Posted on 05/17/2002 5:52:46 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:00:33 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
KING: Mike Wallace will be with us for the hour, remains with us. Joining us now in Washington, Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. CBS broke this story, everyone's run it all day. Mike can chime in with questions as well. We'll start with Senator Graham with the now familiar what did they know and when did they know it?
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Senator Bob Graham says that this is an "overblown story" but this won't prevent Dan Rather & company from jumping all over it from the political angle.
The Cost of Life (Clinton/Gore Sellout of Security for Campaign Contributions) **FR EXCLUSIVE** #3 Thread Two | 9/23/01 | Jon Loose and Connie Hair
Victoria Cummock and CIA Director John Deutch were resolute in their opposition to the “softball” report. Gore was given no choice but to pull back the report. Reinstalled were sensible new procedures that would cost the airlines millions of dollars.
· Conduct airport vulnerability assessments and develop action plans
· Require criminal background checks and FBI fingerprint checks for all screeners, and all airport and airline employees with access to secure areas
· Deploy existing technology
· Signifi cantly expand the use of bomb-sniffing dogs
· Complement technology with automated passenger profiling
· Certify screening companies and improve screener performance
· Aggressively test existing security systems
· Use the Customs Service to enhance security
· Give properly cleared airline and airport security personnel access to the classified information they need to know
· Begin implementation of full bag-passenger match
· Providing more compassionate and effective assistance to families of victims
· Improve passenger manifests
· Significantly increase the number of FBI agents assigned to counter-terrorism investigations, to improve intelligence, and to crisis response
· Provide anti-terrorism assistance in the form of airport security training to countries where there are airports served by airlines flying to the US
The security measures were in the final recommendation report. However, the implementation timetable was nowhere to be found.
In February of 1997, Victoria Cummock called the report “toothless.” She informed Gore that unless specific implementation dates were added in the report she would file a dissent, because the airline industry would not have to do anything until such measures were mandated.
On February 12, 1997, an open meeting was held on the commission’s final report. Gore made a point to inform Ms. Cummock that he would leave room for her dissent to the final report. NBC Dateline caught these comments on videotape. Also on videotape was Mr. Gore presenting the final report to President Clinton minutes later and pronouncing that the report had unanimous consent. But it didn’t.
This was reposted courtesy of backhoe, today.
BS -- Congress was briefed on the same material the very day after Bush was.
. I have not seen the specific document from which he was briefed on August the 7th, but we heard a summary of it, and if that summary is correct, it had some important information, but not exceptional information in terms of what I'm certain that the White House already knew, about the threat of Osama bin Laden.
Which is exactly the point the White House is making. However, this won't prevent the Demmycrats with Presidential ambitions (Dashle, Gephardt, Hillary, etc.) from making it sound almost like Bush knew in advance that airplanes would be flown into the WTC Towers and the Pentagon. BTW, one other point. Even most of the hijackers themselves didn't know their planes would be flown into buildings. Only the hijackers doing the actual piloting knew this. The rest of them thought they were just along on a standard hijacking. This is also what the intelligence agencies thought when they got some evidence that a hijacking might be in the works. NONE of the intelligence agencies (nor did most of the hijackers themselves) had any inkling that the planes would be used as flying bombs.
KING: All right. Mike, do you see this -- first, do you agree that this may be overblown or do you think this is the kind of story that if Clinton were in office the conservatives would be railing against him, with Bush in office, the Democrats are railing against him?
WALLACE: Of course it's political....
Telling....and that's why it'll backfire. Dems will rue the day they tried to slime the President with this grossly irresponsible charge.
Hit the nail on the head.
This reminds me of an old Chinese saying that goes something like this: "Don't wish for something because you might get what you ask for."
Well, the Demmycrats wished for the control of the Senate and, thanx to Jeffords, they got what they wished for. Unfortunately, for them, it also gave them control of the Senate Intelligence Committee so they can't claim ignorance of the vague warnings (hijackings but not flying bombs).
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