What A Tangled We Weave
Sep 30th, 2006 at 3:12 pm by Susie
E&P has this enlightening excerpt from Bob Woodward’s new book:
After what has already emerged, it is a bit of letdown with nothing really beyond what has already been reported — including Henry Kissinger’s surprising role as a key adviser. But, far more startling, is a separate sidebar/excerpt on a pre-9/11 warning, also mentioned briefly in the early “scoops” but not in this depth.
The Post also reveals today that the 9/11 Commission was not told about this meeting.
The Woodward excerpt describes how, on July 10, 2001, CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters “to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. The mass of fragments made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.”
Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser. “For months,” Woodward writes, “Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy… that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden…. Tenet and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.
“Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer’s instinct strongly suggested that something was coming….
“But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the intelligence, asking: Could it all be a grand deception?”
Woodward describes the meeting, and the two officials’ plea that the U.S. “needed to take action that moment — covert, military, whatever — to thwart bin Laden.”
The result? “Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn’t want to swat at flies.
“Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long….
“Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, Tenet thought, but she just didn’t get it in time. He felt that he had done his job and been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.
“Black later said, ‘The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.’”
Condi Rice for President!
Rice gives me the creeps, partly because of the scary, empty stare in her eyes and partly because you can tell she is always lying.
Think this will turn off all her Washington insider supporters? Naw, neither do I.
When she gets confronted with her failures, she just gets more belligerent and lies through her teeth. And I have seen nobody smack her down.
White House Defends Threat Response
Thu May 16, 2002 5:22 PM ET
By RON FOURNIER, AP White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON (AP) - Under fire from angry lawmakers, the White House on Thursday defended its decision not to alert Americans to information before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network wanted to hijack U.S. airplanes.
President Bush had received general, nonspecific information during a vacation briefing at his ranch Aug. 6 that bin Laden’s group was considering hijackings, and he never considered making the information public, said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
“You would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized information,” Rice said. “You would have to think five, six, seven times about that, very, very hard.”….
But Rice said the administration never considered alerting the public to a possible hijacking threat at home, and had no idea that hijackers might consider using an airplane as a missile in a suicide attack.
“In the pre-9-11 world, we never even considered issuing a warning,” Rice said….
Condi for Prez, are you out of your mind! She is as soulless and evil as the rest.
Yuck, don’t like that at all.