General Discussion

bigtree

(85,975 posts) Tue May 14, 2013, 11:24 PM May 2013

They ignored repeated warnings about the threat.

Excerpt from the 6 August 2001 PDB

Washington, D.C., 12 April 2004 - President Bush on Saturday, 10 April 2004, became the first sitting president ever to release publicly even a portion of his Daily Brief from the CIA. The page-and-a-half section of the President's Daily Brief from 6 August 2001, headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," had generated the most contentious questioning in last week's testimony by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before the commission investigating the September 11th attacks.

The American people can decide for themselves about the warning quotient, now that the text of the Brief is public. Even with the text, we don't really know what the President knew and when he knew it. According to the CIA and the 9/11 commission, there were 40 other mentions of Al Qaeda or Bin Laden in the President's Daily Briefs before 9/11. Most of those presumably came during what Dr. Rice called "the threat spike" of June and July 2001. The August 6 Brief came on the downside of that spike, so the other PDB reports may be more (or less) alarming. Until these are released - and Saturday's release shows it can be done with minor deletions to protect sources - neither the American public nor the 9/11 commission can move on to the next question: "What did the President do and when did he do it?" Or, perhaps most important, how do we fix our vulnerabilities, rather than just hide them?

read: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/

related:

Dick Cheney on Benghazi: We would have been 'locked and loaded'
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2013/05/14/dick-cheney-on-benghazi-we-would-have-been-locked-and-loaded/

TP - Dick Cheney: Benghazi ‘One Of The Worst Incidences I Can Recall In My Career’...

CHENEY: I watched the Benghazi thing with great interest, Sean Hannity. I think it’s one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career. It put the whole capability claiming the terrorist problem solved once we got Bin Laden, that Al Qaeda was over with. If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for re-election.

They lied. They claimed it was because of a demonstration video, that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence. They ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people on the ground that they need more security. They reduced what was already there.

Cheney’s choice of words is interesting, given the numerous security lapses and misleading narratives that took place during his multiple periods in power in Washington. One would think that the former vice president would regard the 9/11 attacks as the “worst incident” that he could recall. Or perhaps the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, in which he and other members of the administration repeatedly misled the American people about Iraq’s WMDs and the war’s difficulty and costs. Or the Abu Gharib prison scandal, in which Iraqis were tortured under the watchful eyes of American soldiers and prompted more and greater attacks on U.S. forces. Or perhaps the thirteen attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds that occurred during the Bush administration’s two terms, in which nearly a dozen Americans died.

Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chair of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on Benghazi, referred to claims that a cover-up occurred as “Pulitzer Prize fiction.” Likewise, the CIA’s original draft of the infamous talking points, which Republicans, including Cheney, point to as evidence of a conspiracy, mentioned that the attacks “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” with the next draft showing the intelligence community’s belief that a demonstration had occurred prior to the attacks . . .

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/05/14/2007111/dick-cheney-benghazi-one-of-the-worst-incidences-i-can-recall-in-my-career/