Bush on Defensive:Says If He d Known, He Would Have Acted to Foil Terror Plot

ABC News ^ | May 17, 2002 | ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman, Terry Moran, Linda Douglass, Brian Ross and Lisa Sylvester contributed

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

President Bush, reacting to "second-guessing" over his handling of intelligence information ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks, said he would have acted to foil the attackers had he known what they were planning. (ABCNEWS.com)

Bush on Defensive Says If He’d Known, He Would Have Acted to Foil Terror Plot May 17 — President Bush said today that if he had known terrorists planned to "use an airplane to kill Americans," he would have done everything possible to stop them, but the furor over his administration's alleged failure to respond properly to pre-Sept. 11 terror attack information continued to grow.

"The American people know this about me and my national security team and my administration: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," he said in an address to Air Force Academy cadets in the Rose Garden.

But while the Bush administration has maintained that there was no reason for anyone in the government to expect that terrorists would crash planes into buildings, a government profile of terrorists done in 1999 that was funded by the CIA says, "Suicide bomber[s] belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency or the White House."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer today denied the significance of the report, which was entitled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?, saying, "It is not a piece of intelligence information, suggesting that we have information about a specific plan."

"I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that terrorists think in evil ways, in unimaginable ways, and it describes several of the ways," Fleischer said.

Counterterror Chief Looses Job

Fallout from the revelations this week about apparent breakdowns in communication within the various agencies responsible for monitoring suspected terrorist activity has already claimed the job of the CIA's counterterorrism chief.

ABCNEWS has learned that Cofer Black, who has run the counterterrorism center for the past three years, has been moved out of the post. The counterterrorism center is the lead CIA team tasked with finding indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Sources told ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman there will be more changes coming among the top figures in the CIA, but Bush still has faith in both CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The White House acknowledged this week that it had received intelligence in the weeks before Sept. 11 that terrorists might try to hijack U.S. jets, but said the information was too vague to act upon.

The FBI also received a memo from its Phoenix office, dated July 10, 2001, that said it was believed that bin Laden had sent terrorists to the United States to learn how to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools.

"The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York [the seat of the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force] of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges," the memo began, sources told ABCNEWS.

The eight-page memo is extremely detailed, according to the sources, providing the names and backgrounds of several individuals, as well as the schools where they were enrolled. It also recommended that the FBI look into whether there were other suspects enrolled in other schools around the country.

Plan to Dismantle Al Qaeda

As information about possible hijack threats were being received last summer, though, U.S. security officials were drawing up a presidential order to begin a military and financial campaign to dismantle bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which was later blamed for the attacks of Sept. 11. Al Qaeda was already blamed for the bombings of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, and of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998.

The draft was only completed on Sept. 10, and Bush had not seen it before the hijacked airliners were crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Fleischer said.

The plans in that proposed order, which was revealed by Fleischer today, were used when the U.S.-led coalition unleashed its assault on Afghanistan in October.

At a briefing with reporters Thursday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the threats did not mention a specific time, place or mode of attack, and she said officials believed any such attack would be a "traditional" hijacking — not the Sept. 11 suicide mission that would turn passenger jets into missiles.

"It is always a question of how good the information is and whether putting the information out is a responsible thing to do," Rice said. "You would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized information. You would have to think five, six, seven times about that, very, very hard."

Rice stressed that there was no way anyone could have predicted that terrorists would pilot hijacked planes into famous buildings filled with people.

"Had this president been aware that terrorists would have used airplanes as missiles and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he would have acted on it," Rice said.

Unhappy Families

However, one man whose wife died on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, Stephen Push, the co-founder of Families of Sept. 11, said he and many members of his organization are having a hard time accepting that explanation.

"I was very disturbed when I saw Condoleezza Rice's press conference yesterday," Push said today on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "In 1995, al Qaeda confessed that they were planning to slam planes into the United States. In July an FBI agent in Phoenix was concerned about the number of Middle Eastern men who were coming to the United States learning how to fly and they were concerned that they were connected with [Osama] bin Laden. In August, an FBI agent in Minneapolis was concerned that Zacarias Moussaoui was learning to use planes in this manner. … Did the president not have this information in front of him when he made decisions?"

He wondered why, after a terrorist hijacked a plane in Algeria and tried to crash it into the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1994, it was inconceivable to U.S. officials that terrorists might try something similar here.

Like the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, Push said a full, public investigation of possible intelligence failures is needed.

An Angry Man

While Vice President Dick Cheney saved his public anger for Democrats he accused of playing politics with the questions that have been raised, sources told ABCNEWS that for months he has been just as angry about lapses in U.S. intelligence gathering.

In addition to the removal of Black from his position at the CIA, there are believed to have been similar changes at the FBI.

Sen. Barbara Feinstein, D-Calif., said today that she began urging such changes as early as July 2001, when the amount and type of information she was hearing at briefings as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee made her feel "a sense of foreboding."

"I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month to urge that he restructure our counterterrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks," Feinstein said in a statement released today.

Feinstein released the statement after Fleischer used her as an example of a Democrat who had been briefed about threats that the administration was aware of, as he charged that other members of her party were trying to take political advantage of the tragedy of Sept. 11.

She said that it was Fleischer who was playing politics, though.

"In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the issue is too important to our nation to engage in the kind of politics Mr. Fleischer is practicing," the statement said.

A Right to Know?

Despite the administration's statements about the lack of hard evidence about hijacking threats, the Federal Aviation Administration was concerned enough to issue information circulars in June, July and August, and ordered officials to be on a heightened state of alert, particularly overseas.

Sources told ABCNEWS that a June circular said, "Although we have no specific information that this threat is directed at civil aviation, the potential for terrorist operations, such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the U.S. remains a concern."

Push said that kind of information, as well as the decision that the concerns were serious enough that the president should be briefed on them, could have had an effect on his wife's decision to travel by plane.

"When I first heard the news that President Bush had been briefed about the possibility of hijackings in August, what immediately occurred to me is that my wife should have known that information before she decided to fly," he said. "I think she probably wouldn't have flown that day. Even if she did, she had a right to know the risks she had been taking."

He said that Families of Sept. 11 is planning a rally on Capitol Hill on June 11 to push Congress to start a commission to investigate the events leading up to the terror attacks.

White House Promises Cooperation

Democratic lawmakers calling for an investigation were met with a warning from Cheney, though the vice president said the White House would cooperate with any inquiry.

"They need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions that were made by some today that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11," Cheney said Thursday night at the New York state Conservative Party's annual dinner. "Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war."

Cheney said he would work with House and Senate leadership to investigate any intelligence failures — but warned not to turn it into a distraction.

"The people and agencies responsible to help us learn to defeat such an attack are the very ones most likely to be distracted from their critical duties if Congress fails to carry their obligation in a responsible fashion," he said. Earlier Thursday, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.C., both called for an investigation.

ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman, Terry Moran, Linda Douglass, Brian Ross and Lisa Sylvester contributed to this report " width=185 vspace=3 border=0>
President Bush, reacting to "second-guessing" over his handling of intelligence information ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks, said he would have acted to foil the attackers had he known what they were planning. (ABCNEWS.com)

Bush on Defensive

Says If He’d Known, He Would Have Acted to Foil Terror Plot

May 17

— President Bush said today that if he had known terrorists planned to "use an airplane to kill Americans," he would have done everything possible to stop them, but the furor over his administration's alleged failure to respond properly to pre-Sept. 11 terror attack information continued to grow.

<! -- begin print page / send page box -->

"The American people know this about me and my national security team and my administration: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," he said in an address to Air Force Academy cadets in the Rose Garden.

But while the Bush administration has maintained that there was no reason for anyone in the government to expect that terrorists would crash planes into buildings, a government profile of terrorists done in 1999 that was funded by the CIA says, "Suicide bomber[s] belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency or the White House."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer today denied the significance of the report, which was entitled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?, saying, "It is not a piece of intelligence information, suggesting that we have information about a specific plan."

"I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that terrorists think in evil ways, in unimaginable ways, and it describes several of the ways," Fleischer said.

Counterterror Chief Looses Job

Fallout from the revelations this week about apparent breakdowns in communication within the various agencies responsible for monitoring suspected terrorist activity has already claimed the job of the CIA's counterterorrism chief.

ABCNEWS has learned that Cofer Black, who has run the counterterrorism center for the past three years, has been moved out of the post. The counterterrorism center is the lead CIA team tasked with finding indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Sources told ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman there will be more changes coming among the top figures in the CIA, but Bush still has faith in both CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The White House acknowledged this week that it had received intelligence in the weeks before Sept. 11 that terrorists might try to hijack U.S. jets, but said the information was too vague to act upon.

The FBI also received a memo from its Phoenix office, dated July 10, 2001, that said it was believed that bin Laden had sent terrorists to the United States to learn how to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools.

"The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York [the seat of the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force] of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges," the memo began, sources told ABCNEWS.

The eight-page memo is extremely detailed, according to the sources, providing the names and backgrounds of several individuals, as well as the schools where they were enrolled. It also recommended that the FBI look into whether there were other suspects enrolled in other schools around the country.

Plan to Dismantle Al Qaeda

As information about possible hijack threats were being received last summer, though, U.S. security officials were drawing up a presidential order to begin a military and financial campaign to dismantle bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which was later blamed for the attacks of Sept. 11. Al Qaeda was already blamed for the bombings of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, and of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998.

The draft was only completed on Sept. 10, and Bush had not seen it before the hijacked airliners were crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Fleischer said.

The plans in that proposed order, which was revealed by Fleischer today, were used when the U.S.-led coalition unleashed its assault on Afghanistan in October.

At a briefing with reporters Thursday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the threats did not mention a specific time, place or mode of attack, and she said officials believed any such attack would be a "traditional" hijacking — not the Sept. 11 suicide mission that would turn passenger jets into missiles.

"It is always a question of how good the information is and whether putting the information out is a responsible thing to do," Rice said. "You would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized information. You would have to think five, six, seven times about that, very, very hard."

Rice stressed that there was no way anyone could have predicted that terrorists would pilot hijacked planes into famous buildings filled with people.

"Had this president been aware that terrorists would have used airplanes as missiles and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he would have acted on it," Rice said.

Unhappy Families

However, one man whose wife died on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, Stephen Push, the co-founder of Families of Sept. 11, said he and many members of his organization are having a hard time accepting that explanation.

"I was very disturbed when I saw Condoleezza Rice's press conference yesterday," Push said today on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "In 1995, al Qaeda confessed that they were planning to slam planes into the United States. In July an FBI agent in Phoenix was concerned about the number of Middle Eastern men who were coming to the United States learning how to fly and they were concerned that they were connected with [Osama] bin Laden. In August, an FBI agent in Minneapolis was concerned that Zacarias Moussaoui was learning to use planes in this manner. … Did the president not have this information in front of him when he made decisions?"

He wondered why, after a terrorist hijacked a plane in Algeria and tried to crash it into the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1994, it was inconceivable to U.S. officials that terrorists might try something similar here.

Like the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, Push said a full, public investigation of possible intelligence failures is needed.

An Angry Man

While Vice President Dick Cheney saved his public anger for Democrats he accused of playing politics with the questions that have been raised, sources told ABCNEWS that for months he has been just as angry about lapses in U.S. intelligence gathering.

In addition to the removal of Black from his position at the CIA, there are believed to have been similar changes at the FBI.

Sen. Barbara Feinstein, D-Calif., said today that she began urging such changes as early as July 2001, when the amount and type of information she was hearing at briefings as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee made her feel "a sense of foreboding."

"I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month to urge that he restructure our counterterrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks," Feinstein said in a statement released today.

Feinstein released the statement after Fleischer used her as an example of a Democrat who had been briefed about threats that the administration was aware of, as he charged that other members of her party were trying to take political advantage of the tragedy of Sept. 11.

She said that it was Fleischer who was playing politics, though.

"In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the issue is too important to our nation to engage in the kind of politics Mr. Fleischer is practicing," the statement said.

A Right to Know?

Despite the administration's statements about the lack of hard evidence about hijacking threats, the Federal Aviation Administration was concerned enough to issue information circulars in June, July and August, and ordered officials to be on a heightened state of alert, particularly overseas.

Sources told ABCNEWS that a June circular said, "Although we have no specific information that this threat is directed at civil aviation, the potential for terrorist operations, such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the U.S. remains a concern."

Push said that kind of information, as well as the decision that the concerns were serious enough that the president should be briefed on them, could have had an effect on his wife's decision to travel by plane.

"When I first heard the news that President Bush had been briefed about the possibility of hijackings in August, what immediately occurred to me is that my wife should have known that information before she decided to fly," he said. "I think she probably wouldn't have flown that day. Even if she did, she had a right to know the risks she had been taking."

He said that Families of Sept. 11 is planning a rally on Capitol Hill on June 11 to push Congress to start a commission to investigate the events leading up to the terror attacks.

White House Promises Cooperation

Democratic lawmakers calling for an investigation were met with a warning from Cheney, though the vice president said the White House would cooperate with any inquiry.

"They need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions that were made by some today that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11," Cheney said Thursday night at the New York state Conservative Party's annual dinner. "Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war."

Cheney said he would work with House and Senate leadership to investigate any intelligence failures — but warned not to turn it into a distraction.

"The people and agencies responsible to help us learn to defeat such an attack are the very ones most likely to be distracted from their critical duties if Congress fails to carry their obligation in a responsible fashion," he said. Earlier Thursday, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.C., both called for an investigation.

ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman, Terry Moran, Linda Douglass, Brian Ross and Lisa Sylvester contributed to this report

" width=185 vspace=3 border=0>
President Bush, reacting to "second-guessing" over his handling of intelligence information ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks, said he would have acted to foil the attackers had he known what they were planning. (ABCNEWS.com)

Bush on Defensive

Says If He’d Known, He Would Have Acted to Foil Terror Plot

May 17

— President Bush said today that if he had known terrorists planned to "use an airplane to kill Americans," he would have done everything possible to stop them, but the furor over his administration's alleged failure to respond properly to pre-Sept. 11 terror attack information continued to grow.

<! -- begin print page / send page box -->

"The American people know this about me and my national security team and my administration: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," he said in an address to Air Force Academy cadets in the Rose Garden.

But while the Bush administration has maintained that there was no reason for anyone in the government to expect that terrorists would crash planes into buildings, a government profile of terrorists done in 1999 that was funded by the CIA says, "Suicide bomber[s] belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency or the White House."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer today denied the significance of the report, which was entitled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?, saying, "It is not a piece of intelligence information, suggesting that we have information about a specific plan."

"I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that terrorists think in evil ways, in unimaginable ways, and it describes several of the ways," Fleischer said.

Counterterror Chief Looses Job

Fallout from the revelations this week about apparent breakdowns in communication within the various agencies responsible for monitoring suspected terrorist activity has already claimed the job of the CIA's counterterorrism chief.

ABCNEWS has learned that Cofer Black, who has run the counterterrorism center for the past three years, has been moved out of the post. The counterterrorism center is the lead CIA team tasked with finding indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Sources told ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman there will be more changes coming among the top figures in the CIA, but Bush still has faith in both CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The White House acknowledged this week that it had received intelligence in the weeks before Sept. 11 that terrorists might try to hijack U.S. jets, but said the information was too vague to act upon.

The FBI also received a memo from its Phoenix office, dated July 10, 2001, that said it was believed that bin Laden had sent terrorists to the United States to learn how to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools.

"The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York [the seat of the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force] of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges," the memo began, sources told ABCNEWS.

The eight-page memo is extremely detailed, according to the sources, providing the names and backgrounds of several individuals, as well as the schools where they were enrolled. It also recommended that the FBI look into whether there were other suspects enrolled in other schools around the country.

Plan to Dismantle Al Qaeda

As information about possible hijack threats were being received last summer, though, U.S. security officials were drawing up a presidential order to begin a military and financial campaign to dismantle bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which was later blamed for the attacks of Sept. 11. Al Qaeda was already blamed for the bombings of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, and of two U.S. Embassies in Africa in 1998.

The draft was only completed on Sept. 10, and Bush had not seen it before the hijacked airliners were crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Fleischer said.

The plans in that proposed order, which was revealed by Fleischer today, were used when the U.S.-led coalition unleashed its assault on Afghanistan in October.

At a briefing with reporters Thursday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the threats did not mention a specific time, place or mode of attack, and she said officials believed any such attack would be a "traditional" hijacking — not the Sept. 11 suicide mission that would turn passenger jets into missiles.

"It is always a question of how good the information is and whether putting the information out is a responsible thing to do," Rice said. "You would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized information. You would have to think five, six, seven times about that, very, very hard."

Rice stressed that there was no way anyone could have predicted that terrorists would pilot hijacked planes into famous buildings filled with people.

"Had this president been aware that terrorists would have used airplanes as missiles and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he would have acted on it," Rice said.

Unhappy Families

However, one man whose wife died on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, Stephen Push, the co-founder of Families of Sept. 11, said he and many members of his organization are having a hard time accepting that explanation.

"I was very disturbed when I saw Condoleezza Rice's press conference yesterday," Push said today on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "In 1995, al Qaeda confessed that they were planning to slam planes into the United States. In July an FBI agent in Phoenix was concerned about the number of Middle Eastern men who were coming to the United States learning how to fly and they were concerned that they were connected with [Osama] bin Laden. In August, an FBI agent in Minneapolis was concerned that Zacarias Moussaoui was learning to use planes in this manner. … Did the president not have this information in front of him when he made decisions?"

He wondered why, after a terrorist hijacked a plane in Algeria and tried to crash it into the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1994, it was inconceivable to U.S. officials that terrorists might try something similar here.

Like the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, Push said a full, public investigation of possible intelligence failures is needed.

An Angry Man

While Vice President Dick Cheney saved his public anger for Democrats he accused of playing politics with the questions that have been raised, sources told ABCNEWS that for months he has been just as angry about lapses in U.S. intelligence gathering.

In addition to the removal of Black from his position at the CIA, there are believed to have been similar changes at the FBI.

Sen. Barbara Feinstein, D-Calif., said today that she began urging such changes as early as July 2001, when the amount and type of information she was hearing at briefings as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee made her feel "a sense of foreboding."

"I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month to urge that he restructure our counterterrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks," Feinstein said in a statement released today.

Feinstein released the statement after Fleischer used her as an example of a Democrat who had been briefed about threats that the administration was aware of, as he charged that other members of her party were trying to take political advantage of the tragedy of Sept. 11.

She said that it was Fleischer who was playing politics, though.

"In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the issue is too important to our nation to engage in the kind of politics Mr. Fleischer is practicing," the statement said.

A Right to Know?

Despite the administration's statements about the lack of hard evidence about hijacking threats, the Federal Aviation Administration was concerned enough to issue information circulars in June, July and August, and ordered officials to be on a heightened state of alert, particularly overseas.

Sources told ABCNEWS that a June circular said, "Although we have no specific information that this threat is directed at civil aviation, the potential for terrorist operations, such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the U.S. remains a concern."

Push said that kind of information, as well as the decision that the concerns were serious enough that the president should be briefed on them, could have had an effect on his wife's decision to travel by plane.

"When I first heard the news that President Bush had been briefed about the possibility of hijackings in August, what immediately occurred to me is that my wife should have known that information before she decided to fly," he said. "I think she probably wouldn't have flown that day. Even if she did, she had a right to know the risks she had been taking."

He said that Families of Sept. 11 is planning a rally on Capitol Hill on June 11 to push Congress to start a commission to investigate the events leading up to the terror attacks.

White House Promises Cooperation

Democratic lawmakers calling for an investigation were met with a warning from Cheney, though the vice president said the White House would cooperate with any inquiry.

"They need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions that were made by some today that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11," Cheney said Thursday night at the New York state Conservative Party's annual dinner. "Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war."

Cheney said he would work with House and Senate leadership to investigate any intelligence failures — but warned not to turn it into a distraction.

"The people and agencies responsible to help us learn to defeat such an attack are the very ones most likely to be distracted from their critical duties if Congress fails to carry their obligation in a responsible fashion," he said. Earlier Thursday, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.C., both called for an investigation.

ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman, Terry Moran, Linda Douglass, Brian Ross and Lisa Sylvester contributed to this report

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ARGGHHH! System troubles at my end I guess!

Please delete this post!

[Uncle Bill]

BTTT

"Due to White house spin control Thursday, this is what hit the wires:

"The White House on Thursday defended its decision not to alert Americans before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack airplanes. White House officials said such a warning would have risked shutting down the country's airline system."

"The defense came after Democrats led angry calls for President Bush to hand over a top-secret CIA briefing he received in August about the threats. Lawmakers also called for the release of an FBI memo before Sept. 11 that warned headquarters that many Middle Eastern men were training in at least one U.S. flight school." - Associated Press.

Now here's the rub: while many are out there saying "See, we told you the government knew about this and didn't say anything!", a little digging shows that not only did the government have prior knowledge, but a warning DID go out to the airline industry."
Source

[Republican_Strategist]

Spin Insanity Courtesy of the Left

Clinton's Bin Laden GATE - Mother of all Scandals