Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Contrary to what the Bush Administration has led us to believe, the US government knew a major attack was coming in Summer 2001.
Below is an excerpt from an conversation between MSNBC's Tim Russert and Richard A. Clarke.
As a counter-terrorism expert, Clarke worked for the Bush Administration, and reported directly to Condi Rice when she was the National Security Advisor.
MR. RUSSERT: We'll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it. The Washington Post captured this way: "On July 5 of 2001, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. `Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer non-vital travel, put off scheduled exercises, place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks in the summer of 2001, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness--and anxiety--against imminent terrorist attack."Did Dr. Rice instruct you to organize that meeting?
MR. CLARKE: No. I told her I was going to do it. And I had already been doing it two weeks before, because on June 21, I believe it was, George Tenet called me and said, "I don't think we're getting the message through. These people aren't acting the way the Clinton people did under similar circumstances." And I suggested to Tenet that he come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team with him. And we sat in the national security adviser's office. And I've used the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet's warnings as "He had his hair on fire." He was about as excited as I'd ever seen him. And he said, "Something is going to happen."
Now, when he said that in December 1999 to the national security adviser, at the time Sandy Berger, Sandy Berger then held daily meetings throughout December 1999 in the White House Situation Room, with the FBI director, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the head of the Defense Department, and they shook out of their bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks. And we did prevent the attacks in December 1999. Dr. Rice chose not to do that.
Now, in retrospect, we now know that there was information in the FBI that hadn't bubbled to the top, that two of the hijackers were in the United States. If we had had that kind of process in the summer of 2001 that we had in December '99, where the national security adviser was every day in the White House asking the FBI director and the attorney general and the secretary of defense, "Go back to your building, find out all that you can"--if we had done that in the summer of 2001, maybe the information that was in the FBI would have shaken loose.
MR. RUSSERT: But you kept your guard up for six weeks, through the end of August. Why didn't you stay on high alert through September 11th? And you regret this day that you didn't because you may have stopped that attack.
MR. CLARKE: We kept up the high alert for some facilities that could keep up the high alert. The Defense Department, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and others, said that they were physically not capable of keeping the troops overseas, for example, on high alert any further, that they were exhausting the troops. And, therefore, they unilaterally came down off of alert. We kept all of our counterterrorism forces in the United States on alert. We continued to send out threat advisories to the airports and the airlines. We continued to send out information to 18,000 state and local police departments and to Immigration and Customs and Secret Service and Coast Guard.
MR. RUSSERT: You included the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. Was there any briefing at that time or around that time which suggested that al-Qaeda may hijack an airplane to be used in a terrorist attack?
MR. CLARKE: Apparently, the president got a briefing when he was on vacation in Texas. Apparently, the CIA gave him a paper that listed all of the things al-Qaeda could do. It didn't focus on a hijacking. But apparently, it listed a hijacking as among the things that al-Qaeda could do, even though al-Qaeda had never done it before. But long before that August 6 briefing at the ranch in Texas, we had brought in the FAA, which under the presidential directive was in charge of airline security, and told them increase security in the United States on airlines at airports, not because we had the intelligence that this was about to happen, but because it was a prudential thing to do, knowing that some unknown attack was coming.
With all of the above going on, why in the world did Bush go on vacation the entire month of August 2001?
Also, why was our nation put into a somewhat "defenseless" state when practice military missions were conducted on September 11, which took our fighter jets away from Washington?
Why did Condi Rice state that the Bush Adminstration never imagined that a hijacked plane would be used as a weapon, and flown into a building, when, prior to 9/11, the US government conducted training exercises for that exact scenerio?
Below is a huge list of military exercises which took place prior to 9/11, which included training for scenarios of planes hitting the Pentagon:
Clarke served as chief counter-terrorism advisor on the NSC when Al-Qaeda bombed the two U.S. Embassies in August of 1998 and the attacked the U.S.S. Cole in October of 2000, under the Clinton administration (a position he was promoted to by Clinton). Under the new Bush administration, he was more or less demoted.....he maintained the same position but, as a member of the Senior Executive Service and was no longer on the NSC. Both he and the Bush administration have been critical of each other.
There's always two sides to a story but, out of all the media sources MSNBC is very biased so, chances are you're only going to hear half of the story from them. Which is fine but, you need to realize that (so the same applies when (if) you watch FOX)and also check elsewhere to get the complete story and decide for your self what happened.....which is almost always some where in the middle of the two stories (but not always). I find wikipedia to be helpful....it's user submitted but, then reviewed by the staff thoroughly and it warns you if part of something has not been verified yet or even if the material may be biased (and it eventually gets removed if it's not corrected within a certain period of time). You can read about Richard Clarke here on it:
Would Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield/Wolfowitz, et all sacrifice 3000 Americans to obtain their goals of circumventing the constitution, invading Iraq and profiting from the war and the oil.
There is not a doubt in my mind these men are perfectly capable of such action.
He was also slicing a piece of cake when he heard the information.
No, No, No - it was Pizza!
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
