{"id":182237,"date":"2015-11-13T18:21:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T23:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/11\/13\/kept-us-safe-my-ass\/"},"modified":"2015-11-13T18:21:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T23:21:00","slug":"kept-us-safe-my-ass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/11\/13\/kept-us-safe-my-ass\/","title":{"rendered":"Kept Us Safe, My Ass"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of Evil Minions\u2122<\/sup> have always claimed that their actions were justified, because they, “Kept us safe.”<\/p>\n

Of course, this ignores 911, which is a lot like saying, “Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play Our American Cousin<\/i>?<\/p>\n

Well, in Politico<\/i>, a bit of fish wrapper that charlie Pierce calls, “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”, we now have an (unquestionably self-serving) account from fromer intelligence personnel claiming that the administration steadfastly ignored clear signs of an imminent and catastrophic terrorist attack on America soil<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cBin Laden Determined to Strike in U.<\/i>S.\u201d<\/i> The CIA\u2019s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming. <\/span>

<\/span> By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA\u2019s counterterrorism center, \u201cit was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.\u201d \u201cThere were real plots being manifested,\u201d Cofer\u2019s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. \u201cThe world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.\u201d The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm<\/i>.<\/span>

<\/span> But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until now\u2014or been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters<\/i><\/a>, <\/i>a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.<\/span>

<\/span> The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called \u201cthe Blue Sky paper\u201d to Bush\u2019s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat\u2014\u201cgetting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.\u201d <\/i>\u201cAnd the word back,\u201d says Tenet, \u201c\u2018was \u2018we\u2019re not quite ready to consider this. We don\u2019t want the clock to start ticking.\u2019\u201d (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they\u2019d been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didn\u2019t get the new threat: \u201cI think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties\u2014they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.\u201d <\/span>
That morning of July 10, the head of the agency\u2019s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black\u2019s office. \u201cAnd he says, \u2018Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,\u2019\u201d recounts Black. \u201cThe information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.\u201d Black and his deputy rushed to the director\u2019s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed. Tenet picked up the white phone to Bush\u2019s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. \u201cI said, \u2018Condi, I have to come see you,\u2019\u201d Tenet remembers. \u201cIt was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, \u2018I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now. We have to get there.\u2019\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. (George W. Bush was on a trip to Boston.) \u201cRich [Blee] started by saying, \u2018There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.\u2019” [Condi said:] \u2018What do you think we need to do?\u2019 Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, \u2018We need to go on a wartime footing now!\u2019\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> \u201cWhat happened?\u201d I ask Cofer Black. \u201cYeah. What did<\/i> happen?\u201d he replies. \u201cTo me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It\u2019s kind of like The Twilight Zone<\/i>.\u201d Remarkably, in her memoir, Condi Rice writes of the July 10 warnings: \u201cMy recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day.\u201d Having raised threat levels for U.S. personnel overseas, she adds: \u201cI thought we were doing what needed to be done.\u201d (When I asked whether she had any further response to the comments that Tenet, Black and others made to me, her chief of staff said she stands by the account in her memoir.) Inexplicably, although Tenet brought up this meeting in his closed-door testimony before the 9\/11 Commission, it was never mentioned in the committee\u2019s final report. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What a surprise.<\/p>\n

Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration<\/li>\n
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)<\/li>\n
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f%$#ed up during the execution.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Of course they f%$#ed up the the prelude to the September 11 attacks.<\/p>\n

    They f%$#ed everything up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of Evil Minions\u2122 have always claimed that their actions were justified, because they, “Kept us safe.” Of course, this ignores 911, which is a lot like saying, “Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play Our American Cousin? Well, in Politico, a bit of fish wrapper that charlie …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[969,1182,1102,982,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evil","category-george-w-bush","category-intelligence","category-stupid","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}