Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

It all goes back to the "we had no specific warning that hijackers would fly a 767 into the WTC at 9:15 am eastern time on Sept. 11 2001" canard.

She doesn't think your stupid enough to buy this. She thinks the editors of the Washington Post are stupid enough to buy it, and she's right.

I watched her for 5 minutes but had to turn it off because I was starting to vomit.

Mad Hatter to Alice: "No room. No room. Please sit down"

Of course the poor woman thinks everyone around her is *duhm*. Consider that not only is she currently surrounded by minions of the Bush administration (where evolution is still "no proven"), but before that she was employed by a Junior University of no particular account. Poor woman probably hasn't heard an intelligent conversation since she left the University of Denver in 1981!

(It always come back to Big Game rivalry ya know!)

I watched PBS, and it appears that one of her key points was that the 'system' was old and needed complete overhaul, so it didn;t matter that we had in place an elected, um, appointed, 150-million dollar robot (or whatever was the sum spent on GWB's 2000 election machinery) to counterbalance the limitations of such legacy systems!
In one way of thinking
Good systems plus creative hands-on president and team = Grade A government
Bad Systems plus creative hands-on president and team = Grade B government
Good Systems plus robot president with hand-me-down Iran-Contra era robots on team = Grade C government
Bad Systems plus robot president and hand-me-down Iran-Contra era robots on team = Grade D government
Just the luck of the American people that we had to have on the 9/11 watch a Grade D government.
Can he be sued for misrepresentation? He told us he carried a 'C' grade at Yale?

The woman's a Soviet Union specialist.

It's no wonder she thinks in terms of historical matters and not ongoing issues.

She hasn't worked on current threats since the 1980s.

Condi did her best impersonation of "incompetent bureaucrat" today. After all she doubles as "workout partner". That narrows the pool of NSA talent considerably.

The real fireworks should come next week when Freeh and Ashcroft testify. The commission talked to Clinton today, so he probably gave them plenty of questions to ask Freeh. “Why did you consider investigation of a blow job more important than antiterrorism? Why did you not bring the FBI into the computer age? Better yet, “Mr Freeh, do you have an IM account, do you currently have a Hotmail account and can define “blog””. Or “How can the US afford to have an FBI director who is computer illiterate in the information age?” Simon and Benjamin really raked Freeh over the coals. He deserves it.

"The threats were believed to be overseas, where all the previous attacks had been.

Look, if you need to fabricate stuff to attack the administration then you obviously don't have a very good case."

Huh?

"RICE. I believe the title was Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States. Now, the P.D.B. - "

This reminds me of (believe it or not) a piece in DC Comics "Formerly Known as the Justice League #5" -

Broadcaster 1: ...President is certain Saddam Hussein is behind this apparent alien invasion. When asked why Saddam would choose to invade Queens in a flying saucer, a White House spokesman replied-- (pause)

Broadcaster 1: "Because we said so!"

Broadcaster 2: It's the End of the World--Again!--as only the VOX News Channel can bring it to you!

And that appeared in 2003.

"A@b.com" forgot tp change his watch to Daylight Savings, so his comments will be a bit off for awhile.

I believe that Rice is the primary designated scapegoat for Iraq, with Wolfowitz the vack-ip scapegoat. Why such a successful policy needs a scapegoat I do not know.

"The threats were believed to be overseas, where all the previous attacks had been."

Explain to me how the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 was overseas?

I suppose you could argue that Manhattan is "overseas" because it is technically an island. Dittoheads have made stupider arguments.

Mercy, you had perhaps noticed the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center, the millenium plot, etc. No dear, not all the attacks were overseas. And that is just the ones we know about.

Let me see:
We are currently occupying Iraq because of WMDS we haven't found, a connection to terror that did not exist, in order to develop a democracy (by June 30) among a people whom significant numbers of are trying to kill us, so that we may to turn over soveirenty to an entity (on June 30) to whom we do not know.

While in her testimony:
Condi Rice can't recall...will get back to...issued alerts that no one recieved...and praised Clarke, a man whom some in her administration and party thought had perjured himself...while she told the same story...

While yesterday:
Donald Rumsfield stated that we will take back towns alongside free Iraqi's who had...turned over their weapons, flack jackets, and equipment, and offices to insurgents.

Where is Mark Twain when you need him?

No, Daniel, it's in the real world that people think that a briefing on Bin Laden determined to attack the United States would mean that we should worry about an attack within the united states.

in the parallel world of bush-enabling, a series of warnings and chatter and a briefing that contains information about al qaeda hijacking jets and determined to attack of course means - nothing. It's history. It's reporting.

Denial is a powerful force indeed, and the bush years have given us a marvelous public display of exactly how powerful it is.

Along the same lines was the "233 days" mantra, which probably impresses people who don't happen to remember that new Presidents often have a "first 100 days" program for things they think are particularly important, as well as the remarkable statement I heard as an excerpt where she was talking about the "structural problems" that they couldn't fix in 233 days, but fixed "immediately" after 9/11. Well, why couldn't they have fixed at least some of them after the August 6 briefing?

There was also an interesting rhetorical device I heard relative to whether there was a "silver bullet" that could have "prevented 9/11". Rice seemed to be trying to frame the argument in terms of "nobody could have prevented 9/11, so don't blame us because it happened". That's a tremendously weaselly argument; I'm willing to posit that 9/11 would have been hard to prevent in any case, but that's why what I really want to know is whether they did any reasonable things to try to prevent it. And the answer seems to be a resounding "no" at this point.

To me, this testimony only made the administration look worse. It's not plausible any more to think that they were fixated on other things and were not getting information about the AQ threat. Now we know that they were getting that information and still ignoring it.

Another problem with Rice's claim that all the attacks had been overseas is the report - not denied by anyone - that the Clinton administration foiled an attack on the Los Angeles airport. But then, like New York, California is a blue state, so it's overseas culturally, even on another world from that of the average Bushie.

One question that Ben-Veniste didn't ask but should have:

"Why did John Ashcroft announce in June 2001 that he was no longer taking commercial aircraft for security reasons?"

Another:

"Can you explain reports that Pentagon personnel canceled flights on commercial aircraft the day before 9-11 for security reasons?"

Well, maybe they can ask Ashcroft himself next week.

http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm

torsor12: you may well be right. Fortunately, it looks like we'll have the PDB soon enough.

But if you've got a non-public document like this, with two people making public statements about it, then my money is on the one who's trying hardest to avoid the document being released. Think about it. Ben-Veniste has read the PDB. Let's say they declassify it, and it does turn out to be a history less. Boy, isn't "Ben" going to look stupid then, huh?

Guess we'll know soon.

This is the crux of the matter: Given the increased chatter, given the information, schetchy thought it was, given the title of the August 6 PDB, what if any steps were taken? Was anything done at all? What directives did the President issue? What guidance did he offer?

WHY DID HE THINK IT WAS OKAY TO GO ON A MONTH'S VACATION?

If the Big Dog had still been President, things would have been better handled. By a lot.

It is apparent that Condi Rice--who is smart but not wise--has a real hot button with that particular August 6 PDB. She is repeating, I bet, an adopted defense of the charge that she ignored the article's key message about Al Qaeda turning its attention to the US Homeland for the first time. The line that "the article contained no new threat information" is typical of the lame response the Intelligence Community gets when it writes a piece that asks the policy level to THINK about something of overarching importance--and what reasonably struck the IC as an historic milestone on August 6: "They are coming after us on our own turf now, not striking our interests overseas".

Rice presents a picture of a remarkably passive and reactve national security director, who thinks the Administration has no obligation to act unless the evidence is so obvious even a three year old would recognize it. I know where this atitude came from: her boss has the same mindset.

Get these people out of here.

Is this a warning or a historical document?
The Department of Defense Announced Today ...

http://undelay.org/2004_04_01_arch#108150836397972023

Let us assume for the moment that Rice honestly believes that the August 6 PDB was just "a historical document." Her defense is still worthless.

The PDB was not issued in a vacuum. There had been two whole months of intelligence pointing to something "spectacular" coming along. The PDB was obviously issued against this background.

Stupid people are unable to connect serial events. Bush may be a dolt, but Rice is certainly able to look at the pattern from May, 2001 up until the August 6 PDB and conclude that more rigorous security steps are in order.

Yet, she (and the rest of the administration) did nothing. As Gourlich (sp?) pointed out, the administration has been unable to produce any documentation whatever to support its contention that it steps were taken.

I think the proper term here is criminal negligence.

I find the troll-free format very pleasing. Even though I do enjoy insulting them, this is much more interesting. I imagine all of them back on their ranches cutting brush and doing other manly shit.

I hape someone with more readers than I have points out that Clarke and Rice were talking about exactly the same thing. Rice was talking about how it was impossible to do anything because of structural problems, and Clarke was talking about how the Bush administration rejected and ignored his attempts to do something about these structural problems. When he talked about going into crisis mode, he was proposing an active response to these problems, but whoever he talked to (Rice, ultimately Bush, maybe Cheney, maybe Rumsfeld, maybe Ashcroft maybe Card) suppressed his proposal. Rice really played right into Clarke's hands, though I don't know if anyone in the media or the Democratic party picked up on that.

Torsor12, because of the 10-minute limitation, you have to piece together evidence. Don't forget that Bob Kerry also cited the 8/6/01 PDB and he noted that the FBI was concerned about signs of a domstic hijacking.

Now unless Kerry was lying, then Rice was. Given that Rice has a propensity to lie under pressure, something we have plenty of evidence of (go see the Center for American Progress for a working list), and given that she didn't bother to read the entire 94-page NIE on Iraq, why should we believe that she's telling the truth? Maybe she didn't read the entire PDB, short as it was?

The testimony proves that the inertia within the bureaucracy invites dereliction. Languid conditions exist at the working level no matter which party occupies the seat of power. The FBI working level was probably minding the store by attending superflous meetings, updating their marksmanship, and engaging in other feckless activities.The 2 recent CIA-agent spy convictions indicate that there is ample time for distractions/digressions from taskings. It seems that FBI management either doesn't know what the working level is producing, doesn't know how to extract desired production, doesn't know how to assign and evaluate production of forward-looking intelligence, won't fire drunks and slugs. The production priority of "historical documents" needs to be replaced by production of action papers.

Why oh why do we handsomely employ such dolts at the working and management levels? Because the Civil Service Personnel Policies require it or -- is it inertia in Personnel Evaluations? My guess is that the bureaucracy is very comfortable. It is the inertia within the system. Somewhere heads should roll within the FBI and CIA.

The title of the PDB is irrelevant, as Rice noted everyone knew bin Laden would like to hit us. And, the document was produced in response to the President's concerns about an attack in the U.S.

No one on the Commission contradicted her on the specifics of what she claimed is in it. Had ben Veniste been able to, he would have. Meaning, Rice is telling the truth that there were no specific threats identified about attacks in the U.S.

And there is no way any proposals to reform FISA or tear down the wall of separation between FBI and CIA was going to fly prior to 9-11. In fact, the Patriot Act which did revise the language for getting search warrants under FISA is still being roundly criticized by...among others, John Kerry.

" because of the 10-minute limitation, you have to piece together evidence."

And if you waste three of those minutes patronizing the witness by saying she's a credit to her race, and venting about the combat in Iraq, you have even less reason to lament the witness "filibustering" when she's only trying to answer your question.

I hope Bruce Moomaw liked the part when Condi complimented Kerrey on a speech he'd given a few years earlier. Because she's referring to his "strategic" thinking in saying something I've been telling this group for quite some time now:

MR. KERREY: "Invade Iraq and liberate 24 million Iraqis. That’s what I’d do.

....

"-- look, I mean we spend at least $2 billion a year on a military strategy right now. We’ve got a no-fly zone in the north, a no-fly zone in the south, and guess what? bin Laden’s first attack on Khobar Towers in 1996 occurred because we had military forces in Saudi Arabia after Desert Storm."

I get livid when Rice tells us she did not know "time, place, mode, who, .." of attacks. This specificity is intellectually dishonest. How could someone so given to this kind of dishonesty ever succeed in academia, much less a place like Stanford?

The 8/6/01 PDB probably was a "historical document" with "no new information" and did not contain "specific threats."

Now, let's define historical, new, and specific in Condi-speak. Does historical mean "they've done it before" or "a re-hash of this summer's intelligence"? Same thing with new- did the PDB simply pull together various strands that had been circulating during the first part of the summer but not add any new (i.e. uncovered after 8/5/01) bits? And how specific does intel need to be to cross the threshold- a GPS locator and the secret handshake, if you will.

Nobody called Condi on the specifics because they can't- it's classified. But the commission members do know what "historical" means in terms of this PDB.

We have heard her words, now let the Post, Times, et al find out what those words mean.

I'm sorry, my Lefty friends, but the Republicans have again Rope-a-doped you guys.

We've brilliantly used your hyper partisan aggressiveness to turn Condi into a political force to be reckoned with. It would not be surprising to me if the Democrat simpletons on the 911 Commission might have boosted her all the way to the Whitehouse.

Could you imagine a Hilary v Condi race for the Big House?

Adrian CP

I suppose Condi wanted, Patrick Sullivan, a PDB that said "19 Al Qaeda hijackers will commandeer four commercial aircraft on September 11 and attempt to fly them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol, traumatizing the entire nation. Attached is a 37 page memo verifying all of our sources, an affadavit from Osama admitting to the plot, as well as our draft assessment of the lawsuit that probably will be filed by the victims several weeks after the tragedy due to White House negligence." Is that specific enough to act on?

Seriously, it is the passivity Condi exemplifies that disturbs me. She really doesn't think she has to think and act--except when the evidence is so specific and in-your-face that there is no choice. This is not what you call leadership, and it's not what you call judgment.

My $.02.

The title is missing a verb:
"Bin Laden (is) Determined To Attack Inside the United States." Would seem the most likely...
Or, to bend over backwards, it could be "Bin Laden (had been) Determined To Attack Inside the United States."
No need to worry!

"It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting." Does't that historical information based on old reporting itself warn of new attacks to any thoughtful person?

Yep, I saw the part where she (correctly) zinged Kerrey for also saying that the proper response to the Cole attack might have been to invade Iraq. I also clearly remember the proposal -- made by William Safire in the NY Times just a few months after the attack -- that a workable intermediate course of action might be for the US to invade and occupy just Shiite Iraq (or a large part of it) -- thereby sealing off what was left of Saddam's regime from any ability to invade Saudi Arabia and also cutting him off from most of his remaining oil revenues, by setting up an occupational regime vastly easier and cheaper for us to run than trying to occupy the unfriendly Sunni section of the country.

Of course, I'm also flabbergasted by the apparently shared beliefs of Sullivan and Kerrey that Bin Laden would have been deterred from attacking the US merely because the US pulled its troops out of Saudi Arabia. That, after all, was merely one of his propaganda points for Moslem consumption. He has much bigger fish to fry, and said so at the time.

No matter how many excuses you try to make for it, the crazy hubris of the Bush Neocons' belief that Iraq could be EASILY AND CHEAPLY occupied and reformed had a disastrous effect on US military and strategic planning. If Kerrey actually did share that belief, the more fool he. Lots of other Bush opponents did not share it.

As for homing in on the central -- and gaping -- holes in Rice's testimony: Fred Kaplan and William Saletan have done a much better job of summing those up than I could:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098499/
http://slate.msn.com/id/2098500/

Summing up: she and Bush were entirely correct in solemnly announcing that, if Bin Laden had been thoughtful enough to send a telegram announcing his precise plans, they would have tried to stop him. Since he didn't, she felt no obligation whatsoever to order any response to the extremely high-intensity warnings US intelligence was receiving that something was in the offing, to try and actually find out what the attack plan might possibly be. After all, surely that's not the job of an NSA...

(Kaplan and Saletan aren't alone: see the Washington Post's surprisingly tough-minded editorial: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62952-2004Apr8.html . For that matter, see George Will's column in the same issue last night declaring that there really isn't that much conflict between Rice's and Clarke's expressed views, and that what they both show was that the government was seriously slow on the ball under both Clinton and Bush: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63010-2004Apr8.html ).

" Of course, I'm also flabbergasted by the apparently shared beliefs of Sullivan and Kerrey that Bin Laden would have been deterred from attacking the US merely because the US pulled its troops out of Saudi Arabia."

I'm flabbergasted that anyone would construct such a strawman and think I'd let it stand. Nowhere did I suggest any such thing.

" she felt no obligation whatsoever to order any response to the extremely high-intensity warnings US intelligence was receiving that something was in the offing, to try and actually find out what the attack plan might possibly be. After all, surely that's not the job of an NSA... "

Just exactly what should she have done?

My question is: why, if the title of the PDB had nothing to do with its contents, were they wasting preznit's time with it? Did they have to put a scary title on to get him to come to the meeting, but then they didn't want to scare him back to the bottle by telling him what was really going down?

Patrick, playing his usual games: what she should have done is screamed. loudly. What she should not have done is assumed it was someone else's job.

The PDB, don't forget, occurs in the context (although Patrick loves decontextualized information) of the "chatter" that is being cited on a regular basis. What kind of dimwit says "well, i'm sure the fbi and the cia are on it, and this chatter - it's just chatter."

As for Patrick's mischaracterization of commission questioning - no, it wasn't patronizing - well, that's just par for the course with him.

Adrian, you are kidding, right? You don't really expect us to take you seriously, do you? Rice was credible to those who already are bush-enablers; she didn't do much for anyone else. She certainly didn't demonstrate that she has the leadership, the decision-making, the analytical judgement, or the political skills to continue on in her own job, much less as the president.

Anyhow, how is it possible that in a responsiblity administration, an NSA who didn't read the full NIE on Iraq wasn't fired ASAP?

Condi and Bob Graham are on the same page:

------------endquote-----------
May 27, 2002, ...

Sen. Bob Graham (D.-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told HUMAN EVENTS May 21 that his committee had received all the same terrorism intelligence prior to September 11 as the Bush administration.

"Yes, we had seen all the information," said Graham. "But we didn't see it on a single piece of paper, the way the President did."

Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen earlier. "The particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing that day was about three years old," Graham said. "It was not a contemporary piece of information."
--------endquote-----------

"Patrick, playing his usual games: what she should have done is screamed."

Because she's a girl?

What would've been accomplished by screaming?

Yes, the PDB was just a bunch of vague, non-specific, historical information, which nonetheless must be kept top secret at all costs for national security's sake.

I marvel at the amount of effort wingers such as PS put into constructing their logical castles in the air. He should really be compensated for his efforts.

My dear Pat, you quoted Kerrey's speech with the obvious intention of hanging me through guilt by association with him. Rest assured that I regard his beliefs regarding Iraq, as expressed in that speech, as being every bit as harebrained as the Bush Administration's. (And I'm geting a little tired of your engaging in precisely this cute little trick and then whining that I'm "constructing a strawman" when I point your attempted trick out. The person who consistently constructs strawmen and then drags them into this space is, of course, you.)

As for what Rice "should" have done at that meeting: would it be asking too much for you to actually read the Fred Kaplan "Slate" piece that I linked to? He's quite explicit on the subject. So were Saletan and the Washington Post editorial. What she should NOT have done was what she did: sit around and wait for someone else to order a more thorough investigation of the increasingly serious rumors.

From William Saletan's very useful glossary of Ricean Doublespeak ( http://slate.msn.com/id/2098500/ ):

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."

SPECIFIC INFORMATION: The precise, useful information the administration didn't get, thereby absolving it of responsibility. Example: "On Aug. 6, 2001, the president's intelligence briefing … referred to uncorroborated reporting, from 1998, that a terrorist might attempt to hijack a U.S. aircraft in an attempt to blackmail the government into releasing U.S.-held terrorists. … This briefing item was not prompted by any specific threat information."

BRIEFING: Addition to a warning, without which the warning is insufficient. Example: "To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us."

RECOMMENDATION: Addition to a briefing, without which the briefing is insufficient. Example: "In the memorandum that Dick Clarke sent me on Jan. 25, he mentions sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done about them."

HISTORICAL: Communications that mentioned the past and were therefore irrelevant to the future. Example: "The Aug. 6 PDB [president's daily briefing] …was not a particular threat report. And there was historical information in there about various aspects of al-Qaida's operations. … This was not a warning. This was a historic memo."

See also Saletan's other 16 entries in the Glossary.

As for what she should have done at the time of the August briefing: since Pat Sullivan is apprently incapable of following my links, it looks like I'll have to quote most of Fred Kaplan's article here.

"Ben-Veniste brought up the much-discussed PDB—the president's daily briefing by CIA Director George Tenet—of Aug. 6, 2001. For the first time, he revealed the title of that briefing: 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States.'

"Rice insisted this title meant nothing. The document consisted of merely 'historical information' about al-Qaida—various plans and attacks of the past. 'This was not a "threat report," ' she said. It 'did not warn of any coming attack inside the United States.' Later in the hearing, she restated the point: 'The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says Bin Laden would like to attack the United States.'

"To call this distinction 'academic' would be an insult to academia.

"Rice acknowledged that throughout the summer of 2001 the CIA was intercepting unusually high volumes of 'chatter' about an impending terrorist strike. She quoted from some of this chatter: 'attack in near future,' 'unbelievable news coming in weeks,' "a very, very, very big uproar.' She said some 'specific' intelligence indicated the attack would take place overseas. However, she noted that very little of this intelligence was specific; most of it was 'frustratingly vague.' In other words (though she doesn't say so), most of the chatter might have been about a foreign or a domestic attack—it wasn't clear.

"Given that Richard Clarke, the president's counterterrorism chief, was telling her over and over that a domestic attack was likely, she should not have dismissed its possibility. Now that we know the title of the Aug. 6 PDB, we can go further and conclude that she should have taken this possibility very, very seriously. Putting together the facts may not have been as simple as adding 2 + 2, but it couldn't have been more complicated than 2 + 2 + 2.

"The Aug. 6 briefing itself remains classified. Ben-Veniste urged Rice to get it declassified, saying the full document would reveal that even the premise of her analysis is flawed. The report apparently mentions not historical but 'ongoing' FBI precautions. Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey added that the PDB also reports that the FBI was detecting a 'pattern of activity, inside the United States, consistent with hijacking.'

"Responding to Ben-Veniste, Rice acknowledged that Clarke had told her that al-Qaida had 'sleeper cells' inside the Untied States. But, she added, 'There was no recommendation that we do anything' about them. She gave the same answer when former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a Republican and outspoken Bush defender restated the question about sleeper cells. There was, Rice said, 'no recommendation of what to do about it.' She added that she saw 'no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing' these cells.

"Here Rice revealed, if unwittingly, the roots—or at least some roots—of failure. Why did she need a recommendation to do something? Couldn't she make recommendations herself? Wasn't that her job? Given the huge spike of traffic about a possible attack (several officials have used the phrase 'hair on fire' to describe the demeanor of those issuing the warnings), should she have been satisfied with the lack of any sign that the FBI wasn't tracking down the cells? Shouldn't she have asked for positive evidence that it was tracking them down?

"Former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer posed the question directly: Wasn't it your responsibility to make sure that the word went down the chain, that orders were followed up by action?

"Just as the Bush administration has declined to admit any mistakes, Condi Rice declined to take any responsibility. No, she answered, the FBI had that responsibility. Crisis management? That was Dick Clarke's job. '[If] I needed to do anything,' she said, 'I would have been asked to do it. I was not asked to do it.'

"Jamie Gorelick, a former assistant attorney general (and thus someone who knows the ways of the FBI), drove the point home. The commission's staff has learned, she told Rice, that the high-level intelligence warnings were not sent down the chain of command. The secretary of transportation had no idea about the threat-chatter nor did anyone at the Federal Aviation Administration. FBI field offices and special agents also heard nothing about it. Yes, FBI headquarters sent out a few messages, but have you seen them? Gorelick asked. 'They are feckless,' she went on. 'They don't tell anybody anything. They don't put anybody at battle stations.'

"Bob Kerrey was blunter still. 'One of the first things I learned when I came into this town,' he said, 'was that CIA and FBI don't talk to each other.' It has long been reported that regional agents deep inside the FBI wrote reports about strange Arabs taking flight lessons and that analysts inside the CIA were reporting that Arab terrorists might be inside the United States. If both pieces of information were forced up to the tops of their respective bureaucracies, couldn't someone have put them together? 'All it had to do was be put on intel links and the game's over,' Kerrey said, perhaps a bit dramatically, the conspiracy 'would have been rolled up.'

"This was one of Clarke's most compelling points. In his book, testimony, and several TV interviews, Clarke has argued that the Clinton administration thwarted al-Qaida's plot to set off bombs at Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium because intelligence reports of an impending terrorist attack were discussed at several meetings of Cabinet secretaries. Knowing they'd have to come back and tell the president what they were doing to prevent an attack, these officials went back to their departments and 'shook the trees' for information. When Bush came to power, Rice retained Clarke and his counterterrorism crew, but she demoted their standing; terrorism was now discussed (and, even then, rarely) at meetings of deputy secretaries, who lacked the same clout and didn't feel the same pressure.

"Rice's central point this morning, especially in her opening statement, was that nobody could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. The problem, she argued, was cultural (a democratic aversion to domestic intelligence gathering) and structural (the bureaucratic schisms between the FBI and the CIA, among others). But this is the analysis of a political scientist, not a policymaker. Culture and bureaucracies form the backdrop against which officials perceive threats, devise options, and make choices. It is good that Rice, a political scientist by training, recognized that this backdrop can place blinders and constraints on decision-makers. But her job as a high-ranking decision-maker is to strip away the blinders and maneuver around the constraints. This is especially so given that she is the one decision-maker who is supposed to coordinate the views of the various agencies and present them as a coherent picture to the president of the United States. Her testimony today provides disturbing evidence that she failed at this task—failed even to understand that it was part of her job description."

It's not MY job...

That last paragraph of Kaplan's, by the way, is in precise agreement with George Will's Post column on the matter last night: the whole purpose of leaders is to be energetic enough to successfully "stir the fudge". If they aren't, they're not leaders.

More on Condoleeza "It's Not My Job" Rice from Noam Scheiber (who', you'll recall, is not particularly fond of John Kerry):

http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml?pid=1541
_____________________________

This is probably not the most novel point, but watching Condoleezza Rice testify before the 9/11 Commission this morning I was amazed at how much of her defense of the administration hinged on such a literal interpretation of responsibility. Rice argues that the White House would have "moved heaven and earth" to prevent the 9/11 attacks had someone, somewhere just told them exactly when and where the attacks were going to take place. Because no one did, the administration cannot be considered negligent.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that the administration could have prevented the attacks. But there's obviously a lot of territory between acting on highly specific intelligence that happens to fall in your lap and doing everything in your power to defend the country against a horrific terrorist attack. Just being willing to do the former doesn't necessarily imply that you're doing the latter.

This line of defense was obviously developed to defend the administration against the specific charge, leveled by Dick Clarke and others, that the White House didn't respond appropriately to the spike in "chatter" in July of 2001 hinting at an attack. Rice, in her opening statement, explained that:

"The threat reporting that we received in the Spring and Summer of 2001 was not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack. Almost all of the reports focused on al-Qaida activities outside the United States, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, the information that was specific enough to be actionable referred to terrorist operations overseas. More often, it was frustratingly vague. Let me read you some of the actual chatter that we picked up that Spring and Summer:

" 'Unbelievable news in coming weeks'

" 'Big event ... there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar'

" 'There will be attacks in the near future'

"Troubling, yes. But they don't tell us when; they don't tell us where; they don't tell us who; and they don't tell us how."

I'm no intelligence expert, but if I were picking up a series of transmissions indicating a "very, very, very, very" big attack, the fact that these transmissions didn't tell me when and where the attack was going to happen would not make me sleep better at night. It would make me want to do everything I could to figure out where and when the attacks were going to occur. This seems to me one of the pillars of Clarke's critique of the administration--and, judging from the questioning, that of commissioners like former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer--and I have a hard time seeing how Rice's testimony rebutted it.

(This was not, incidentally, a single, isolated comment culled from the testimony. Rice repeatedly suggested that the administration would have done more had it had specific information--the implication being that it could not have done more since it didn't have that information. Rice even went so far as to say she "wasn't asked" by Clarke's counterterrorism group or the FBI to take additional action in response to the rise in chatter. Lady, you're the National Security Adviser! Is it really much of a defense to say you never got any specific instructions from the people below you on the organizational depth chart? At the very least, why not press them to see what kind of instructions they might offer if they were going to offer instructions?)

"White House may not declassify all of August 2001 Presidential briefing":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64562-2004Apr9.html

One of the more interesting things about CondiSleaza Ricin's testimony was the unwillingness to acknowledge or God forbid, unawareness of the al Qaeda plot to hijack planes and crash them into the ocean. In addition, the Egypt Air Crash in 98 (99?), has, in retrospect, taken on a far more sinister air, especially since the last words on the recorder were "Allah u Ahkbar". That the Nat Sec Advisor would be clueless about this sort of thing makes me want to get my passport ready to flee to Brazil.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Bush-Memo.html?ex=1081569600&en=b7e2b4b744cd64ac&ei=5059&partner=AOL :

"President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo.

"The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 -- a month before the Sept. 11 attacks -- said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press.

"The same month as that briefing of Bush, U.S. intelligence officials received two uncorroborated reports suggesting terrorists might use airplanes, including one that suggested al-Qaida operatives were considering flying a plane into a U.S. embassy, current and former government officials said.

"Those August 2001 reports -- among thousands of varied and uncorroborated threats received by the government each month -- weren't deemed credible enough to tell the president or his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the officials said. Neither involved the eventual Sept. 11 plot.

"The sources who read the presidential memo would only speak on condition of anonymity because the White House has not yet declassified the highly sensitive document, entitled ' "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States." '...

"The sources said the presidential memo included a series of bullet items that brought Bush through a history of mostly uncorroborated intelligence that cited al-Qaida's interest in hijacking planes to win the release of Islamic extremists who had been arrested in 1998 and 1999 as well as the trips of suspected al-Qaida operatives, including some U.S. citizens, in and out of the United States. It suggested al-Qaida might have a support system in place on U.S. soil, the sources said.

"The document also included FBI analytical judgments that some al-Qaida activities were consistent with preparation for airline hijackings or other types of attacks, some members of the commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks said earlier this week.

"The second-to-last bullet told the president that there were numerous -- at least 70 -- terror-related investigations under way by the FBI in 2001 involving matters or people on U.S. soil, the sources said.

"And the final bullet told the president of a recent intelligence report indicating al-Qaida operatives were trying to get inside the United States to carry out an attack with explosives, the sources said. There was no specifics about the timing or target, the sources said.

"The sources said the briefing memo did not provide the exact date of that intelligence but made clear it was in the 2001 time frame, and that FBI and other agencies were investigating it. The information had been provided to intelligence and law enforcement agencies well before Bush's briefing, the sources said.

"They said the final bullet in the presidential memo was based on an intelligence report received in May 2001 that indicated bin Laden operatives were trying to cross from Canada into the United States for an attack.

"A joint congressional inquiry report into the Sept. 11 failures first divulged the existence of the May 2001 threat report last year but did not reveal it was included in Bush's briefing. The congressional inquiry described the intelligence this way:

" 'In May 2001, the Intelligence Community obtained information that supporters of Osama bin Laden were reportedly planning to infiltrate the United States via Canada in order to carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives.'

"In her testimony Thursday to the Sept. 11 commission, Rice described Bush's Aug. 6 daily briefing as including mostly 'historical information' and said most threat information in the summer of 2001 involved overseas targets.

"Rice also testified that she did not recall seeing any warnings before Sept. 11 that a plane might be used a terrorist weapon, though it was possible others in the White House did.

"Current and former government officials familiar with terrorism intelligence told the AP that in the same month Bush received his briefing, U.S. intelligence received two uncorroborated reports -- among hundreds -- suggesting terrorist might use planes but that neither reached the president or Rice.

"The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said one report in August 2001 said there was uncorroborated information that two bin Laden operatives had met in October 2000 to discuss a plot to attack the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi using an airplane.

"That report stated the operative would either bomb the embassy using the airplane or drive the airplane into it, according to information provided congressional investigators and cited in their report released last year.

"Separately, the CIA sent a warning to the Federal Aviation Administration in August 2001 asking the agency to advise commercial airliners that six Pakistanis in Latin America, not connected to al-Qaida, were considering a hijacking, bombing or sabotage of an airliner. That warning did not have specifics on a time or location but said it could involve Britain, Canada, Mexico, Malaysia, Cuba, among others, according to information made public by the congressional inquiry.

"Rice stated emphatically on Thursday she did not see any such reports about al-Qaida using a plane as a weapon until after Sept. 11, suggesting the intelligence may have reached someone lower in the White House."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/politics/10PANE.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position= :

"President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.

"The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a 'closely held intelligence report' that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.

"The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was 'historical' in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.

"The Congressional report last year, citing efforts by Al Qaeda operatives beginning in 1997 to attack American soil, said operatives appeared to have a support structure in the United States and that intelligence officials had 'uncorroborated information' that Mr. Bin Laden 'wanted to hijack airplanes' to gain the release of imprisoned extremists. It also said that 'a group of Bin Laden supporters was planning attacks in the United States with explosives.' "

Meanwhile, the White House has leaked a classified memo from Richard Clarke to the Times purporting to indicate that the FBI failed to act on Administration orders to keep a sharper eye on suspected Moslem terrorists within US borders.

I was just reminded that W's stem-cell speech was given on the 7th of August. Many people at the time commented on his "deer-in-the-headlight" appearance while delivering that speech. Was he still scared shitless by what he had just learned the day before?

" My dear Pat, you quoted Kerrey's speech with the obvious intention of hanging me through guilt by association with him."

Wrong, as usual. I quoted him to associate him with ME.

Btw, in the mountain of words you've produced there is nothing--repeat: NOTHING--saying what Condi should have done in response to all this "chatter", that wasn't already being done by Dick Clarke.

Sorry Pat actually it does. And even if it didn't she shouldn't need a safe to fall on her to realize something is wrong and act. That's what a NSA is getting paid for.
You've got to take responsibility some time.

The 6 Aug. PDB document was released today with minor redactions. As I read it, the content is consistent with the Rice statement before the 911 Commission:

Rice: (in response to abusive questioning by Ben-Veniste) “You said did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.”

The document contains no new information that would prompt an action on the part of Rice. However, I agree that in general, the current and as well as past administrations have been timid in dealing with both the internal and external terror threat against the US. But as far as the 911 commission goes, it looks mainly like grandstanding by politicians.

Sorry fellas, here's the last paragraph of the PDB:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001900364_webbushmemo10.html

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

Clarke was telling her he was working with the FBI on these. Was he lying?

There's a useful contrast for those who might believe Rice didn't have enough specific information about when/where/etc: remember the Office of Special Plans, created because Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz didn't believe the CIA was looking at the data about a possible connection between AQ & Saddam carefully enough? You can't really dispute the fact that the neocon cadre pushed and pushed the bureaucracy to yield what it wanted, and went around it when it didn't. Don't you believe, Patrick, that if the "chatter" had been about Saddam they would have made more of an effort to get to the bottom of the intel? Shake the trees? The problem wasn't with the lack of information; the problem was that the people processing said information had blinders on.

A. Zarkov: "Rice: (in response to abusive questioning by Ben-Veniste) 'You said did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.' "

It explicitly warned of possible near-future attacks inside the US (that is, Rice was lying). It said that Al Qaida was interested in hijacking US jetliners for unspecified purposes. it said that Al Qaida agents were inspecting buildings in NYC for possible destruction. And it said that Al Qaida had expessed interest in attacking targets in Washington.

As for Patrick's attitude toward Bob Kerrey: I take it, then, that Patrick agrees with him that the proper thing to do in response to the attck on the Cole was to immediately invade Iraq, for the harebrained reason Kerrey gave -- namely, that once we got our troops out of Saudi Arabia Al Qaida would be totally uninterested in attacking us any more?

"Btw, in the mountain of words you've produced there is nothing--repeat: NOTHING--saying what Condi should have done in response to all this 'chatter', that wasn't already being done by Dick Clarke."

See Kaplan, Saletan and Scheiber on that subject. (I'm interested in your direct response to their critiques.)

Sullivan: "Sorry fellas, here's the last paragraph of the PDB:

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

"Clarke was telling her he was working with the FBI on these. Was he lying?"

Well, why don't we find out? It is, after all, Clarke who announced on TV that ALL of his E-mails to and from Rice should be declassified, and it's the White House that has been stubbornly resisting that suggestion. As I've said before: if he's bluffing, he's certainly doing a spectacular job of it -- and if the White House isn't bluffing, it's behaving in a very odd fashion.

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