The GOP Refrain: Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi (But Never 9/11)

The House Select Committee on Benghazi will begin in earnest after the November Elections. And now there is “new, shocking evidence” which is not so new, not so shocking and not really evidence, just claims from an unhappy former employee.

Before we go there again, and again and again…. I want to remind, well, everyone that, 9/11 has created the world in which we live- a world in which several thousand Americans died in NYC, in which the U.S. feels beseiged, in which hundreds of thousands went off to war and several thousand died and many more thousands were injured for life returning home to too little care, begrudgingly given. In the name of those wars we have lost a lot of our privacy; we have spent trillions of dollars; we have been major players in the destabilizatoin of one the most troubled areas on the globe accompanied by horrendous loss of life, of limb, of  sanity, and now we stare into the face of yet another mideastern war.

I got a call a few nights ago from the older brother of a young man who I taught in college. He said he just wanted to talk about his “little brother”, a 180 lbs weightlifter, history major, and ROTC cadet, who did three tours in Iraq and died during the last one.  His older brother, kept asking “Why?”

I want to be clear. I do not know if the Bush administration could have stopped 9/11 from happening but the editorial that follows makes the case that the opportunity was there and the Bush leadership team took a pass on it

While there were some rumblings about the culpability, responsibility and accountability of those at the top of our National Security establishment in the months that followed the most horrific attack on the United States by agents of a foreign power in history, in the rush of self-protective Americanism, Mr. Bush and his associates basically got a pass.

There are those who proudly proclaim themselves as true Americans and Consersatives who are happy to make a lot of Benghazi but make nothing of 9/11 whose costs will continue to pile up year after year. 

I cannot imagine how reasonable and just people could create a standard to which they want to hold Barack Obama and not apply the same one to George W. Bush.

But, of course, they do.

The Deafness Before the Storm
By KURT EICHENWALD
Published: September 10, 2012
New York Times

IT was perhaps the most famous presidential briefing in history.

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action. Officials at the Counterterrorism Center of the C.I.A. grew apoplectic. On July 9, at a meeting of the counterterrorism group, one official suggested that the staff put in for a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place, two people who were there told me in interviews. The suggestion was batted down, they said, because there would be no time to train anyone else.

That same day in Chechnya, according to intelligence I reviewed, Ibn Al-Khattab, an extremist who was known for his brutality and his links to Al Qaeda, told his followers that there would soon be very big news. Within 48 hours, an intelligence official told me, that information was conveyed to the White House, providing more data supporting the C.I.A.’s warnings. Still, the alarm bells didn’t sound.

On July 24, Mr. Bush was notified that the attack was still being readied, but that it had been postponed, perhaps by a few months. But the president did not feel the briefings on potential attacks were sufficient, one intelligence official told me, and instead asked for a broader analysis on Al Qaeda, its aspirations and its history. In response, the C.I.A. set to work on the Aug. 6 brief.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush officials attempted to deflect criticism that they had ignored C.I.A. warnings by saying they had not been told when and where the attack would occur. That is true, as far as it goes, but it misses the point. Throughout that summer, there were events that might have exposed the plans, had the government been on high alert. Indeed, even as the Aug. 6 brief was being prepared, Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi believed to have been assigned a role in the 9/11 attacks, was stopped at an airport in Orlando, Fla., by a suspicious customs agent and sent back overseas on Aug. 4. Two weeks later, another co-conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota after arousing suspicions at a flight school. But the dots were not connected, and Washington did not react.

Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t ever know. And that may be the most agonizing reality of all.

Kurt Eichenwald, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a former reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars.”

I am often asked what could Bush have done?

I look to the commentary of people like Richard Clarke , Bush’s anti-terrorism “tsar”, who also served Clinton, and George HW Bush in similar capacities.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/23/usa.september11

Here is what they say that Bush and his national security team should have done:

1) Take the reports seriously.

2) Convene an intelligence, both external and internal, summit.

3) Send out an alert featuring the warnings about an imminent attack and ask that all agencies, federal/state/county/local, pool all reports of behavior fitting the emerging profile.

4) Place the airlines, and trains on high alert with additional screening and security precautions (both on and off the planes like those in place during the hijacking era).

5) Set up an inter-agency coordinating office (Clarke’s might have been the logical choice)