Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Sadly, not surprised at all.

Is that all there was to the PDB, Or are we seeing a very heavily redacted version of a few of the pages, and nothing al all of the rest?

My guess is that you've seen about all. It could be that updates from staffers are limited to fit on a 3x6 hard card ... substantive brevity.

Kevin Drum is clearly wrong. Releasing it on 9-12-01 would have let the Al Qaeda cell in the UAE know there was a traitor in their midst. And the cell in NYC would have learned that they'd been observed casing federal buildings in that city.

Just to name two.

Patrick is right, this would have endangered national security on 9-12-01.

Also, releasing it now is endangering national security.

Now all our enemies know a) that our president is so incurious that memos on crucial topics like terrorism have to be restricted to one page, b) that PDBs may be so poorly written as to have no thesis or conclusion statement and to state many facts ambigiously (this may be partially driven by the need to squeeze the facts into a single page), and c) that 9-11 went off without a hitch despite all the advanced evidence of it.

The real liars are Dick Clarke and his Democrat puppet masters. Clarke's book has significant errors about the millenium bomb attempt.

Was it "shaking trees" or shaking knees that led to the arrest of convicted millennium terrorist Ahmed Ressam?

As former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke tells it in his book "Against All Enemies," an international alert to be on the lookout for terrorists played a role in Ressam's capture at a Port Angeles ferry terminal in December 1999, his car loaded with bomb-making material.

But national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in her testimony before the Sept. 11 commission last week, discounted Clarke's version and credited a savvy U.S. customs agent, Diana Dean.

Dean stopped Ressam because "she sniffed something about Ressam. They saw that something was wrong" — not because of some security alert, Rice testified.

The debate over Ressam's capture encapsulates the controversy between Clarke and the Bush administration over which president — Clinton or Bush — took the threat of al-Qaida more seriously, and whether either administration did enough before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Disputing Clarke's claim, Rice testified customs agents "weren't actually on alert."

At least one of the agents who helped apprehend Ressam sides with Rice's version of events.

Moreover, others involved in the Ressam case say Clarke's book contains factual errors and wrongly implies national-security officials knew of Ressam's plan to set a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport long before they actually did.

"I've found the exchange over Ressam one of the more interesting aspects of this debate," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign-policy studies and homeland security at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "This whole 'shaking-the-trees' concept has become fascinating," he said, referring to the notion that law enforcement was on the lookout for terrorists.

Ressam's arrest came on President Clinton's watch. Early that month, Clarke wrote in his book, the United States had learned terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden were planning as many as 15 attacks on Americans worldwide as the millennium approached.

Clarke, who worked for both Clinton and Bush, said he convened the Counter-terrorism Security Group, which he chaired, and sent out warnings both overseas and to local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies around the country to be on heightened alert for suspicious activity. "And then we waited," he wrote.

"The break came in an unlikely location," Clarke wrote, describing Ressam's arrest by customs agents during a "routine screening."

According to a former customs agent who was involved, Clarke's version, laid out in one chapter of his book, wrongly implies they were on "heightened alert" and somehow looking for terrorists.

"No," was the terse reply of Michael Chapman, one of the customs agents who arrested Ressam, when asked if he was aware of a security alert.

"We were on no more alert than we're always on. That is a matter of public record," said Chapman, now a Clallam County commissioner.

A review of the trial testimony of Chapman, Dean and two other U.S. customs agents involved in the arrest turned up no reference to a security alert.

Rather, it supports Chapman's assessment that agents thought Ressam was smuggling drugs when they opened the trunk of his rental car and found bags of white powder buried in the spare-tire well. Only after finding several plastic black boxes, containing watches wired to circuit boards, did anyone suspect a bomb.

Dean has said repeatedly she singled Ressam out for a closer look because he was nervous, fumbling and sweating. Ressam has since told agents he was sick, and federal sources have confirmed Ressam had apparently gotten malaria while at terrorist-training camps in Afghanistan.

Clarke's version of that night contains other errors. Some of them are minor. But one implies national-security officials knew more about Ressam's plans than they could have at the time:

• Clarke wrote that Ressam bolted and left his car on the ferry. In fact, Ressam drove off the ferry and ran when he was stopped for inspection.

• Clarke reported Dean ran after Ressam. Actually, two other agents gave chase.

• More significantly, Clarke wrote that agents had found "explosives and a map of the Los Angeles International Airport" in the car, implying the threat to the airport was known almost immediately.

There was no map in the car. A map of Greater Los Angeles was found days later in Ressam's apartment in Montreal. Nobody had a clue for nearly 11 months that Los Angeles was a target.

Circles scrawled on the map around three L.A.-area airports weren't found until October 2000, after the document had been turned over to the FBI. It wasn't until Ressam began cooperating in May 2001 that his actual target was known for sure.

In fact, in the weeks after Ressam's capture, officials in Seattle were so unsure about his actual target that then-Mayor Paul Schell canceled the city's popular New Year's Eve celebration at Seattle Center, thinking the Space Needle could be a target.

• Clarke reported Canadians had somehow "missed" the existence of Ressam's cell of radical Algerian Muslims in Montreal and that, after Ressam's arrest, the Canadian government cooperated.

According to testimony at Ressam's trial and interviews with Canadian intelligence officials, Ressam and the cell in Montreal had been under surveillance for at least two years before Ressam's arrest. But the Canadian Security Intelligence Service never told anyone.

U.S. prosecutors have complained bitterly about Canada's foot-dragging as the Ressam case proceeded. Canadian prosecutors blocked U.S. access to at least one crucial witness — an Algerian who gave Ressam a gun and talked about blowing up Jews in Montreal.

Indeed, the U.S. came within hours of dropping charges against Ressam on the eve of his March 2001 trial because the Canadian government attempted to withdraw the witnesses.

King County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez, who, in 2001, was one of three federal prosecutors who tried Ressam in Los Angeles, agreed some of Clarke's assertions "are not consistent with the evidence at trial."

Just curious what you think of this offering from The Smoking GUn:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0412042phoenix1.html

Adrian Spidle,

You left out the URL for your cut and paste:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001901197_ressam12m.html

"Adrian Spidle,

You left out the URL for your cut and paste:
Posted by liberal"

I've stopped referencing my posts on this blog for two reasons:

1 - Some well respected conservatives are imediately removed by God, and

2 - Some kneejerk lefties on this board start out their responses with "Everyone knows so and so is a homophobic, chicken hawk, greedy, extremist, lying, owned by big business, mother-raping idiot" and then they ignore the actual good points made by the reference in question.

Adrian who wasn't born last night

Adrian's cut-and-paste article is well-researched but unfortunately has all the ethics of the Media Research Center. Facts are cherry-picked to meet the pre-defined story. (In this way it is not unlike the way the Bush administration processes intelligence information.)

In reality Clark acknowledges the lucky catch by Dean. The difference he, and others, claim is that once the arrest was made it was not treated by higher ups as an isolated case, but rather as an example of something they were looking for. They used that as a springboard to find the rest of the gang.

But no point in arguing with Adrian. His choice of quotes puts him firmly in the Bush-can-do-no-wrong-and-don't-confuse-me-with-facts camp.

"Facts are cherry-picked to meet the pre-defined story..."

I've never seen a better description of Liberal Scholarship.

"But no point in arguing with Adrian. His choice of quotes puts him firmly in the Bush-can-do-no-wrong-and-don't-confuse-me-with-facts camp.

Posted by: Z"

I don't like Bush's "no child left behind" program or his Medicare drug program, and I'm afraid he's way too timid militarily.

Adrian

"Facts are cherry-picked to meet the pre-defined story..."

I've never seen a better description of Liberal Scholarship.

"But no point in arguing with Adrian. His choice of quotes puts him firmly in the Bush-can-do-no-wrong-and-don't-confuse-me-with-facts camp.

Posted by: Z"

I don't like Bush's "no child left behind" program or his Medicare drug program, and I'm afraid he's way too timid militarily.

Adrian

Nice site. Keep up the good work.

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