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Administration Ignored Bin Laden Intel
gettin-bored noted a nice article running in very high priority on the Washington Post, right up there on page 17 of the print edition, where it's revealed that the CIA Director warned Rice about Bin Laden two months before 9/11. And strangely, the meeting was never mentioned during all the 9/11 commission reports making you really question what exactly they were actually hearing that was more important than the CIA director telling the National Security Advisor that Bin Laden was going to attack Americans.
That's an urban legend.
On Friday (September 29), Charlie Rose interviewed three people: Bob Wright (Chairman & CEO, NBC Universal), Michael Isikoff, and David Corn (dual authors of _Hubris:_The_Inside_Story_of_Spin_,_Scandal,_and_t he_Selling_of_the_Iraq_War_). Isikoff and Corn made some insightful comments about the Iraq War.
According to the current administration, Iraq is related to 9/11. Both these interviews would justify anyone's cynicism about the politicians running our nation: the United States of America.
If anyone knows where to find the transcripts for both interviews, please share your information with the SlashDot audience.
As reluctant as I am to defend this loathesome administration, you need to get your facts straight.
Condi Rice served as National Security Council staff director for Soviet and East European affairs in Bush 41's administration. By all accounts she did a very good job--as judged by her superiors Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor, and the first President Bush. I think it's safe to say that a number of significant events in Soviet and East European affairs took place at this point in history, which I'll leave as an exercise for you to research. Do you think that maybe Rice had a hand in crafting the US response to those events, given her position?
Yes, Rice is black and female. So. What. Neither fact speaks to her qualifications to be National Security Advisor. Or is that a position that can only be held by a white male?
I think your racism and sexism is showing. (And no, your "male American of Japanese ancestry" comment does not insulate you.)
Interesting, Bill Clinton said last Sunday night or whenever it was that He "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy." I guess that turned out to be a lie if Rice was being pressured to set one herself.
the clinton admin did leave detailed plans. berger, clarke etc. the bush admin basically ignored them. so i think tenet is talking generically about rice coming up with a plan of their own since they weren't doing anything on the recommendations left by the clinton admin.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. It tries to show how the US (and others) reign in sovereign countries via economic power rather than brute force through use of things like the world bank. Chilling subject, but I think that Overthrow is better written and makes for a better read.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Okay, so maybe the parent is a troll, posting AC and all, but in case you're not, my AC friend, I'd just like to make a request:
In the future, please make an argument against the issue or the facts presented, not simply against the supposed motivations of the presenter of the information. Because even if you're right, and this article is coming straight from DNC headquarters, that has no bearing on whether it's true or not, or whether the criticisms leveled in the article are valid.
kthx!
President Bush asserted that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken as part of "a global war against terror" that the United States is waging. In reality, as anticipated, the invasion increased the threat of terror, perhaps significantly.
... that required patently untrue public statements and egregious manipulation of intelligence." The Downing Street memo, published on May 1 in The Sunday Times of London, along with other newly available confidential documents, have deepened the record of deceit.
Half-truths, misinformation and hidden agendas have characterised official pronouncements about US war motives in Iraq from the very beginning. The recent revelations about the rush to war in Iraq stand out all the more starkly amid the chaos that ravages the country and threatens the region and indeed the world.
In 2002 the US and United Kingdom proclaimed the right to invade Iraq because it was developing weapons of mass destruction. That was the "single question," as stressed constantly by Bush, Prime Minister Blair and associates. It was also the sole basis on which Bush received congressional authorisation to resort to force.
The answer to the "single question" was given shortly after the invasion, and reluctantly conceded: The WMD didn't exist. Scarcely missing a beat, the government and media doctrinal system concocted new pretexts and justifications for going to war.
"Americans do not like to think of themselves as aggressors, but raw aggression is what took place in Iraq," national security and intelligence analyst John Prados concluded after his careful, extensive review of the documentary record in his 2004 book "Hoodwinked."
Prados describes the Bush "scheme to convince America and the world that war with Iraq was necessary and urgent" as "a case study in government dishonesty
The memo came from a meeting of Blair's war cabinet on July 23, 2002, in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, made the now-notorious assertion that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of going to war in Iraq.
The memo also quotes British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime."
British journalist Michael Smith, who broke the story of the memo, has elaborated on its context and contents in subsequent articles. The "spikes of activity" apparently included a coalition air campaign meant to provoke Iraq into some act that could be portrayed as what the memo calls a "casus belli."
Warplanes began bombing in southern Iraq in May 2002 -- 10 tons that month, according to British government figures. A special "spike" started in late August (for a September total of 54.6 tons).
"In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq," Smith wrote.
The bombing was presented as defensive action to protect coalition planes in the no-fly zone. Iraq protested to the United Nations but didn't fall into the trap of retaliating. For US-UK planners, invading Iraq was a far higher priority than the "war on terror." That much is revealed by the reports of their own intelligence agencies. On the eve of the allied invasion, a classified report by the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community's center for strategic thinking, "predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict," Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger reported in The New York Times last September. In December 2004, Jehl reported a few weeks later, the NIC warned that "Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalised' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself." T
http://use.perl.org
The terrorists were already in place by then attacking us for Bill Clinton's policies during his term.
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Bin Laden claims he got his first revelation in 1982, because of US support for Israeli involvement in Lebanon:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-9
Please remind me, but I think it was the conservative hero Reagan running the show at that time. Bin Laden is also a bit upset about the first Iraqi war (which is kind of ironic considering he volunteered to help defend Saudi Arabia from Iraq in the same way he considers himself to have expelled the Soviets from Afghanistan), and none too happy about Israel.
You can say Clinton was ineffective at eliminating the terrorist threat, either by the Bush-style double strategy of war abroad and removing civil liberty at home, or by other means. But to say that the 9/11 terrorists attacked because of Clinton's policies is very, very close to being completely wrong.
At least you don't agree with Bush, who claims the attacks were because they hate our freedom:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/2
Which would seem crazy if they hadn't come up with the idea themselves and publicized it.
The document concludes:
Taken from:
"Rebuilding Americas Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, 2000
Paul Wolfowitz
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense 2001-2005
Life is too short to proofread.
Then, the conversation fell silent. Kay thought that someone would ask questions about his work, but no one asked any questions.
Questions? Kind of like what you just stated that Clark said that Kay said had just happened... shown below? (Is that hear say?)
According to Kay, Bush asked, 'What do you need from me?' Kay answered, 'I need patience to allow me to finish my work.' Bush answered, 'I have all the patience in the world.'
Subordinate asks for time to do work..... and gets it. Wow.
Clark saying that Kay reported there were no WMDs in Iraq also leaves out a few facts, as you can see in Dr. Kay's testimoney before Congress in 2003. It is well worth reading. Just a sample:
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Hardly the biggest sex scandal. He got a blow job from an adult woman who was not his wife, and tried to lie about it. Big deal. Who wouldn't? The scandal was the $150 million and two years spent investigating it, and the vindictiveness of the Republicans who placed Clinton's sex life as America's highest priority, even more important than terrorism.
Both Presidents are at fault. Both presidents failed when they had good chances of snagging him, clinton on numerous occasions, and bush with Tora Bora.
Can we count the 7 months bush joined office and didnt do keep up the weekly security meetings? Took 9-11 to get Bush to do his job, which he still hasnt done.
Even though I agree with your sentiment, your comment is neither here nor there.
- Your "reply" wasn't really a reply at all, but got modded 100% Insightful
I have the sneaking feeling that all this somehow reinforces the AC's point.[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Video cameras in stores and petrol stations rarely record continous video in crisp high-definition. Watch a 'crimwatch' episode - you will see plenty of examples of surveillance camera videos. Unless you want to be scared that more people are lying, let's assume that all of those were not doctored.
These cameras would have to videofilm a plane going at 500MPH.
Have you tried to film something passing at 500MPH a very short distance from you using a very crappy camera?
If that is all it takes to scare you shitless.. you have my sympathy
Do you think that maybe Rice had a hand in crafting the US response to those events, given her position?
You're talking about Bush the Smarter's administration, yes? The one that completely missed all warning signs of the impending fall of the Soviet Union? The one that labelled Mikhail Gorbechev as "the man with no new ideas"? The one that insisted that the Soviet Union was an overwhelming conventional threat that justified huge increases in military spending right up until the very day it imploded?
Must have been impressive advice she was giving.
Exactly. There you go.
Why, exactly, would Clinton lie? What possible gain would he have there? If people want to attribute something to malice instead of incompetance, they're going to have to explain, exactly, what the malice was. Clinton doesn't like aspirin or something?(1)
No, that was incompetance, and, incidentally, it's the exact same incompetance that happens in any war, like the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy, or the bombing last year of Aaytha, Iraq. Sometimes bad intelligence about targets happens, and innocent people die and innocent buildings get destroyed.
Meanwhile, we know the Bush Administration delibrately manipulated the American people into a war with repeated and persistent instances of lying by stating things they knew weren't true, or had already been disproven. In addition to, whenever there were two opposing opinions, choosing the one that would support their views instead of the one the intelligence community believed, which isn't strictly speaking 'lying', but it isn't a way to gather intelligence.
And we know why he did that, because we know he wanted a war with Iraq as soon as he got into office.
That's simply not comparable to mistakenly bombing a building, which, incidentally, the military has done a lot more under Bush, although that's simply because they've bombed a lot more things.
And, yeah, while the 'it was really an aspirin factory' meme has gotten out there, we're almost certain it was operated for al-Qaeda, funnelling money and medicine to them, and we don't actually know it wasn't producing precurser chemicals for WMDs. By Bush standards, that would be enough to raze it to the ground, imprison all workers without a trial, and torture the people operating it, so I have no idea what people are bitching about.
1) The gag here, at the time, people said it was 'wag the dog'...pretending to be in a war to distract from a scandal. But, hehe, can't actually use that one at the same time as 'Monica distracted Clinton from al Qaeda'. Saying he was fighting terrorism to 'distract' from a sex scandal doesn't actually work politically.(2)
2) And the last thing Republicans want to do now is mention the words 'sex scandal'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Remember that the elder Bush's war with Iraq, 1991's "Operation Desert Storm," was also founded on a lie.
- Nurse Nayirah