Posted on 03/29/2004 1:09:00 PM PST by presidio9
Finally ... finally we can talk about what's really going on. Rather than accept the myth that 9/11 turned President Bush into a "hero" ... former counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke has bravely spoken out to tell us the real story - that Bush did not treat terrorism as an urgent issue. And that going to war in Iraq, in addition to tragically costing us so many lives, has diverted money and resources away from where they should have been focused - on dismantling al Qaeda and strengthening our homeland security.
We now know that the Bush White House never made counterterrorism a priority leading up to September 11th. In fact, on April 30, 2001, the new administration released the government's annual report on terrorism, with a noted change: extensive mention of bin Laden, which previous terrorism reports contained, had been left out. A Bush State Department Official reportedly told CNN at that time that the U.S. government under Clinton had made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden.
In fact, Bush never even held a cabinet level meeting devoted to terrorism until the week before the attack. While FBI agents were fielding concerns about non-citizens in flight school uninterested in learning how to land planes, and the CIA was aware that potential terrorists had entered the United States, because terrorism was not a priority in the high levels of the federal government these discussions were never elevated to a place where the information could be shared across departments, where the appropriate people would have an opportunity to connect the dots...
Here is a brief timeline (much of the information is from the Center for American Progress) of some of the more egregious warnings of looming terrorism that Bush overlooked as he spent the first eight months in office planning tax cuts for the wealthy, devising a way to invade Iraq, and taking long vacations out at his ranch in Crawford, Texas:
1) A 1999 report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council specifically theorized that al Qaeda could fly airplanes into buildings - so we know that the scope of the attack was not entirely beyond anyone's imagination.
2) In early 2001, a surge of al Qaeda activity and plans for attacks against American "interests" were noted, including by Israeli intelligence agencies.
3) Also in early 2001, the Bush administration departed from Clinton's policy of tracking money to terrorist organizations. (Was Bush trying to protect the Saudi royal family?)
4) In July 2001, U.S. and Italian officials were warned that al Qaeda may use planes as missiles at a Genoa summit of industrialized nations.
5) On August 6, 2001, while on vacation in Crawford, the president received a one and a half page briefing advising him that al Qaeda was capable of a major strike against the U.S., and that the plot could include the hijacking of American airplanes. And then what did the president do with this important information? He went fishing - bringing new meaning to the phrase, "Gone Fishin'"!
6) In July, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines because of a "threat assessment."
7) Newsweek has reported that on September 10th, 2001, a number of Pentagon officials canceled travel plans for the next morning due to security concerns, and "that as many as 10 to 12 warnings" were issued before 9/11 - "more than two of the warnings specifically mentioned the possibility of hijackings."
8) Also on September 10th (as I posted in a statement on November 21, 2002), Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected the FBI's request for a $58 million increase for their counterterrorism budget to pay for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators. He did that despite the fact, discovered later by a Congressional investigation, that the FBI had only one analyst monitoring al Qaeda and a severe shortage of Arabic translators.
Soon after September 11th, Condoleezza Rice said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." And now Bush says, "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people." Did he really say this? I heard it on the radio but I couldn't believe my own ears. Indeed, the scope of the horror of 9/11 is beyond the realm of what even the most savvy threat assessors may have thought possible.
However ... as the brief timeline above shows, THE PRESIDENT WAS REPEATEDLY WARNED that al Qaeda was planning some sort of attack, and that the attack may involve airplanes. So these are my questions:
-WHY DIDN'T OUR GOVERNMENT DO MORE TO BEEF UP SECURITY AT AIRPORTS AND ON AIRPLANES?
-WHY WEREN'T WARNINGS ISSUED TO THOSE ENTRUSTED TO PROTECT OUR FLIGHT SECURITY?
-ISN'T LEADERSHIP ABOUT ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY, ANTICIPATING THE UNFATHOMABLE, HEEDING WARNINGS AND FIRMLY ACTING UPON THEM?
-WHEN THE PRESIDENT RECEIVED A MEMO THAT HIJACKINGS OF AMERICAN PLANES MIGHT OCCUR, SHOULDN'T HE HAVE IMMEDIATELY TAKEN ACTION?
I DO BELIEVE THAT EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN THAT TRULY CARES ABOUT THIS COUNTRY, AND LEARNS THE FACTS, WOULD HAVE TO SERIOUSLY ASK THESE QUESTIONS ... AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT IN NOVEMBER!
AHHHHHHHH wasn't the esteemed Gore supposed to be working on that during his pathetic reign?????
Decades ago, her brain rolled into her nose. I think she snagged it with a fingernail, then ate it.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Clinton on Wednesday signed into law the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 1996, which includes some of the wide-ranging security measures recommended by Vice President Al Gore's aviation security commission.
"(The bill) will improve the security of air travel," the president said at a signing ceremony in the Old Executive Office Building. "It will carry forward our fight against terrorism."
The measure, combined with a budget bill signed last week, authorizes the installation of new bomb-detection scanners to examine both carry-on and checked baggage at major airports, pays for new FBI agents to be assigned to airport security, increases inspection of mail on board flights, and increases the use of bomb-sniffing dogs.
Gore's commission presented its report and recommendations on September 9. Clinton said Wednesday that the bill he was signing made almost all of those recommendations "the law of the land."
"This bill is an outstanding example of how we can advance our strategy when we work together -- the government and private citizens, the executive branch and Congress, Republicans and Democrats," Clinton said.
The bill also assigns the National Transportation Safety Board the task of dealing with families of those injured or killed by air disasters. That recommendation grew out of complaints from families of victims of TWA Flight 800 that the airline was slow or inadequate in responding to their needs.
TWA Flight 800 exploded shortly after takeoff from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport in July, killing all 230 aboard.
The bill authorizes $19 billion for the FAA over the next two years. It also bars unlicensed pilots from setting aeronautical records. This is designed to prevent a situation like this year's crash that killed 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, who was attempting to become the youngest pilot to complete a cross-country flight.
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour p!ss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.
You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel.
Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you.
You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood.
May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you.
You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed, drooling, meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool.
You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me.
After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything.
Your attempt at constructing a creative commentary was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult.
I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.
Wasn't that an episode of South Park? ;^)
How exactly does one theorize specifically ?
It's simply naive to think otherwise.
The terror attacks of 2001 happened because of a lack of security, which Israel had been warning us about for years. Unfortunately, nothing will be, nor would have been done until something happened.
It's still true. Nothing will be done about the threat of future terrorism until something happens; our borders are still wide open.
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