I have not yet seen "The Path to 9/11". But given its producers and apparent Scaife funding, I suspect the film's coverage of antiterrorism history from the end of January 2001 to 9/11 is significantly discordant from the record. Below are some URLs that helped me remember that record, and that might do the same for others.
IMO, 9/11 DID NOT "change everything". Terrorism has existed for a long time, and until the end of January 2001 the US government had extremely capable and successful systems in place to thwart it. The historical record shows that new occupants of the White House in early 2001 apparently removed the security bars, locks, and alarms that had previously prevented all domestic terror attacks from abroad.
It amazes me how Rove, Bush, Cheney, et. al. have suppressed this extremely recent historical record and continue to sell themselves as bulwarks of protection for the "homeland". They say the fact there hasn't been another successful attack since 9/11 proves that they've put protection in place. But isn't this a nonsequitur? Doesn't the fact that no attacks occurred in the hundreds of years BEFORE 9/11 instead prove that the Bush administration let down America's guard against foreign terrorist attacks?
The ammunition needed to counter Orwellian White House electoral propaganda wrapped in fearmongering is "out there", on the internet, if you look closely enough. Remember this Newsweek article from four years ago? Karl Rove and company are counting on the electorate/TV audience to forget, and to instead bring in their minds to the polls the messages with which plutocrats will saturate them over the next two months.
The best link I found is a Newsweek article from 2002, listed as (1) below:
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(1) Newsweek's account (
http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorismfoi/whatwentwrong.html ) of Dubya's dismantling US antiterrorism efforts:
WHAT WENT WRONG. The inside story of the missed signals and intelligence failures that raise a chilling question: did September 11 have to happen? By Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff; Newsweek May 27 2002
Back in July 2001, Bill Kurtz and his team hit pay dirt, and no one seemed to care. A hard-driven supervisor in the FBI’s Phoenix office, Kurtz was overseeing an investigation of suspected Islamic terrorists last July when a member of his team, a sharp, 41-year-old counterterrorism agent named Kenneth Williams, noticed something odd: a large number of suspects were signing up to take courses in how to fly airplanes....
But little of that seemed to make a difference back in Washington, where the Kurtz team suffered a fate even worse than Cassandra’s: not only were they not believed, they were ignored altogether.... under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being prodded back into its old law-and-order mind-set: violent crime, drugs, child porn. Counterterrorism, which had become a priority of the Clintonites ... seemed to be getting less attention. When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons.
The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden, among other actions. In self-absorbed Washington, the Phoenix memo, which never resulted in arrests, landed in two units at FBI headquarters but didn’t make it to senior levels. Nor did the memo get transmitted to the CIA, which has long had a difficult relationship with the FBI—and whose director, George Tenet, one of the few Clinton holdovers, was issuing so many warnings that bin Laden was 'the most immediate' threat to Americans he was hardly heeded any longer....
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(2) An archive (
http://foi.missouri.edu ) of hundreds of important mainstream media stories that have slipped down the "memory hole" is at foi.missouri.edu. The Newsweek story just cited is just one of them. Note the index of categories into which the material has been sorted includes several "terrorism" entries. I concentrated on stories from 2001 and 2002, before the White House had whipped its "press corpse" fully into compliance with the party line. Remember "Watch what you say?"
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(3) A great Washington Post article on Dubya's stand-down against
terrorism is at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A8734-2002Jan19 :
"Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly Ambition
By Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 20, 2002; Page A01
... Bush's engagement with terrorism in the first eight months of his term, described in interviews with advisers and contemporary records, tells a story of burgeoning ambition without the commitment of comparably ambitious means. In deliberations and successive drafts of a National Security Presidential Directive approved by Bush's second-ranking advisers on Aug. 13, the declared objective evolved from "rolling back" to "permanently eroding" and eventually to "eliminating" bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. Cabinet-rank policymakers, or principals, took up the new strategy for the first time on Sept. 4....
- The administration did not resume its predecessor's covert deployment of cruise missile submarines and gunships, on six-hour alert near Afghanistan's borders. The standby force gave Clinton the option, never used, of an immediate strike against targets in al Qaeda's top leadership. The Bush administration put no such capability in place before Sept. 11. ...
- On May 8, Bush announced a new Office of National Preparedness for terrorism at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. At the same time, he proposed to cut FEMA's budget by $200 million. ... -Bush did not speak again publicly of the dangers of terrorism before Sept. 11, except to promote a missile shield that had been his top military priority from the start. At least three times he mentioned "terrorist threats that face us" to explain the need to discard the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. ...
Clinton's Cabinet advisers, burning with the urgency of their losses to bin Laden in the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the Cole attack in 2000, had met "nearly weekly" to direct the fight, Kerrick said. Among Bush's first-line advisers, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" that kind of focus, he said. "That's not being derogatory. It's just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what Dick Clarke and the CSG were doing.""
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(4) 2004 Richard Clarke CNN interview: Only one of 100 Bush "principals' meetings" dealt with antiterror policy
From
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/28/le.00.html :
CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER Interview With Richard Clarke ... Aired March 28, 2004 ...
WOODRUFF: Now we turn to the fallout from this week's 9/11 hearings. ... the most dramatic moments came during the testimony of former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke. Claims made in his new book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," set off a fury at the White House. Richard Clarke joins us now....
CLARKE: The issue is not about me. The issue is about the president's performance in the war on terrorism. And because I had the temerity to suggest he didn't do much of anything before 9/11, and by going into Iraq he's actually hurt the war on terrorism after 9/11, the White House has geared up this personal attack machine and is trying to undermine my credibility.
... let's contrast the performance of that administration when they had word from George Tenet that some attack was going to take place somewhere, with the performance of the Clinton administration in December of 1999 when they had similar information. In December 1999, the president ordered daily meetings of the FBI director, the attorney general and the head of the CIA and the secretary of defense in the White House, with the national security team, to shake out any information and prevent the attacks. And they were successful in doing that.
Presented with even more frightening information, President Bush did not choose to do that, did not choose to get personally involved, except getting those morning intelligence briefings. The principals committee, the top secretaries of the departments, met according to the Associated Press, over 100 times from the beginning of the administration to September 11th. One of those meetings, one of those meetings, was on terrorism. All I'm saying is that this wasn't a priority for them."
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(5) Remember Sen Dianne Feinstein's July 2001 antiterror policy warning (
http://feinstein.senate.gov/Releases02/attacks.htm ), on CNN?
Statement By U.S. Senator Feinstein - On Concerns Raised About Possible Terrorist Attacks on Our Nation -May 17, 2002
I am very surprised by the tone of the comments by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer regarding concerns I raised last summer about a possible terrorist attack on our nation ... What I said last July on CNN was that I was deeply concerned as to whether our house was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me a sense of foreboding for some time. ...
In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month to urge that he restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks. Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff, the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September 2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not believe we had six months to wait.
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(6) Remember the 1999 federal report that contradicted Condi's famous disclaimer (
http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing1/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-03-31.htm )?
Condi Rice, Thursday May 16, 2002: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.
BUT, from
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0517-06.htm :
1999 Report Warned of Suicide Hijack" By John Solomon; Published on Friday, May 17, 2002 by the Associated Press
WASHINGTON …… Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building. "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said. The report, entitled the "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?," described the suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks al-Qaida might seek for the 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. ...
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(7) A comparison of Janet Reno's conterterrorism priorities with John Ashcroft's is at
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2092978 .
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(8) Remember Attorney General John Ashcroft's extremely misleading testimony before the 9/11 Commission?
In ostensible justification for the assault on Constitutional rights in the so-called "PATRIOT Act", Ashcroft blamed "the old national intelligence system" for the 9/11 attacks. BUT, for more than two years, The Center for American Progress has hosted online copies of internal Department of Justice documents proving that Ashcroft and his White House bosses had quickly dismantled the antiterror efforts of their predecessors, during the spring and summer of 2001.
Some highlights, from the Center for American Progress (
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/lookup.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=39039 ):
(8a) "5/10/01 Ashcroft New DoJ Budget Goals Memo (
http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/ASHCROFTMEMO.PDF ): Out of 7 strategic goals described, not one mentions counterterrorism, a serious departure from Reno{'s 4/6/00 DoJ Budget Goals Memo}"...
(8b) "8/9/01 Internal Draft of New Ashcroft DoJ Strategic Plan (
http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/STRATEGICPLAN.PDF ): ... Specifically highlighted by Ashcroft are domestic violent crime and drug trafficking prevention. Item 1.3 entitled "Combat terrorist activities by developing maximum intelligence and investigative capability" is passed over. After September 11, Ashcroft quickly amended his
http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/mps/strategic2001-2006/chapter2.pdf>. ..."
(8c) "Late August 2001 Internal FBI FY2003 Budget Request to Ashcroft ( http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/FBI03REQUEST.PDF ): FBI specifically asks for, among other things, 54 translators to translate backlog of intelligence gathered (line 3 under Foreign Language Services, cost of $5.1 million), 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff (line 14 entitled CT field investigations, cost of $28 million), and 200 professional intelligence researchers (line 16, entitled Intelligence Production, at a cost of $20.8 million). FBI has repeatedly stated that it has a serious backlog of intelligence data it has gathered but simply does not have the staff to analyze or translate it into usable information." ...
(8d) "9/10/2001 Official FY2003 Dept. of Justice Budget Request To White House ( http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/FY03ASHCROFT.PDF ): shows that Ashcroft ignored FBI's anti-terrorism requests ... Ashcroft was planning to ignore the FBI's specific requests for more translators, counterintelligence agents and researchers, mentioned above. It additionally shows Ashcroft was trying to slash funding from counterterrorism and grants and other homeland defense programs before 9/11." ...
(8e) "POST-SEPTEMBER 11: Ashcroft Still Ignores FBI Counterterrorism Requests ( http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/OMBPASSBACK.PDF )
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(9) CSPAN-2 BookTV Sunday Sept 10th 6pm ET: " ...Road to 9/11"
Arab-American civil rights activist James Zogby interviews author Lawrence Wright, writer for New Yorker magazine, about his new book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11"
The book apparently examines the path to 9/11 from the viewpoints of adversaries of the US and of John O'Neill, head of security at WTC.
From http://www.amazon.com/Looming-Tower-Al-Qaeda-Road-11/dp/037541486X :
"Wright, a talented New Yorker staff writer with a diverse portfolio and a long-standing personal interest in the Middle East, was on the al-Qaeda beat within hours of the 9/11 attacks. The product of his efforts is more deeply researched and engagingly narrated than nearly all of the looming stack of books on Osama bin Laden and his cohorts published in the past five years.
The events are familiar: this account begins with theorist Sayid Qutb, covers the trajectories of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and culminates with Mohammed Atta and the collapsing Trade Center. But Wright's interview--fueled, character-driven approach captures both the complexity of individual actors--Qutb's alienation, for example, and bin Laden's struggle for legitimacy--as well as the fluid internal dynamics of the often covert terrorist organization. The tragic centerpiece of the book, familiar to New Yorker readers, is Wright's sensitive portrayal of John O'Neill, the deeply flawed working-class FBI gumshoe from New Jersey who may have been the only American to fully understand the al-Qaeda threat before 9/11. Wright seems to have found his calling: a perceptive and intense page-turner, this selection and Peter Bergen's The Osama bin Laden I Know (2006) should be considered the definitive works on the topic. Brendan Driscoll"
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(10) The best search engine for 9/11 material beyond what you can get through googling is provided by the Library of Congress at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cocoon/minerva/html/sept11/sept11-about.html .
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