posted on August 21, 2007 01:40:42 PM newClinton CIA appointee responsible for 9/11
CIA Missed Chances to Thwart al-Qaida
Aug 21 04:05 PM US/Eastern
By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA's top leaders failed to use their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to Sept. 11, the agency's own watchdog concluded in a bruising report released Tuesday.
Completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now, the 19-page executive summary finds extensive fault with the actions of senior CIA leaders and others beneath them. "The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner," the CIA inspector general found.
"They did not always work effectively and cooperatively," the report stated.
Yet the review team led by Inspector General John Helgerson found neither a "single point of failure nor a silver bullet" that would have stopped the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
In a statement, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the decision to release the report was not his choice or preference, but that he was making thereport available as required by Congress in a law President Bush signed earlier this month.
"I thought the release of this report would distract officers serving their country on the front lines of a global conflict," Hayden said. "It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed."
The report does cover terrain heavily examined by a congressional inquiry and the Sept. 11 Commission. However, the CIA watchdog's report goes further than previous reviews to examine the personal failings of individuals within the agency who led the pre-9/11 efforts against al-Qaida.
Helgerson's team found that no CIA employees violated the law or were part of any misconduct. But it still called on then-CIA Director Porter Goss to form accountability boards to look at the performance of specific individuals to determine whether reprimands were called for.
The inquiry boards were recommended for officials including former CIA Director George Tenet, his deputy director for operations Jim Pavitt, Counterterrorism Center Chief Cofer Black, and agency Executive Director A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard.
In October 2005, Goss rejected the recommendation. He said he had spoken personally with the current employees named in the report, and he trusted their abilities and dedication. "The report unveiled no mysteries," Goss said.
Hayden stuck by Goss's decision.
Providing a glimpse of a series of shortfalls laid out in the longer, still-classified report, the executive summary says:
—U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet "by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created."
—The CIA's analysis of al-Qaida before Sept. 2001 was lacking. No comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden was written after 1993, and no comprehensive report laying out the threats of 2001 was assembled. "A number of important issues were covered insufficiently or not at all," the report found.
—The CIA and the National Security Agency tussled over their responsibilities in dealing with al-Qaida well into 2001. Only Tenet's personal involvement could have led to a timely resolution, the report concluded.
—The CIA station charged with monitoring bin Laden—code-named Alec Station—was overworked, lacked operational experience, expertise and training. The report recommended forming accountability boards for the CIA Counterterror Center chiefs from 1998 to 2001, including Black.
—Although 50 to 60 people read at least one CIA cable about two of the hijackers, the information wasn't shared with the proper offices and agencies. "That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systemic breakdown.... Basically, there was no coherent, functioning watch-listing program," the report said. The report again called for further review of Black and his predecessor.
While blame is heaped on Tenet and his deputies, the report also says that Tenet was forcefully engaged in counterterrorism efforts and personally sounded the alarm before Congress, the military and policymakers. In a now well-known 1998 memo, he declared, "We are at war."
The trouble, the report said, was follow-up.
In a statement, Tenet said the inspector general is "flat wrong" about the lack of plan.
"There was in fact a robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication to fighting terrorism, dating back to long before 9/11," he said. "Without such an effort, we would not have been able to give the president a plan on Sept. 15, 2001, that led to the routing of the Taliban, chasing al-Qaida from its Afghan sanctuary and combating terrorists across 92 countries."
The inspector general did take exception to findings of Congress' joint inquiry into 9/11. For instance, the congressional inquiry found that the CIA was reluctant to seek authority to assassinate bin Laden. Instead, the inspector general believed the problem was the agency's limited covert-action capabilities.
The CIA's reliance on a group of sources with questionable reliablity "proved insufficient to mount a credible operation against bin Laden," the report said. "Efforts to develop other options had limited potential prior to 9/11."
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.George S. Patton
[ edited by Bear1949 on Aug 21, 2007 01:42 PM ]
posted on August 21, 2007 05:29:49 PM new
And imo, IF the voters are stupid enough to vote in a liberal as our CIC....we're going to experience this SAME scenario again.
Dems don't want to deal with being PRO-active, preemptively working to prevent future attacks.
They had their chance and they FAILED - we suffered 9-11 because of their LACK of action, especially after FIVE attacks on our interests. Their total failure to take these individual terrorist attacks as being anything more than isolated incidents. They were VERY wrong.
Under THIS administration they have continually made efforts to change the 'old way of doing things' to NEW ways of dealing with these threats. And it IS working....we have not had another attack.
So while the liberals have fought FOR terrorists RIGHTS...this administration has chosen a much more successful way of handling what we do to stop them.
THAT'S called LEADERSHIP. Not acting out of FEAR but rather out of strength.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
Ann Coulter
[ edited by Linda_K on Aug 21, 2007 05:31 PM ]
Bush, Clinton figures defend terrorism policies
Albright: It took 'megashock' of 9/11 to understand threat
Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Posted: 0635 GMT (1435 HKT)
• Clarke: Bush ignored warnings
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The top military and diplomatic leaders of the Clinton and Bush administrations were grilled Tuesday by members of the commission investigating the government's antiterror policies before the attacks of September 11, 2001 brought unprecedented destruction and death to the American homeland.
The dignitaries who testified said time and again how tough it was to deal with a ruthless enemy a world away, based on shifting intelligence information.
Testimony begins again Wednesday morning.
The commission heard from Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor, Madeleine Albright, along with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his predecessor, William Cohen.
Each agreed that until September 11, there was not enough support -- either domestically or internationally -- to send U.S. troops into Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cohort.
"It would have been very hard, pre 9/11, to have persuaded anybody that an invasion of Afghanistan was appropriate," said Albright, who headed the State Department under President Clinton. "I think it did take the megashock, unfortunately, of 9/11, to make people understand the considerable threat."
Rumsfeld, who took the helm of the Pentagon less than nine months before the attacks, told commissioners there was no indication before September 11 of what was about to happen.
"I knew of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers," he said.
But members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, in the first of two days of public hearings, expressed frustration with officials from both administrations that stronger action wasn't taken against al Qaeda, given the fact that Islamic extremists had carried out a series of attacks on U.S. targets during the preceding eight years.
Those attacks included the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; the bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in 1996; the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Commission member Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, said he thought it was a "big mistake" that despite repeated provocations, only one military strike was launched against al Qaeda before September 11: a cruise missile attack on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998.
"I don't understand, if we're attacked and attacked and attacked, why we continue to send the FBI over, like the Khobar Towers was a crime scene or the East African embassy bombings was a crime scene," said Kerrey, who had called for a declaration of war against al Qaeda before September 11.
"I keep hearing the excuse that we didn't have actionable intelligence. Well, what the hell does that say to al Qaeda?"
Albright's response was that Kerrey was "the only person that I know of who suggested declaring war."
"In retrospect, you were right," Albright said. "But we used every single tool we had in terms of trying to figure out what the right targets would be and how to go about dealing with what we knew."
Cohen, a former Republican senator who headed the Pentagon under Clinton, said the U.S. military was prepared to kill or capture bin Laden and other key al Qaeda leaders whenever there was "actionable intelligence." But he said the process was like chasing "mercury on a mirror."
Cohen said that three times in 1998 and 1999, airstrikes in Afghanistan to kill bin Laden had to be scrubbed because of doubts about the intelligence and concerns about civilian casualties.
"Each time, the munitions and people were spun up," he said. "They were called off because the word came back, 'We're not sure.' "
But even Albright expressed frustration about the reluctance to push ahead with military force against al Qaeda and bin Laden.
"From my perspective, the Pentagon did not come forward with viable options in response to what the president was asking for," she said.
Details on plans to kill bin Laden revealed
The 9/11 commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, provided more details Tuesday on the three aborted attempts to kill bin Laden, based on information gathered during the commission's inquiry.
One of those planned strikes, in Afghanistan in February 1999, was called off because then-White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke warned that it would have risked the lives of visiting officials from the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. counterterrorism ally, Zelikow said.
To this day, the lead CIA official in the field that day believes that "this was a lost opportunity to kill bin Laden before 9/11," Zelikow said.
Another planned attack, in May 1999, was scrubbed because CIA Director George Tenet said the intelligence was based on a single, uncorroborated source and the attack carried the risk of civilian deaths, Zelikow said.
Tenet and Clarke are scheduled to testify before the commission Wednesday.
In interviews and a book released this week, Clarke accuses the Bush administration of not paying enough attention to the al Qaeda threat before September 11 and of focusing efforts afterward on Iraq, not al Qaeda.
The White House has denounced "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" as a wildly inaccurate account of the administration's efforts. But Clarke has stood by his assertions, saying Bush "botched the response to 9/11."
Also scheduled to testify is former Clinton national security adviser Samuel Berger, who previously told the panel that a failed attack on bin Laden would have made the United States look weak and only strengthened the hand of the terrorist mastermind.
Rumsfeld, in his testimony Tuesday, expressed skepticism that killing bin Laden would have done anything to prevent the attacks of September 11 because the sleeper cells who carried out the attacks were already in the country.
"Ironically, much of the world, in all likelihood, would have blamed September 11th on the U.S. as an al Qaeda retaliation for the U.S. provocation of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden," he said.
Powell, Rumsfeld: Threat taken seriously
Powell and Rumsfeld insisted that contrary to assertions in Clarke's book, President Bush and his administration, from its earliest days, took the threat from al Qaeda seriously and began developing a new strategy designed to eliminate al Qaeda, instead of just containing it.
Powell said that a strategic review was completed a week before September 11, too late to prevent the attacks.
But Zelikow told commissioners that though the Bush administration was developing new policies to deal with al Qaeda in 2001, "There is no evidence of new work on military capabilities or plans against this enemy before September 11."
Commissioners asked why, after the Clinton administration warned the Bush national security team that al Qaeda was such a threat, the Bush national security team took so long to put together its plan.
"What made you think, even when you took over and got these first briefings, given the history of al Qaeda and its successful attacks on Americans, that we had the luxury even of seven months before we could make any kind of response?" said Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator and commission member.
Powell, a retired general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that in his experience, the time frame for such an undertaking was not unduly long.
"It was a complex issue, and it's not as if we were not doing anything but sitting around working [on the al Qaeda strategy]," he said.
Gorton later told CNN that "basically, with both administrations, I think each of them felt that it had a luxury of time, and it turned out that that luxury was not available to us."
"I don't think that anyone could say that both administrations were asleep," though they didn't take al Qaeda's declaration of war on America "seriously enough," Gorton said.
"But again, it's easy to say that in hindsight. Almost no one in either party ... said it ahead of time."
Another disagreement in Tuesday's hearing between the commission and the Bush administration was the refusal of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to give public testimony.
The White House maintains that Rice, as a staff adviser to the president rather than a Cabinet official, should not be called to testify under the principle of executive privilege. She has given four hours of private testimony to the commission.
But several members of the bipartisan, independent commission, which voted unanimously to ask Rice to testify, expressed frustration about her refusal to do so. (Gallery: 9/11 commission members)
"I hope Dr. Rice will reconsider and come before our commission for the sake of the American people," said Tim Roemer, a member and former Democratic congressman.
CNN's Phil Hirschkorn, Sean Loughlin, Barbara Starr and Steve Turnham contributed to this report.
posted on August 22, 2007 08:37:29 AM new
No reason to take bin laden down?
NONSENSE
The clinton administration knew FULL WELL that bin laden/AQ had been behind the FIVE ATTACKS on American interests, MURDERING OUR TROOPS ABROAD during HIS administration.
When one reads clintons OWN statements themselves....NO ONE can deny clinton knew.
He was just to cowardly to ACT.
Like most liberals, talk - talk - talk. Get their lawyers involved. Worry about how the world will see our actions. Worry if they're BE ANGRY with the US FOR doing anything. Feel they need to have the UN approve. The list of their EXCUSES go on and on.
They will ALWAYS find an excuse to NOT TAKE ACTION - and they did just that.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
posted on August 22, 2007 09:03:14 AM new
bushit ignored the warnings...he was too busy playing golf on one of his many vacations.
He also has said that Binladen was not important.
Oh, and no matter what the date of my post is....the information contained it is still FACT.
According to bear 9/11 is not relevant or important because it happened 6 years ago....so why would he post the OP ????
Because repugs can't think logically or reason...that's why.
posted on August 22, 2007 09:21:29 AM newState Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: August 17, 2005
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.
In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.
-----
Michael F. Scheuer, who from 1996 to 1999 led the Central Intelligence Agency unit that tracked Mr. bin Laden, said the State Department documents reflected a keen awareness of the danger posed by Mr. bin Laden's relocation.
----
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/international/asia/17osama.html?ex=1281931200&en=2b945263d3848ee1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
[ edited by Linda_K on Aug 22, 2007 09:37 AM ]
posted on August 22, 2007 09:30:30 AM new
Statement on Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients
December 2, 2004
STATEMENT BY THE PRESS SECRETARY
President Bush will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to L. Paul Bremer III, Tommy R. Franks, and George J. Tenet in a ceremony at the White House on December 14, 2004.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Nation's highest civil award. It was established by President Truman and later re-established by President Kennedy. It is awarded by the President of the United States to persons who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
###
President George W. Bush presents former CIA Director George Tenet, Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2004, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room of the White House. (AP/Ron Edmonds)
"""U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet "by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created." ""'
Well, bushit LIKED him !!!
(Or was that tenet's reward for sticking to the "PLAN".???????)
Linda_K
posted on August 22, 2007 09:14:17 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
more delusion. tsk tsk tsk""'
SHOW the "delusion".....you can't , unless you think 9/11 was a "delusion"..??????
posted on August 22, 2007 09:54:43 AM newState Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996
Just goes to show you Bush has not been any more successful in capturing Bin Laden.
At least when Clinton was in office Bin Laden did not fly planes into building inside the US.
Bush was the one that promised to get Bin Laden dead or alive. Almost six years later and Bush can not even tell you if he is still dead or alive. So much for that promise. More lies from Bush.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on August 22, 2007 10:01:51 AM new
OH BUT BUT BUT
The HUGE differenceS were that clinton KNEW right where bin laden was.....this administration did/does NOT.
PLUS.....clinton was offered bin laden several times....and WOULD NOT TAKE HIM>
Had THIS administration been offered the same thing.....binladen WOULD have been taken.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
posted on August 22, 2007 10:03:32 AM newUnder THIS administration they have continually made efforts to change the 'old way of doing things' to NEW ways of dealing with these threats.
Don't be so boastful Linda. It was only after the 9/11 attacks happened. It was only after the 9/11 commission made recommendations. It was not like Bush decided to change things after he took office in January 2001.
And it IS working....we have not had another attack
Once again you have no proof that any of Bush's actions have directly prevented another 9/11 attack. You make it seem like the 9/11 attacks were to be a regular occurrence. Your reply will only hold up until there is another 9/11 style attack. Then you will have egg all over your face.
One can claim that what FDR put in place after Pearl Harbor is still working today after all the Japanese have not attacked the US since then. Don't be so naive.
More than two dozen "clusters" of young Muslim men in the northeast United States pose the most serious threat to homeland security, but they are not the type of terrorists behind the September 11th attacks, which the NYPD labels an "anomaly" in a report released Wednesday.
The report, by the NYPD's intelligence and counter terrorism divisions and titled "Radicalization in the West and the Homegrown Threat," was discussed during a conference of law enforcement and security officials headed by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
It concludes that the September 11th attacks were an "anomaly" and the most serious terror threat to the country comes from clusters of "unremarkable" individuals who are on a path that could lead to homegrown terror.
The report focuses on "the trajectory of radicalization" and tracks the path of a non-radicalized individual to an individual with the willingness to commit an act of terror.
"The threat is real; this is not some bogey man we are creating here," said Rand Corporation terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, who reviewed and contributed to the NYPD report. "There are individuals who are proselytizing, inciting angry young men to go down this path."
The report identifies mosques, bookstores, cafes, prisons and flop houses as what it calls "radicalization incubators" that provide "extremist fodder or fuel for radicalization."
The leader of an American Arab civil rights group labeled the NYPD report as "unfortunate stereotyping" and at odds with federal law enforcement findings that the threat from homegrown terrorists was minimal.
"It is completely un-American; it goes against everything we stand for," said Kareem Shora, executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "We do not want to alienate any segment of any community, and by using that language you are actually aiding the extremists in their recruiting efforts."
The NYPD report concludes that while al Qaeda can provide inspiration and an "ideological reference point," instances of command and control by al Qaeda are the exception rather than the rule.
It states that most or many terrorist attacks and attempted attacks in Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States have been thought up by and planned by local residents seeking to attack their own country of residence.
The report is seen by several individuals familiar with it as filling a large gap in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, which was released July 17 and contained little to no explicit discussion of homegrown terrorism.
The NYPD report cites at least 10 well-known recent cases where local authorities, the FBI and European police and intelligence agencies have thwarted plots developed either wholly or in a very large part by homegrown "actors," with little or no support from al Qaeda.
In an Intelligence Assessment published at the end of June, New Jersey officials at the state's Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness noted, "Through its ongoing review of extremist Web logs, the Intelligence Bureau has identified numerous pockets of radical youth existing in New Jersey communities and especially on N.J. campuses."
The purpose of the structure proposed by the NYPD is to create a tool enabling authorities to measure whether these "pockets" are moving from sanctioned activities toward violence.
Other law enforcement efforts to arrive at a prescriptive approach to homegrown terrorism are underway, and law enforcement officials are conscious that while these activities seem essential, they touch on thorny political issues in many jurisdictions and have to be carefully orchestrated to avoid conflict with constitutional protections in the U.S. But, Jenkins says, those protections have an outer limit.
"Freedom of speech, freedom of religion does not provide a defense against planning and preparation for violence," Jenkins said.
In West Yorkshire, England, a "community mapping model" is underway seeking to identify potential high-risk pockets in the region, which includes Leeds, home to several alleged conspirators of the four bombers in the July 7, 2005 attack on London's transportation system that killed 52 people.
In at least one major U.S. city, a similar pilot study is under consideration.
The New Jersey Intelligence Assessment identified prisons, the Internet, universities and religious/cultural institutions as the places where "radicalization in New Jersey appears to occur."
That report also spells out the key concern behind the intense law enforcement effort to make an effort to identify individuals who might be moving toward violence.
"There is evidence that radicalization is taking place in the U.S ... Studies of this phenomenon in Europe have shown that these individuals are virtually indistinguishable from the population in which they live. Certain risk factors such as age and personality type may be identified, but they are not predicative," the New Jersey report says.
The dense, 90-page NYPD analysis is the nation's first full analysis of the potential for increased homegrown terror in the United States and the first to develop a matrix on which to plot the course of "unremarkable" people as they move toward the potential for violent action.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
In 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing killed six people.
In 1998, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa killed 224.
Both were the work of al-Qaida and bin Laden, who in 1998 declared holy war on America, making him arguably the most wanted man in the world.
In 1998, President Clinton announced, “We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes.” INTERACTIVE
NBC News has obtained, exclusively, extraordinary secret video, shot by the U.S. government. It illustrates an enormous opportunity the Clinton administration had to kill or capture bin Laden. Critics call it a missed opportunity.
posted on August 22, 2007 10:17:56 AM new
Here, rather than repeat history....OR let the liberals REVISE it....read for yourselves ALL the MISSED OPPORTUNITIES bill clinton had to take down bin laden.
EIGHT YEARS for clinton to TAKE ACTION against bin laden - he FAILED to do so
vs
what the liberals WHINE about for the eight short months the new administration was in office.
AND as we see, as history PROVES, this President HAS taken action both after 9-11 when MANY liberals were calling to DO NOTHING....'don't bomb Afghanistan'....and were also against doing anything about the THREAT from saddam.
One party is willing to act....the other unwilling even after FIVE attacks. And one party votes to remove the threat the OTHER admin. claimed saddam posed....while their own party wouldn't do it themselves.
One party VOTES to go to war, along almost ALL of the other party. Now, the reps still feel we can be successful in Iraq and the liberals want to run away like COWARDS from the SAME AQ/binladen that brought us 9-11.
Wow....not hard at all to see which party WILL defend America....and which only TALKS a sorry TALK of doing so. tsk tsk tsk
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
posted on August 22, 2007 10:34:50 AM new
Sorry, linduh that you can't read, it wears you out figuring out those correctly spelled words that don't say what YOU want them to say (oh, and the OP topic was 9/11):
Bush, Clinton figures defend terrorism policies
Albright: It took 'megashock' of 9/11 to understand threat
Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Posted: 0635 GMT (1435 HKT)
• Clarke: Bush ignored warnings
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The top military and diplomatic leaders of the Clinton and Bush administrations were grilled Tuesday by members of the commission investigating the government's antiterror policies before the attacks of September 11, 2001 brought unprecedented destruction and death to the American homeland.
The dignitaries who testified said time and again how tough it was to deal with a ruthless enemy a world away, based on shifting intelligence information.
Testimony begins again Wednesday morning.
The commission heard from Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor, Madeleine Albright, along with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his predecessor, William Cohen.
Each agreed that until September 11, there was not enough support -- either domestically or internationally -- to send U.S. troops into Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cohort.
"It would have been very hard, pre 9/11, to have persuaded anybody that an invasion of Afghanistan was appropriate," said Albright, who headed the State Department under President Clinton. "I think it did take the megashock, unfortunately, of 9/11, to make people understand the considerable threat."
Rumsfeld, who took the helm of the Pentagon less than nine months before the attacks, told commissioners there was no indication before September 11 of what was about to happen.
"I knew of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers," he said.
But members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, in the first of two days of public hearings, expressed frustration with officials from both administrations that stronger action wasn't taken against al Qaeda, given the fact that Islamic extremists had carried out a series of attacks on U.S. targets during the preceding eight years.
Those attacks included the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; the bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in 1996; the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Commission member Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, said he thought it was a "big mistake" that despite repeated provocations, only one military strike was launched against al Qaeda before September 11: a cruise missile attack on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998.
"I don't understand, if we're attacked and attacked and attacked, why we continue to send the FBI over, like the Khobar Towers was a crime scene or the East African embassy bombings was a crime scene," said Kerrey, who had called for a declaration of war against al Qaeda before September 11.
"I keep hearing the excuse that we didn't have actionable intelligence. Well, what the hell does that say to al Qaeda?"
Albright's response was that Kerrey was "the only person that I know of who suggested declaring war."
"In retrospect, you were right," Albright said. "But we used every single tool we had in terms of trying to figure out what the right targets would be and how to go about dealing with what we knew."
Cohen, a former Republican senator who headed the Pentagon under Clinton, said the U.S. military was prepared to kill or capture bin Laden and other key al Qaeda leaders whenever there was "actionable intelligence." But he said the process was like chasing "mercury on a mirror."
Cohen said that three times in 1998 and 1999, airstrikes in Afghanistan to kill bin Laden had to be scrubbed because of doubts about the intelligence and concerns about civilian casualties.
"Each time, the munitions and people were spun up," he said. "They were called off because the word came back, 'We're not sure.' "
But even Albright expressed frustration about the reluctance to push ahead with military force against al Qaeda and bin Laden.
"From my perspective, the Pentagon did not come forward with viable options in response to what the president was asking for," she said.
Details on plans to kill bin Laden revealed
The 9/11 commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, provided more details Tuesday on the three aborted attempts to kill bin Laden, based on information gathered during the commission's inquiry.
One of those planned strikes, in Afghanistan in February 1999, was called off because then-White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke warned that it would have risked the lives of visiting officials from the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. counterterrorism ally, Zelikow said.
To this day, the lead CIA official in the field that day believes that "this was a lost opportunity to kill bin Laden before 9/11," Zelikow said.
Another planned attack, in May 1999, was scrubbed because CIA Director George Tenet said the intelligence was based on a single, uncorroborated source and the attack carried the risk of civilian deaths, Zelikow said.
Tenet and Clarke are scheduled to testify before the commission Wednesday.
In interviews and a book released this week, Clarke accuses the Bush administration of not paying enough attention to the al Qaeda threat before September 11 and of focusing efforts afterward on Iraq, not al Qaeda.
The White House has denounced "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" as a wildly inaccurate account of the administration's efforts. But Clarke has stood by his assertions, saying Bush "botched the response to 9/11."
Also scheduled to testify is former Clinton national security adviser Samuel Berger, who previously told the panel that a failed attack on bin Laden would have made the United States look weak and only strengthened the hand of the terrorist mastermind.
Rumsfeld, in his testimony Tuesday, expressed skepticism that killing bin Laden would have done anything to prevent the attacks of September 11 because the sleeper cells who carried out the attacks were already in the country.
"Ironically, much of the world, in all likelihood, would have blamed September 11th on the U.S. as an al Qaeda retaliation for the U.S. provocation of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden," he said.
Powell, Rumsfeld: Threat taken seriously
Powell and Rumsfeld insisted that contrary to assertions in Clarke's book, President Bush and his administration, from its earliest days, took the threat from al Qaeda seriously and began developing a new strategy designed to eliminate al Qaeda, instead of just containing it.
Powell said that a strategic review was completed a week before September 11, too late to prevent the attacks.
But Zelikow told commissioners that though the Bush administration was developing new policies to deal with al Qaeda in 2001, "There is no evidence of new work on military capabilities or plans against this enemy before September 11."
Commissioners asked why, after the Clinton administration warned the Bush national security team that al Qaeda was such a threat, the Bush national security team took so long to put together its plan.
"What made you think, even when you took over and got these first briefings, given the history of al Qaeda and its successful attacks on Americans, that we had the luxury even of seven months before we could make any kind of response?" said Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator and commission member.
Powell, a retired general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that in his experience, the time frame for such an undertaking was not unduly long.
"It was a complex issue, and it's not as if we were not doing anything but sitting around working [on the al Qaeda strategy]," he said.
Gorton later told CNN that "basically, with both administrations, I think each of them felt that it had a luxury of time, and it turned out that that luxury was not available to us."
"I don't think that anyone could say that both administrations were asleep," though they didn't take al Qaeda's declaration of war on America "seriously enough," Gorton said.
"But again, it's easy to say that in hindsight. Almost no one in either party ... said it ahead of time."
Another disagreement in Tuesday's hearing between the commission and the Bush administration was the refusal of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to give public testimony.
The White House maintains that Rice, as a staff adviser to the president rather than a Cabinet official, should not be called to testify under the principle of executive privilege. She has given four hours of private testimony to the commission.
But several members of the bipartisan, independent commission, which voted unanimously to ask Rice to testify, expressed frustration about her refusal to do so. (Gallery: 9/11 commission members)
"I hope Dr. Rice will reconsider and come before our commission for the sake of the American people," said Tim Roemer, a member and former Democratic congressman.
CNN's Phil Hirschkorn, Sean Loughlin, Barbara Starr and Steve Turnham contributed to this report."""
Statement on Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients
December 2, 2004
STATEMENT BY THE PRESS SECRETARY
President Bush will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to L. Paul Bremer III, Tommy R. Franks, and George J. Tenet in a ceremony at the White House on December 14, 2004.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Nation's highest civil award. It was established by President Truman and later re-established by President Kennedy. It is awarded by the President of the United States to persons who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
###
President George W. Bush presents former CIA Director George Tenet, Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2004, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room of the White House. (AP/Ron Edmonds)
"""U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet "by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created." ""'
Well, bushit LIKED him !!!
(Or was that tenet's reward for sticking to the "PLAN".???????)
posted on August 22, 2007 10:53:53 AM new
Tenent is WELL quoted as telling American's how much clinton did to PREVENT our intelligence agencies from being allowed to SHARE their info about terrorists. The CIA and the FBI were not ALLOWED to work together under clinton.
One of the first things THIS admin. did about that was to change that law so they could now HELP one another.
posted on August 22, 2007 12:53:26 PM new
Face it demomorons, it was your hero Klinton that failed the US citizens in this matter. Bush is just being blamed for having to try and clean up another of Klinton's messes.
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If it's called common sense, why do so few Demomorons have it?
posted on August 22, 2007 01:25:47 PM newEIGHT YEARS for clinton to TAKE ACTION against bin laden - he FAILED to do so
Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'
U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground is Lacking
By Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 10, 2006; A01
The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world -- no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image -- has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.
"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."
But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.
The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the "zone" is.
"Here you've got a guy who's gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly," said T. McCreary, spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center. "And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That's an extremely difficult problem."
Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.
Many factors have combined in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make the pursuit more difficult. They include the lack of CIA access to people close to al-Qaeda's inner circle; Pakistan's unwillingness to pursue him; the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; the strength of the Iraqi insurgency, which has depleted U.S. military and intelligence resources; and the U.S. government's own disorganization.
But the underlying reality is that finding one person in hiding is difficult under any circumstances. Eric Rudolph, the confessed Olympics and abortion clinic bomber, evaded authorities for five years, only to be captured miles from where he was last seen in North Carolina.
It has been so long since there has been anything like a real close call that some operatives have given bin Laden a nickname: "Elvis," for all the wishful-thinking sightings that have substituted for anything real.
After playing down bin Laden's importance and barely mentioning him for several years, Bush last week repeatedly invoked his name and quoted from his writings and speeches to underscore what Bush said is the continuing threat of terrorism.
Many terrorism experts, however, say the importance of finding bin Laden has diminished since Bush first pledged to capture him "dead or alive" in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Terrorists worldwide have repeatedly shown they no longer need him to organize or carry out attacks, the experts say. Attacks in Europe, Asia and the Middle East were perpetrated by homegrown terrorists unaffiliated with al-Qaeda.
"Will his capture stop terrorism? No," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a recent interview. "But in terms of a message to the world, it's a huge message."
Despite a lack of progress, at CIA headquarters bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still the most wanted of the High Value Targets, referred to as "HVT 1 and 2." The CIA station in Kabul still offers a briefing to VIP visitors that declares: "We are here for the hunt!" -- a reminder that finding bin Laden is a top priority.
Gary Berntsen, the former CIA officer who led the first and last hunt for bin Laden at Tora Bora, in December 2001, says, "This could all end tomorrow." One unsolicited walk-in. One tribesman seeking to collect the $25 million reward. One courier who would rather his kids grow up in the United States. One dealmaker, "and this could all change," Berntsen said.
Bin Laden Still Alive
On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.
That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.
"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."
Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.
White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment on the specific allegation. "Military and intelligence units move routinely in and out," she said. "The intelligence and military community's hunt for bin Laden has been aggressive and constant since the attacks."
The Pakistani intelligence service, notoriously difficult to trust but also the service with the best access to al-Qaeda circles, is convinced bin Laden is alive because no one has ever intercepted or heard a message mourning his death. "Al-Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way. We are pretty sure Osama is alive," Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
Pakistani intelligence officials also say they think bin Laden remains actively involved in al-Qaeda activities. They cite the interrogations of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a key planner of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and Abu-Faraj al-Libbi, who served as a communications conduit between bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda operatives until his capture last year.
Libbi and Ghailani, who was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004, were the last two people taken into custody to have met with and taken orders from Zawahiri and to hear directly from bin Laden. "Both Ghailani and Libbi were informed that Osama was well and alive and in the picture by none other than Zawahiri himself," one Pakistani intelligence official said.
Two Pakistani intelligence officials recently interviewed in Karachi said that the last time they received firsthand information on bin Laden was in April 2003, when an arrested al-Qaeda leader, Tawfiq bin Attash, disclosed having met him in the Khost province of Afghanistan three months earlier.
Attash, who helped plan the 2000 USS Cole bombing, told interrogators that the meeting took place in the Afghan mountains about two hours from the town of Khost.
By then, Pakistan was the United States' best bet for information after an infusion of funds from the U.S. intelligence community, particularly in the area of expensive NSA eavesdropping equipment.
"For technical intelligence ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) works hand in hand with the NSA," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. "The U.S. assistance in building Pakistan's capabilities for technical intelligence since 9/11 is superb."
Since early 2002, the United States has stationed a small number of personnel from the NSA and the CIA near where bin Laden may be hiding. They are embedded with counterterrorism units of the Pakistan army's elite Special Services Group, according to senior Pakistani intelligence officials.
The NSA and other specialists collect imagery and electronic intercepts that their CIA counterparts then share with the Pakistani units in the tribal areas and with the province of Baluchistan to the south.
But even with sophisticated technology, the local geography presents formidable obstacles. In a land of dead-end valleys, high peaks and winding ridge lines, it is easy to hide within the miles of caves and deep ravines, or to live unnoticed in mud-walled compounds barely distinguishable from the surrounding terrain.
The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles. Pakistan deploys 70,000 troops there. Its army had never entered the area until October 2001, more than a half century after Pakistan's founding.
Pakistani Sources Lost
A Muslim country where many consider bin Laden a hero, Pakistan has grown increasingly reluctant to help the U.S. search. The army lost its best source of intelligence in 2004, after it began raids inside the tribal areas. Scouts with blood ties to the tribes ceased sharing information for fear of retaliation.
They had good reason. At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen have been assassinated in South and North Waziristan since May 2005. "Al-Qaeda footprints were found everywhere," Interior Minister Sherpao said in a recent interview. "They kidnapped and chopped off heads of at least seven of these pro-government tribesmen."
Pakistani and U.S. counterterrorism and military officials admit that Pakistan has now all but stopped looking for bin Laden. "The dirty little secret is, they have nothing, no operations, without the Paks," one former counterterrorism officer said.
Last week, Pakistan announced a truce with the Taliban that calls on the insurgent Afghan group to end armed attacks inside Pakistan and to stop crossing into Afghanistan to fight the government and international troops. The agreement also requires foreign militants to leave the tribal area of North Waziristan or take up a peaceable life there.
In Afghanistan, the hunt for bin Laden has been upstaged by the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and by Afghan infighting for control of territory and opium poppy cropland.
Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2003, said he thinks bin Laden kept close to the border, not wandering far into either country. That belief is still current among military and intelligence analysts.
"We believe that he held to a pretty narrow range of within 15 kilometers of the border," said Vines, who now commands the XVIII Airborne Corps, "so that if the Pakistanis, for whatever reason, chose to do something to him, he could cross into Afghanistan and vice versa."
He said he thinks bin Laden's protection force "had a series of outposts with radios that could alert each other" if helicopters were coming or other troop movements were evident.
Pakistani military officials in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, described bin Laden as having three rings of security, each ring unaware of the movements and identities of the other. Sometimes they communicated with specially marked flashlights. Sometimes they dressed as women to avoid detection by U.S. spy planes.
Pakistan will permit only small numbers of U.S. forces to operate with its troops at times and, because their role is so sensitive politically, it officially denies any U.S. presence. A frequent complaint from U.S. troops is that they have too little to do. The same complaint is also heard from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where there were few targets to go after.
Although the hunt for bin Laden has depended to a large extent on technology, until recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were in short supply, especially when the war in Iraq became a priority in 2003.
In July 2003, Vines said that U.S. forces under his command thought they were close to striking bin Laden, but had only one drone to send over three possible routes he might take. "A UAV was positioned on the route that was most likely, but he didn't go that way," Vines said. "We believed that we were within a half-hour of possibly getting him, but nothing materialized."
Faced with the most sophisticated technology in the world, bin Laden has gone decidedly low-tech. His 23 video or audiotapes in the last five years are thought to have been hand-carried to news outlets or nearby mail drops by a series of couriers who know nothing about the contents of their deliveries or the real identity of the sender, a simple method used by spies and drug traffickers for centuries.
"They are really good at operational security," said Ben Venzke, chief executive officer of IntelCenter, a private company that analyzes terrorist information and has obtained, analyzed and published all bin Laden's communiques. "They are very good at having enough cut-outs" to move videos into circulation without detection. "It's some of the simplest things to do."
Uncertain Command Structure
Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies, with both the Pentagon and the CIA accusing each other of withholding information. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials.
In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.
"How did they get the intel?" he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.
"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know.
Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.
A CIA spokesman said Hayden, now the CIA director, does not recall this conversation. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "The notion that the department would do anything that would jeopardize the success of an operation to kill or capture bin Laden is ridiculous." The NSA continues to share intelligence with the CIA and the Defense Department.
At that time, Rumsfeld was putting in place his own aggressive plan, led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), to dominate the hunt for bin Laden and other terrorists. The overall special operations budget has grown by 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal year 2007.
Rows and rows of temporary buildings sprang up on SOCOM's parking lots in Tampa as Rumsfeld refocused the mission of a small group of counterterrorism experts from long-term planning for the war on terrorism to manhunting. The group "went from 20 years to 24-hour crisis-mode operations," one former special operations officer said. "It went from planning to manhunting."
In 2004, Rumsfeld finally won the president's approval to put SOCOM in charge of the "Global War on Terrorism."
Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. "There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"
"We work by consensus," explained Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., who recently stepped down as deputy director of counterterrorism under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "In order to find Osama bin Laden, certain departments will come together. . . . It's not that effective, or we'd find the guy, but in terms of advancing United States power for that mission, I think that process is effective."
But Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the JSOC commander since 2003, has become the de facto leader of the hunt for bin Laden and developed a good working relationship with the CIA to the extent that he recently was able to persuade the former station chief in Kabul to become his special assistant. He asks for targets from the CIA, and it tries to comply. "We serve the military," one intelligence officer said.
McChrystal's troops have shuttled between Afghanistan and Iraq, where they succeeded in killing al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and killed or captured dozens of his followers.
Under McChrystal, JSOC has improved its ability to quickly turn captured documents, computers and cellphones into leads and then to act upon them, while waiting for more analysis from CIA or SOCOM.
Industry experts and military officers say they are being aided by computer forensic field kits that let technicians retrieve information from surviving hard drives, cellphones and other electronic devices, as was the case in the Zarqawi strike.
McChrystal, who has commanded JSOC since 2003, now has the authority to go after bin Laden inside Pakistan without having to seek permission first, two U.S. officials said.
"The authority," one knowledgeable person said, "follows the target," meaning that if the target is bin Laden, the stakes are high enough for McChrystal to decide any action on his own. The understanding is that U.S. units will not enter Pakistan, except under extreme circumstances, and that Pakistan will deny giving them permission.
Such was the case in early January, when JSOC troops clandestinely entered the village of Saidgai, two officials familiar with the operation said, and Pakistan protested.
A week later, acting on what Pakistani intelligence officials said was information developed out of Libbi's interrogation, the CIA ordered a missile strike against a house in the village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Pakistani and American officials thought Zawahiri to be hiding.
The missile killed 13 civilians and several suspected terrorists. But Zawahiri was not among them. The strike "could have changed the destiny of the war on terror. Zawahiri was 100 percent sure to visit Damadola . . . but he disappeared at the last moment," one Pakistani intelligence official said.
Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American protest near Damadola, shouting, "Death to America!"
"Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri," the Pakistani intelligence official said in a recent interview. "He keeps popping on television screens. It's miserable, but we don't know where he or his boss are hiding."
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on August 22, 2007 01:31:34 PM newOne of the first things THIS admin. did about that was to change that law so they could now HELP one another.
This was only after the 9/11 attacks.
This was released in February 2003 from the White House.
The New Terrorist Threat Integration Center
As directed by the President in his State of the Union address, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Director of the FBI, working with the Attorney General, and the Secretaries of Homeland Security, Defense, and State have developed plans for the Nation's first unified Terrorist Threat Integration Center. TTIC will have unfettered access to all terrorist threat intelligence information?from raw reports to finished analytic assessments?available to the U.S. Government.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on August 22, 2007 01:32:42 PM newBush is just being blamed for having to try and clean up another of Klinton's messes
And the next president will have to clean up all of Bush's messes.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on September 5, 2007 01:21:29 PM new
That's right Linda. Mingopig, Logansdunce and the rest of the demomorons cannot accept the fact it was their hero, Horndog-in-Chief, that did nothing to stop the terror. Now they try to deflect attention away from their failures.
Like Dennis Miller stated last night. There have been no terror attacks on US soil since 9/11. That is a testament to the job the Bush is doing.
How many attacks were there after the world trade center bombings, when Klinton had a chance to protect us and didn't? At least two that I know of.
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If it's called common sense, why do so few Demomorons have it?
posted on September 5, 2007 08:12:01 PM new
That they can't accept the truth is no surprise. Some will NEVER deal in any reality.
But their party is working to limit the ways this admininstration has used to stop the domestic terrorists who HAVE TRIED to do their evil deeds here in America.
IF voters are foolish enough to elect another do-nothing liberal....we'll face more national attacks because they believe suspected terrorists have RIGHTS. And they protect them...rather than work with this administration to catch terrorists. We'll be like the UK IF liberals are elected. They'll return to their do nothing practices and we'll see an even worse 9-11 under them.
They can deny just how well this administration HAS done preventing another attack. But all one has to do is look to the UK and the recent attempt in Germany as to learn what DOES work and what doesn't.
Doing NOTHING doesn't work. Didn't before and won't ever.
I hope we elect another 'eyes-wide open' republican to deal with what our nation faces for generations to come. Liberals now are only interested in saying whatever it takes to get elected. Screw America's best interests.
They're in SUCH denial about the threats we face....it's pathetic, really.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
Ann Coulter
[ edited by Linda_K on Sep 5, 2007 08:14 PM ]
posted on September 6, 2007 02:16:53 PM newcannot accept the fact it was their hero, Horndog-in-Chief, that did nothing to stop the terror. Now they try to deflect attention away from their failures.
The two idiots above want to believe Bush has stopped terror from happening.
Why dont you count the number of terrrorists attacks worldwide that have ocurred since Bush has taken office.
Does Madrid and London mean anything to you?
There have been no terror attacks on US soil since 9/11. That is a testament to the job the Bush is doing.
I guess you idiots think 9/11 was supposed to be an everyday occurrence. You stupid fools can not conclude for a fact that anything Bush has done has directly prevented any attacks.
Your reasoning will only be good until another terrorist atatck happens.
How many attacks were there after the world trade center bombings, when Klinton had a chance to protect us and didn't? At least two that I know of.
How many people died in terrroist attacks on US soil while Clinton was in office compared to the number of people that died during terrorist attacks on US soil while Bush was in office?
Clinton 2 attacks approx 180 died.
Bush 1 attack and almost 3000 dead.
"In my experience, those who do not like you fall into two categories: the stupid, and the envious. - John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester
[ edited by logansdad on Sep 7, 2007 12:24 PM ]
posted on September 7, 2007 05:11:50 AM new
"GET A CLUE, ld. Or whine about something truthful for ONCE in your life"
From that statement,you know one thing that will defintely happen-he'll whine-hes a democrat,they're ALWAYS whinning.Every time I come in here I feel I should bring a pound of cheese..
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you look like your passport photo, you probably need the trip
posted on September 7, 2007 12:34:04 PM newWE are the ones who have been comparing the terrorism in the UK to the US NOT being attacked in the same way.
Yeah so what does that prove. The UK was fighting the terrorists in Iraq to prevent terrorists from attacking them and yet it happened anyway.
Just goes to show you that strategy does not work.
And you still can't prove anything Bush has done actually prevented a terrorist attack from happening.
And you're the IDIOT who can't even spell IDIOT. LOL
Oooo, the spelling queen got me. With all your intelligence and knowledge you should be really smart. Let's prove that theory shall we.
Linda - the one that doesn't know the difference between your and you're.
Linda the one that after being proved wrong 10 times, still things there is a langauge called Canadian.
Linda - the one that posts her email address in a public chat board but then expects everyone to ignore it.
Keep showing yuor intelligence Linda. Your intelligence level rates right next to the pet rocks from the 80's.
Or whine about something truthful for ONCE in your life.
Let's see can I keep whining about how I was wrongfully kicked off the OTWA. OOPS that was not me either. THAT WAS YOU.
You just cant face the facts. More people have died under Bush because of terrorist attacks than Clinton.
"In my experience, those who do not like you fall into two categories: the stupid, and the envious. - John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester
posted on September 7, 2007 12:40:45 PM newMore people have died under Bush because of terrorist attacks than Clinton.
Your figures are way off. Oklahoma City, 9/11. Yes, 9/11 was Clinton's fault for doing nothing when he knew the terrorists had organized. How about the 1st world trade center bombings?
Well logansdunce, looks like you have been proven wrong again.
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If it's called common sense, why do so few Demomorons have it?
Are YOU a Bunghole?
Screw America's best interests.