How Bush, Cheney policies killed 3000 on 9/11

For the last 8 years there's been a dirty little secret surrounding the 911 attacks that isn't really such a secret after all. It's been an open secret for years and one that neither the news media, the Republicans, or the Democrats have wanted to touch.

 

The saying is the first casualty of war is truth and never was that more true than in the 911 attacks and what the ultimate truths revealed.

 

And these irrefutable truths supported by irrefutable evidence is that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were guilty of the worst case of gross, even criminal negligence with regards to the national security of the United States in the 911 attacks in American history, and second, contrary to the myths put out by the Bush Administration and swallowed whole by the press, 911 could have and should have been prevented.

 

The failure of the press in holding those accountable has not only been an insult to history, it also resulted in subsequent disasters that never would have occurred had Bush been held accountable for his negligence regarding 911..

 

The evidence against Bush, Cheney and Rice for gross negligence bordering on the criminal in the 911 attacks is irrefutable as will be demonstrated. But a cowed press, afraid of being accused of being "unpatriotic" during a time of war, were complicit in fostering the fantasy put out by Bush and Rice that 911 couldnt have been prevented,

Bush was petrified of any real investigation into 911 and what it might reveal and the conclusions it would reach as evidenced by his refusal at first to cooperate with the 911 Commission and even vehemently opposed its creation. After it was created over his objections he  at first,refused to allow Rice to cooperate. He didn't want to cooperate because he knew that in the end, he could be held accountable for the same kind of gross negligence that eventually became apparent in his decisions to invade Iraq, the post invasion mismanagement of Iraq, his handling of Katrina and what we know now about the failures of the lack of oversight involving massive fraud which has caused the economic meltdown.

One only has to remember that look on his face when Andy Card whispered that two planes had hit the World Trade Center in a terrorist attack, to see that at that moment Bush knew that all the people who had warned him that such an attack was not only possible but imminent, all the people who warned him that Al-Qaeda was the biggest threat to US national security in the world, were all right, and that he,Cheney and Rice who all dismissed terrorism as a major threat were wrong.

 

What makes the evidence against Bush, Cheney and Rice irrefutable is that it is all based on facts, documents and testimony that has never been refuted or challenged by any of the principles or anyone else at any time. It was only a desire by many of the country's institutions,foremost being the press, but also both political parties who each for very different reasons, didnt want to touch it that kept Bush's negligence from being a prime issue. Conservatives who like to beat their chest about national security all ran for the hills when it was a conservative president who, through irresponsibility, horrendous judgement and and virtually criminal negligence based solely on conservative ideology allowed the worst attack by a foreign enemy on American soil to happen.

 

Conservative ideology was that China was our biggest threat. Terrorism was not. They were right, Clinton was wrong ( Rove even boasted to Time Magainze after the election that the Bush Adminsitration was "going to be ABC -- Anything But Clinton". If Clinton did it they would undo it.) And so the Bush-Cheney White House was grossly negligent when it came to anything regarding terrorism pre-911.

 

And the evidence of Bush's negligence is this:

 

During the transition period in January of 2001, Bush had a face to face meeting with then President Clinton in which Clinton told him that Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were the single biggest threats to US national security in the world. During the same transition period Bush and Rice met face to face with outgoing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger where Berger told both Bush and Rice that Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were the single biggest threats to US national security in the world. And to emphasize the point Berger told them the threat from Al-Qaeda was so great he predicted that the Bush Administration would spend more time dealing with Al-Qaeda than any other single issue during Bush's entire presidency.

Continuing during the transition period in January of 2001, Bush was given the usual national security briefings at Blair House given to all presidents-elect by the CIA and FBI. At the CIA briefing, George Tenet and the CIA told Bush that Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were the single biggest threats to US national security in the world. And in the national security briefing from the FBI, Bush again was told that Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were the biggest threats to US national security in the world.

When Bush finally took office the first thing he did regarding terrorism was demote Richard Clarke the anti-terrorism czar who served for 20 years under four Presidents from a cabinet level position to a sub cabinet level position.

 

The reason? Bush, Cheney and Rice as well as the Republicans in general didn't believe terrorism was the threat the Clinton Administration had told them it was. It was the Republicans who accused Clinton of a Wag the Dog ploy when Clinton, acting on CIA intelligence, launched a missile barrage at Bin Laden and an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in retaliation for some terrorist attacks overseas.  The Republicans led by Orin Hatch roundly accused Clinton of using a Wag the Dog ploy to  take the heat  and attention off his Monica Lewinsky problem.

The next thing Bush did after taking office with regards to terrorism, according to Richard Clarke's testimony before the 911 Commission and stated in his book, was to disband what Clarke called the Principals Meeting. As Clarke described it, in the Clinton administration there was a daily meeting chaired by Clarke and attended by relevant cabinet  heads who had a role in fighting terrorism: Janet Reno, the Attorney General, Bob Mueller, the director of the FBI, George Tenet at CIA, and directors of ATF,Immigration and other departments directly involved in anti-terrorism.

 

According to Clarke,  the latest intelligence regarding terrorism collected by each agency in the previous 24 hours was shared among the heads of all the agencies present. ( The 911 Commission found during the Bush Administration there was a lack of sharing of intelligence -- but in keeping with their promise not to fix blame they never stated the obvious -- that Bush's discontinuing of the Principals Meeting was a major contributing factor ).

 

 Clarke testified that after each of these meetings, the heads of these agencies would go back to their respective departments and in his words, "shake the trees" for the latest information on terrorism developed over the last 24 hours and then present it at the next meeting.  If this had this been allowed to continue this alone could have prevented 911.

The first piece of evidence supporting this is the famous Phoenix Memo. An FBI agent in Phoenix had been called by the owner of a Phoenix flying school who was suspicious of two new students. What made him suspicious was that the two flying students were both middle eastern men who wanted to learn how to fly jumbo jets but curiously didn't want to learn how to take off or land. They were also paying for their flying lessons with cash. One of those two men was Mohammed Atta.

The FBI agent agreed the activity was suspicious and wrote up a report. But the report was never sent up the ladder and never reached FBI Headquarters in Washington. Under the old process during the Clinton Administration where terrorism had the highest priority, that information would have been sent right to the top and would have been something Mueller would have shared with Clarke and the others at the Principles Meeting. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what Clarke, Reno and Mueller would have done with this information.
 

From that moment on, Atta and all of his associates wouldn't have been able to sneeze without the FBI knowing about it. They would have been under surveillance 24 hours a day. Their phones would have been tapped. The plot undeniably would have been discovered and 911  would have been prevented with this one piece of information alone.

 

But there was more. There was the Minneapolis Memo that finally came to light and resulted in the prosecution,after the fact, of Moussaoui. But Collen Rowley, the FBI agent most familiar with the Moussaoui case and how it could have prevented 911 wrote this in her memo to FBI director Mueller after the attacks:

"I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mischaracterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons:( italics mine)."

She went on to say,

"The Minneapolis agents who responded to the call about Moussaoui's flight training identified him as a terrorist threat from a very early point. The decision to take him into custody on August 15, 2001, on the INS "overstay" charge was a deliberate one to counter that threat and was based on the agents' reasonable suspicions."

Her memo continued, "Although the last thing the FBI or the country needs now is a witch hunt, I do find it odd that (to my knowledge) no inquiry whatsoever was launched of the relevant FBIHQ personnel's actions a long time ago. Despite FBI leaders' full knowledge of all the items mentioned herein (and probably more that I'm unaware of),

And this:

"In the day or two following September 11th, you, Director Mueller, made the statement to the effect that if the FBI had only had any advance warning of the attacks, we (meaning the FBI), may have been able to take some action to prevent the tragedy. Fearing that this statement could easily come back to haunt the FBI upon revelation of the information that had been developed pre-September 11th about Moussaoui, I and others in the Minneapolis Office, immediately sought to reach your office through an assortment of higher level FBIHQ contacts, in order to quickly make you aware of the background of the Moussaoui investigation and forewarn you so that your public statements could be accordingly modified. When such statements from you and other FBI officials continued, we thought that somehow you had not received the message and we made further efforts. Finally when similar comments were made weeks later, in Assistant Director Caruso's congressional testimony in response to the first public leaks about Moussaoui we faced the sad realization that the remarks indicated someone, possibly with your approval, had decided to circle the wagons"

You can read the entire memo here.

The fact is there was enough known well before the 911 attacks to have prevented it. Under the authority given Richard Clarke in the Clinton Administration and the priority terrorism was given as a serious threat to US national security, that information would have been sent to the highest levels of government and it is virtually impossible that it would have been ignored by Clarke, Tenet and the others had they known about it.

Given Mueller's testimony before the 911 Commission that he had told Bush that Al-Qaeda was the biggest threat to US national security in the world, it is unlikely that the dismissing of the suspicion raised by Moussaoui was the result of official FBI policy.It is a virtual certainty that the "improper political considerations" cited by Crowley in her memo for what she tries not to call a "cover up" involved the negligence of Bush, Cheney and Rice in their dismissal of terrorism as a real threat. Add to this Clarke's testimony that in August of 2001, less than a month before the attacks, he and George Tenet were "running around the White House like men with our hair on fire" because of the big spike in Al-Qaeda intercepts and their translations, and its not likely that there was any official playing down of the threat  either by the CIA or FBI. It simply fell on the deaf ears of Bush, Cheney and Rice who did absolutely nothing.

But this wasn't the only chance the Bush Administration had to prevent 911.

A year ago the media reported on George Tenet's statements that the intelligence coming to him in July 2001 pointing to a major Al-Qaeda attack was so disturbing he went to the White House for an emergency meeting with Rice. Rice was so dismissive at the time that when asked about the meeting in 2007 she said she couldn't even remember having it though White House logs show that in fact Tenet did have a meeting with her on the date in July that he claimed. Either she is lying or has a selective memory.

But the two most damning pieces of evidence against Bush, Rice and Cheney is theAugust 4th, 2001 PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing and declassified in 2004) entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within the United States" and an August CIA  translation of an Al-Qaeda intercept which, when translated, indicated that there was going to be an imminent major attack against the United States and in the words of the CIA memo it was going to be "spectacular".

While the memo could not say where in the world this attack would take place, whether it would be against US interests overseas or in the US itself, the most important thing is that it was completely ignored by Bush and Rice. Together with the August 4th PDB about Bin Laden determined to strike in the United States one would have thought some alarm bells might have gone off and some precautions taken. Bush,Cheney and Rice did nothing.

Rice's flimsy defense of herself regarding the August 4th PDB was that it was, in her words, "a historical overview" of Al-Qaeda and didn't contain any actionable intelligence or specific threats.  It's hard to imagine what part of the word "daily" in Presidential Daily Briefing Rice thought was history. Maybe she thought the CIA didn't have anyone smart enough to title a paper "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the US: A Historical Overview" if that's what was intended.  But on page 2 of that document (which can be found online) there was the mention of "30 current FBI investigations" into Al-Qaeda cells which were known to be in the United States. And as if that weren't enough, Rice's one time claim that they "had no idea Al-Qaeda was going to use airplanes as weapons", is totally undermined on page 2 of that PDB where the joint intelligence report says that Al-Qaeda planned to use hijacked airliners as part of their plan to strike inside the United States. This remember, was on August 4th 2001.

While it does not specifically say they would use those hijacked airliners as missiles, to use that as a defense puts Rice in the position of trying to make the argument that simply hijacking airliners and holding passengers hostage was nothing to get excited about and not actionable therefore she and Bush were not to blame for not knowing that Al-Qaeda would use them as missiles on Sept 11.

 

At the time of the 911 hearings, the press swallowed this explanation whole though Democrats on the committee didnt and were immediately labeled "partisan" by Republicans trying to do damage control.

But this is what was known before the attack: There were the warnings given to Bush by Clinton,Berger,the FBI, the CIA and Richard Clarke during the Presidential transition about the threat Al-Qaeda posed that Bush and Rice totally ignored. There was the Tenet meeting in July. And in August of 2001 not only was there the August 4th PDB, but Clarke testified that the spike in Al-Qaeda intercepts were the highest he had ever seen in 20 years of fighting terrorism, and the translations indicated a major Al-Qaeda attack against the US was imminent. So imminent that he testified that in mid August of 2001 he and George Tenet were "running around the White House like men with their hair on fire", trying to get Rice's attention and a meeting with Bush to warn him of the impending danger. Their requests for a meeting with Bush who was on vacation in Crawford were denied. And Rice took no action herself.

If Bush and Rice had taken the warnings seriously  how simple would it have been to issue an urgent FAA alert to every major airline and airport in the country against possible hijackings by Middle Eastern men? How basic would it have been to issue those directives and warnings and put airline and airport security on alert to be watchful of Middle Eastern men and to report any suspicious behavior or red flags? And if they had, still another opportunity to prevent 911 had presented itself.

 

On the morning of September 11, Mohammed Atta and another of the 911 hijackers boarded a flight from the Portland Airport in Maine to Logan for the connecting flight to San Franciso. The ticket taker at the Maine airport was taken aback by the fact that the ticket was a $2500 one way ticket to San Francisco, the kind you get when you book your flight at the last minute. It immediately raised his eyebrows and his suspicions. As he told interviewers, "You dont see one of those ( a $2500 one way ticket) very often". And this was at the Maine airport, not a busy hub so Atta and the other hijacker stood out like sore thumbs to begin with. What would have happened if that clerk had gotten an FAA alert  for a potential hijacking and to be aware of any suspicious activity by middle eastern men? What are the odds that an FAA alert, the fact that they were middle eastern and the $2500 ticket might have led to him making a call?

 

And if one wants to make the argument that no one knew exactly when those attacks would take place, and that an FAA alert against a hijacking couldnt be open ended,  remember that all of the Al-Qaeda intercepts the CIA translated in August indicated the attack was imminent.

Bush, Cheney and Rice completely ignored these warnings because they didn't take terrorism seriously. That's why you see that stupid expression on Bush's face in that Florida schoolroom the morning of September 11th when he was told the news. He knew he had been wrong and now 3,000 Americans were paying for it with their lives and the country would be thrown into a convulsion.

When Bush came to office, his and the Republicans primary national security concern was getting out of the ABM treaty with Russia so they could re-start  the Star Wars program  Terorism was dismissed as a major threat. The Bush Administration believed the biggest threat to US national security in the world wasn't Al-Qaeda, but China. And unlike in the Clinton Administration where, according to Richard Clarke,  terrorism was the number one national security priority, in the Bush White House,  terrorism was  virtually dismissed.

Not only was the gross negligence of Bush and Rice totally responsible for allowing the 911 attacks to occur, but thanks to timid Democrats, unpatriotic Republicans too afraid to speak out against a Republican President, and a cowed press who was afraid to hold Bush accountable for fear of being called unpatriotic by the Republicans, Bush, Rice and Cheney were off the hook and were actually able to promote themselves as the watchdogs and saviors of US National security and the leaders in the fight against terrorism when it was their failures that were responsible for the attacks being successful in the first place.

 

Instead it was open season on the intelligence agencies who, for all of the criticism sent their way, had in their possession and had developed enough intelligence to have prevented the 911 attacks had there been someone at the top who cared enough to take it all seriously..

Three weeks after the attacks Rice held a press conference, the purpose of which was to state that there was nothing they could have done to have prevented the attacks. All they had, she said, was this August 4th PDB and she outlined some of the things in it. Watching that press conference and hearing about that memo I almost fell out of my chair and said to myself, uh-oh, its all going to hit the fan now and Bush is going to get impeached. It wasn't until 5 years later that the press decided this failure on the part of Rice and Bush was news and there was a brief flurry of stories about that memo which quickly died down.

At that same press conference Rice's defense for why they couldn't have prevented 911 was that they didn't know the day or date, didn't know the names of the hijackers, didn't know the target and they didn't know they were going to use airliners as weapons.

The problem with that defense is  that there wasn't a cab driver in America who couldn't have prevented 911 with that kind of information and one would think the President of the United States and his national security advisor could have done better.  But the irony is most of that information was available and knowable if only Bush or Rice had cared enough to want to know.

And if the press had done their jobs, something we haven't seen in years, and held Bush, Cheney and Rice accountable for their mistakes in judgment, gross negligence and incompetence, even if Bush hadn't been impeached, he never would have had the political capital to invade Iraq, so the value of holding Bush accountable not only would have been a service to history and justice for the families of the people killed that day, it would have prevented all the huge mistakes that occurred since. 

The gross incompetence of Bush and his whole administration became even more obvious with the unnecessary Iraq invasion. But unfortunately, when it came to Iraq, the majority of mass media failed to do their jobs again. And this pattern would continue for almost all of Bush's two terms. But it started during the hearings by the 911 Commission.

 

The truth that none of our institutions have wanted to face is, there were more than enough warnings and intelligence to have prevented 911 had there been an Administration competent enough to act on it, and responsible enough to take it seriously. Bush was neither.

 

Ever since 911 there has been, as Agent Rowley suggested, a cover-up to keep the truth from being told,. a conspiracy of silence by those who simply felt it better not to have to deal with the whole truth and hold Bush and his administration accountable because it was almost as awful as the attacks themselves. So. instead we heard that the reason for 911 were  intelligence failures by the intelligence community. But the only real intelligence failures with regards to 911 occurred at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.