South Byron, NY—
I’m doing some railfanning outside South Byron NY, which is a bit west of Rochester. Because of the Easter holiday, rail traffic is light. Just as well; I’m getting a lot of reading done, from various news sources.
Well, the Democrats got what they wanted… they got the President to release the PDB from August 6th 2001, which had the title headlined, “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.” But what did they get?
I expect they got exactly what they wanted; a smoke screen, to cover their own actions. Here’s the exact text of that PDB: (Bold is mine… you’ll see why in a minute)
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Osama bin Laden Determined To Strike in US
Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Osama bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America”.
After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington according to a XXXXXX service.
An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXX service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US.
Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.
Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.
Although bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks.
Bin Laden associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.
Al-Qaida members – including some who are US citizens – have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qaida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1900s.
A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a XXXXXX service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this 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 US 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 Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.
Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004
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So, clearly, even based on the document the Democrats were clamoring for, the White House had nothing new to go on and certainly no actionable information.
Yes, it’s true, the Democrats are quick to wave the the paragraph about “The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related.” Trouble with that argument, however, is that even investigations to this day, have revealed no connections between the investigations mentioned in the PDB, and the 9/11 attacks.
Now, we know that DNC ‘attack poodle’ David BenVineste had seen this memo before it was declassified. Why would he then be pressing for this memo in open hearings? If the goal of the commission, is as stated, to find out how to prevent such attacks from happening again, and this was information the commission already had in hand, why would BenVineste have persisted in his ‘attack poodle District Attorney’ routine?
Political cover, that’s why.
Notice; I didn’t say political points, though admittedly, on the surface there’s much to commend the concept, and in fact such an argument will give a boost to the Democrats among the uninformed. But what I said was “Political cover.” Cover from what? Why, what the Democrats don’t want you to know, of course.
Which is, that President George W. Bush’s first major national security policy directive was in the words of Condi Rice: “not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda.”
The fact is that the directive was issued a week before the attacks, on September 4, 2001. Now, Doctor Rice didn’t say as much, but the order took nigh on eight months to process. This was not due to a lack in the Bush administration. This is however directly connection to the Democrats who held up confirmations of key members of the new administration until less than two months before the 9/11 attacks.
Which in turn, explains why so many of the security positions at the highest levels, were still staffed by Clinton Mis-administration appointees…. such as Richard Clarke. As a result of this Democrat stonewalling, for example, Mr. Bush’s appointee for the top NSC special assistant for intelligence programs, Mary Sturtevant, had only been on the job for several weeks on 9/11. Do you suppose this would have any effect on how responsive the White House was to various threats?
To their credit, the White House has brought up none of this; Indeed, they need not do so, since as I’ve said they were already properly reacting to everything they knew about.
Clearly, were the general public to find out about this connection, they’d lose the desperately needed political points they’ve spent their entire time on the 9/11 commission trying to gain. Time they were supposed to be using for the purposes of fact finding.
Now ask yourself; will anyone bring what I’ve just told you into account in the 9/11 commission’s final report?
You know better, don’t you really?
Tags: BitsBlog
