformation campaign, Tenet wrote.
But the evidence of an impending attack continued to pour in. At
one C.I.A. meeting in late July, Tenet wrote that Rich B. told
senior officials bluntly, "they’re coming here," a declaration that
was followed by stunned silence.
The intelligence community’s evidence was summarized in the special
P.D.B. that was delivered to Bush while he was vacationing at his
ranch in Crawford.
The P.D.B. ended by noting that "F.B.I. information … indicates
patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with
preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including
recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The F.B.I. is
conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout
the U.S. that it considers Bin Ladin-related. C.I.A. and the F.B.I.
are investigating a call to our Embassy in the U.A.E. in May saying
that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the U.S. planning
attacks with explosives."
Bush apparently was not pleased by the C.I.A.'s intrusion on his
vacation nor with the report's lack of specific targets and dates.
He glared at the C.I.A. briefer and snapped, "All right, you’ve
covered your ass," according to an account in author Ron Suskind's
"The One Percent Doctrine," which relied heavily on senior C.I.A.
officials.
Ordering no special response, Bush returned to his month-long
vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about
stem-cell research.
Averting 9/11
While it will never be known whether a different reaction by Bush
and his national security team might have disrupted the 9/11
attacks, a variety of options -- both short- and long-term -- were
available.
Inside the F.B.I. in August, there were other warnings that went
unheeded. F.B.I. agents in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui
because of his suspicious behavior in trying to learn to fly
commercial jetliners when he lacked even rudimentary skills.
F.B.I. agent Harry Samit, who interrogated Moussaoui, sent 70
warnings to his superiors about suspicions that the Islamic
extremist had been taking flight training in Minnesota because he
was planning to hijack a plane for a terrorist operation.
F.B.I. officials in Washington showed "criminal negligence" in
blocking requests for a search warrant on Moussaoui's computer or
taking other preventive action, Samit testified more than four
years later at Moussaoui’s criminal trial.
Samit's futile warnings matched the frustrations of other federal
agents in Minnesota and Arizona who had gotten wind of al-Qaeda's
audacious scheme to train pilots for operations in the United
States. The agents couldn’t get their warnings addressed by senior
officials at F.B.I. headquarters.
But another big part of the problem was the lack of urgency at the
top. Bush and his top aides shrugged off the growing alarm within
the U.S. intelligence community.
Counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke said the 9/11 attacks
might have been averted if Bush had shown some initiative in
"shaking the trees" by having high-level officials from the F.B.I.,
C.I.A., Customs, and other federal agencies go back to their
bureaucracies and demand any information about the terrorist threat.
If they had, they might well have found the memos from the F.B.I.
agents in Arizona and Minnesota. They also might have exploited the
information that two known al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar
and Nawar al-Hazmi, had entered the United States. On Sept. 11,
they boarded American Airlines Flight 77 and helped fly it into the
Pentagon.
In his book, "Against All Enemies," Clarke contrasted President
Bill Clinton's urgency over the intelligence warnings that preceded
the Millennium events with the lackadaisical approach of Bush and
his national security team.
"In December 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were
going to be major al-Qaeda attacks," Clarke said in an interview
about his book. "President Clinton asked his national security
adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney
general, the F.B.I. director, the C.I.A. director and stop the
attacks.
"Every day they went back from the White House to the F.B.I., to
the Justice Department, to the C.I.A. and they shook the trees to
find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the
United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United
States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and
working together.
"Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when
we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an
attack. Did the President ask for daily meetings of his team to try
to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her
counterparts to try to stop the attack? No." [CNN's "Larry King
Live," March 24, 2004]
Other Priorities
In his book, Clarke offered other examples of pre-9/11 mistakes by
the Bush administration, including a downgrading in importance of
the counterterrorism office, a shifting of budget priorities, an
obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and an emphasis on
conservative ideological issues, such as Ronald Reagan's Star Wars
missile defense program.
A more hierarchical White House structure also insulated Bush from
direct contact with mid-level national security officials who had
specialized on the al-Qaeda issue.
The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission -- New
Jersey’s former Republican Gov. Thomas Kean and former Democratic
Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton -- agreed that the 9/11 attacks could
have been prevented.
"The whole story might have been different," Kean said on NBC's
"Meet the Press" on April 4, 2004. Kean cited a string of law-
enforcement blunders including the “lack of coordination within the
F.B.I." and the F.B.I.'s failure to understand the significance of
Moussaoui's arrest in August while training to fly passenger jets.
Yet, as the clock ticked down to 9/11, the Bush administration
continued to have other priorities. On Aug. 9, 2001, Bush gave a
nationally televised speech on stem cells, delivering his judgment
permitting federal funding for research on 60 pre-existing stem-
cell lines, but barring government support for work on any other
lines of stem cells derived from human embryos.
On side trips from his August vacation, Bush also made forays to
Middle American cities that Bush said represented "heartland
values" and the basic decency of Americans. Some residents living
near the Atlantic and Pacific oceans viewed the hype about
"heartland values" as a not-so-subtle snub at the so-called "blue"
coastal states that favored Al Gore.
Bush kept drawing distinctions, too, between his presidency and
Bill Clinton's. Bush and his senior advisers continued their
hostility toward what they viewed as the old Clinton phobia about
terrorism and this little-known group called al-Qaeda.
Tenet's late August trip to Crawford seeking to underscore the
urgency of the terrorist threat may have been viewed in that light,
helping to explain why it devolved into a meaningless discussion of
the ranch's "flora and fauna."
Despite the Sept. 4, 2001, meeting of senior Bush aides to review
the counter-terrorism initiatives that had been languishing since
March, the administration still didn’t seem moved by the urgency of
the moment.
On Sept. 6, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld threatened a
presidential veto of a proposal by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan,
seeking to transfer money from strategic missile defense to
counterterrorism.
Also on Sept. 6, former Sen. Gary Hart, who had co-chaired a
commission on terrorism, was again trying to galvanize the Bush
administration into showing some urgency about the threat. Hart met
with Rice and urged the White House to move faster. Rice agreed to
pass on Hart’s concerns to higher-ups.
~~~
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, "Secrecy &
Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq," can be
ordered at:
secrecyandprivilege.com
It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, "Lost
History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press. & 'Project Truth'."
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