CBS Gives Platform to Suggestion Bush Team Could've Stopped 9/11 (TRANSCRIPT and QUOTES)

MediaResearchCenter ^ | 11:50am EST, Thursday December 18, 2003 | BrentBaker

[fight_truth_decay]

CBS on Wednesday night provided a forum for the Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, to complain about access to documents as reporter Randall Pinkston hyped his story: "For the first time, commission chairman Tom Kean is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented." Pinkston added: "Appointed by President Bush, Kean is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame."

Specifically, complaining about trouble getting to see "top-secret daily briefs, documents that may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration." That was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's assertion that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

Pinkston moved on to a 9/11 widow's complaint about a failure to connect the dots, but Pinkston's story presented pre-9/11 issues as if it were a simplistic world in which if people had been warned about threats to planes the terrorist attacks would have been avoided. In fact, it would have set off a panic and caused a myriad of problems economically. And he ignored how a concern of the Bush administration is that if the public learns there were reasons to believe planes were threatened people will assume that means 9/11 could have been prevented when, in fact, there were threats to all kinds of things and only in retrospect do we know which threat was real.

Pinkston did raise President Clinton's name -- but literally not until the very last word of his story.

Dan Rather set up the December 17 CBS Evening News piece: "The head of the independent commission investigating the 9-11 terror attacks in the United States is out with some strong accusations about what the panel is finding. The final report is due out officially in May. CBS's Randall Pinkston has tonight's story."

Pinkston's story began with video of Tom Kean walking down street with Pinkston as Kean maintained: "This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right."
Pinkston: "For the first time, commission chairman Tom Kean is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented."
Kean: "I do not believe it had to happen."
Pinkston: "Appointed by President Bush, Kean is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame."

Pinkston to Kean as the two sat in an office: "Do you think someone or someones should have been fired?"
Kean: "There are people certainly if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed."
Pinkston: "To find out who failed and why, the commission has navigated a political minefield, threatening a subpoena to gain access to the President's top-secret daily briefs, documents that may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration."

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow: "How is it possible we have a national security advisor coming out and saying we had no idea they could use planes as weapons when we had FBI records back to '91 stating that this was a possibility."
Pinkston: "Kristen Breitweiser is one of four New Jersey widows who lobbied Congress and the President to appoint the commission. The widows want to know why government agencies didn't connect the dots until September 11th, on tips like warnings from FBI offices about suspicious student pilots."
Breitweiser: "If you were to tell me that two years past the murder of my husband on live national television, I still wouldn't have one question answered, I wouldn't believe it."
Pinkston: "Kean admits the commission also has more questions than answers."
Pinkston to Kean: "To date, we don't know whether the same people who were sitting in the decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions."
Kean: "That's correct."
Pinkston: "Shouldn't we at least know whether-"
Kean: "Yes. Answer is yes. And we will."
Pinkston concluded: "Kean promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton."

The Web site for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: http://www.9-11commission.gov

[fight_truth_decay]

"This was not something that had to happen." "They simply failed."

— Thomas H. Kean, Chair of the independent commission investigating 9/11. Kean is a Republican appointed by Bush

"They don't have any excuse because the information was in their lap, and they didn't do anything to prevent it."

— Senator Richard Shelby, then ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee; member of the joint intelligence committee that investigated 9/11

"I don't believe any longer that it's a matter of connecting the dots. I think they had a veritable blueprint, and we want to know why they didn't act on it."

— Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican member of the joint intelligence committee that investigated 9/11

"There were lots of warnings."

— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

"Should we have known? Yes, we should have. Could we have known? Yes, I believe we could have because of the hard targets [CIA operatives were tracking]."

— Representative Porter Goss, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; Republican co-chairman of the joint intelligence committee that investigated 9/11

"I cannot say for sure that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers."

— FBI Director Robert Mueller

"If you put all those pieces together, I don't say you could have prevented September 11th, but there might have been some warning, had it been handled properly."

Vice President Dick Cheney

"Had one human being or a common group of human beings sat down with all that information, we could have gotten to the hijackers before they flew those four airplanes either into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or the ground of Pennsylvania."

— Senator Bob Graham, then Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Democratic co-chairman of the joint intelligence panel that investigated 9/11

"As of September 10th, each of us knew everything we needed to know to tell us there was a possibility of what happened on September 11th."

— Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff (described by the Associated Press as "the Bush administration's top anti-terrorism prosecutor")

Sources

"9/11 could have and should have been prevented."

The quotes above all originated in 2001 and 2002..Kean sheds new light without completion of his investigation? One could take all these earlier quotes and come to this same conclusion. And why does Kean come out now on CBS before his work is completed. Something smells fishy!

[sarasota]

More evidence of SeeBS and their thick-headedness. Real original thinking, lads.

[talleyman]

"9/11 - why didn't you connect the dots?"
"Iraq - why did you connect the dots?"

There's a network called CBS?

[Puppage]

Boy, sure can't wait for campaign finance to take hold. It'll be oh, so fair.

[Jerry Attrick]

This is now the Leftist Clintonista's DemonRats ONLY prayer in next year's election. Since they have NO plan or viable policy...AND all of their crap rhetoric has failed and the economy and war are going Bush's way....their only hope is to pin 9/11 on him.

Good luck!

[My2Cents]

And why does Kean come out now on CBS before his work is completed.

The answer is simple: Bush's approval rating is up to 63% after the capture of Saddam, and Howard Dean now trails Bush by about 20%.

Now that this "investigation" has been politicized, the public needs to hear how these failures have their root in the Clinton Administration. How many books have been published over the past two years pointing to the failures of the Clinton team? And then there is Laurie Mylorie's book, BUSH VS. THE BELTWAY which discusses the foot-dragging on the part of the career bureaucrats within the CIA and the State Department when it came to crafting and executing the "War on Terror." Kean would have been more accurate to have said that personnel "within the Administration" (i.e., mid-level careerists at the CIA and the FBI) dropped the ball in failing to discover the 9/11 plot before it happened. This is not Bush's fault, but the media will jump on it as if it is. And I would hope that out of this, George Tenet gets his walking papers. Frankly, it would be Bush's fault if presented with the failings of key agencies if he didn't clean house.

[Spok]

This is like saying because the Israelis know the MO of the suicide bombers, they can be prevented from killing civilians. Just knowing what might happen doesn't tell you when, where and who.

[tbpiper]

You have to factor in that Bill Clinton warned GW about the danger of Bin Laden.*

* this factiond brought to you by the 'Yeah, Right' division of the "Me,Too School of Monday Morning Quarterbacking"

[TheCrusader]

Most of those quotes are directed towards the shortcomings of our intelligence system, not of the Administration. Very, very misleading quotes.

Just as an aside, why didn't Bill Klintoon stop the bombing of the WTC in 1993? Why did Klintoon's intelligence system fail to properly warn the U.S. Navy and the U.S.S. Cole not to throw their anchors down in the treacherous waters off Yemen? Why did Klintoon's Administration utterly fail our servicemen in Mogadishu and lead them into a murderous ambush? I'm really gettin tired of all this liberal b.s being thrown around.

[Cicero]

Well, Mueller is a jerk, and the FBI bears the primary responsibility for not following up on some obvious leads during clinton's term in office. But the Chad Wars and obstructive Democrats in the Senate severely delayed many of Bush's key appointments. As I recall, Mueller had only been in office about a week when 9/11 happened. I fault Mueller for his later inactions, not for his failure to pick up on this threat during his first week in office.

Bush should have known better than to give this job to Governor Kean.

[tbpiper]

Just as an aside, why didn't Bill Klintoon stop the bombing of the WTC in 1993?

He was just coming to it.

[Eastbound]

If any failure at all, it was failure to issue a pre-emptive warning to any nation supporting the terrorists with consequences so harsh it would have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Even terrorists would not want their homeland to become radioactive. In fact, it still isn't too late.

Shoot at me with a .22 and I will defend myself with a 5-inch canon. Attack my city and I will destroy your nation.

[squidly]

The libs would have prevented profiling of Arab males at airports prior to 9/11. They still prevent it.

[Peach]

Kean: "There are people certainly if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed."

An unintelligable sentence from an another intelligent man. He's lying.

[fight_truth_decay]

We cannot forget: In a wide-ranging interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," Clinton said his first thought that day, after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, was: "Bin Laden did this!"

[GOP_1900AD]

It is really quite simple. Bush is a product of the Dale Carnegie school of human relations. Even after the overt Gore anti electoral putsch of 2000, Bush insisted on beginning in a friendly way. So the backstabbers licked their chops. One of them is the Director of CI. By failing to purge all criminals from the White House on January 21st, 2001, Bush blundered badly. Now, those same criminals have engineered this. Any questions?

[fight_truth_decay]

The quotes (comments) I directed your attention to were only to show there was nothing new in what is spread nice and thick all over the media today...just little bit of a desperate spin of an old story on a new day.

[cake_crumb]

They're following the plan outlined in the Intelligence Committee memo. We rememeber Bubba, the asperine factory, the USS Cole and Sudan trying to give Binny to Bubba, who didn't want him. Hard to blame all that on a man who was only in office a few months, facing down China over the EP-3 and the Americans they held hostage, and Congress to win a tax cut.

[section9]

This is their last best hope. The capture of Saddam has accentuated the turn of the tide in Iraq since "Iron Hammer" began just before Thanksgiving. The economy is climbing and unemployment is falling.

Now Kean is, I really believe, interested in getting to the bottom of who was responsible. I don't believe that he is interested in Bush losing the election. He is a Republican, after all. But there are others on the commission who will try to undo Bush. They are working for two clients:

1. The Clintons

2. The DCI and his incompetent beureaucrats.

Bush, Rice, and the other members of the Administration have only to confront the coming shenanigans with blunt honesty. This weapon will not prosper, as well.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[bankwalker]

Although this appears bad for President Bush right now, I suggest we let it play out over time. This may be the only way to expose the Klinton fiasco to the sheeple.