Jim Rarey
911 COVERUP PANEL TAKES A DIVE
Thu Apr 8, 2004 14:25
63.228.145.202

911 COVERUP PANEL TAKES A DIVE
By Jim Rarey
April 7, 2004
http://www.worldnewsstand.net/MediumRare/40.htm

In an ignominious capitulation to the White House the leaders of the 9/11 Commission traded two and a half hours of testimony by Condoleeza Rice in public under oath in exchange for a written promise not to ask anymore White House persons to testify in public or under oath. It is not clear who this includes but no doubt comprises all cabinet level officials.

There are a number of questions which either have not been asked or to which answers have not been forthcoming or what answers have been provided are contradictory and confusing.

Rice is not likely to shed any light on the situation. Given her previous public pronouncements. She is either a not too accomplished liar, stupid, completely out of any loop on terrorist information or all of the above.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld needs to be recalled to clear up the confusion about the scrambling of jets. Most researchers, including this one, had assumed the longstanding procedure for scrambling jets whenever air traffic control reported a suspected or actual hijacking or lost contact with a plane was still in place on 9/11. Conflicting timelines provided by the FAA, NORAD and DOD did not agree on when the FAA reported the hijackings or when the jets were actually scrambled (too late to have done any good even if they could have found and identified the hijacked planes).

This led researchers to reason that someone must have given an order not to follow the longstanding procedure. Thus the hunt began for the person who gave the order for the jets to “stand down.” In the June 2002 issue of Aviation Now, it was finally disclosed that the longstanding procedure was not in place on 9/11! It had been superseded by an instruction from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued on June 1, 2001. The new procedure called for the FAA administrator (at that time Jane Garvey), not air traffic control, to contact NORAD and request military assistance. NORAD then was to determine what resources (jets) were available and then contact the National Military Command Center (NMCC) which in turn would get the personal approval of the Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) for authority to scramble the jets.

Rumsfeld says he was at his desk in the Pentagon and had no knowledge of any hijackings until the Pentagon was hit. (Did he have his phone off the hook?)

Finally Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the Continental U.S. Norad Region (Conar), at Tyndall AFB, Fla. issued the order to scramble two jets from Otis Air Force Base saying he would get the required approval (from Rumsfeld) later. The jets arrived in the New York area after a hijacked plane hit the second tower.

Rumsfeld and others need to explain why such a cumbersome and time-consuming procedure, with all its built-in delays, was instituted. Especially since the knowledge was wide spread that Islamic terrorists had plans (including Project Bojinka) to hijack commercial jets and crash them into the Pentagon, WTC, Sears Tower and other targets.

In recent days, news reports have disclosed a number of warnings US intelligence received about hijacked commercial planes. This is what the spooks call a limited hangout. By the time these warnings are acknowledged officially (perhaps in the 9/11 commission report) they will be dismissed as “old news.” See this author’s June 18, 2002 archived article (available at the URL below), “Bojinka, The Dog That Didn’t Bark.”
http://www.worldnewsstand.net/MediumRare/16.htm

Over the period of five years, from 1996 to 2001, the FBI made numerous inquiries about suspected bin Laden associates taking pilot training in at least four flight schools in Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and Florida. The last inquiry took place at the Airman Flight School in Norman Oklahoma just three weeks before the Sept. 11 disaster.

The next scheduled public hearings that will focus on “failures in intelligence” and law enforcement will be April 13-14.

Scheduled witnesses include Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Attorney General Janet Reno, CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Robert Mueller and former FBI Director Louis Freeh If the White House allows them to testify in public and the right questions are asked (don’t count on either) we may learn something.

As for Condoleeza Rice, her performance tomorrow may determine how soon she resigns.

The 9/11 disaster did not result from an intelligence failure. It was caused by refusal of high government officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations to act on the knowledge they had, for whatever reason

Permission is granted to reproduce this article in its entirety.

Past Medium Rare articles back to October 2001 are archived at:
http://www.worldnewsstand.net/MediumRare/Archives.htm

The author is a free lance writer based in Romulus, Michigan. He is a former newspaper editor and investigative reporter, a retired customs administrator and accountant, and a student of history and the U.S. Constitution.

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Clarke vs. Rice: Excerpts from testimony
Thursday, April 8, 2004 Posted: 1:14 PM EDT (1714 GMT)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/08/clarke.rice/

Condoleezza Rice and Richard Clarke, in testimony before the 9/11 commission, gave differing views of events leading up to September 11, 2001

CNN) -- Fifteen days after former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke testified before the 9/11 commission, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice made her case before the panel.

Here are excerpts from their testimony on several key issues before the commission.
What did Bush know and what did he do?

CLARKE: President Bush was regularly told by the director of Central Intelligence that there was an urgent threat. On one occasion -- he was told this dozens of times in the morning briefings that [CIA director] George Tenet gave him. On one of those occasions, he asked for a strategy to deal with the threat. ...

[Rice's] looking into it and the president asking for it did not change the pace at which it was considered. And as far as I know, the president never asked again.

RICE: From January 20 [2001] through September 10 [2001], the president received at [daily intelligence briefings] more than 40 briefing items on al Qaeda, and 13 of those were in response to questions he or his top advisers posed.

The threat-reporting that we received in the spring and summer of 2001 was not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack. Almost all of the reports focused on al Qaeda activities outside the United States, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, the information that was specific enough to be actionable referred to terrorist operations overseas.

Most often, though, the threat reporting was frustratingly vague.
How high a priority was terrorism?

CLARKE: George Tenet and I tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the al Qaeda threat were frequently given to the president and other high-level officials. And there was a process under way to address al Qaeda.

But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way. My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, didn't either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem.

RICE: President Bush understood the threat, and he understood its importance. He made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al Qaeda one attack at a time. He told me he was tired of swatting flies. ...

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.
How did the Clinton and Bush administrations' approaches differ?

CLARKE: My impression was that fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly no higher priority. There were priorities probably of equal importance such as the Middle East peace process, but I certainly don't know of one that was any higher in the priority of that administration.

I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue.

RICE: 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. ...

On an operational level, therefore, we decided immediately to continue to pursue the Clinton administration's covert action authority and other efforts to fight the network. ... We also moved to develop a new and comprehensive strategy to try and eliminate the al Qaeda network.
How does the war in Iraq fit into the war on terror?

CLARKE: The war in Iraq was not necessary. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States. And by going to war with Iraq, we have greatly reduced our possibility to prosecute the war on terrorism.

RICE: Given our exceedingly hostile relationship with Iraq at the time -- this is, after all, a place that tried to assassinate an American president, was still shooting at our planes in the no-fly zone -- it was a reasonable question to ask whether, indeed, Iraq might have been behind this.
Could more have been done to prevent 9/11?

CLARKE: Let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. ... Every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information.

Contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

RICE: There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States -- something made very difficult by structural and legal impediments that prevented the collection and sharing of information by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

• Government Refuses to Produce Wiretaps Between Bush Aide and — Joseph AF. Sadowski, Thu Apr 8 18:06