Cool article - but Clinton flew back that day or the next. W sent a plane for him I believe.

Did anyone else but me hear Reno slip and practically come out and say that Clinton had attempted to assassinate bin Laden? :eek:

Oliver North was on Faux News last night, too. They actually let him into Iraq.

Irrelevant.

not to the general credibility of the writer who asserts many things expected to be taken at face value :shrug:

He never said W didn't send a plane for Clinton. He said Clinton and Gore couldn't fly that day but the Bin Ladens did. True, no?

He said "Not even Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who were out of the country, were allowed to fly home." I took that to mean that the Pres. did not allow these two men to fly home. I believe that is untrue. If it is, it begs the question of what other info in the article is untrue.

It doesn't say the president didn't allow them to fly. Those are your words. They could not fly on September 11. No one could, except the Bin Ladens and members of the Saudi royal family. Here are Clinton's own words:

http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/04/cli...ipt/index.html

September 11
KING: Where were you on September 11, Mr. President?

CLINTON: Australia. But I had an unusual experience because my former staff members Cheryl Mills and Bruce Lindsey were in Cheryl's office down in Tribeca with a full view of the World Trade Center. So they called me between the time the first tower was hit and the time the second tower was hit and talked me through it.

KING: Were you watching it too?

CLINTON: Later I turned it on. But I was downtown in a little town in Port Douglas where I had taken my family for vacation after the '96 election.

KING: Did you come right back?

CLINTON: I did. The White House was kind enough to give me military transport, and I left the next day and got home as quick as I could.

KING: To New York?

CLINTON: Yes.

KING: Was it difficult coming into New York?

CLINTON: Yes, it was very sad. I went down as quickly as I could, took my daughter down to the crisis center. Hillary was in Washington already at work trying to figure out what needed to be done for the state and the city.

Must read
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Apr13.html

Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings
Reports Preceded August 2001 Memo
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A01


By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.



In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."

The intelligence included reports of a hostage plot against Americans. It noted that operatives might choose to hijack an aircraft or storm a U.S. embassy. Without knowing when, where or how the terrorists would strike, the CIA "consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil," according to one of two staff reports released by the panel yesterday.

"Reports similar to these were made available to President Bush in the morning meetings with [Director of Central Intelligence George J.] Tenet," the commission staff said.

Click the link for the full article.

Didn't the incident actually happen on 9/12 in Australia and wouldn't it take a day to get a plane there to pick up Bill Clinton :shrug:

In any event, my point was this author made it sound like Clinton waited for days, etc. He, at best, spun that thruth. :cool:

and so it begins
 

You were saying Dissention and Goldie:
___________________________________________________________
Head Spook Sputters

April 15, 2004
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

If only Osama had faxed an X-marks-the-spot map to the
Crawford ranch showing the Pentagon, the Capitol, the twin towers and the word "BOOM!" scrawled in Arabic.

That might have sparked sluggish imaginations. Or maybe not.

Only a couple of weeks after the endlessly vacationing President Bush got his Aug. 6, 2001, briefing with the shivery headline "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the C.I.A. chief, George Tenet, and other top agency officials received a briefing about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui after his suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school. And that had another shivery headline: "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."

"The news had no evident effect" on prompting the C.I.A. to warn anyone, according to the drily rendered report of the 9/11 commission's staff, which faults the agency for management miasma and Al Qaeda myopia, citing a failure to make a "comprehensive estimate of the enemy."

Asked by the commission member Timothy Roemer about whether he had shared this amazing news at a Sept. 4 meeting with Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Clarke - the meeting on Al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke had been urgently begging for since January - Mr. Tenet said no. Asked if he had ever mentioned it to Mr. Bush in August, during a month of "high chatter and huge warnings," Mr. Tenet said no.

The Man Whose Hair Was Allegedly on Fire told the commissioners that he had not talked to the president at all in August. Mr. Bush was in Texas, and he was in Washington. Or he was on vacation, and the president was in Texas. Quel high alert.

After the hearing, Mr. Tenet had an aide call reporters to say he had misspoken, that he had briefed the presidenttwice in August, in Crawford on Aug. 17 for a morning briefing he deemed unexceptional and again in Washington on Aug. 31.

I'm not sure whether Mr. Tenet - a mystifyingly beloved figure even though he was in charge during the two biggest intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs - has a faulty memory, which is scary. Or if he's fuzzing things up because he told the president more specifics than he wants to admit. But in a town where careers are made on face time with the president, it's fishy that the head spook can't remember a six-hour trip to Crawford for some.

In a commission staff report, there is a stark juxtaposition of Sandy Berger's approach before the millennium and Condi Rice's before 9/11.

"Berger, in particular, met or spoke constantly with Tenet and Attorney General Reno," the report said. "He visited the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. on Christmas Day 1999 to raise the morale of exhausted officials."

Condi and her deputy, Steve Hadley, did not stoop to mere domestic work. "Rice and Hadley told us that before 9/11, they did not feel they had the job of handling domestic security." They left that up to Dick Clarke to broker, the same guy Dick Cheney said "wasn't in the loop."

Maybe Condi's confusion about her job - that it entailed national security as well as being the president's foreign policy governess and workout partner - explains why so many critical clues went into the black holes of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy spoke to newspaper publishers and said: "This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, `An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.' . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed - and no republic can survive."

Compare Kennedy with Mr. Bush, who conceded no errors and warned that any Vietnam analogy with Iraq - in this acid flashback moment when 64 U.S. troops were reported to have died last week and when McNarummy is forcing up to 20,000 troops to stay in Iraq - "sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy."

He reiterated that his mission is dictated from above:
"Freedom is the almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world."

Given the Saudi religious authority's fatwa against our troops, and given that our marines are surrounding a cleric in the holy city of Najaf, we really don't want to make Muslims think we're fighting a holy war. That would only further inflame the Arab world and endanger our overstretched military, so let's hope that Mr. Bush's reference to the almighty was to Dick Cheney.**

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/op...caa52e14438498

That's what I was saying: they all lie and contradict each other. ;)

I thought that the month of August was pretty much silent and without any chatter? Now it's a month filled with warnings?

I thought national security was Minute Rice's job? Now it's Richard Clarke's? But, I thought he was "out of the loop"?

I thought the White House "shook every tree" to get this information? Now they apparently didn't?

Gimme a break. The article should be titled "Lies and the lying liars who tell them."

Wouldn't a lying liar be telling the truth :shrug:

So much for Philosophy 101 - please return to your regularly scheduled programming!!! :cool:

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock....drip, drip, drip...

WHAT A MORNING!!!! :lol:

Bush Erred on Mustard Gas
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...bush_mistake_3

"Once again, President Bush (news - web sites) misspoke on a weapons issue, telling the nation that 50 tons of mustard gas were found in Libya — twice the amount actually uncovered."

Jobless Claims Rise More Than Expected
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...y_jobless_dc_1

"The number of Americans filing initial claims for jobless aid rose a sharper than expected 30,000 last week, the biggest jump in over a year, according to a government report on Thursday that could temper budding enthusiasm over a U.S. labor market revival. "

Poll: Kerry Favored Over Bush in N.Y.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...sidential_poll

"Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) has a hefty double-digit lead over President Bush (news - web sites) among New York state voters, according to a statewide poll released Wednesday."

Iraq War Prompts Voter Questions in Key U.S. State
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...n_bush_iraq_dc

"Mounting violence and casualties in Iraq (news - web sites) may be straining support for President Bush (news - web sites) in Ohio, a Midwestern state that could well determine his re-election this November."

Here is a link to a GREAT NYTimes article called:


Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings
Were More Dire and Persistent



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/po...ae34c7959e856d