| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Jez" |
| Date: |
28 Jul 2004 01:36:43 PM |
| Object: |
OT: An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report |
An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report
Robert Scheer
http://207.44.245.159/article6559.htm
July 27, 2004 "Los Angeles Times" -- Busted! Like a teenager whose beer
bash is interrupted by his parents' early return home, President Bush's
nearly three years of bragging about his "war on terror" credentials has
been exposed by the bipartisan 9/11 commission as nothing more than
empty posturing.
Without dissent, five prominent Republicans joined an equal number of
their Democratic Party peers in stating unequivocally that the Bush
administration got it wrong, both in its lethargic response to an
unprecedented level of warnings during what the commission calls the
"Summer of Threat," as well as in its inclusion of Iraq in the war on
terror.
Although the language of the commission's report was carefully couched
to obtain a bipartisan consensus, the indictment of this administration
surfaces on almost every page.
Bush was not the first U.S. president to play footsie with Muslim
extremists in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, nor was the
Clinton administration without fault in its fitful and ineffective
response to the Al Qaeda threat. But there was simply no excuse for the
near-total indifference of the new president and his top Cabinet
officials to strenuous warnings from the outgoing Clinton administration
and the government's counter-terrorism experts that something terrible
was coming, fast and hard, from Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's gang, they
said repeatedly, was planning "near-term attacks," which Al Qaeda
operatives expected "to have dramatic consequences of catastrophic
proportions."
As early as May 2001, the FBI was receiving tips that Bin Laden
supporters were planning attacks in the U.S., possibly including the
hijacking of planes. On May 29, White House counter-terrorism chief
Richard Clarke wrote national security advisor Condoleezza Rice that
"when these attacks [on Israeli or U.S. facilities] occur, as they
likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them."
At the end of June, the commission wrote, "the intelligence reporting
consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous
level." In early July, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft was told "that
preparations for multiple attacks [by Al Qaeda] were in late stages or
already complete and that little additional warning could be expected."
By month's end, "the system was blinking red" and could not "get any
worse," then-CIA Director George Tenet told the 9/11 commission.
It was at this point, of course, that George W. Bush began the longest
presidential vacation in 32 years. On the very first day of his visit to
his Texas ranch, Aug. 6, Bush received the now-infamous two-page
intelligence alert titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United
States." Yet instead of returning to the capital to mobilize an
energetic defensive posture, he spent an additional 27 days away as the
government languished in summer mode, in deep denial.
"In sum," said the 9/11 commission report, "the domestic agencies never
mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have the direction,
and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened.
Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was
not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement
were not marshaled to augment the FBI's efforts. The public was not
warned."
In her public testimony to the commission, Rice argued that the Aug. 6
briefing concerned vague "historical information based on old
reporting," adding that "there was no new threat information." When the
commission forced the White House to release the document, however, this
was exposed as a lie: The document included explicit FBI warnings 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." Furthermore, this briefing was only one
of 40 on the threat of Bin Laden that the president received between
Jan. 20 and Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush, the commission report also makes clear, compounded U.S.
vulnerability by totally misleading Americans about the need to invade
Iraq as a part of the "war on terror."
For those, like Vice President ***** Cheney, who continue to insist that
the jury is still out on whether Al Qaeda and Iraq were collaborators,
the commission's report should be the final word, finding after an
exhaustive review that there is no evidence that any of the alleged
contacts between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein "ever developed into a
collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence
indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying
out any attacks against the United States."
So, before 9/11, incompetence and sloth. And after? Much worse: a war
without end on the wrong battlefield.
--
Jez
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious,
of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society
highly values its normal man.It educates children to lose themselves
and to become absurd,and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed
perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."
R.D. Laing
.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report |
28 Jul 2004 03:39:18 PM |
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On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 19:36:43 +0100, Jez wrote:
An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report
Robert Scheer
http://207.44.245.159/article6559.htm
July 27, 2004 "Los Angeles Times" -- Busted! Like a teenager whose beer
bash is interrupted by his parents' early return home, President Bush's
nearly three years of bragging about his "war on terror" credentials has
been exposed by the bipartisan 9/11 commission as nothing more than
empty posturing.
[]
In her public testimony to the commission, Rice argued that the Aug. 6
briefing concerned vague "historical information based on old
reporting," adding that "there was no new threat information." When the
commission forced the White House to release the document, however, this
was exposed as a lie: The document included explicit FBI warnings 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." Furthermore, this briefing was only one
of 40 on the threat of Bin Laden that the president received between
Jan. 20 and Sept. 11, 2001.
Which is why Rice refused to testify under oath-she was going to lie her
arse off.
Bush, the commission report also makes clear, compounded U.S.
vulnerability by totally misleading Americans about the need to invade
Iraq as a part of the "war on terror."
He's done that since before he assumed his stolen office.
[]
So, before 9/11, incompetence and sloth. And after? Much worse: a war
without end on the wrong battlefield.
.
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