The yawn is not mine. It's directed at the MSM who yuck it up with Shrub's "comedy" routines.
SHENON was just on BookTV. Most of what he said can be found in these two links, and in Google. The commission's report "didn't point fingers," but *does* point out that CLINTON was "obsessed" with binLaden and issued a kill order on him (later extenuated) and that Shrub was warned some (forty?) times before 9-11 and Shrubbites all were "incompetent" and that Condo lied while CLARKE didn't. Oh, and this ZELIKOW had conflicts of interests, deep ties to Condo and un-logged phone calls with KKKarl. Btw, BERGER was stealing dispersed copies of the ONE, SAME memo from CLARKE, listing 29 things the CLINTON admin could do better, which BERGER thought would make him the scapegoat. Oh, and the FBI (TENANT) had a much worse record than the CIA, but the new FBI dude, MUELLER, "charmed" the commission with his availability, while the CIA stonewalled and therefore came off worse. Ho hum.
The vignette of KISSENGER dropping his coffee cup when the Jersey Girls asked him whether he had any clients named BINLADEN is priceless.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/books/04thom.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.... Mr. Berger had actually been more attentive to the threat of Al Qaeda than most government officials, including his successors in the Bush administration, but he apparently feared that he and his boss would become scapegoats. “Beneath his gruff amiability,” Mr. Shenon writes of Mr. Berger, “there was deep insecurity that, even he admitted, bordered on paranoia.”
In a memorable scene Mr. Shenon depicts the widows of 9/11 victims, a group that called itself the Jersey Girls, meeting Henry A. Kissinger, President Bush’s choice to be chairman of the 9/11 Commission, in the posh offices of Mr. Kissinger’s international consulting firm in New York. When one of the Jersey Girls asks Mr. Kissinger if he has any clients named bin Laden, Mr. Kissinger spills his coffee and nearly falls off his sofa. “It’s my bad eye,” Mr. Kissinger explains, as the women rush to clean up the mess — “like good suburban moms,” Mr. Shenon says one widow recalls. The next morning Mr. Kissinger telephoned the White House to resign from the commission.
The black hat of Mr. Shenon’s story is the commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow. Brilliant but abrasive and secretive, he is regarded by some commission staff members as a White House mole, compromised by his close ties to Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush’s national security adviser. The book’s portrait of Mr. Zelikow is harsh, but Mr. Shenon seems to have reached out to Mr. Zelikow to get both sides of the story. (Mr. Zelikow scoffs at charges of conflict and conspiracy made by Mr. Shenon’s sources.)
The official ineptitude uncovered by the commission is shocking. Dubbed “Kinda-Lies-a-Lot” by the Jersey Girls, Ms. Rice comes across as almost clueless about the terrorist threat. “Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president,” Mr. Shenon writes. “Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.” ....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-benedict/philip-shenons-commi_b_90481.html.... After reading The Commission, which peels back much of the "ass-covering" that the actual Commission did in pursuit of its congressional mandate, I've given up my LIHOP-hood. I'm fully on board with the Incompetence Theorists. Shenon doesn't attack government ineptitude head-on. He reveals the terrifying extent of it -- from the FAA to the CIA -- through a series of gripping vignettes, through the stories and relationships of dozens of people affected by 9/11, from the Jersey Girls But-For-Whom-the-Commission-Would-Never-Have-Been, to Henry Kissinger, who, in a meeting with them, spilled hot coffee and nearly fell off his seat when one of them asked if he had any clients whose last named is Bin Laden. ....
2. The 9-11 Commission didn't want to point fingers as to who in government bore the responsibility for the intelligence failures that allowed the attacks to happen, but your reporting points pretty decisively at Condi Rice for consistently, even stubbornly, refusing to pass on the warnings from Richard Clarke and others to the President. It turns out there were dozens of dramatic warnings of attacks, spanning most of 2001. How aware were you of Condi Rice's failings in this regard before you began researching the book? Was it widely known that there were warnings throughout 2001 - in addition to the famous Aug. 6 PDB - that she ignored? Condoleezza Rice has a lot to answer for about her performance as national security adviser in 2001, and I had no idea how much until I got into the reporting of the book. Like every other reporter covering the 9/11 commission, I focused too much on the infamous Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," as if it were the one and only clear warning to the White House of catastrophe that summer. The truth is that the Aug. 6 PDB was only the tip of the iceberg -- that the White House, and Rice in particular, were being told virtually every day in the spring and summer of 2001 that the United States faced a dire terrorist threat, and that no one ruled out an attack on American soil.
I was really struck by one CIA report to the White House, dated June 30, 2001, with an incredibly stark headline, "Bin Laden Threats Are Real," which seemed a desperate effort to attract somebody's attention in the West Wing. And yet, the documentary records suggests that Rice just wasn't very interested in the threat and, in fact, demoted her counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, in the early months of 2001. Compare Rice to her predecessor, Sandy Berger, who pressed Clinton to focus on Al Qaeda and gave Clarke instant access to the Oval Office.
3. What were the three or four biggest surprises that turned up when you did the research for the book that you hadn't known when you were reporting on the 9/11 Commission for the Times? I was startled to learn of the battles within the commission's staff, particularly between some of the teams of investigators and Philip Zelikow, the executive director. I had no sense at all of those struggles while the commission was in business, if only because the staff was barred by Zelikow from talking to reporters. I also had no understanding of just how much control Zelikow had over the commission's day-to-day investigation. Other surprises: That so many of the commissioners and staff questioned George Tenet's truthfulness, to the point where they required him to testify under oath in private interviews; that the commission had missed so much evidence at the National Security Agency, almost certainly the commission's most grievous research failure; that Zelikow had several contacts with Karl Rove and apparently ordered his secretary to stop logging any phone calls with the White House. ....
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