Woodward: Bush misleads about violence in Iraq, troops attacked every 15 minutes

The idea would be to maintain production during periods of "regional instability" like the invasion of Iraq or a military crisis in Nigeria. The Saudis could erase any of that in an instant.

 

Did anyone post this? Hope not. The White House must be dizzy from the spin.


The Covered-Up Meeting

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, October 2, 2006; 1:12 PM


The "State of Denial" in the title of Bob Woodward's new book describes President Bush's ongoing refusal to see the true consequences of the war he launched in Iraq.

But one of the book's most notable revelations suggests that the Bush White House was in another state of denial more than five years ago, this one about the threat of terrorism before September 11, 2001.

If the omniscient narrator of Woodward's book is to be believed, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice waved off warnings that should by any reasonable standard have put the government on high alert for an al-Qaeda attack.

And in what looks like a potential administration cover-up, Rice and the other participants in that meeting apparently never mentioned it to anyone, including investigators for the 9/11 Commission.

In a short excerpt from his book in Sunday's Washington Post, Woodward writes: "On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

"Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. . . .

"He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action. . . .

"Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden. . . .

"Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies. . . .

"The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about.

"Philip D. Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting, but it was not clear to him what immediate action really would have meant. In 2005 Rice hired Zelikow as a top aide at the State Department."

Philip Shenon writes in the New York Times: "Members of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a July 2001 White House meeting at which George J. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, about an imminent attack by al-Qaeda and failed to persuade her to take action. . . .

"Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel. . . .

"In interviews Saturday and Sunday, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

"'None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,' said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former congressman from Indiana. 'I'm deeply disturbed by this. I'm furious.'"

Peter Baker wrote in Saturday's Washington Post: "The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration 'was at least as aggressive' in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years."

There has been a fascinating sequence of not-quite denials from administration officials.

As Baker wrote: "White House and State Department officials [Friday] confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

"'This is the first time these thoughts and feelings associated with that meeting have been expressed,' McCormack said. 'People are free to revise and extend their remarks, but that is certainly not the story that was told to the 9/11 commission.'"

That's not much of a defense for a potential cover-up -- saying that no one had ever mentioned it before.

And yet, in a Saturday press release entitled " Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward's Book ," the full extent of the White House's refutation was to quote McCormack.

On Sunday, White House counselor Dan Bartlett issued a new rebuttal on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Here's the video ; here's the transcript .

Speaking for Rice, Bartlett said: "I spoke to her this morning. She believes this is a very grossly mis-accurate characterization of the meeting they had."

Stephanopoulos: "So this didn't happen?"

And here's the money quote from Bartlett: "That's Secretary Rice's view, that that type of urgent request to go after bin Laden, as the book alleges, in her mind, didn't happen."

Get that? In her mind, it didn't happen.

Rice weighed in herself this morning, with a full-throated denial -- that she remembered anything about the meeting.

Anne Gearan writes for the Associated Press: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaeda attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"'What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,' Rice said."

Incomprehensible, indeed.

Peter Rundlet , a counsel to the 9/11 Commission, writes on the liberal Think Progress Web site: "Many, many questions need to be asked and answered about this revelation -- questions that the 9/11 Commission would have asked, had the Commission been told about this significant meeting. . . .

"Was it covered up? It is hard to come to a different conclusion. . . .

"At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot."

Around the time of that July meeting, Rice and Bush were more focused on their pet issue: missile defense. And Bush wasn't interested in "swatting flies" -- he was already looking for a reason to attack Iraq.

And a month later, as Ron Suskind reported in his book, "The One Percent Doctrine," an unnamed CIA briefer flew to Bush's Texas ranch to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' According to Suskind, Bush heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html



What is also interesting is that in an interview with Mike Wallace Sunday, Woodward was asked by Wallace how he could prove that these things were said. Woodward replied (I'm paraphrasing), "I have the conversations on tape. (that were being referred to) I let your producer listen to them before I came on the program."


Rice is a damned liar. She always has been, and is still at it. The Bush Administration has a lot to answer for in those months and weeks before 9/11. They have covered it up as best they could, for years, but it's finally coming out.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

Great Read!!!

thanks.

 

Did Condi lie under oath to the 911 commission? Seems so....

Condi Rice, 9/11 and Another Nest of Lies

By William Rivers Pitt
Monday 02 October 2006

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have committed perjury in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission in May of 2004. At a minimum, her testimony was a convenient mishmash of half-truths and omissions which served to paint the White House as innocent bystanders as the attacks of 9/11 unfolded. Certainly, her testimony omitted the fact that the two most senior intelligence officials in the nation delivered a stern warning regarding an impending terror attack two full months before 9/11.

Sunday's edition of the Washington Post carried a story titled "Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice." The story described a desperate attempt by CIA chief George Tenet and CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black to draw Rice's attention to the looming threat of an al-Qaeda strike against the United States. Tenet and Black insisted on a meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001. This meeting was first reported by Bob Woodward in his new book, "State of Denial."

"Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts," read the Post story, "and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined 'Bin Laden Threats Are Real.' Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself ... Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment - covert, military, whatever - to thwart bin Laden."

The meeting, according to Tenet and Black, went nowhere. "Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies," the Post story reported. "Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place."

"Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated," continued the Post story. "Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Black later said, 'The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.'"

The Post story concluded with a remarkable Editor's Note: "How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush's 'neocons' and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that 'what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years.'"

This comment suggests the entire Post story was inspired by former President Clinton's remarkable denunciation of the Bush administration's efforts to thwart bin Laden in a recent Fox News interview. The seriousness of this meeting, however, goes far beyond political sniping and gamesmanship.

Peter Rundlet served as counsel to the 9/11 Commission, and has accused the White House of hiding the meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice from the commission. Rundlet practiced at the influential law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and was formerly associate counsel to the president and a White House Fellow, serving in the Office of Chief of Staff to the President, before joining the commission.

Writing for the online news magazine Think Progress, Rundlet stated, "Many, many questions need to be asked and answered about this revelation, questions that the 9/11 Commission would have asked, had the commission been told about this significant meeting. Suspiciously, the commissioners and the staff investigating the administration's actions prior to 9/11 were never informed of the meeting. As Commissioner Jamie Gorelick pointed out, 'We didn't know about the meeting itself. I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it.'"

This is a remarkable revelation in and of itself. The head of CIA and the head of CIA's counterterrorism branch delivered a warning in the strongest possible terms to Ms. Rice two months before the attack, yet this meeting was not revealed to the 9/11 Commission. It may well have remained a historical non-event had Woodward not written about it.

Which brings us to Ms. Rice's sworn testimony in May 2004 before the commission.

At one point in this hearing, Commission Vice-Chair Lee Hamilton directly asked Rice about the so-called intelligence failures leading up to 9/11: "At the end of the day, of course, we were unable to protect our people. And you suggest in your statement - and I want you to elaborate on this, if you want to - that in hindsight it would have been - better information about the threats would have been the single - the single most important thing for us to have done, from your point of view, prior to 9/11, would have been better intelligence, better information about the threats. Is that right? Are there other things that you think stand out?"

Rice responded, "Well, Mr. Chairman, I took an oath of office on the day that I took this job to protect and defend. And like most government officials, I take it very seriously. And so, as you might imagine, I've asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done. I know that, had we thought that there was an attack coming in Washington or New York, we would have moved heaven and earth to try and stop it. And I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack."

Not only did Rice fail to mention the dramatic warnings given to her by Tenet and Black, she goes on to flatly state that neither she nor the administration had a clue that an attack was coming. Further, she claims that "no single thing could have prevented that attack."

"The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks," read the Post report on Sunday, "but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda."

Combined with the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing delivered to Bush, which explicitly stated that bin Laden intended to attack the United States, the revelation of this meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice indicates that the Bush White House should have and could have made a far greater effort at thwarting the 9/11 attacks. Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission on the matter may rise to the level of perjury. At a minimum, it exposes yet another nest of lies delivered by a member of this administration.

"A mixture of shock, anger, and sadness overcame me," wrote Peter Rundlet in his Think Progress article, "when I read about revelations in Bob Woodward's new book about a special surprise visit that George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black made to Condi Rice, also on July 10, 2001. If true, it is shocking that the administration failed to heed such an overwhelming alert from the two officials in the best position to know."

Indeed.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100206X.shtml

 

thank god we have ace sleuths like bob woodward on the case. that dastardly, ultra-secretive bush administration found the perfect place to hide the inconvenient fact that the number of attacks in Iraq is on the rise. Ingeniously, they put it in the form of a large and easily understood graph on page 22 of the most widely read compendium of facts and figures about Iraq on the internet! There it is, secretly stashed away in the Iraq Index, which is maintained and constantly updated by the Brookings Institute. I have been able to view this continuously updated graph dozens times through my special security clearance, which consists of a computer connected to the interwebs. Now that's top secret information.

Woodward's claim this is somehow being kept from the public is simply false.

as to the Tenet "revelation" one might simply ask why he didn't mention this to W himself? after all, they met every morning for the daily intelligence briefing.

 

Woodward is aiding the enemy, he is impeding America's war on terror and must be detained at once and held indefinately.

 

Why didn't tenet bring this to the attention of the 9/11 comission? Seems very odd to me....

 

Can we just vote Democrat in November and turn Bush into a lame duck President before he destroys this country and the Middle East?

DD

 

I'd hit it.

 

basso did you ever wonder if the 911 report might have been a white wash and not the most "bipartisan" of documents?

Records Show Tenet Briefed Rice on Al Qaeda Threat

By PHILIP SHENON and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: October 2, 2006

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 — A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The account by Sean McCormack came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, 2001, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. McCormack also said records show that the Sept. 11 commission was informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/w...&en=5de194832d554019&ei=5094&partner=homepage

 

Do you work for W. Bush? Everything you post has been nothing but garbage.

 

Do you work for the monkey? Everything you post has been nothing but garbage.

 

Do you work for the Dunce in Chief? Everything you post has been nothing but garbage.

 

yet more dowdification: if you'd bothered to post the whole article, you'd have come across this bit. note the quote from reliable neocon ben-veniste.

next?

---
But both current and former officials took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account that Mr. Tenet and his aides left the meeting in frustration, feeling as if Ms. Rice had ignored them.

Mr. Tenet told members of the Sept. 11 commission about the July 10 meeting when they interviewed him in early 2004, but committee members said the former C.I.A. director never indicated he had left the White House with the impression that he had been ignored.

“Tenet never told us that he was brushed off,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission. “We certainly would have followed that up.”

Mr. McCormack said the records showed that, far from ignoring Mr. Tenet’s warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Atttorney General John Ashcroft.

But Mr. Ashcroft said by telephone on Monday evening that he never received a briefing that summer from Mr. Tenet.

“Frankly, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get that kind of briefing,” he said. “I’m surprised he didn’t think it was important enough to come by and tell me.”

 

I hear that Woodward fella is a real hack.

 

Spin however you want, Condi did have the meeting, she was breifed about a possible attack and she lied about that knowledge to the 911 commission.

And she is still lying about it.

 

Rice lying?!?! Nah....

She shouldn't have to dignify this mess with a response.

 

Man you are disrespecting the future president of the U.S. Just because she is lying about this, has lied in the past about numerous other issues, and feels that the best response to the Cole bombing was to not respond, is no reason to fault her.

 

Rice lies? She'll make a fine President. Lying is the main prerequisite for the job.

 

I said it when the report came out and I'll say it again, the "bipartisan" 911 commission and report is a white wash and a scam on America. The report isn't worth the paper it's written on. Let's have a real, independent investigation into how 911 happened.


Why Did 9/11 Panel Omit "Secret" Meeting?

By Justin Rood - October 3, 2006, 11:42 AM

What did the 9/11 Commission know, and when did they know it? And why didn't they tell the rest of us?

The esteemed panel has come under fire before, for both its general conclusions and specific findings. But now it appears they're in for a whole new round of criticism, that could shake the wide public confidence their work once enjoyed.

At issue is a key meeting on July 10, 2001, between then-national security adviser Condolleezza Rice, then-director of central intelligence George Tenet, and Tenet deputy Cofer Black. (Rice is now secretary of state; Tenet is retired; and Black is an executive with private security contractor Blackwater.) The meeting, in which Tenet warned Rice of the al Qaeda threat, does not appear in the commission's final report, although it had already been publicly reported two years earlier -- and the panel had been briefed on its details by Tenet himself.

The meeting was first reported by Time magazine in August 2002, in its mammoth report, "Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?"

The meeting was an opportunity for Tenet and Black to brief Rice on the al Qaeda threat, Time said, something Tenet was reportedly very concerned about. The magazine said the DCI's message was that he " couldn't rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas."

According to stories which appeared online last night, in January 2004 Tenet re-created the briefing for 9/11 panelist Richard Ben-Veniste, executive director Phil Zelikow, and professional staff for the panel. (Zelikow, who worked with Rice before joining the commission staff, is now a top aide to Rice.)

The meeting was reported again last week, this time by Bob Woodward in his new book, "State of Denial." In it, he characterized Tenet's message at the sit-down as: "First, al Qaeda is going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself. . . Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately."

On the premise that Woodward's book was the first time the meeting had been mentioned to him, 9/11 panelist Ben-Veniste told the New York Times that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about," he told the paper.

When reporters confirmed Tenet's January 2004 briefing with the 9/11 commission yesterday, the Democratic panelist changed his tune. "Ben-Veniste confirmed. . . that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004," McClatchy newspapers reported. But he wouldn't comment further, referring all questions about the content of the report to Philip Zelikow. Zelikow has yet to comment.

It's clear that the commission knew. Even if they didn't read Time magazine, even if they didn't search for news clips before digging in, they received a detailed briefing -- staffers as well as Ben-Veniste. To date, no one has explained why the meeting wasn't mentioned in the final report.

Why not?

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001676.php