The 9/11 Commission Report, Part 2

June, 2003

With each meeting, Tom Kean grew more exasperated with Alberto Gonzales.  Kean kept asking himself the same questions:  Did Gonzales understand the political damage he was doing to President Bush?  Did the president understand what was being done by Gonzales in his name?

The White House, through Gonzales, was refusing to provide the commission with essential documents, including the president's daily briefs that went to Bush in the months before 9/11.  Gonzales also made it clear that President Bush would not be made available for a formal interview with the full commission.  Nor would Vice President Dick Cheney.  Nor would National Security Adviser Conoleezza Rice be allowed to testify in public or under oath.  "No, no, no," Kean kept hearing.

In my second part of this 5-part series (Read Part 1 here) on the 9/11 Commission's investigation, based on the book The Commission by Philip Shenon, I will try to expose the remarkable attempt to derail and stonewall the investigation by the Bush administration, in an all-too-obvious effort to avoid blame for their actions before 9/11 that failed to prevent the attack.  They eventually caved to public and media pressure and gave in on some points - allowing Rice to testify in public, although only in an attempt to cover her ass after the worst charges against her were brought to light - but not nearly everything that the commission should have received in order to make a proper investigation, and definitely not in a timely enough manner to make all the evidence understandable. 

And Tom Kean was wrong.  Gonzales knew exactly what he was doing (for once).  There wasn't an ounce of political damage from all this stonewalling.  The public didn't care.  The media didn't care.  Bush got re-elected in 2004.  The reasons why the administration refused to give any details about their actions before 9/11 were never exposed.  Just like their reasons for entering the Iraq war, for continuing the Iraq war indefinitely, for creating the surge, for ignoring Katrina, for torturing prisoners, for spying on American citizens, etc.  None of it ever mattered.  Yes, everyone hates Bush and everyone agrees he's the worst president ever, and he may have possibly cost the Republicans control of Congress in 2006, but there haven't been any true repercussions.  I mean, John McCain is running even with Obama and ahead of Hillary in current polls.  Are you serious?  Does anyone pay attention to anything anymore?  I'll just keep writing and hope that at least one reader, somewhere, somehow, gets angry enough to change his mind about how safe Republicans like Bush and McCain truly make us.  Because that's the only thing they're running on.  And they failed miserably before 9/11, have failed miserably since, and have made every effort to hide these facts from the rest of us.

The President's Daily Brief (PDB) is a highly classified document presented to the President by the CIA each morning, highlighting new international intelligence requiring attention by the president and an analysis of sensitive international situations.  These briefs were a major point of contention between Gonzales and the Commission, and ultimately, only a handful of the briefs were released to the commissioners, under specific protocol, and under certain conditions (and only after intense public pressure had threatened Bush's re-election).  There were about 300 total PDBs between the Bush and Clinton administration that dealt in some way with al Qaeda before 9/11.  Of those, the Commission was given full access to 20.  Philip Zelikow and commissioner Jamie Gorelick were given access to the full 300, and asked for another 50 to go to the rest of the commission.  Gonzales said there was no chance of that, and a subpoena to get the rest of the PDBs, or at least Zelikow and Gorelick's notes on them (which the White House kept for "security purposes"), was prepared.  But after significant negotiations in February 2004 (just 4 months before the final report was due), the Commission caved and said that they could instead primarily use the SEIBs, which were intelligence summaries that were less classified and were often used to prepare the actual PDBs. 

Many of the 9/11 family groups were outraged by this new compromise;  it was even clearer now that only Gorelick and their nemesis Zelikow would ever see the full library of PDBs;  the other commissioners would see only an edited version of what Gorelick and Zelikow chose to show them.

What did the 9/11 families miss?  What did the public not learn?  According to the author's interview with Jamie Gorelick,

She knew the Bush administration was right to complain that much of the intelligence in the PDBs in the months before 9/11 was maddeningly nonspecific about a possible date of place of an attack... But she was astonished by the sheer volume of the warnings.  Flood, cascade, tsunami, take your pick of metaphors.  She could see that in the spring and summer of 2001, there was a consistent drumbeat of warnings, day after day, that al-Qaeda was about to attack the United States or its allies.

It was clear to Gorelick that the CIA had gone to President Bush virtually every morning for months in 2001 to give him the message that the United States needed to be ready for a catastrophic terrorist strike.  And from what she was reading, no one ruled out the possibility of a domestic attack.

The most famous PDB was of course the August 6th one that was eventually made public during the Rice testimony that the White House belatedly agreed to.  This was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States."  (Link to the full PDB in PDF form). You may not remember what was revealed in the pages of the document, which Rice claimed was "historical" and "not current."

"FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin-Laden-related.  CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

Wow.  As Gorelick said, "[the verbs] were almost all in the present tense" -- 'indicates', 'is conducting', 'are investigating'.  How could those warnings be considered 'historical'?"

Here are some other headlines from the less-classified SEIBs from the spring and summer of 2001 (remember, there was no access by the Commission for all of these in PDB form):

"Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations" (April 20)
"Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack" (May 3)
"Terrorist Group Said Cooperating on US Hostage Plot" (May 23)
"Bin Ladin's Network's 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)
"Bin Ladin Threats Are Real" (June 30)
"Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays" (July 2)

Wow again.  I mean, how many hours was it after the attacks on 9/11 when every news story in the country was about Bin Laden and al Qaeda?  It was definitely by that afternoon.  Did you ever wonder how we knew so fast, how we were convinced?  Because we fucking knew before 9/11!  We knew he was going to attack, we knew the World Trade Center had been attacked before, we knew federal buildings in New York were being surveyed, and then a fucking 747 jet slams into the Trade Center and (if you watch the movie United 93, you'll realize), nothing -- and I mean nothing -- is done to prevent another attack for at least 2 hours.  For crying out loud, the FAA and NORAD responded to United 93, the last plane to go down, 30 minutes AFTER it had crashed.  There was more than enough time to prevent the 2nd crash into the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, but our government didn't do shit to prepare for it and didn't know how to respond when it was happening.  It's bad enough that President Bush read a children's book for 8 minutes after his adviser leaned into his ear and told him we were under attack.  But for Christ's sake, couldn't someone do something?  Apparently not.

It was especially troubling for Team 3 to realize how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person:  Condoleezza Rice.

Richard Clarke's emails 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 PDBs and the SEIBs.

On June 25, he warned Rice that six separate intelligence reports showed that bin Laden's followers were warning of an imminent, calamitous attack. 

He pointed out to her that an intercepted message between al-Qaeda followers warned of something coming that would be "very, very, very, very big."

Other parts of the government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department.  On June 21, the United States Central Command (in the Persian Gulf), went to "delta" alert (its highest) for American troops in six countries. 

But what had Rice done at the NSC? 

There is no record to show that Rice made any special effort to discuss terrorist threats with Bush.  The record suggested, instead, that it was not a matter of special interest to either of them that summer.

According to Bush, in December 2001, "I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring [bin Laden] to justice, and would have given the order to do that... But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

If anyone on the White House staff had responsibility for making Bush's blood boil that summer about Osama bin Laden, it was Condoleezza Rice.

More about Rice in the next part of this series.  Stay tuned.

Comments

[John McCain]

If Bush's blood was boiling, why did it stop boiling part-way through the Afghanistan mission (you know the one where we were supposed to get Bin Laden?) when he decided to focus on Iraq instead? I'm tired of hearing Bush called the worst President ever. That doesn't do his lack of true patriotism justice. He's the worst American ever. Sorry Benedict, your title has been usurped by the Idiot-in-Chief.

[Bill]

Excellent comment, Mr. McCain. I hope your attempts to become the third term of the Bush presidency fail as a result of citizens educating themselves about the failures of the current administration and the war in Iraq.