- We think so. After all, suddenly it is understandable
to these political icons that a White House so beset with so many problems
and issues in September 2001 (so many the President just had to run off
and read with second graders), the Bush administration just could not deal
with every contingency. This is from the same set of panel members who
said that didn't believe that the events of 9-11 had to happen. We suppose
that sufficient reward was put before them to straighten out their perspectives
to the political realities at hand.
-
- It very disheartening. However, these two were the ones
Bush and Cheney wanted to exclusively meet. So perhaps other panel members
might still remember what service to the country and their office entails.
-
- Just remember that the focus is not whether or not Al-Qaeda
and terrorism were major items of central interest. Focus must be on the
facet that Clarke's efforts to protect the country under intelligence relating
to domestic attacks were sandbagged and that we went from the highest state
of alert domestically to one that left the barn door open on 9-11 for the
events to unfold for history.
-
- We didn't need Al-Qaeda or terrorism to be front page
because aside from the inescapable fact that we just had gone off that
high alert, we have a trillion dollar military defense system to intervene
when planes go off transponder. Would they push this malarkey upon us if
those planes had nuclear payloads? Of course not.
-
- Don't forget the NSA is there to protect our nation and
anticipate our needs. She is not there to sabotage efforts to protect our
nation against the very attacks that concern this country's terrorism chiefs.
Someone had better clearly explain how we went from the highest state of
alert to de facto no alert. Someone better explain how the welcome mat
for terrorists opened during Bush's term and why he felt so self assured
about hanging around the Booker T. Elementary School once Andrew Card told
him that America was under attack. Many also want to know why Card didn't
stay by the President's side just in case he had a question about what
was happening. But history records that the President was more concerned
about his mission with second graders during a non election year when he
traveled to Florida after being criticized for being away from Washington
all of August 2001.
-
- Washington knows the truth. The Congress and the Democratic
leaders all know the truth. They have honed political instincts and 9-11
to them represents an opportunity to grasp for themselves the riches of
this obscene agenda. When we are lucky enough to have a person with inside
information tell us that Condy Rice surely knew about the plans of terrorists
to use planes to drive them into buildings, we see Kean and Hamilton say
that she is among the many persons supplying the panel with information.
Because of foreign press interest in her - highlighting that the US media
is avoiding this important story - they are rushing looking into it. This
entire political structure smells.
-
- The Bush administration was asleep at its post on 9-11
- the important question whether it represented negligence or a deliberate
intentional deed. If this country put its guard down to allow and assure
the success the events of 9-11 so that Bush according to Rice could do
more than swat at flies, then its time to take this president and his cohorts
to task.
-
- In this regard, the Commission better answer whether
these terrorists could have commandeered two planes with precision into
the World Trade Center based on flight school lessons, why one, two, three
four planes off transponder did not trigger an immediate launch of a prepared
response to defend this country. There was de facto no response to an attack
that could have been so much worse than it was - that it was 3000 rather
than 30000 or 300000 or even 3000000 therefore is attributable to luck
or strange coincidence and all we can tell you if were the higher numbers
no one would tolerate the feeble rationalizations seen to day by these
two on Meet the Press. However, in respect to the 3000, what is the difference?
Our position to protect this country should be the very same regarding
3000 than 3000000.
-
- When we hear the White House say that was no way that
this country or this administration could have prepared for the vents of
9-11, we get angry for that type of big lie bespeaks the need of this country
to have committed trillions over decades to national defense.
- Don't you see the lies get bigger and bolder since JFK
- TWA Flight 800, Princess Diana, and now 9-11? You are the victim. So
sit around passive and you will get what the N.W.O. believes you well deserve.
-
- What the American people better not forget that is that
for six weeks this country was on the highest alert ever.
-
- There is one line of questions this panel had better
pursue.
-
- In view of the highest state of alert in US history during
the six weeks in the summer of 2001, what would have been the difference
had the 9-11 attack taken place during this six-week period of time?
-
- Answers to this line would show that there was no response
on 9-11 and that the state of readiness WOULD have intervened in the events
of 9-11 (accounting why the enemies within waited until this heightened
level unknown to the terrorists abated).
-
- There was a sense of urgency during that period of time.
How do you account from moving to a state of urgency to one of complacency
and de facto neglect?
-
- Call and write this panel. Tell them you are watching
and expecting them to ask the incisive questions. Tell them if they softball
Rice, they better first tell the American people they now have developed
a conflict of interest and are not discharging their duty. They know 9-11
needn't have happened but it was allowed to happen and they better not
sweep it under the rug.
-
- From Meet the Press transcript:
-
- MR. HAMILTON: Well, I'm not sure that it is. Let's take
the question raised by Mr. Clarke's testimony. He said that the Bush administration
put an important priority on al-Qaeda and terrorism but not an urgent one.
Well, how do you draw that line between important and urgent? That's a
very subjective kind of a judgment and it can easily be colored by your
own biases, by your own position, if you would. That's very typical, it
seems to me, of the kinds of differences we confront here.
-
- SenderBerl: Misdirection, deflection. The issue must
center on the high level of alert for the six weeks, the basis therefor,
the reason it was lowered and the degree it was lowered. Tack on to this
that we had a trillion dollar defense system to preclude attack on our
country, with a system structured to respond to four planes off transponder
and there was no response at all. Of course at any time couple on the issues
regarding the President's more than weird behavior at the Booker T. Elementary
School and there is much the 9-11 panel needs to answer as fiduciaries
for the USA.
-
- MR. KEAN: I think that's probably fair and probably right,
but I think they were skeptical about a number of things at that point.
No question, there was a period in the summer when people refer to it as
their hair being on fire, there were so many threats of one kind coming
in, but most of them, in all honesty, were not threats to this country,
they were threats to things abroad. And we put a barricades around our
United States embassies. We tried to protect our American citizens over
there. We did a number of actions in that area. Did we do enough at home?
No, but I think to your question, there was some skepticism, no question
about it.
-
- SenderBerl: When we heard this we knew Kean was compromised.
If he says something like this on national television he had better explain
before making such a statement why this country was on the highest alert
ever one that could not be sustained for more than six weeks apparently
and how he can justify such a high state of alert unless someone in a high
position had intelligence that supported a domestic attack.
-
- MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post wrote this in May of
last year: "On July 5 of [2001]...the White House summoned officials
of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room." 'Something really
spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon',"
said "Richard Clark," the terrorism czar. "The group included
the Federal Aviation Administration"--"the Coast Guard"--the--"FBI,
Secret Service"--"Immigration and Naturalization Service."
-
- "Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to
cancel vacations, defer nonvital travel, put off schedule exercises and
place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks
[in the summer of 2001], at home and overseas, the U.S. government was
at its highest possible state of readiness - and anxiety - against imminent
terrorist attack."
-
- Congressman Hamilton, it sounds like people in the White
House really expected something big to happen and really did ring the alarm
bell.
-
- MR. HAMILTON: Yes. I think they did and especially Mr.
Clarke at that. That's kind of a high watermark in the summer when the
chatter on the intelligence lines was very high, a lot of reports coming
in at that moment about possible terrorist activity. And there wasn't any
question that there was a sense of urgency at that point and may have been
the high watermark prior to, of course, September 11 in terms of the government
being keyed up, ready to go and ready to act.
-
- SenderBerl: You see that Russert understands and sees
that these two have been compromised and it is only confirmed by Hamilton's
lame answer. These people should be hung until they fess up to the truth.
-
- MR. RUSSERT: It says they were on high alert for six
weeks, canceling vacations, the whole bit. And then, did we let our guard
down before September 11th?
-
- MR. KEAN: We did a bit, because the threat level went
down. All these tremendous things that were coming over stopped coming
over, and we weren't getting the level of threat that we got, and as that
threat level went down and people had been sort of at the ready all along,
they did let down their guard a bit. There's no question about it. We were
not at the state of readiness on September 11th that we'd been back in
August.
-
- SenderBerl: You knowif we didn't know better we would
think that Kean spent the day with Condoleezza Rice. This is why the Constitution
warned us to be on guard against enemies foreign and domestic.
-
- MR. RUSSERT: Why do you think that is?
-
- MR. KEAN: I think when the chatter went down, when they
didn't hear all these people talking to each other so much, there were
other priorities out there. You can't keep people sort of at the ready
constantly, day after day after day after day, and I think gradually they
had a plan. They had a meeting, as you know, just before September 11th.
They thought they were operating on some of these things, but the actual
tension relaxed as the chatter relaxed.
-
- SenderBerl: Russert is a professional. He does his job,
and then it is up to you and you and you to listen and act. He asks the
right questions for a television journalist and he shows he knows that
these people are among the low of the low, but he has to leave it to others
to see the handwriting on the wall. Thus, we do what he cannot do but it
is up to you to do the next step - holler loudly! By the way, how come
not one representative of the families of 9-11 victims that prepared the
questions for Rice and Bush have been invited onto these shows?
-
- MR. HAMILTON: That no one has been let go?
-
- MR. RUSSERT: Yeah.
-
- MR. HAMILTON: Not really. First of all, government's
not very good at that. not just this government but many governments, in
holding people strictly accountable. Secondly, I think the problem is really
more systemic in nature. The more I look at it, the more I see kind of
systemwide problems rather than individual responsibility. That doesn't
mean the commission will not make criticism. We may make criticisms--I
don't know--of individual people. But what I'm quite sure is, we will find
somewhere along the line that there were a lot of problems. A government
has to manage huge amounts of data, not all of it in English. Millions
and millions of bites of data come into the government all the time, and
analyzing those, collecting them and disseminating--very, very tough job,
and it takes systems analysis and management to an extraordinary degree.
-
- SenderBerl: If you are not nauseated by this type of
whitewash before the formal whitewash then there's nothing we can say that
will bring light to you.
-
- MR. RUSSERT: There's a report in a British newspaper,
The Independent, about a former translator for the FBI with top-secret
security clearance, says she's provided information to the panel investigating
the attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qaida's plan to attack
the U.S. with aircraft months before the strike happened. Sibel Edmonds
is her name. She said she spent more than three hours in a closed session
with the commission and provided information that was circulating within
the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting an attack using aircraft
was months away, that terrorists were in place. Is she credible?
-
- MR. KEAN: We've had all her testimony. It's under investigation.
I can't say--we're certainly not there that she's credible or uncredible
yet.
-
- MR. HAMILTON: We've talked to her.
-
- MR. KEAN: Yeah.
-
- MR. HAMILTON: We've talked to people she has identified.
We've looked at documents. Look, the commission gets leads by the dozens,
every day. I had a dozen of them last week. And we do our level best to
follow up on all of them. In this case, and several others that have been
prominent in the European press, we have been very, very careful in our
research. We're not totally completed with it, as the governor has mentioned.
-
- SenderBerl: Do we have to say a word here?
-
- MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, you think September 11th could
have been prevented?
-
- MR. HAMILTON: Well, there's a lot of ifs. You can string
together a whole bunch of ifs. And if things had broken right in all kinds
of different ways, as the governor has identified, and many more, and,
frankly, if you'd had a little luck, it probably could have been prevented.
But we'll make a final judgment on that, I believe, when the commission
reports.
-
- MR. RUSSERT: The widows and widowers of the victims of
September 11 have been a driving force in the creation of this commission
and its investigation. Kristen Breitweiser testified in September of 2002
and posed some questions. And I'd like to play her testimony and come back
and talk about it.
-
- (Videotape, September 18, 2002):
-
- MS. KRISTEN BREITWEISER (9/11 Widow): One thing remains
clear from this history. Our intelligence agencies were acutely aware of
an impending domestic risk posed by al-Qaeda. A question that remains unclear
is how many lives could have been saved had this information been made
more public. How many victims may have taken notice of these Middle Eastern
men while they were boarding their plane? Could these men have been stopped?
Could the devastation of September 11 been diminished in any degree had
the government's information been made public in the summer of 2001?
-
- (End videotape)
-
- SenderBerl: The question should have been do you think
9-11 could have been prevented had the heightened alert status been maintained
for another month? Another better form of question would have been do you
think the military national defense system should have been keyed and one
would imagine it was keyed to sending up planes to intercept a number of
planes off transponder (under military planning of various modes to implement
nuclear attack upon major cities). Why then was there no response particularly
when the military and national defense system knew we were just taken off
the highest alert level in US history?
-
- MR. RUSSERT: And it should be said, those of us in the
media did not focus on al-Qaeda in the summer of 2001. In fact, in the
2000 presidential election, I believe terrorism was mentioned twice in
the presidential debates. So everyone had a much different mind-set pre-September
11.
-
- MR. HAMILTON: And it's very important that the commission
keep that in mind. That is to say, we have to try to put ourselves into
the place of the policy-maker back then facing not one, but dozens of threats
at that time, and try to understand whether or not they acted reasonably
under those circumstances; not the circumstances now, when we're looking
back, and it's so very clear.
-
- SenderBerl: Hamilton shows he is inept here because you
don't apply standards that would apply to an everyday citizen to the National
Security Advisor and those charged with protecting the country. Gee, if
nuclear threats become diminished is that a rationalization to allow the
military to stand down from monitoring against a launch of nuclear weapons
against the USA?
-
- We think we have made our point. If you don't tell them
that you are on to them, they will have no respect or regard for you and
you will be victimized yet again.
-
- End APRIL 4 9:30 PM. Sender, Berl & Sons Inc.
|
