:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: Woodward excerpt IV ::

PLAN OF ATTACK : The Special Relationship
Blair Steady in Support
'I'm There to the Very End,' Prime Minister Told Bush
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 21, 2004; Page A01

This is the fourth of five articles adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq. Simon & Schuster. © 2004.

On Sunday, March 9, 2003 -- 10 days before launching war with Iraq -- President Bush was increasingly worried about the political peril of his chief ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"Do you think he could lose his government?" Bush asked Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser.

"Yes," she replied.

"Would the British really do that?"

"Remember Churchill," she said, noting that he had lost his government after winning World War II. Though Blair's Labor Party had more than a 2 to 1 majority in Parliament, the defection of 150 or more Laborites would leave the opposition Conservatives with the temptation or opportunity to join the Labor defectors to bring down Blair's government in a vote of no confidence.

The president was very worried. He called Blair for one of their regular conversations. They explored the possibilities, which other countries on the U.N. Security Council they could get to support or at least acquiesce in a war. His last choice, said Bush, would be "to have your government go down. We don't want that to happen under any circumstances. I really mean that."

If it would help, Bush said, he would let Blair drop out of the coalition and they would find some other way for Britain and its 41,000 military personnel in the region around Iraq to participate.

"I said I'm with you. I mean it," Blair replied.

Bush said they could think of another role for the British forces -- "a second wave, peacekeepers or something. I would rather go alone than have your government fall."

"I understand that," Blair responded, "and that's good of you to say. I said, I'm with you."

Bush said he really meant that it would be all right for Blair to opt out. "You can bank on that."

"I know you do," Blair said, "and I appreciate that. I absolutely believe in this, too. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's good of you to say that," the prime minister repeated in his very British way. "But I'm there to the very end."

It was an extraordinary offer, confirmed by Bush in an interview in December. Had Blair accepted, the United States would have been virtually alone in launching the war -- with only a few thousand troops from countries such as Australia and Poland.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:51:00 AM [+] ::
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SAVE ANGEL!!!

:: 10:16:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Lawyer: Guantanamo Is a Lawless Enclave" ::

WASHINGTON - The United States has created a "lawless enclave" at a military base in Cuba where more than 600 men from 44 countries are being held without access to American courts, a lawyer for the men told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Attorney John Gibbons said "it's been plain for 215 years" that people in federal detention may file petitions in U.S. courts.

The prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were mostly picked up in the fighting in Pakistan and in Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban government in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks. The government has labeled them "enemy combatants."

Their appeal, the first major challenge arising from the U.S. war on terror to reach the high court, asks a basic legal question: Can foreign-born prisoners picked up overseas and held outside U.S. borders use American courts to try win their freedom?

Read more here.

RESOURCES:

Supreme Court.

Case briefs.

Audio of the oral arguments.

posted by me

:: 3:44:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Woodward excerpt II ::

PLAN OF ATTACK : Making the Case
With CIA Push, Movement to War Accelerated
Agency's Estimate of Saddam Hussein's Arsenal Became the White House's Rationale for Invasion
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 19, 2004; Page A01

This is the second of five articles adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq. Simon & Schuster. © 2004.

On Jan. 2, 2002, CIA Director George J. Tenet met with Vice President Cheney -- at Cheney's request -- to brief him on what the agency could do in Iraq.

In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Iraq was much less of a priority than terrorism for Tenet, but not for one of the agency officials who accompanied him to the meeting, the chief of the Iraqi Operations Group, a former covert operations officer who can be identified only by his nickname, Saul.

Within the CIA's Near East Division, which handled some of the hardest, most violent countries, the Iraqi Operations Group was referred to as "The House of Broken Toys." It was largely populated with new, green officers and problem officers, or old boys waiting for retirement. After taking it over in August 2001, Saul had begun a full review of where the CIA stood with Iraq.

At 43, Saul had worked for years in sensitive undercover posts as a case officer and senior operator in CIA stations around the world. Saul was born in a small town in Cuba; his father had been involved in one of the most spectacular CIA failures -- the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in which 1,200 Cuban exiles had been abandoned on the beach by their CIA sponsors. As Saul told associates, "I am here as the result of a failed CIA covert operation."

Now Saul had a blunt message for Cheney about covert operations and Saddam Hussein. He told Cheney that covert action would not remove Hussein. The CIA would not be the solution.

The one thing the dictator's regime was organized for was to stop a coup, he said. Hussein had taken power in a coup. He has put down coups. The son of a bitch knows what a coup is, Saul said. If you are an Iraqi military unit and you have the bullets to launch a coup, you don't have the gas to move your tanks. If you have gas, you don't have bullets. Nobody stays in power long enough to launch a coup.

Only a U.S. military operation and invasion that the CIA could support had a chance of ousting Hussein, Saul told Cheney. The agency had done a lessons-learned study of past Iraq covert operations, he said, and frankly the CIA was tainted.

"We've got a serious credibility problem," he said. The Kurds, the Shiites, former Iraqi military officers and probably most attuned people in Iraq knew the history of the CIA's cutting and running. To reestablish credibility, potential anti-Hussein forces would have to see a determined seriousness on the part of the United States. Preparations for a massive military invasion might send that signal, nothing else.

Saul laid out for Cheney the problems with standing up at the United Nations, talking negotiations and containment, while secretly telling the Saudis and Jordanians the United States was going to remove the regime covertly. They needed a single national policy that everyone supported and explained in the same way.

Another lesson was that the CIA couldn't sustain a covert action program for a lengthy period of time. The regime would find some of the human sources that the agency might recruit and roll them up. So they had to move fast.

Cheney was used to briefers coming to his office with ambitious declarations and promises that their department or agency would deliver. The CIA message, which Saul later delivered to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was the opposite, sobering, highly unusual in its judgment that it really could not do the job.

Saul was discovering that the CIA reporting sources inside Iraq were pretty thin.

What was thin?

"I can count them on one hand," Saul said, pausing for effect, "and I can still pick my nose."

In effectively casting a vote for military action as the only feasible way of removing Hussein, the CIA contributed to the gathering momentum that carried the United States to war in Iraq. It would make other contributions as well -- by successfully establishing a network of informants inside Iraq whose lives were in jeopardy as long as Hussein was in power; and by providing the evidence for what became the Bush administration's main rationale for the war: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:48:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Shhh! The FBI's listening to your keystrokes" ::

A CNET News.com report
By Declan McCullagh

The FBI is trying to convince the government to mandate that providers of broadband, Internet telephony, and instant-messaging services build in backdoors for easy wiretapping.

That would constitute a sweeping expansion of police surveillance powers. Instead of asking Congress to approve the request, the FBI (along with the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration) are pressing the Federal Communications Commission to move forward with minimal public input.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:26:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Woodward excerpt Ia ::

Rove Revels in Democrat Kerry's Lead
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A15

This article was adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq. Simon & Schuster. © 2004.

By early February 2004, White House political adviser Karl Rove could see that Iraq was turning into a potential negative. The violence on the ground continued. The U.S. military had more than 100,000 troops there and would require that many or more for some time. American soldiers were being killed at too high a rate, and the administration hadn't reached a political settlement. Turning the government over to the Iraqis looked shaky. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, and President Bush's and CIA Director George J. Tenet's public acknowledgments that the intelligence might have been wrong, were potentially big setbacks.

Previously, Rove had claimed he was salivating that the Democrats would nominate former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential race. But Dean had imploded and Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, had won 12 of the first 14 Democratic primary contests and appeared to be headed for the nomination. Politics is a game of recovery, adaptability and optimism. So Rove had a new line.

"The good news for us is that Dean is not the nominee," Rove now argued to an associate in his second-floor West Wing office. Dean's unconditional opposition to the Iraq war could have been potent in a face-off with Bush. "One of Dean's strengths, though, was he could say, I'm not part of that crowd down there." But Kerry was very much a part of the Washington crowd, and he had voted in favor of the resolution for war. Rove got out his two-inch-thick, loose-leaf binder titled "Bring It On." It consisted of research into Kerry's 19-year record in the Senate. Most relevant were pages 9 to 20 of the section on Iraq.

The record was that Kerry had been all over the map. Sounding like a method actor who believes his lines, Rove offered some readings from the Kerry record.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:31:00 PM [+] ::
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:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird
Recent Wisdom From Newspaper Columnists
From a January "Parenting" column by John Rosemond in the Providence (R.I.) Journal: Reader: "I can't keep my 20-month-old daughter out of the dog's food. I've tried scolding, distracting, time-out, nothing has worked." Rosemond: "(F)rom a strictly nutritional standpoint (a nutritionist told me), most dog food is superior to the diets of many Americans." "(A pediatrician said) he has yet to see a child who suffered ill effects from eating dog food," except for chunk-type that might get stuck in the throat. [Providence Journal, 1-27-04]

From a February "Ask Dr. (Peter) Gott" column in the Herald News of suburban Chicago: Reader: "(M)y grandson ... told me that his fifth-grade teacher (a female) instructed the class that hand-washing (following urination in a public restroom) is unnecessary; urine is sterile." Dr. Gott: "Bless your grandson's teacher." "As a general rule, the urogenital area is cleaner than most other body parts are, and it need not be washed nor should hands be washed after urinating." "You and I, reader, are the products of our upbringing. It's time to make a change." [Herald News, 2-14-04]

Also, in the Last Month ...
An American Airlines flight was canceled after the local Transportation Security Administration official ordered a bomb search (which proved fruitless) based only on information that he said came from a psychic (Fort Myers, Fla.). And a Chicago attorney was permitted to withdraw from representing a 75-year-old alleged serial bad-check-writer after he sheepishly admitted that he had taken a check from her for his retainer, but that it had bounced. [St. Petersburg Times, 3-28-04] [Belleville News-Democrat-AP, 4-1-04]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 10:23:00 AM [+] ::
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:: /. ::

Mars Rock Supports Cross-Seeding Theory

from the rock-paper-scissors-life dept.
914 writes "Mars rover Opportunity has found a rock (nicknamed 'Bounce') that "provides conclusive evidence not only of Martian meteorites on Earth, but also of the possibility of cross-seeding." Not only that, but according to the UPI article: 'The discovery of Bounce raises the distinct possibility that life arising from a common source could have existed for a time on both worlds.'"

ALSO...
Deep thoughts w/ Slashdot:
Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

posted by me

:: 9:23:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Woodward excerpt I ::

PLAN OF ATTACK : Deciding on War
Behind Diplomatic Moves, Military Plan Is Launched
'We're Going to Have to Go to War,' Bush Said to Rice
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A01

Shortly after New Year's Day 2003, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had a private moment with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex.

Bush felt the effort to get United Nations weapons inspections inside Iraq on an aggressive track to make Saddam Hussein crack was not working. "This pressure isn't holding together," Bush told her.

The media reports of smiling Iraqis leading inspectors around, opening up buildings and saying, "See, there's nothing here," infuriated Bush, who then would read intelligence reports showing the Iraqis were moving and concealing things. It wasn't clear what was being moved, but it looked to Bush as if Hussein was about to fool the world again. It looked as if the inspections effort was not sufficiently aggressive, would take months or longer, and was likely doomed to fail.

"I was concerned people would focus on not Saddam, not the danger that he posed, not his deception, but focus on the process and thereby Saddam would be able to kind of skate through once again," Bush recalled in an interview last December.

"I felt stressed," he added. All the holiday parties at the White House had not helped. "My jaw muscle got so tight. And it was not just because I was smiling and shaking so many hands. There was a lot of tension during that last holiday season."

There was another factor at work that was not publicly known. Sensitive intelligence coverage on U.N. inspections chief Hans Blix indicated that he was not reporting everything and not doing all the things he maintained he was doing. Some in Bush's war cabinet believed Blix was a liar.

"How is this happening?" Bush asked Rice. "Saddam is going to get stronger."

Blix had told Rice, "I have never complained about your military pressure. I think it's a good thing." She relayed this to the president.

"How long does he think I can do this?" Bush asked. "A year? I can't. The United States can't stay in this position while Saddam plays games with the inspectors."

"You have to follow through on your threat," Rice said. "If you're going to carry out coercive diplomacy, you have to live with that decision."

"He's getting more confident, not less," Bush said of Hussein. "He can manipulate the international system again. We're not winning.

"Time is not on our side here," Bush told Rice. "Probably going to have to, we're going to have to go to war."

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:15:00 PM [+] ::
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:: From Iraq w/ Love ::

Anti-U.S. Outrage Unites a Growing Iraqi Resistance
A NY Times report

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 11 — Moneer Munthir is ready to kill Americans.

For months, he has been struggling to control an explosion of miserable feelings: humiliation, fear, anger, depression.

"But in the last two weeks, these feelings blow up inside me," said Mr. Munthir, a 35-year-old laborer. "The Americans are attacking Shiite and Sunni at the same time. They have crossed a line. I had to get a gun."

Ahmed, a 29-year-old man with elegant fingers and honey-colored eyes, has been planting bombs inside dead dogs and leaving them on the highway. He and a team of helpers have been especially busy recently.

"We start work after 11 p.m.," Ahmed said. "Our group is small, just friends, and we don't even have a name."

Khalif Juma, a 26-year-old vegetable seller, said he and his cousins bought a crate of Kalashnikov rifles last week.

"To be honest, we weren't like this before," he said. "But we're religious people, and our leader has been threatened. We would be ashamed to stay in our houses with our wives at a time like this."

A new surge of Iraqi resistance is sweeping up thousands of people, Shiite and Sunni, in a loose coalition united by overwhelming anti-Americanism. On March 31, insurgents in Falluja ambushed four civilian contractors and mutilated their bodies, and the fiery words of Moktada al-Sadr, the young radical Shiite cleric, a few days later prompted violent uprisings in four cities.

In Baghdad, Kufa, Najaf, Baquba and Falluja, interviews with Sunnis and Shiites alike show a new corps of men, and a few women, who have resolved to join the resistance. They also reveal a generation of young people inured to violence and hankering to join in the fighting.

There is no way to estimate the size of the mushrooming insurgent force, but demonstrations in several cities by armed and angry people indicate that it probably runs in the tens of thousands. Many people said they did not consider themselves full-time freedom fighters or mujahedeen; they have jobs in vegetable shops, offices, garages and schools.

But when the time comes, they say, they line up behind their leaders — with guns.

posted by me

:: 8:51:00 PM [+] ::
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:: RE Dubya & Iraq ::

Bush Ordered Iraq Plans in November 2001, Book Says
From Bloomberg.com

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush ordered an Iraq war plan in November 2001, two months after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and while the U.S. military was still trying to oust the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan, according to excerpts of a new book.

``Let's get started on this,'' Bush recalled telling Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001, according to ``Plan of Attack,'' by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward. ``And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to.'' Army General Franks, now retired, led the U.S. Central Command from June 2000 to August 2003.

The excerpts, published in an early version of the Post's Sunday edition, support testimony by former White House counter- terrorism adviser Richard Clarke that the Bush administration was focused on Iraq instead of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was fired by Bush, accused the president this year of planning to oust Hussein within weeks of taking office in January 2001. O'Neill made the claim in ``The Price of Loyalty,'' a book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Suskind.

``What it amounts to is what the intelligence people would call multiple-source confirmation that the Bush presidency arrived in office with an agenda,'' said Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore. ``They used Sept. 11 as a way to realize that agenda.''

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:35:00 AM [+] ::
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:: RE Dubya ::

The Price of Incuriosity
A NY Times OpEd piece

Americans knew George W. Bush was an incurious man when they elected him, but the hearings of the 9/11 investigating commission, which turned yesterday from the F.B.I.'s fecklessness to the C.I.A.'s blurred vision, have brought that fact home in a startling way. The president is trying hard to present himself as a hands-on manager who talked terrorism incessantly with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet. ("I wanted Tenet in the Oval Office all the time.") But Mr. Tenet had to concede yesterday that he was not in Crawford, Tex., for the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Mr. Tenet told the panel he didn't meet with Bush all that month, but the C.I.A. later said there had been two meetings. No one has been able to say whether Mr. Bush followed up in any way after he asked his intelligence agencies whether there was a domestic threat from Al Qaeda, and got a loud "yes" in response.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:56:00 PM [+] ::
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:: 911 Probe update ::

Sept. 11 Panel Cites C.I.A. for Failures in Terror Case
By PHILIP SHENON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
From The NY Times

WASHINGTON, April 14 — George J. Tenet and his deputies at the Central Intelligence Agency were presented in August 2001 with a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly" about the arrest days earlier of Zacarias Moussaoui, but did not act on the information, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Wednesday.

An interim report by the panel's staff offered a stinging assessment of the C.I.A. under Mr. Tenet's leadership and was made public during a hearing at which Mr. Tenet disclosed that he had little contact with President Bush during much of the summer of 2001, a period when intelligence agencies were warning of a dire terrorist threat.

Mr. Tenet, the director of central intelligence since 1997, testified that he had no contact at all with Mr. Bush in August, the month in which the president received a C.I.A. report suggesting that terrorists of Al Qaeda were already in the United States and might be planning a domestic airplane hijacking.

The agency later telephoned reporters on Wednesday to correct Mr. Tenet's testimony, saying he met once with the president during Mr. Bush's nearly monthlong vacation that August at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., and once again when Mr. Bush returned to Washington later that month. In defending Mr. Bush from recent contentions that he was not sufficiently attentive to domestic terrorist threats before Sept. 11, the White House has cited his face-to-face meetings with Mr. Tenet as proof of his interest.

Mr. Tenet offered an aggressive defense, insisting that the agency had provided "clear and direct" intelligence about the larger danger posed by Al Qaeda before Sept. 11. "Warning was well understood, even if the timing and method of attacks was not," he said.

ALSO
From Newsday.com
Excerpts from commission testimony

AND
From The Dallas Morning News
Sweeping change may lie ahead for FBI, CIA
9-11 panel expected to advise overhaul after Bush indicates interest
By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT

WASHINGTON – President Bush's willingness to consider a major overhaul of the nation's intelligence agencies could jump-start a wave of overdue reforms, members of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said Wednesday.

The bipartisan panel, tasked with recommending fixes for the systemic failures that permitted the 9-11 attacks, is expected to propose changes well beyond those already accomplished by the FBI and CIA in the last 2 ½ years.

"There is a train coming down the track," Commissioner John Lehman told CIA Director George Tenet. "There are going to be very real changes made."

The commission has yet to decide whether to embrace major change advocated by some experts, such as creation of a director of intelligence post to oversee all spy agencies or the removal of counterterrorism functions from the FBI in favor of a domestic intelligence agency. But individual commissioners have made it clear that the panel will offer sweeping recommendations when it issues its final report in July.

Speaking a day after Mr. Bush said he would be open to intelligence community restructuring, the commission's chairman, Tom Kean, pronounced the comments "extraordinarily helpful."

"There have been attempts to reform the intelligence community in the past," Mr. Kean said during a break in Wednesday's daylong hearing. "And presidents of both parties have stopped them."

posted by me

:: 10:51:00 PM [+] ::
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:: FYC (for your consideration) ::

From Media Monitors Network:
Bush administration dropped ball on Sept. 11th terrorism
by Ray Hanania
"...when the same kind of evidence suggests Bin Laden was planning a sequel to the first failed attempt to destroy the Twin Towers, Rice and Bush want us to believe that Bin Laden's threats were meaningless and only important in the light of 20-20 hindsight."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think it might have been too much to expect Osama Bin Laden to have picked up the telephone and called National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice or President Bush before 19 of his mostly American-based disciples hijacked planes and struck the World Trade Center a second time.

So after the first assault on the Twin Towers by al-Qaeda, the many subsequent al-Qaeda attacks that followed, and all of Bin Laden's sabre-rattling about trying again (possibly using hijacked airplanes as torpedoes) we might have been better prepared.

We didn't have Al-Jazeera reporters conveying the threats. The sources were clandestine, foreign governments and media reports, according to the now infamous Aug. 6, 2001 "President's Daily Brief" that only a handful of weeks before Bin Laden's strikes warned that Bin Laden wanted to do more. Something big. And that Bin Laden would rely on cells in the United States.

Funny how government is. When Bin Laden says something innocuous, it's a clear threat and evidence that he was involved in September 11th. Recall Bin Laden never initially claimed credit for Sept. 11th. He only celebrated and rejoiced in the terrorism afterwards in numerous interviews, and that was enough for President Bush to indict him.

But when the same kind of evidence suggests Bin Laden was planning a sequel to the first failed attempt to destroy the Twin Towers, Rice and Bush want us to believe that Bin Laden's threats were meaningless and only important in the light of 20-20 hindsight.

Sorry, Mr. President. I don't buy that baloney. You screwed up. You had other priorities, like avenging the honor of your father by taking out Saddam Hussein instead of fighting the real war on terrorism. All the reasons you gave us for attacking Iraq were based on lies and half-truths, evidence that doesn't even come close to the frightening accuracy of what you had and missed involving Bin Laden before Sept. 11th.

Now you want us to believe that the PDB offering the most convincing evidence of a Sept. 11th threat ever to exist was nothing more than "historical" observations, as Rice explained after being forced to testify before the September 11th Commission you've been so reluctant to support.

I don't buy her responses or your excuses.

It's clear you were so consumed with trumping up evidence to justify an attack against Iraq that you couldn't have possibly seen al-Qaeda coming, even if Bin Laden had held a press conference to declare his intentions ahead of time.

The blame doesn't just fall on your shoulders. I also blame your "Hell's kitchen cabinet" of advisers like Richard Perle, a guy who makes the traditional "Big Lie" as little more than a "fib." I also blame the news media who you rope-a-doped after September 11th into pulling their punches on truth in the name of National Patriotism.

How dare any reporter challenge you when we had been struck so viciously and immorally by such a backward, sandal-wearing Third World degenerate? I am sure you and Rice saw how easy it was to brow-beat the media with just enough guilt that they wouldn't ask questions like, "With all the evidence before hand, why didn't President Bush see this attack coming?"

And, "Why are we attacking Iraq so forcefully first, while Bin Laden continues to operate and make threats in Afghanistan?" Not enough contracts for Halliburton, I presume. No oil spoils in Afghanistan to satiate America's drunken thirst for gasoline, big cars, SUV's and the new post-September 11th patriotism fad, Hummers.

My God. The PDB speaks clearly about al-Qaeda operatives working in the United States, contemplating the use of hijacked airplanes, and even conducting surveillance of buildings in New York, a city and target mentioned twice in the 11-paragraph PDB.

It's very possible that ignorance is the president's defense. I mean, could anyone but a person so naïve not been alarmed even had they failed to read and appreciate the content of the PDB had they only read the PDB's ominous headline: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

Maybe Bush misunderstood. He thought Bin Laden's American-based cells were engaged in some sort of labor union strife? Or, possibly, Bush has other meanings for the word "determined." Add them to his dictionary of new phrases, like "subliminable."

The fact that it took nearly three years for the White House to release the PDB suggests strongly that President Bush is not as stupid as he might seem. Bush knows exactly how damaging the PDB appears, now that he finally understands what it all means.

posted by me

:: 1:32:00 AM [+] ::
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23 skiddoo

:: 1:23:00 AM [+] ::
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:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird:
Louis Paul Kadlecek, 21, who had never even been in an airplane before, broke into a hangar at an airport near Lake Jackson, Texas, on Feb. 29, and, using trial-and-error, got a Cessna 172 airborne for about a mile, intending to fly to Mexico, before slamming into power lines. Although the crash left the plane a total loss, Kadlecek climbed out and walked home, but sheriff's deputies, based on witnesses' descriptions, arrested him the next day. One Brazoria County aviation official estimated that stunt pilots might survive an incident like that one time in 1,000. Said another, "This guy used up all the luck he's ever going to have." [Houston Chronicle, 3-2-04, 3-4-04]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 1:21:00 AM [+] ::
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:: The Bush League ::

All in the family?
Taking a look at the relationship between Bush clan and Saudi rulers
By JOHN FREEMAN
Special to The Kansas City Star

On Sept. 13, 2001, the United States imposed a nationwide no-fly zone, and yet more than 140 individuals were permitted to leave America.

Nearly all of them were Saudi, and roughly two dozen were kin to Osama bin Laden. What kind of intelligence failure allowed this to happen? Were these individuals seriously questioned? Who allowed them to leave?

And given that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were Saudi, what was the rush in squandering what may have been a potential intelligence mother lode?

Craig Unger first reported this story in Vanity Fair. In House of Bush, House of Saud, he places this incredible scenario in the context of a decades-old relationship between the ruling clan of Saudi Arabia and America's pre-eminent political dynasty: the Bush family.

In a year when the president will campaign as tough on terror and homeland security, Unger's book makes essential reading. Not only does it pose disturbing questions about Saudi involvement in 9/11 (wittingly or unwittingly), but it also presents a frighteningly believable case that the Bush administration's cozy relationship with the royal house of Saud precipitated this catastrophe.

Read more here.

ALSO
From The Boston Globe:
Unasked questions
The 9/11 commission should ask who authorized the evacuation of Saudi nationals in the days following the attacks
By Craig Unger, 4/11/2004

IN ITS TOUGH QUESTIONING of Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice, the 9/11 commission has already shown itself to be more resolute than some skeptics predicted. Many Americans now realize that multiple warnings of an Al Qaeda attack on American soil crossed the desks of Bush administration officials in the months leading up to 9/11. The administration's previously unchallenged narrative has begun to unravel.

But when hearings resume on Tuesday, we may learn exactly how tough the commission is prepared to be. This time the stars will be Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, among others. When they testify -- especially Mueller -- we will see whether or not the commission has the stomach to address what may be the single most egregious security lapse related to the attacks: the evacuation of approximately 140 Saudis just two days after 9/11.

This episode raises particularly sensitive questions for the administration. Never before in history has a president of the United States had such a close relationship with another foreign power as President Bush and his father have had with the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud. I have traced more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went from the House of Saud over the past 20 years to companies in which the Bushes and their allies have had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group among them. Is it possible that President Bush himself played a role in authorizing the evacuation of the Saudis after 9/11? What did he know and when did he know it?

Craig Unger, the former editor of Boston Magazine, is the author of "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties" (Scribner, March 2004).

Read more here.

PLUS
BuzzFlash interview: Craig Unger
From WorkingForChange.com

BuzzFlash: Despite your book, despite, again, other journalists who have brought this issue up, there is still the 800-pound elephant in the room that the Bush administration just doesn’t want to talk about. You never hear them voluntarily bring up Saudi Arabia. Is that likely to change in an election year? Are the Democrats likely to make it an issue? Or are we just going to go through this election with Saudi Arabia again being like the relative you don’t want to talk about?

Craig Unger: It absolutely should be an issue. And you have the 9/11 Commission which I think has to address many of these questions. You have the Kerry campaign, which I believe should raise some of these questions. It’s an elemental question in American foreign policy -– how do you deal with this? If we’re going to have a serious war on terror, President Bush -– and this may be one place where I really agree with him -– has said how he responded to 9/11 should be an issue in the campaign. I agree with him absolutely on that. We might disagree on how well he’s done, but the Saudi role in all this is very, very important.

I would like to redirect attention back to, if I may, to what I call the great escape -- the evacuation of Saudis. The Bush administration clearly played a role. They clearly authorized that. Why did they do that? How could they possibly have done it? They were already arresting people in Guantanamo and detaining them for months and months and months. But Saudis who may have had knowledge of this were whisked out of the country in the dead of night.

poated by me

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:: "Urbi et Orbi" ::

"May the culture of life and love render vain the logic of death."
-- The Pope, today @ St. Peter's Basilica

"May world leaders be confirmed and sustained in their efforts to resolve satisfactorily the continuing conflicts that cause bloodshed in certain regions of Africa, Iraq and the Holy Land."

posted by me

:: 3:21:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Inquiry Into Attack on the Cole in 2000 Missed 9/11 Clues" ::

From The NY Times:
WASHINGTON — The American investigators probing the October 2000 terrorist attack against the Navy destroyer Cole came tantalizingly close to detecting the Sept. 11 plot, F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials now say. But the government missed the significance of a series of clues because some investigators believed that the evidence fit narrowly into their case against the ship bombers and, others say, they did not have access to all the information.

The lost opportunity, described by the officials for the first time in interviews this week, involved two of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who fell under suspicion by the C.I.A. early in 2000 but were not put on a watch list of foreigners barred from entering the United States until August 2001, after they were already here.

A reconstruction of events shows that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency failed to recognize the significance of the two men and to act in concert to intercept them because of internal miscommunications and legal restrictions on the sharing of C.I.A. intelligence information with criminal investigators at the F.B.I. Problems developed even though F.B.I. agents and C.I.A. officers were assigned to each other's operational and analytical units.

The reconstruction also shows that the importance of the two men, who have figured centrally in examinations of the government's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, was misunderstood before the attacks because investigators thought the two were associated with only the Cole bombing. They were not linked with a plot to strike targets within the United States until after Sept. 11, 2001.

"You have to go back to that time and get rid of all your guilty knowledge about what happens later," one C.I.A. official said. "At the time, it was looking more like Alhazmi and al-Midhar were involved in ship bombings."

The government's failure to effectively pursue leads about Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi after they first came to the attention of the C.I.A. in Malaysia in January 2000 will be a focus of hearings next week by the independent commission studying the government's response to terrorist threats before Sept. 11, commission members said.

The performance of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in dealing with Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi has led to years of recriminations and finger-pointing between the organizations. Officials from both agencies, while still in disagreement over critical details, now say the evolution of the Cole investigation is critical to understanding the miscues before Sept. 11.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:11:00 AM [+] ::
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:: The August 6 PDB ::

Pre 9/11 memo warned Bush
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
From correspondents in Crawford, Texas

A SECURITY memo sent to President George W Bush about one month before the September 11 attacks warned that al-Qaeda had penetrated the United States and of possible plane hijackings, the White House said today.

The Bush administration released the memorandum under pressure from the official inquiry into the 2001 strikes by Osama bin Laden's group as the president's counter-terrorism strategy before September 11 faces growing scrutiny.

The memo, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US", said that in mid-2001 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents suspected al-Qaeda was preparing air hijackings and had been studying federal buildings in New York.

The memo was declassified and released virtually intact, with only the names of three intelligence sources blacked out.

Bush is spending the Easter holiday weekend at his Texas ranch. He was also on holiday at the ranch when the memorandum was sent.

F U L L T E X T :

The following is the text of the August 6, 2001, memo sent to President Bush and marked "For the President Only".

Three names have been replaced by XXXXXX for security reasons.

Osama bin Laden Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Osama bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington according to a XXXXXX service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXX service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. bin Laden associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qaeda members - including some who are US citizens - have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1900s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a XXXXXX service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."

ALSO
From TIME.com:
Probing the Memo

But the report, which was presented to Bush while he was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, seemed to be written by a CIA eager to sound an alarm. Citing clandestine and foreign-government sources, it asserts that the terrorist network had set up shop in the U.S., was carrying out suspicious activity, hoped to strike Washington, might even be planning to hijack airliners and was the focus of 70 FBI field investigations. The PDB also contains two new pieces of specific information that are likely to prompt more questions. One was a mention of "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." The Administration said last week it had followed up on that report and found that the suspicious characters turned out to be Yemeni tourists. Another item described a threat phoned in to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 in which the caller said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives. The caller gave no more specifics, and federal investigators never found a link between the tip and 9/11, the White House said.

Still, what commissioners will no doubt ask is why, given the memo's strong assertions that bin Laden was bound and determined to strike inside the U.S., the warning didn't spur more action from the President. Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, told TIME that he and like-minded panelists intend to press ahead with questions on "what occurred [inside the White House] between Aug. 6 and Sept. 11." Panel members will probably ask why the President didn't cut his vacation short or order emergency meetings with Robert Mueller, then the new FBI director. "Once you see the PDB, given what you already know," says Ben-Veniste, "you'll have to make a determination of whether it was exclusively historical or whether there was information there ... indicating an attack."

posted by me

:: 9:52:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Dubya & the 911 Probe ::

Bush's Pre-9/11 al-Qaida Memo Released

From an AP report
CRAWFORD, Texas - A document sent to President Bush before the Sept. 11 attacks cited recent intelligence of a possible al-Qaida plot to strike inside the United States. The White House released the document Saturday.

"Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US," the memo to Bush stated. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

The document, declassified Saturday, said that after President Clinton launched missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, "bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington." The memo cited intelligence from another country, but the White House blacked out the name of the country.

Efforts to launch an attack from Canada around the time of "Y2K" "may have been part of bin Laden's frst serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S." the document states.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived an attack at about the same time on Los Angeles International Airport by himself, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah "encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation," the document said.

Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, the memo said.

"The group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks," it warned.

The document said that "some of the more sensational threat reporting" - such as warnings that bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to win the release of fellow extremists" - could not be corroborated.

Since 1998, the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." They included evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists.

A senior administration official said that incident involved two Yemeni men seen taking photos of Federal Plaza in Manhattan. The FBI interviewed the men and concluded they were tourists, the official said.

The document also said the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May "saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."

ALSO:
Sony Buys Movie Rights to Clarke's Book

NEW YORK - Former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke's best-selling book may soon be a movie. Sony Pictures Entertainment has purchased the film rights to "Against All Enemies," Sony vice chairwoman Amy Pascal told The New York Times for its Saturday editions.

In the best-selling book, Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser to the past three presidents, charges that the Bush administration prioritized Iraq above threats from al-Qaida before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The movie version is to be produced by John Calley, the entertainment group's former chairman, who worked on the 1976 Watergate drama "All the President's Men" at Warner Brothers.

"You could shoot the first 56 pages and have an extraordinary half of a movie, then it goes on to more enthralling stuff," Calley told the Times. "If we were able to do `All the President's Men' with people meeting in garages and whispering in parks, then certainly with someone sitting at a table in the White House we could have a remarkable event."

Clarke retired in 2003 after 30 years in government and reiterated the claims made in his book during testimony before the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sony Pictures did not disclose terms of the deal.

posted by me

:: 6:43:00 PM [+] ::
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:: 911 Probe update ::

9/11 Documents Show Hijacking Warnings
From an AP report

WASHINGTON - U.S. government agencies issued repeated warnings in the summer of 2001 about potential terrorist plots against the United States masterminded by Osama bin Laden, including a possible plan to hijack commercial aircraft, documents show.

While there were no specific targets mentioned in the United States, there was intelligence indicating al-Qaida might attempt to crash a plane into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. And other reports said Islamic extremists might try to hijack a plane to gain release of comrades.

The escalating seriousness was reflected in a series of warnings issued by the State Department, Federal Aviation Administration, Defense Department and others detailing a heightened risk of terror attacks targeting Americans.

Whether the Bush administration had enough information to take more aggressive action is at the heart of the dispute over the contents of an Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence briefing the White House was working to declassify at the urging of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. White House officials said the document would not come out Friday and probably would not be ready for release until early next week.

Several Democrats on the commission claim the memo, called a presidential daily brief, or PDB, included current intelligence indicating a high threat of hijackings. It was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

"Something was going to happen very soon and be potentially catastrophic," said one of the Democrats, former Indiana Rep. Timothy Roemer. "I don't understand, given the big threat, why the big principals don't get together."

Related links:

Joint intelligence report

9/11 Commission

posted by me

:: 8:02:00 PM [+] ::
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:: From MoveOn.org With Love ::

Censure Bush for Misleading Us

In an attempt to evade responsibility for the misleading statements that pushed the nation into war, Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and delay any political damage until 2005, after the upcoming election.

But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. And now that reality is setting in, the President wants to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him.

Congress has the power to censure the President — to formally reprimand him for betraying the nation's trust. If ever there was a time for this, it's now.

Join the call on Congress to censure President Bush.
Censure-related Resources.

posted by me

:: 8:34:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "LexiCondi" ::

From Slate.com:
Decoding Rice's self-serving testimony
By William Saletan
Condi: in her own words

Four years ago, when the Justice Department deposed Al Gore in the Clinton fund-raising scandal, I poked fun at Gore's self-serving, hypocritical redefinitions of everyday words. Today, National Security Adviser Condi Rice resorted to similar tactics in her testimony before the 9/11 commission. Here's a glossary of her terms.

Gathering threats: Unclear perils that previous administrations irresponsibly failed to confront quickly.

Example: For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient. Historically, democratic societies have been slow to react to gathering threats, tending instead to wait to confront threats until they are too dangerous to ignore or until it is too late.

Vague threats: Unclear perils that the Bush administration understandably failed to confront quickly.

Example: 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. … The threat reporting was frustratingly vague.

Up-to-date intelligence: The precise, useful information the administration responsibly demanded and got.

Example: President Bush revived the practice of meeting with the director of Central Intelligence almost every day. … At these meetings, the president received up-to-date intelligence. … From Jan. 20 through Sept. 10, the president received at these daily meetings more than 40 briefing items on al-Qaida.

Read more here.

ALSO:
You can read a transcript of Rice's testimony here.

posted by me

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