The Sydney Herald’s March 8th edition carries a detailed excerpt from a new book, due out Monday, which chronicles White House efforts to cover up the clear incompetence of then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice in the months leading up to 9/11.
Other news stories have provided some details of this story, but Philip Shenon’s The Commission - The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation by (Little, Brown, $35), brings together an array of material which, taken in total, paints a devastating picture of Rice’s incompetence and lack of attention to the threat of Al Queada attacks on the U.S. despite a deluge of warnings. It also details how the head of the 9/11 Commission made it his job to make sure those facts were kept away from the public.
As has been clear before now, one of the major sources of those warnings was Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s counter-terrorism director. Clarke had managed to survive at least the initial stages of the transition from the Clinton administration to the bush White House, but his bluntness and his continued "harping" on what he saw as the most serious terrorist threat levels ever to face the U.S. were largely ignored by Rice.
Shenon’s bombshell revelation in the excerpt from the first chapter is a Clarke memo, written just one week before the 9/11 attack. Clarke had been bombarding Rice for months with warnings of the pending threat, and had been repeatedly ignored and/or rebuffed. His Sept. 4th memo, Shenon says, was chilling in its accuracy about what was to come:
(Warren) Bass (a member of the 9/11 Commission) told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke's frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience.
"Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?" he asked Rice. "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al-Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US.
Bass's colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 email was so sensitive - and potentially damaging, especially to Rice - that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not "significantly reproduce" the wording of a classified document.
Commission staff matched up the dates and headlines of senior briefings prepared for President Bush and for Rice and found more than 40 references to the Bin Laden terror threat in briefings between January and September of 2001 – some prepared for the President and Rice’s office by CIA Director George Tenant, and others in senior intelligence briefing documents, based on those same CIA findings, sent regularly to senior administration officials. Shenon lists a litany of the titles of these documents:
"Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations" (April 20)and "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real" (June 30)
It was especially troubling for Hurley's team to realise how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person: Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser. Emails from the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the presidential and senior briefings
"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3)
"Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23)
"Bin Ladin's Networks' Plans Advancing" (May 26)
"Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent" (June 23)
"Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats" (June 25)
"Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks" (June 30)
"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2)
As is now clear, Rice never took any serious action in response to these warnings, but the existence of the Clark memo was clearly a threat to the White House. They could not allow it to see the light of day. But they already had in place a secure defense in the form of Philip Zekilow, who had been appointed Chief Director of the 9/11 Commission. As commission staff came to realize, Zekilow had worked on the Bush transition team in 2000 and 2001, had a fervent dislike for Clarke, a strong friendship with Rice and, they also learned, had played a role in ...developing the "pre-emptive war" strategy at the White House in 2002.
In other words, one of the more fervent of the White House Kool Aid drinkers had been put in charge of the Commission charged with investigating the circumstances of 9/11 and what might have gone wrong with America’s intelligence system. It is easy to see, therefore, why the Commission’s findings produced so little in the way of useful public information or of actionable items for correction.
Zelikow’s role clearly had nothing to do with getting at the truth. It was concentrated on hiding it...in making sure that the fact that Richard Clarke had been right and had tried repeatedly to warn Rice and the Administration..never saw the light of day. And he was successful, aided in part by a lazy press corps and Republican allies in the House and Senate such as Kansas Senator Pat Roberts who repeatedly blocked efforts to release key Commission documents.
Given the lack of action prior to now and the mountain of corruption, lies, incompetence, and cover-ups perpetrated by this administration, it seems highly unlikely that these revelations will result in any meaningful action, although they could clearly be grounds for impeachment in the case of the President for failure to protect the United States against the threat of attack, and ouster for Rice in terms of clearly gross incompetence in ignoring mounting warnings for nearly a year before the 9/11 attacks.
At a press conference 8 months after the attacks, Shenon recounts,
(Rice was) (a)sked if September 11 didn't represent an intelligence failure by the Administration. (S)he replied almost testily: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Centre, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon - that they would try to use an airplane as a missile."
Gee Condi....Nobody?
I have seen Condi’s name bandied about as a possible VP for McCain. I can’t imagine a more horrifying choice.