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.

Comments

Not the only administration

[SengirV]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A586 15-2004Jul17.html

Kinda makes Hillary a hypocrite based on what she said here, now doesn't it? - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A586 15-2004Jul17.html

Those looking to pin this ONLY on this current administration are showing they are simply interested in partisan politics. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Re:condi's Hotmail account

[Anonymous Coward]

Do spam filters work for printed documents? I think this is a good place to post a link to the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing on the state of security for the United States. This particular PDB had some pretty stunning statements that President Bush seemed to have firmly ignored.

The title of the briefing is "Bin Ladin Deteremined to Strike in US." What did Bush do after being read this briefing? He continued his month long vacation.

Would it have mattered?

[antifoidulus]

Most of the principals were in the country by the time Bush came to office, killing Bin Laden wouldn't have done much. Even now, Al Qaeda is not some monolith organization, and it is academically lazy to think of it as one. Bin Laden's capture would certainly have a demoralizing effect, but it would not cripple the organization, nor would killing him in early 2001 have done so. Hell, we really need to get Al-Zawahri, but have been failing at that.

9/11 CANNOT be blamed on one individual. True, Clinton did not do as much as he should have during his term, but Bush obviously didn't see the flaws being all that major as he didn't do anything about them in the first 9 months. Also recall that anything Clinton did in the Middle East(most hypocritically was bomb Iraq) was labeled as "Wag the Dog" by Republicans. Meanwhile, when they do similar things they are being "tough on terrorism".

The intelligence failures showed systemic flaws in the US intelligence gathering organization, flaws that go back decades(hell, Bush Sr. was head of the CIA for a few months). As George Tenet said, 9/11 was a "failure of imagination" on the part of the intelligence community. And so far in my opinion Bush has done almost nothing to fix those flaws. Well, he has allowed Army translators who are in short supply to be fired because they are gay, I guess there is always that. Also see the court cases of dismissed FBI agents who claimed they were ignored when they warned about attacks. The system is broken, and Clinton blaming Bush and Bush blaming Clinton surprisingly won't fix it. Killing Bin Laden won't fix it. Iraq certainly won't fix it. Nor will using homeland security money to pay off political backers and punish adversaries(Because we all know Indiana has the most potential terrorist targets). What needs to be done cannot be boiled down to a soundbite, but I do know that past administrations, this administration and in all likelihood future administrations don't have the will or desire to really fix it, but instead like to apply popular band-aids and use ad-hominem attacks on their critics.

Re:Would it have mattered?

[theLOUDroom]

9/11 CANNOT be blamed on one individual.

Sure it can, has name is Osama Bin Laden. We just don't seem very interested in catching him.

Maybe if Bush wasn't so close with the rest of his family we'd be able to find him:
"Salem bin Laden invested through James R. Bath, the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, some money in Arbusto Energy, a company run by George W. Bush"

Olbermann

[mabu]

Keith Olbermann has an incredibly poignant video response on this issue. This is probably what motivated some conservative nutjob to send him a letter full of soap powder. Sometimes I wonder about people.

What scares the shit out of me....

[TrumpetPower!]

Just for a moment, let's play a game of ``What if?''

What if the conspiracy nutjobs are right, and 9/11 was, in some way, a deliberate action by the Bush administration in exactly the same way that Hitler was behind the burning of the Reichstag? (Godwin, I know--so sue me.) After all, the conspiracy theorists have some compelling points--the collapse of WTC #7, that none of the released footage of the Pentagon attack shows what actually hit the building, the striking dissimilarity of the appearance between the two impacts on the WTC and the impact on the Pentagon, the complete and utter lack of response by NORAD or the Pentagon's own on-site defense systems....

What scares the shit out me is that this article is perfectly consistent with the theory that the Bush administration knew just what bin Laden was up to, and chose to ignore it: the CIA (whom Bush, Jr., has always publicly kept at arm's length or further) told the administration, repeatedly and emphatically...and the administration most pointedly ignored everything the CIA had to say.

Of course, this could also be after-the-fact CYA by the CIA...but, then again, WTC 7 could have been the first skyscraper in history to collapse for no good reason whatsoever, and there could have been a massive and completely hushed-up malfunction in the anti-aircraft defensive systems in the most heavily protected building on the planet, and there could have been....

Honestly, I'm about as anti-conspiracy as one can get. There's just so damn much about 9/11 that's so glaring, so obvious, so uncomplicated, that I'm left with two conclusions: massive unprecedented incompetence by a team headed by some of the most competent political operatives in America (Cheney, Rove, etc.)...or a conspiracy. A conspiracy that would perfectly fit with the actions of an administration with decided totalitarian fascist tendencies, such as one that would strip civil liberties in the name of protecting the homeland, which would endorse and actually use torture and commit other atrocities, which supports big business at every opportunity over all else domestically, which would invade sovereign nations on trumped-up pretenses, which is accompanied by unprecedented corporate corruption, which wears its Christianity on its sleeve....

Whether for good reason or not, frankly, I'm scared shitless.

Cheers,

b&

Re:Big Dang Deal

[Mr. Slippery]

Bill Clinton said last Sunday night or whenever it was that He "left a anti-terror strategy." I guess that turned out to be a lie if Rice was being pressured to set one herself.

Non sequitor. It's entirely possible (indeed seems likely) that Clinton's people left a strategy (which may or may not have been comprehensive or effective), which Bush's people never adopted. If I leave you a cookbook and you never open it, it can be true both that I left you my fablous peanut butter/chocolate pie recipe, and that someone is pressuring you to come up with a dessert recipe.

Why are the only political stories on Slashdot left-wing propaganda?

What, are you saying that reality has a liberal bias?

Over the past few decades, the right wing has consistently aligned itself with ignorance: creationism, junk science, bad international intelligence. Take the religious right, stir in neocon ambitions for an American empire, sprinkle in corporate greed, and watch as any respect for truth rapidly evaporates from the mix.

The /. readership is more educated than the average American, and so places a higher value on acurate information and critical thinking. In contempory America, this puts them at odds with the leaders of the Republican party.