Haven't we had enough lies from our leaders about the war on terror? Apparently, the McCain campaign doesn't think so. They lit into Obama yesterday, trying to portray him as bad on terror, but the thing is, they did it by lying. And the Washington Post caught them. Here is what Team McCain claimed:
Tuesday, the McCain team drew a direct line between the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying that submitting the bombers to the criminal justice system was, in the words of former Navy secretary and 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, "a material cause" of the 2001 attacks. Lehman participated in the McCain conference call.
Lehman said grand jury evidence in the 1993 bombing was "put under seal" and not made available to the CIA, thus denying the agency timely access to information that "would have enabled many of the dots to be connected well before 9/11 and . . . give a good chance to have prevented" the later attack. In particular, he cited information concerning a connection between Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged ringleader of the 2001 attacks who is imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, and the bombing.
And here's what really happened:
But both the report of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated intelligence failures leading to the 2001 strikes, and the prosecutor of the 1993 case disagreed with Lehman's version of history. The commission's final report, which Lehman endorsed as a member of the panel, gives no indication that any failure to share information on the bombing with the intelligence community had "significance for the story of 9/11."
Instead, the report cites political and intelligence failures to understand the scope of the terrorist threat after the 1993 attack, as well as a failure to fully analyze the implications of the available information. It also blames the FBI and the CIA for failing to effectively communicate with each other, problems that were later addressed in the USA Patriot Act and the reorganization of the intelligence community.
Grand jury secrecy "could have operated in these cases as a barrier to information flowing from law enforcement to intelligence," former U.S. attorney Mary Jo White, who successfully prosecuted six major terrorism cases including the 1993 bombing, said Tuesday. But, she added, "as a matter of fact it did not."
White and several people involved in the 9/11 Commission disputed Lehman's assertion that "the CIA was not allowed to see that evidence." Lehman also described then-CIA Director George J. Tenet as "flabbergasted at what he found in that material" once it was made available to him. But Tenet made no such claim in his 2007 book.
Far from being unknown to the intelligence community, Mohammed was indicted in January 1996 in connection with a plot to blow up transpacific airliners. The congressional joint inquiry on the Sept. 11 plot strongly suggested that the intelligence community was well aware of Mohammed's terrorist activities, but that agencies were unduly focused on apprehending him in the airline case rather than on other plots still in the planning stages.
So now we need to hear from the McCain campaign as to why they just lied to the American people about September 11 and the war on terror. Haven't we had enough lies from Republican presidents?
I'm speechless. Bush has suddenly decided that it's time to catch Osama bin Laden. Conveniently in time for the presidential campaign. Last year, and the 5 years before that, it wasn't very high up on Bush's agenda, avenging the deaths of 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. But now that John McCain's presidential race, and Bush's legacy, are at stake, suddenly Bush is "ordering" his administration to catch Osama.
Republican "limited government" at its worst. From ABC:
Former FAA Inspector: TSA's Enforcement of Post-9/11 Laws 'Basically Nonexistent'
Thousands of foreign student pilots have been able to enroll and obtain pilot licenses from U.S. flight schools, despite tough laws passed in the wake of the 9/ll attacks, according to internal government documents obtained by ABC News.
"Some of the very same conditions that allowed the 9-11 tragedy to happen in the first place are still very much in existence today," wrote one regional security official to his boss at the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration.
"Thousands of aliens, some of whom may very well pose a threat to this country, are taking flight lessons, being granted FAA certifications and are flying planes," wrote the TSA official, Richard A. Horn, in 2005, complaining that the students did not have the proper visas.
Are we really any safer today, after all the "hard work" of the Bush Admin? Is the world a better place after invading Iraq, where there were no WMD or terrorists before 9/11?
Take a look these pro-surge propaganda ads by former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer's pro-Iraq war outfit Freedom's Watch (complete with an eagle on its front web page), they conflate Iraq with terrorism and 9/11 with a "They attacked us before -- and they will attack us again if we leave Iraq" message. Ads like this are running here in NC.
***
I took these grainy pictures of the WTC with my low-tech Palmpix camera on July 11, 2001, while on a business trip. They weren't the best quality and I almost deleted them at the time. I actually retrieved them from the very full trash folder on my hard drive that morning on 9/11 after hearing what happened.
NOTE FROM JOHN: To me, September 11 will always be the day that I sat in Washington, DC, watching the smoke from the Pentagon float across the horizon outside my living room window, wondering if the entire world was at war, while George Bush ran away and hid for the entire day. It will be the day that ABC's Peter Jenning, rightfully, three hours after the attacks, had to ask the White House, on the air, to consider letting us know that Bush was still alive and in control of the country:
"I don’t mean to say this in melodramatic terms, but where is the President of the United States?" Jennings wondered aloud when he realized that Air Force One should have already landed outside Washington, DC. "Pretty soon the country needs to know where he is."
What more can George Bush to do screw with the 9/11 families? It's bad enough that Bush stayed on vacation even after learning on August 6, 2001 that Bin Laden was "determined to attack in US." No, now he's trying to rub salt in their wounds by not inviting any of the families to the signing of the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations. (That's legislation the GOP Congress would never ever enact.)
Christ, even Lieberman tried to reason with his best friend to no avail. CQ Today (sub. req.) has the story:
Family members of Sept. 11 victims are unhappy they were not invited to Friday’s signing ceremony for legislation implementing recommendations of the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks.
Lawmakers who steered the measure through Congress will be on hand for the White House event, but expressed concern that family members who lobbied for the legislation will be absent.
“We would very much like to be by the president’s side as he shows his support by putting his signature on the bill,” said Carie Lemack, president of Families of Sept. 11. Her mother, Judy Larocque, was killed when the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center.
Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, appealed unsuccessfully to the White House on Thursday for a last-minute invitation to family members, according to Leslie Phillips, a spokeswoman for the senator.
No wonder Bush very much doesn't want to be anywhere near the 9/11 families. After all, Bush never caught the guy who masterminded the attacks. And, Al Qaeda, which Bush promised to destroy, has only gotten stronger.
We've all learned that invoking "September the 11th" and Al Qaeda are just political lines for Bush.
We've written about this before. The Bush administration lied to first responders in NYC after September 11, telling them that the air was safe (it wasn't). There was a hearing about it yesterday. Christie Todd Whitman, the former head of the EPA under Bush, took a lot of heat. The thing the article doesn't note is that the White House had a major hand in lying to the firefighters, cops and others who descended on Ground Zero to help. And Mr. Giuliani had a role as well.
An Environmental Protection Agency memo claims city and federal officials concealed data that showed lower Manhattan air was clouded with asbestos after the World Trade Center collapse.
And officials sat on the alarming information even as they told the public it was safe to return downtown, the internal memo says.
Testing by the city Department of Environmental Protection showed the air downtown had more than double the level of asbestos considered safe for humans, claimed federal EPA environmental scientist Cate Jenkins, who supplied the memo to The Post....
On Sept. 18, then-EPA administrator Christie Whitman said the public in lower Manhattan was not being exposed to "excessive levels of asbestos."
That same day, city testing data, some of which was later made public, showed asbestos levels 50 percent higher and more above what her agency considers safe, the memo states.
Whitman said at yesterday's hearing that we should blame the terrorists, not her (for a "moderate" Republican she sure does a great impression of Bush and Cheney). Last time I checked it was the Bush administration, Ms. Whitman, and Mr. Giuliani - and not Osama - who misled the American people about this issue.
And America's Mayor has some explaining to do too. More from the NY Post:
On the day after the attack, the memo claims, city test results from the corner of Centre and Chambers streets and from the corner of Spruce and Gold streets showed asbestos concentration at about twice the level considered safe by the EPA.
The city did not release this information to the public, Jenkins says.
The next day, Sept. 13, city tests were "overloaded" with asbestos in the air - so much that the lab could not conclude precise amounts - along Church Street.
Again, the information was withheld, the memo claims.
When the city published the test results for the weeks following 9/11 on its Web site in February 2002, there were 17 instances where the data was either understated or left blank, Jenkins asserts in her report.
And don't forget the White House role, from Newsday:
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.
That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency's news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.
"When the EPA made a September 18 announcement that the air was 'safe' to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement," the report says. "Furthermore, the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced . . . the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."
Oh yes he did. Right after the debate, he said it on FOX News, talking about his angry response to Ron Paul blaming America for 9/11. From Hotline:
It reminded me of the Saudi prince that gave me the $10 million. He did the same thing: "This is America at fault, the way America has outreach to the world."... I usually hear this on the Democratic side. Don't usually hear it on the Republican side.
Really, Rudy? You usually hear Democrats saying 9/11 was our fault? Well, sure, I mean it was Bush's fault - you know, that old memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In US" - but that's not what you meant. You meant on a more visceral basic level that Ron Paul was saying that America deserved what it got on September 11. And you think you "usually" hear this from Democrats. What Democrats have you heard saying that we deserved September 11? That we're to blame for September 11? The only person I know who said that is your Republican buddy Jerry Falwell, and oh yeah, religious right extremist Fred Phelps (the guy who pickets American soldiers' funerals).
So tell us, Rudy, which Democrats "usually" blame America for September 11? Or is this yet another lie that you'll flip-flop on by the next debate?
Nine months before al-Qaida slammed airliners into the World Trade Center, French intelligence suspected the terror network was plotting a hijacking — possibly involving a U.S. airline — and warned the CIA, former French intelligence officials said Monday.
But the French warning hinted at a plot in Europe, not the United States, and there was no suggestion of suicide attacks or multiple planes. One former official said al-Qaida may have leaked misinformation to divert intelligence agencies from the bigger, deadlier plot to come on Sept. 11, 2001.
The warning was another example of how intelligence agents sensed al-Qaida was hard at work in the months leading up to Sept. 11 but were unable to piece together fragmented warnings into a coherent plot.
Le Monde first reported the story Monday as it published excerpts of 328 pages of classified documents from France's main foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE. One note, dated Jan. 5, 2001, reported that al-Qaida was plotting a hijacking.
I wrote last week about how Senator Clinton had reportedly invoked September 11 in order to justify her vote for the Iraq war authorization.
"As a senator from New York, I lived through 9/11 and I am still dealing with the aftereffects," Clinton said. "I may have a slightly different take on this from some of the other people who will be coming through here.... I do think we are engaged in a war against heartless, ruthless enemies," she said. "If they could come after us again tomorrow they would do so."
At the time, I was a bit annoyed that the Senator was invoking 9/11 with regards to Iraq (a Bush/Cheney ploy), and also that Mrs. Clinton has some notion that September 11 affected her differently than it affected the rest of us.
Yes, for those who died that day, it was markedly worse than what the rest of us experienced. But having lived through that day anywhere in America, I think we were all equally freaked out. One can debate whether it was markedly more damaging psychologically for people near the Pentagon and World Trade Center (I'm not convinced), but as Mrs. Clinton wasn't near either location, the point is moot. (And in any case, it does a disservice to those killed and injured in the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and their families, to suggest that somehow it was worse dying in the Trade Center than dying at the Pentagon or in a field in Pennsylvania).
Well, it's increasingly looking like the 9/11 invocation wasn't just a slip of the tongue, as Democratic strategist James Carville is now using 9/11 as well to defend Hillary's war vote. Arianna has the rest.
