Just because she passed the buck…er, said she would immediately pass the terrorist threat information onto Ashcroft and Rumsfeld? (And as Paul Lukasiak noted above, Powell apparently was left out of the “intelligence” loop…as well as Cheney and Bush).

What the hell was Condi Rice doing as head of the National Security Agency? She was acting more like she was sitting at the front reception desk at some corporation who would refer anyone that came into the front office to one of the good-ol’-boy “decision makers” in the executive suites.

Anyway, I can see how Tenet and Cofer felt like they got the brush off. They were calling for immediate action to address the al Qaeda terrorist threat, but obviously Condi Rice couldn’t be bothered, nor apparently could any of the other top-level elitist Bush people who had transcripts of the July 10, 2001 Tenet/Cofer/Rice meeting placed on their desks.

And the excuse rolled out by Rice and other PNAC Republicans that the summer of 2001 terrorist warnings were not “specific” is just really, really lame.

For example, let’s imagine that Condi Rice, instead of being NSA chief, had been the police chief of a small town. In this scenario, a policeman on a beat picks up a rumor that some bank robbers are in town who are planning on robbing one of the local banks. Furthermore, rumor has it that they’ll be taking public transportation to the bank.

Unfortunately, police chief Condi Rice doesn’t do anything, and the bank robbery happens. And her excuse: no “specific” bank was mentioned in the rumor. And besides, no one could have ever imagined that bank robbers would take a bus to go commit a crime.

And then, after the bank’s been robbed, it comes out that police chief Condi Rice, charged with protecting her town from bank robbers, instead of aggressively acting on the “tip,” passed on the “rumor” information to people in the mayor’s office.

Unfortunately, especially for the innocent people who died in the bank robbery, the mayor was on vacation, so no effort was launched by those in charge to stop the bank from being robbed. No attempt was made to catch the bank robbers before or as they boarded the buses. No coordinated search was conducted to grab the bank robbers in their hideout. And people died.

And what were the people doing who’d brought this bank robbery plot to the attention of their higher-ups. They kept trying to get the attention of the “decision makers.” They were running around with their “hair on fire.” But without any “command” decisions being made by those in command, no coordinated anti-bank robbery plan was ever implemented. And people died.

I don’t believe 9/11 was an inside job.

I do believe, as Wesley Clark states, it was the result of “command negligence.”

But the real culprit was the lack of communication between CIA and FBI, and that was institutional dysfunction. AND IT STILL EXISTS TODAY.

Let me first point out that the FBI was under Ashcroft, and Ascroft was briefed in July 2001. The problem was failure of the Attorney General to tell the FBI, not failure of the CIA to communicate. Tenet’s communication was what you do in the last instance when it appears the people you are talking to at lower levels show insufficient urgency. You get the top guy involved.

Which leads to the much larger implication. Rice, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld all had the briefing that the CIA was certian that al Qaeda was going to strike the U.S. homeland very soon, and no one acted. Except Ashcroft, who stopped flying commercial.

There is no way those three would have decided not to act on their own. They were told by either Bush or Cheney for Bush not to act.

Without clear instructions from Bush or his deputy Cheney, any single one of them who did not respond to that briefing was setting himself/herself to be hung out to dry after the al Qaeda hit. The first question each of them asked Tenet was “Who else has gotten this briefing?” They are all too savvy not to have asked. So they all knew they were not the only one who had gotten the briefing. They’re all to smart to overlook the possibility of becoming a scapegoat and knowing how to protect themselves from that happening. The word not to act had to have come from the very top.

There is no question. Bush was directly responsible for not avoiding the 9/11 attack (even if he delegated the job to Cheney.)

This was directly Bush’s fault, and it clearly is both Treason and a High Crime. No misdemeanor here. With Hastert on the way out by January, it will be very interesting who becomes Speaker since he may be in Gerals Ford’s position shortly.

My scariest thought is that knowing that if they lose the House there are strong grounds for impeachment, there may be no bar to Bush or cheney ordering an attack on Iran.

The orders to our fleet told them to leave port October 1, which places them on station near Iran October 21. This from The Nation 09-21-2006:

According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

[Via Billmon who, thankfully, has given up has pledge to quit blogging.]

This next three or four months could be as interesting and dangerous as the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And my bet is that Aminehejad (Spelling?) may be less crazy than Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Although, given the demonstrated competence level of the current administration and their lackeys, they might pass on something they don’t realize is shocking to the reality-based crowd (i.e. Americans).

A story reported by Reuters and published in Orlando Sentinel on July 12, 2001 – two days after Tenet briefed Rice – said the had FBI tracked 257 terrorist related threats in 2001.

“The No. 1 threat was from exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, accused by the United States of masterminding the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in eastern Africa and other attacks on US interests,” Reuters reported.

The FBI said at the time, according to the Reuters story, that it had gathered intelligence showing terrorists would launch a major attack on American interests using a weapon of mass destruction.

“I’m not a gloom-and-doom type person,” said Dale Watson, assistant director of the FBI Counterterrorism Division, according to the July 12, 2001, report. “But I will tell you this … [We are] headed for an incident inside the United States.”

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100406J.shtml

If the FBI knew, Ashcroft knew.

That makes the Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” the smoking gun, the capstone piece of intelligence that ought to have generated a nationwide alert. If, of course, they had any interest at all in anti-terrorism, which they didn’t and probably still don’t…