[NOLA_C3_Discussion] Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice

[Guest guest]

This ties in very well to the allegations that some high ranking

officials knew about the 9-11 attacks, but wanted them to succeed to

further their right wing agenda.

 

Alobar

 

On 10/1/06, Ward Reilly <wardpeace wrote:

> Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice

> The Washington Post

>

> Sunday 01 October 2006

>

> Editor's Note: How much effort the Bush administration made in going

> after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of September 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. " -The Washington Post

>

> 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. There was no practical way she

> could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

>

> For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism

> policy, including specific presidential orders called " findings " that would

> give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden.

> Perhaps a dramatic appearance - Black called it an " out of cycle " session,

> beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice - would get her attention.

>

> Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen.

> There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge

> volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested

> that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their

> anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

>

> He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much

> noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A.

> Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: " It's my

> sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one. "

>

> But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate

> bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld

> had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other

> intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked.

> Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

>

> Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, 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. 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.

>

> The United States had human and technical sources, and all the

> intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that

> some of it was uncertain " voodoo " but said it was often this voodoo that was

> the best indicator.

>

> 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.

>

> As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden

> was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door

> meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had been considering

> action against bin Laden, including using a new secret weapon: the Predator

> unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire Hellfire missiles to kill

> him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a

> raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it

> and who would have authority to shoot.

>

> Besides, 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. 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. " Adults should not have a system like

> this, " he said later.

>

> 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.

>

> Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous

> lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have

> gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time,

> Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct

> about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not

> organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

>

> Black later said, " The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to

> the gun we were holding to her head. "

>

>