Blame 9/11 on airlines, Congress, Bush (It's Clinton's fault, more lies)

[ProSense]

Blame 9/11 on airlines, Congress, Bush

September 1, 2006

BY ANDREW GREELEY

Snip...

The primary responsibility belongs with the airline industry and the Republican-dominated, big-business-serving Congress. In 1996, a commission chaired by then-Vice President Gore recommended a number of regulations to protect the safety of airline passengers. Among the recommendations was that steel doors separate the flight deck from the rest of the aircraft. Characteristically, the airline industry lobbied against the legislation on the grounds that such doors would cost too much. The absence of the doors, however, cost almost 3,000 lives.

The airline presidents and lobbyists responsible for the defeat of the steel doors ought not to be able to sleep at night because of this deadly betrayal of their passengers. Similarly should the media, which did not denounce the greed of the airlines at the time nor even after the Sept. 11 attack. If the terrorists had known that they could not have gained access to the flight decks, they probably would not have tried to execute their plot. If they had, it would not have worked.

Corporate greed and congressional cowardice and media silence were the primary causes of the destruction at the World Trade Center. To deny this is to lie, one more lie in five years of terrible lies.

The most guilty individuals were President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. They wrote off the warnings about al-Qaida they inherited from the Clinton administration as just one more element of the Clinton years they wanted to discard. We won't give terrorism as high a priority as the previous administrations, Rice told Richard Clark. In a work of prestidigitation worthy of the greatest political crooks in history, the administration excused itself from responsibility and shifted the blame onto President Bill Clinton. Again the national media let them get away with it.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel01.html

Transcript of Rice's 9/11 commission statement

Wednesday, May 19, 2004 Posted: 0425 GMT (1225 HKT)

Snip...

KEAN: ...And yet, you walk in and Dick Clarke is talking about al Qaeda should be our number-one priority. Sandy Berger tells you you'll be spending more time on that than anything else.

Snip...

RICE: Well, in fact, Mr. Chairman, it was not new information. I think we all knew about the 1998 bombings. We knew that there was speculation that the 2000 Cole attack was al Qaeda. There had been, I think, documentaries about Osama bin Laden.

I, myself, had written for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism done at Sanford that I thought that we wanted not to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden had succeeded on our soil.

It was on the radar screen of any person who studied or worked in the international security field.

But there is no doubt that I think the briefing by Dick Clarke, the earlier briefing during the transition by Director Tenet, and of course what we talked with about Sandy Berger, it gave you a heightened sense of the problem and a sense that this was something that the United States had to deal with.

I have to say that of course there were other priorities. And indeed, in the briefings with the Clinton administration, they emphasized other priorities: North Korea, the Middle East, the Balkans.

RICE: One doesn't have the luxury of dealing only with one issue if you are the United States of America. There are many urgent and important issues.

But we all had a strong sense that this was a very crucial issue. The question was, what do you then do about it?

And the decision that we made was to, first of all, have no drop- off in what the Clinton administration was doing, because clearly they had done a lot of work to deal with this very important priority.

And so we kept the counterterrorism team on board. We knew that George Tenet was there. We had the comfort of knowing that Louis Freeh was there.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/08/rice.transcript/index.html

(March 27, 2004 -- 03:00 AM EDT // link)

Snip...

At the beginning of 2000, Condi Rice wrote an article in Foreign Affairs outlining the sort of foreign and national security policy America should pursue. It was published as part of the journal's treatment of the 2000 election and in the article Rice was identified as one of then-candidate George W. Bush's foreign policy advisors. The article was intended to be a quasi-official statement of Bush's policies for the foreign policy elite -- the folks who read Foreign Affairs.

I read the piece at the time, or near after, and it was certainly very widely read by people in the foreign policy community.

I mention it now because this evening a reader reminded me of it and brought a now-pertinent fact to my attention. In the article Rice notes five key foreign policy priorities. Only the last made any mention of terrrorism and it was: "to deal decisively with the threat of rogue regimes and hostile powers, which is increasingly taking the forms of the potential for terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction."

Her article then elaborates on each of the five priorities and takes up the fifth toward the end of the piece.

It's well worth linking through and reading.

Not only does she not mention al Qaida or Osama bin Laden, she scarcely even mentions terrorism in the sense we now generally understand it. Her discussion is about North Korea, Iraq and Iran -- rogue states that might threaten the US with weapons of mass destruction (primarily with the use of missiles) -- and, to a much lesser extent, state-sponsored terrorism from Iran.

The key policy prescription for this section is contained in this paragraph ...

One thing is clear: the United States must approach regimes like North Korea resolutely and decisively. The Clinton administration has failed here, sometimes threatening to use force and then backing down, as it often has with Iraq. These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration. Second, we should accelerate efforts to defend against these weapons. This is the most important reason to deploy national and theater missile defenses as soon as possible, to focus attention on U.S. homeland defenses against chemical and biological agents, and to expand intelligence capabilities against terrorism of all kinds.

The central policy recommendation is national missile defense -- a defensive capacity aimed at states. And though there is mention of chemical and biological agents and the need to "expand intelligence capabilities against terrorism of all kinds" even a quick read of the entire section shows clearly that ideologically-based transnational terrorism simply wasn't on her radar as a significant threat to the United States.

There's no mention of Afghanistan or the madrassas in Pakistan, the importance of knocking down terrorist financial networks, Islamist sleeper cells in American or Germany. None of it.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_03_21.php

Rice article

New glimpses of Bush worldview

By Peter Grier and Faye Bowers | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – An extraordinary fortnight of revelations about US preparedness before Sept. 11 has provided at least this preliminary picture: When the Bush foreign policy team took office in 2000, it was determined to focus on big nations and traditional power geopolitics, not Al Qaeda and the new terrorist threat.

The Clinton people? Sure, they'd made terrorism a priority. But top Bush officials were dismissive of their predecessors' performance, and determined to avoid what they felt were Clintonesque mistakes.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0401/p01s01-usfp.html

Even when the media was doing its balancing act: truth vs right wing spin, Rice got caught in lies:

Finally, the White House reversed position on Tuesday about statements it had made about Clarke. On Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney said that Clarke had been "out of the loop" in the months before the 9/11 attacks. But The New York Times reports that Ms. Rice said Tuesday that this was not the case and that Clarke "was very much involved in the administration's fight against terrorism."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0325/dailyUpdate.html

[cranston36]

1. The Witch King

I used to wonder why Mr. Bush was doing the things he was doing. It never was clear what he was up to, right? Add in Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice and it just becomes a mess that just can’t be cleaned up.
Then, on August 21, 2006 in the White House he said that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
That meant to me that Iraq is not part of the war on terror.
The next day, August 22, 2006, in Salt Lake City, Utah, he told a bunch of veterans that Iraq is the biggest part of the war on terror.
I wonder if he ain’t the biggest liar I ever heard.
Now I don’t wonder why, I just wonder what he’s going to do next.
I reckon it won’t be too surprising. For some reason - when there is something that he needs to do for the good of the country he don’t do it.
Is this a Judas Priest on hand? Some folks have called him a ‘Witch-King’ (because of the ’W’) but I think that’s a bit much. After all - lots of nice folks voted for him - course - he seems to have deceived them.
When I hear ‘em beatin’ their chests I recall something from Job in the Holy Bible, "Job xli. There is no power on the earth which can be compared with him, who was created that he should fear no one. He beholdeth every high thing, he is king over all the children of pride."
The Bible said that.