November 20, 2003
BREAK OUT THE HAIR SHIRT:
The 9/11 Cover-up: What did Bush know about the al Qaeda threat? (David Corn, 11/03, LA Weekly)
[W]hile the World Trade Center ashes were still glowing, Bush and his aides told the public that they had had no reason to suspect this type of horrific attack was about to occur. Yet, as the final report of the joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees notes, for years the intelligence community had collected information reporting that terrorist outfits, including al Qaeda, were interested in mounting 9/11-like attacks — that is, hijacking airliners and crashing them into high-profile targets in the United States. U.S. intelligence services, the Pentagon, and the Federal Aviation Administration during the Clinton and Bush II years apparently did not take action in response to these reports. That was a systemic failure. Bush has never addressed it publicly, but if pressed he could blame the bureaucrats at the CIA, the Defense Department and the FAA for ignoring clear-and-present hints. [...][T]he preliminary evidence is that the White House has been protecting itself. According to the House and Senate intelligence committees’ final report on 9/11, the committees were told by an intelligence community representative that an August 2001 intelligence report included information that bin Laden wanted to conduct attacks in the United States, that al Qaeda members had been residing and traveling to the United States for years and had apparently maintained a support structure here, that bin Laden was interested in hijacking airliners (to trade for prisoners), that the FBI had discerned patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings, and that bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with explosives.
That sure is different than a general warning about al Qaeda.
Unfortunately for Mr. Corn's own accusation, it sure is different than a warning that "terrorist outfits, including al Qaeda, were interested in mounting 9/11-like attacks" too. There's no point defending either the government agencies involved or the Clinton and Bush administrations--obviously 9-11 represented a catastrophic breakdown of the core function of the state. Everyone and everything that was supposed to prevent such things failed, leaving those poor passengers as the nation's last line of defense, and even they couldn't have known how dire their situation was until after the 2nd plane hit, which seems to have been too late for the third (though one wonders if it was really intended for the Pentagon) and just in time for the folks on the 4th to die as heroes.
It's easy to forgot now, but prior to that awful day it had been some time since there'd been a domestic hijacking and the standard operating procedure was to not offer resistance--just get the plane back on the ground and let the authorities negotiate the demands. Indeed, had al Qaeda taken those planes for the purposes of a prisoner swap, it would have been a shocking event, but one that had been gamed out thoroughly and about which volumes had been written--a disaster for America in propaganda terms but an almost mundane problem in terms of how security forces would have responded. Obviously, in hindsight, we'd like to have imposed such drastic measures that the course of events might have been changed, but the very absence of hijackings made it appear that the security system worked and the relative nonlethality of past hijackings made them seem almost predictable. The wicked genius of 9-11 was that it diverged so completely from prior hijackings, that it was so unlike what was apparently warned of in those intelligence briefings. In retrospect we think we knew what they were capable of because we'd read it in Tom Clancy or we knew in our hearts that the first Trade Center bombing was serious--but we kid ourselves. Summon up your memories of that day and preceding the furor and the grief you'll recall stunned disbelief. No amount of fiction and expert prognostication could have prepared us: evil on such a scale dwarfs imagination before hand and daunts comprehension even after.
Want proof of the latter? Just look at how bitchy the media gets about Orange Alerts, or whatever, from the Department of Homeland Security after 9-11. Imagine if these intelligence briefings had revealed the precise plans for the attack beforehand and the administration had grounded the airlines or closed the Trade Center until the plotters could be found? No, we can't imagine it, can we? No one would have tolerated such a thing. Heck, we wouldn't now, not for more than a day or two.
If Mr. Corn needs someone to blame, he may as well blame the President. Folks who seek great responsibility have to be prepared to accept great blame when things go wrong--and things have seldom gone more radically wrong than they did on 9-11. So, there. Do we all feel better? Does that advance the ball any in the fight against terror? Does Mr. Bush seem like a guy who needs to be reminded that he's responsible for our national security and that he's already presided over one massive lapse in that responsibility? Seems bloody unlikely.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 20, 2003 8:11 PMNot just hijackings in the US (wasn't the last one that took off from the US in the late 1970s), but worldwide they had become something that only happened on Air Tanzania, Aeroflot and other third world airlnes.WhenI first heard that commercial jetliners had been used to ram buildings, I wondered how they'd managed to get the pilots to do that? The idea that there could be an organized conspiracy of people who learn how to fly a commerical jetliners, for the sole purpose of turning them into napalm laden cruise missiles, was beyond comprehension. A lone nut or evil genius(a la Clancy or any number of other tacky thrillers), but not something that mundane. (Then again, a real thriller would have had more than four planes used, and would have coordinated the attacks with McVeigh-like bombing on buildings throughout the country. We're lucky they only read the Koran.)
Yep, Bush didn't address the problem in a timely way,if at all. But how can Corn argue that the threat had been handed to Bush in a manageable fashion? And what evidence does he have that Gore would have done anything different in the eight months after his inauguration? The real problem is that people like Corn will and would have bitched and moaned no matter what Bush had done. If there'd been a raid on 10 September capturing most of those guys, Corn would be on the forefront of claiming that talk of attacks, like the ones we know did happen, was pure fantasy and the product of reading too many thrillers back in Texas coupled with a prejudice against innocent Muslims.
At some point, you just have to stop paying attention to Leftists like Corn and The Nation, because they have nothing constructive to contribute.
Why is it that Bush conspiracy theories seem to have infinite shelf-life with the media (Remember "What Bush Knew" in Newsweek. etc. and Cynthia McKninney tales as early as even 2001.) And yet, when the Weekly Standard wants to focus attention on the much better documented yet much more "discarded" connection between Al Qaeda and Saddamm Hussein nobody cares to focus on it.
Posted by: MG at November 20, 2003 9:11 PMThere's no doubt the 3rd plane was intended to hit the Pentagon. The Washington Post had a graphic of the plane's flight path -- the plane actually went in a circle over DC to come back and hit the Pentagon. It was clearly the hijackers' target.
The failure leading to 9/11 was a failure in judgement, shared by all the Presidential candidates and the country at large. No-one imagined al-Qaida could be so lethal because previous terrorist attacks within America had been so incompetent. A carbomb placed in a rental car (in the first WTC bombing)? A terrorist who is promptly caught at the Canadian border? Who would consider such losers a serious threat?
The biggest clue we all missed were the embassy bombings in Africa. Not just the attacks' effectiveness, but the complete indifference to civilian life. Despite killing hundreds of Africans, the terrorists considered the attacks a great success since they nailed a few Americans. The terrorists' statement didn't even pretend to show remorse for the dead Africans.
Peter says:
There's no doubt the 3rd plane was intended to hit the Pentagon. The Washington Post had a graphic of the plane's flight path -- the plane
actually went in a circle over DC to come back and hit the Pentagon. It was clearly the hijackers' target.
Doesn't make sense to me.
Why fly past the Pentagon, all the way across town to the Capitol,
and then turn around and come back to crash into the
Pentagon? Because it wasn't the real target, seems to
me to be the most likely answer.
How about this theory--the real target was the White House.
But since the pilots weren't the most skilled, they missed
it on their pass over the city. This is plausible
since the White House is small and fairly obscured, especially
when moving at several hundred miles an hour, especially
when you're not used to moving that fast.
So at the Capitol they circled back around and went
after the Pentagon, which is impossible to miss. Why not
hit the Capitol? That was the target for Flight 93.
I agree with brian about the White House being the possible target. I remember shortly after 9/11, I saw an air traffic controller that was on duty that morning interviewed about the events of 9/11. She said the plane was heading toward the White House and because of the angle of the sun at that time of day it was difficult for the hijacker to see the White House. It circled around and was making another pass for it and when it saw the pentagon, the hijacker decided to hit that instead. It was a very chilling interview.
Posted by: Jana at November 20, 2003 10:30 PMThe President receives a threat assessment every morning. It is a summary - the detail would require that he spend every waking minute reading that single assessment. Obviously we will never see many (or any) of these assessments. The intelligence means used in their preparation would be rather obvious and their exposure would inhibit future intelligence gathering.
What Corn is engaged in is meme development. This baby meme has been hanging around, malnourished and definitely not thriving. He is just giving it some nourishment. I believe that it is the NSA that prepares the daily assessment and that they use all availible intelligence sources (CIA, DIA, State) in its preparation. Until and unless some one in the NSA comes forward with an unredacted assessment that shows a willing ignorance on the President's part to face unpleasant facts, this meme will continue to limp along as it has to date.
Simply put, this is just more Copperhead propaganda. It is a bit odd that the political situation today resembles nothing more closely than that which obtained in 1863.
Posted by: RDB at November 20, 2003 10:36 PMWe had a static defense arrayed against a dynamic offense. In the long term, there's only one possible result.
Posted by: David Cohen at November 20, 2003 10:48 PMDavid Corn should talk to Peggy Noonan: she wrote about the almost certain probability of a terror attack (in NY even) 3 years before 9/11.
Oh, but she's a conservative.
Unless the left will shut up and take up arms, ignore them. They are useless in this war.
Posted by: jim hamlen at November 20, 2003 11:58 PMMG:
For the same reason that the CIA sending the spouse of one of their own operatives to discount a story they didn't like ended up as a scandal for the White House instead.
Posted by: oj at November 21, 2003 12:02 AMThe Plame thing is a scandal because, as OJ himself pointed out, someone in the White House should have been fired for leaking Plame's cover but no-one's been fired yet.
I shouldn't have said "no doubt" about the target being the Pentagon, but "not much doubt". We'll never know for sure, but a likely explanation for the turn-around over DC is that an inexperienced and excited pilot overshot the Pentagon (easy to do when you're moving at jet speeds) and then came back around to hit it. It's certainly consistent with al-Qaeda ideology (their cheif demand was for the US to pull troops out of Saudi Arabia) and previous targets like the Cole.
The presence of the Washington Monument tends to complicate the final approach to the White House, especially from the south or south-west. The mansion is also a very small target in comparison to the Pentagon or the WTC. I tend to agree that the Pentagon was the primary target of the third plane and that Flight 93 was headed for the Capitol.
I have a friend who lives in South Arlington who told me that the plane flew so low that it sheared some tree limbs on her block and nearly hit her son's elementary school.
Posted by: george at November 21, 2003 10:54 AMAs a pilot, I have some expertise here.
As a matter of National Policy, we don't negotiate with terrorists, do we.
Wrong. We do. Or we did, anyway. For decades, airline pilots were instructed to accede to hijackers demands so as to preserve passenger lives. That is negotiation. Which means the seeds for 9/11 were (unwittingly) planted a long time ago.
If instead the publicly announced policy was to make the flight deck an impenetrable sanctuary, and, upon hijacking take the plane to the nearest piece of concrete so as to be met with overwhelming force, hijackings would quickly have become a non-starter.
Guess what airline pilots are trained to do since 9/11.
Hitting a fixed target on the ground with an airplane is not at all hard to do, especially if you don't care to walk away from the impact. Student pilots master the former quickly, the latter less so, occasionally never.
However, spotting a target from the air in a cluttered environment, unless it is something like the Pentagon, is far, far more difficult. Therefore, the circling seems like a reattack for target acquisition, then opting for the secondary target rather than getting splashed first.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at November 21, 2003 9:13 PMImagine that the FBI craks the conspiracy on 9/10 swoopes in on the boston and Dulles airports and arrests 19 young men of Arab extraction. what would Corn have said?
1. Great work guys.
2. You are a bunch of racist pigs engaged in sterotyping and persecuting Muslims.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at November 22, 2003 12:12 AM