Memo contradicts Rice's testimony

GWB and his Admin fumbled the handoff they got from his predecessor.
OBL was not foriegn policy job #1 with GWB at the start of his Admin. (Picking a fight with the PRC was, which is a whole other screwup on his part.)

 

or perhaps clinton dropped the ball?

 

Why is Condi briefing Bush about Chandra Levy on August 24? Why would any National Security Advisor be briefing any President on something like the Chandra Levy case? Why would the National Security Advisor waste time by watching Gary Condit's interview? Puzzling.
____________________

Bush Gave No Sign of Worry In August 2001


By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A01


CRAWFORD, Tex., April 10 -- President Bush was in an expansive mood on Aug. 7, 2001, when he ran into reporters while playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, Tex.

The day before, the president had received an intelligence briefing -- the contents of which were declassified by the White House Saturday night -- warning "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday.

"No mulligans, except on the first tee," he said to laughter. "That's just to loosen up. You see, most people get to hit practice balls, but as you know, I'm walking out here, I'm fixing to go hit. Tight back, older guy -- I hit the speed limit on July 6th."

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in her testimony Thursday to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spoke of a government on high alert for terrorism in the summer of 2001. "The president of the United States had us at battle stations during this period of time," she testified. Rice's talk of battle stations is part of the Bush administration's effort to counter an impression that it did not do enough about terrorism before Sept. 11; a Newsweek poll released Saturday found that 60 percent think the Bush administration underestimated terrorism before the attacks.

But if top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface. Bush spent most of August 2001 on his ranch here. His staff said at the time that by far the biggest issue on his agenda was his decision on federal funding of stem cell research, followed by education, immigration and the Social Security "lockbox."

Of course, many of the efforts to thwart an attack would not have been visible on the outside. But some officials on the inside -- notably former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke -- say the administration was not acting with sufficient urgency to the spike in intelligence indicating a threat. And there is nothing in Bush's public actions or words from August 2001 to refute Clarke.

During that month, Bush's top aides were concentrating on the president's political standing: His approval rating had slipped, his relations with Congress were tense, and Democrats had regained control of the Senate. The only time Bush mentioned terrorism publicly that month was in the context of violence in Israel.

In public, Bush often engaged in playful banter. Reporters teased him about his golf game and whether he would take an afternoon nap. Bush teased them about their suffering in the Texas heat. "I know a lot of you wish you were in the East Coast, lounging on the beaches, sucking in the salt air, but when you're from Texas -- and love Texas -- this is where you come home," he said.

A former Bush aide who remains close to the White House said the use of the term "battle stations" by Rice was an overstatement as it is understood in what the White House constantly calls "the post-9/11 world." The former aide, who refused to be identified to avoid angering the president and his staff, said that some members of Bush's senior staff did not know the extent of the information he had been given about the al Qaeda threat, and that even those in his inner circle did not imagine "the scale, the precision, the magnitude" of the strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"In a pre-9/11 world, it was like, 'Check it out and see what you find and get back to us after Labor Day,' " the former aide said. "It wasn't just the president who was on vacation. It was the whole government. It was the Bureau [FBI] and the Agency [CIA], too. The attention to the threats was above and beyond normal, but it obviously wasn't enough."

Officials close to Bush defended his approach during that summer, saying that of course what was done looks inadequate now, but that no one could have imagined such attacks back then, including the president. These officials said their only frames of reference were the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, which killed more than 160 people, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, which killed six and injured more than 1,000.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush's actions in August were adequate and appropriate. "The intelligence was non-specific and pointed to attacks overseas," McClellan said. "We directed embassies and bases abroad to button up, and directed the domestic agencies to make sure they were buttoning up at home, as well. . . . If we had had any information that could have prevented the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the president would have taken strong and decisive action to stop them."

In retrospect, Bush's schedule for August 2001 seems quaint, the issues relatively small. On the first of the month, Bush announced a tentative agreement on an HMO patients' "Bill of Rights." The next day, he met with lawmakers about education. On Aug. 4, the issue was Medicaid; on Aug. 8, Bush helped to build a Habitat for Humanity home. Aug. 13 found him celebrating agricultural legislation, and the next day put him at a YMCA picnic. The rest of the month brought him to a fundraiser in New Mexico, a Harley-Davidson plant, a Target store, a Little League championship and a steelworkers' picnic.

Security issues did arise, but nothing about domestic terrorism. During the month, Bush announced his support of peace developments in Northern Ireland, spoke of U.S. withdrawal from an arms treaty with Russia, complained about the "menace" of Saddam Hussein shooting at U.S. planes over Iraq, and named Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The possibility of terrorist attacks against the United States never came up.

In an Aug. 29 speech to the American Legion titled by the White House "President Discusses Defense Priorities," Bush spoke about higher pay for soldiers, an increase in military spending, military research and development, and the need to defend against missile attacks. "We are committed to defending America and our allies against ballistic missile attacks, against weapons of mass destruction held by rogue leaders in rogue nations that hate America, hate our values and hate what we stand for," he said.

Bush vowed to the veterans, 13 days before the attacks: "I will not permit any course that leaves America undefended."

Nor did terrorism have any place in a speech Bush gave at the end of August, after he returned to the White House from his Crawford ranch. The White House titled the Aug. 31 speech "President's Priorities for Fall: Education, Economy, Opportunity, Security." But the only one of these topics Bush discussed with more than a mention was education. "One of the things that I hope Congress does is work and act quickly on the education bill and get it to my desk as soon as they get back," he said.

Reporters' questions also reflected the tranquillity. They asked Bush to comment on a Little League player who lied about his age, the slow pace of reaching an immigration deal with Mexico and the federal role in high-speed Internet access.

The most extended treatment of security issues in the month of August 2001 came on the 24th, when Bush announced Myers's appointment as Joint Chiefs chairman. Again, Bush placed emphasis on missile defense. "One of the things you will hear us talk about is the need to develop an effective missile defense system, and we do have money in the budget for that," he said.

In response to a question about whether the United States would increase its role in Middle East peace efforts, Bush directed Yasser Arafat "to urge the terrorists, the Palestinian terrorists, to stop the suicide bombings." Bush did mention Rice at the session -- but only to say that she and White House counselor Karen Hughes had "briefed" him on the Chandra Levy matter after the two aides watched then-Rep. Gary A. Condit's television interview about the missing intern.

In the White House Rose Garden on Aug. 3, before leaving for the ranch, Bush summarized the achievements of his first months in office and set a three-part agenda for September. His first goal was completing work on legislation dealing with "education and the disadvantaged." His second priority was the federal budget. And third, he said, "beginning in September, I'll be proposing creative ways to tackle some of the toughest problems in our society." There was no mention of terrorism or even foreign affairs as a priority.

Nor was there for the rest of the month, except when the subject was Israel. On Aug. 13, while on a golf outing, he spoke with reporters at length about the heightened tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. But much of his public comments were in the category of lighthearted banter. After helping with the Habitat home on Aug. 8, Bush displayed a bloodied finger and cracked: "It must be a slow news day if you're worrying about my finger."

On Aug. 23, Bush took a trip to Crawford Elementary School, where he allowed the children to ask him questions. He spoke of golf, fishing, exercise and presidential perks such as the White House, the limousine and the Secret Service. Bush also volunteered his afternoon schedule: a meeting with Rice, a phone call to the Argentine president, lunch with the first lady, a visit with the family pets, a call to his personnel office and a lesson on trees. "We've got a horticulturist coming out from Texas A&M to help us identify the hardwood trees on our beautiful place," he said.

In summary, Bush told the children: "I've got a lot going on today."

 

Bush could have heightened security at airports. Bush could have ordered more resources and personel to find out what the nature and seriousness of those threats were. I'm not saying that it would have stopped 9/11. But it would have been doing SOMETHING, besides ignoring it and criticizing Clinton for spending TOO MUCH time fighting terrorism, while spending money on and hyping missle defense.

 

Gary Hart:

"I think this is disingenuous. It's a bit like saying at the local level that a group of citizens warning the mayor and the police department that there is going to be a wave of burglaries. And when the burglaries occur, the defense says, you didn't say which house, what night, and what method. There are steps that could have been taken to make this more difficult. When I was a national candidate, Secret Service said if somebody wants to kill you, they'll probably kill you. Our job is to make it as difficult as possible. We didn't do that."

 

Anyone remember this?
_____________________
President wants Senate to Hurry with new anti-terrorism laws


July 30, 1996

Web posted at: 8:40 p.m. EDT

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Clinton urged Congress Tuesday to act swiftly in developing anti-terrorism legislation before its August recess. "We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue," Clinton said during a White House news conference.

But while the president pushed for quick legislation, Republican lawmakers hardened their stance against some of the proposed anti-terrorism measures.
...

 

Connect the dots...

 

Some got an incomplete memo

One day after President Bush received an August 2001 briefing on al Qaeda's efforts, senior officials got a similar memo without the current threats.

BY JOHN SOLOMON

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Just one day after President Bush received a pre-Sept. 11 briefing on al Qaeda's effort to strike on U.S. soil, senior government executives received a similarly titled memo that excluded information about current threats and investigations, say federal officials who have read both documents.

The Aug. 7, 2001, memo, known as the senior executive intelligence brief or SEIB, didn't mention the 70 FBI investigations into possible al Qaeda activity that Bush had been told of a day earlier in a memo entitled Bin Laden Entitled to Strike in U.S., the officials said Monday.

The senior executives' memo also did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of a U.S.-based explosives attacks or say that the FBI had concerns about recent casing of buildings in New York, the officials told The Associated Press.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because that memo remains classified.

Some members of Congress said Monday they were concerned that senior executive memos and other similar documents may have given policy-makers working for Bush an incomplete picture of the threat.

But administration officials said there was nothing sinister about the deletions.

Typically, the senior executives' memo goes to scores of Cabinet-agency officials doesn't include raw intelligence or sensitive information, officials said.

That is done to guard against unnecessary leaks and because that type of sensitive information isn't deemed essential to be distributed to all policy-makers, they said.

Those on the front lines get that information directly from targeted raw intelligence reports.

For instance, CIA, FBI, Customs and immigration and White House antiterror officials had received the May 2001 intelligence report about a possible al Qaeda explosives plot on U.S. soil shortly after it arrived and were investigating it by the time the president learned of it, the officials said.

Nonetheless, some who saw the memo said they feared it gave policy-makers and members of the congressional intelligence committees a picture of the domestic threat so stale and incomplete that it didn't provide a sense of urgency one month before Sept. 11.

Former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., said Monday he has not yet been able to compare the two memos, but would be concerned if senior policy-makers and key lawmakers weren't aware they were missing some relevant information provided to the president.

''I think it is an important policy issue that we may not know everything the president knows, but we at least should know we don't know some things, that there is something being withheld,'' Graham said.

Members of Congress, outside experts and the independent commission investigating pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures are more broadly questioning whether useful intelligence was, and still is, being held too restrictively.

 

Those are lines not dots...

The WTC reference was to 1993 not a future target.

US residence of Al-Qaeda was old news. This was no revelation of that fact.

Hijacking of aircraft is standard terrorism. It had been done around the world. The guys on 9/11 did it in an unassuming way without firepower. The low-tech approach is what made it do-able.

It is clear that dairy farms in Wisconsin would have been better targets than Federal Buildings....

Other than jet fuel, bin Laden used no explosives. No purchases to trace.

What devastating revelation is this supposed to be?

 

The WTC mention said that Bin Laden would follow the example of the first WTC bombing. It was both old news and a warning.

To what extent did they know about it? Why brief the President if it's old news? If it was old news why didn't the President or Condi do something about it? I think it makes Bush's case worse to say it was old news.

It may be standard but it's not an everyday occurance. When there are warnings about it, people should pay attention. Just because it's standard terrorism doesn't mean our leaders should do nothing.

The revelation is that despite warnings that an attack was planned within in the U.S., and this memo specifically mentioning NYC, Federal buildings etc. the Bush administration did nothing about it, and were in fact set to deliver a speech critical of Clinton for focussing too much on anti-terrorism.

 

Following the example does not mean utilizing the same target.

As Condi said, this briefing was largely historical.

The "warning" has been around since 1997-- according to this document. Non-specific chatter bubbled up over the summer of 2001. What actions could realistically been taken?

New York and Washington are natural targets. We need one of those Star Trek shields of protection over those cities. The planes that did the damage were re-routed post-hijacking to the NY and Washington targets.

The hijackers worked underneath the airport security radar by using extremely low-tech weapons.

 

Even if she did, we now know that perjury carries no penalty. In fact, an entire Congressional delegation will stand on the steps of the Capitol to salute you.

 

This thread is getting more and more silly -- topped off by Rim's 'connect the dots' seek and search execise in selective interpretation. Somebody really had their Super-decoder-ring out to find that hidden gem.

So here's my question.

Could the measures being suggested have been reasonably implemented before September 2001? Would you all have applauded Bush plotting an assassination of Bin Laden, enacting 'homeland security' passing the 'patriot act' and putting guns in aircraft before the US was hit?

I'm not exonerating Bush, by any means. They have to strive to learn and improve from this. (And i'm not encouraged by what i've seen so far). And I agree that the current policies are likely cultivating many more terrorists. I just find this feigned outrage over the failure to stop, what was likely unstoppable, to be over the top even by our overinflated standard of partisanship.

Here's and editorial from the LA Times that I found interesting

 

Wouldn't it be a useful exercise to declassify all of the Presidential Daily Briefings that mention "terrorism", "Bin Laden", or "Al Qaeda" of the Bush and Clinton Administrations. Then walk through the steps that were taken in response to these alerts. This exercise could lead to a more effective response to threats.

Looking at one memo in isolation is ridiculous.

I wonder if both Administrations would agree to this.

 

Any civilian, any person with a jr. highschool education, anybody at all would be do something if they were told that on Sept. 11th planes would be flown into the WTC, and the Pentagon. It wouldn't take any kind of 'leader' or law enforcement executive to do that.

But with these warnings, and things going on, we expect our leaders to actually do something to prepare, investigate, buff up security etc. The administration saw these warnings and did nothing about them.

 

Are you alleging that the aforementioned PBD was just such a warning? Wow! That is some interpretation....

As noted previously, the various elements of the attack that unfolded on 9/11 had been on the table for years. The intercepted chatter of the summer of 2001 (according to Clarke and the Administration of which he was a part at that time) do not reveal any specific that could have led to prevention of 9/11.

 

I am alleging that it was a warning, along with the papers that talked about Planes being used as missles. Put those together with the mention of suspicious people enrolling in flight schools in large numbers. Add to that the general increase(as admitted by this administration) in terrorist 'chatter' during the summer of 2001. Add to that warnings by the outgoing administration that the number 1 threat to the U.S. was Al-Qaeda. Do you allege that all of those pieces of evidence don't constitute a warning?

Of course there was no specific piece of information. As I said the president and his staff wouldn't need an education, or experience or leadership or any other qualifications if there job was to wait for someone to say one month from now on 9/11 Al-Qaeda people who are trained to fly in the U.S. will fly airplanes into the WTC and Pentagon.

These people are there because they are supposed to be a little more motivated, knowledgable, have the ability to lead and steer these kinds of investigations where they are supposed to go.

Again, I'm not saying it definitely would have prevented 9/11. But it would have been taking action to fight the problem of terrorism. If the leaders make it known that fighting terrorism is priority one, and have been warned about hijackings and attacks in NY and Washington, then beefing up security at airports and especially flights to and from those places would be one small step. It might have worked.

Instead the action our president and Condi Rice took was to plan a speech criticizing the Clinton administration for worrying too much about anti-terrorism. That's a step in the wrong the direction.

 

We were definitely at "Battle Stations".



From- http://atrios.blogspot.com/

Operation Ignore

Rice:


At the beginning of the administration, President Bush revived the practice of meeting with the director of central intelligence almost every day in the Oval Office -- meetings which I attended, along with the vice president and the chief of staff. At these meetings, the president received up-to-date intelligence and asked questions of his most senior intelligence officials.

...

I am quite certain -- given that the director of the CIA met frequently face to face with the president of the United States -- that he would have made that available to the president or to me.

...

First of all, it was coming from the top because the president was meeting with his director of central intelligence. And one of the changes that this president made was to meet face to face with his director of central intelligence almost every day.

...

Well, the president was meeting with his director of central intelligence



Tenet:



ROEMER: Would it have made any difference if you had mentioned -- did you ever mention it, for instance, to the president -- your briefing the president from August 6th on?

TENET:: I didn't see the president. I was not in briefings with him during this time. He was on vacation. I was here.

ROEMER: You didn't see the president between August 6, 2001, and September 10th?

TENET:: Well, no. Before -- saw him after Labor Day, to be sure.

ROEMER: So you saw him September 4th -- at the principals' meeting?

TENET:: It was not at principals' meeting.

ROEMER: Well, you don't see him...

TENET:: Condoleezza Rice -- Condoleezza -- I saw him in this time frame, to be sure.

ROEMER: OK. I'm just confused. You see him on August 6th with the PDB.

TENET:: No, I do not, sir. I'm not there.

ROEMER: OK. You're not -- when do you see him in August?

TENET:: I don't believe I do.

ROEMER: You don't see the president of the United States once in the month of August?

TENET:: He's in Texas and I'm either here or on leave for some of that time, so I'm not here.

ROEMER: So who's briefing him on the PDBs?

TENET:: The briefer, himself. We have a presidential briefer.

ROEMER: But you never get on the phone or in any kind of conference with him to talk at this level of high chatter and huge warnings during the spring and summer to talk to him through the whole month of August?

TENET:: We talked to him directly throughout the spring and early summer almost every day.

ROEMER: But not in August?

TENET:: In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no.


(thanks to reader a for the catch)