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#31
07-31-2004, 08:00 PM
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Last update: July 30, 2004 at 10:07 PM Dayton: FAA, NORAD hid 9/11 failures Greg Gordon, Star Tribune Washington Bureau Correspondent July 31, 2004 DAYT0731 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., charged Friday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) have covered up "catastrophic failures" that left the nation vulnerable during the Sept. 11 hijackings. "For almost three years now, NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history," Dayton declared during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing. During the hearing, leaders of the Sept. 11 commission urged Congress to promptly create a national intelligence chief to command a fragmented U.S. counterterrorism effort before Al-Qaida strikes again. "The intelligence community is not going to get its job done unless somebody is really in charge," said the commission's vice chair, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. Hamilton and commission chairman Tom Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, also pressed for creation of a National Counterterrorism Center to end intelligence-sharing failures that may have enabled the Sept. 11 hijackers. "What we're trying to do is force the sharing of information and then make one person responsible," Kean said. The Senate committee, moving with urgency despite Congress' summer recess, gave the two leaders a warm reception in the first of 15 or more congressional hearings in coming weeks on the 40 recommendations laid out in the commission's book-length report. "I think you stood your ground very convincingly," Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the committee's ranking Democrat, told Kean and Hamilton as the hearing concluded. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the committee chair, said she plans to hold several more hearings in hopes that the panel can adopt legislation by Oct. 1, possibly for floor consideration after the November election. Dayton: 'NORAD lied' During the hearing, Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading. The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed. And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, D.C., when the third plane struck the Pentagon -- "farther than they were before they took off." Dayton said NORAD officials "lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people." He told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct, President Bush "should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth." Asked about Dayton's allegation, a spokesman for Colorado Springs-based NORAD said, "We stand on our testimony to the commission" and declined to discuss the 2001 chronology. Erin Utzinger, a spokeswoman for Dayton, said the senator "assumes the FAA knew of NORAD's coverup." FAA spokeswoman Rebecca Trexler said the agency "has never and would never intentionally misrepresent or alter information. We worked very closely with the 9/11 commission and provided them with everything that was available to us." Dayton told reporters that he skipped festivities at the Democratic National Committee Tuesday night and sat in his hotel room until 2:30 a.m. reading the commission report. After piecing together the section about the FAA and NORAD, he said, he could not fall asleep. Dayton outraged "I'm a strong defender of government," he said. "When government fails, it really outrages me. It just destroys peoples' trust and faith." Using the chronology, Dayton argued that if the FAA had promptly sent a systemwide message about the hijackings, the pilot of the fourth plane seized, United Airlines Flight 93, might have been able to secure the cockpit doors and land the plane. Passengers, including Minnesota native Tom Burnett, Jr., "could very well be alive," he said. "This is unbelievable negligence," Dayton said. "It doesn't matter if we spend $550 billion annually on our national defense, if we reorganize our intelligence or if we restructure congressional oversight if people don't pick up the phone to call one another." He also noted that NORAD could not find the hijacked jetliners because terrorists turned off their transponders and NORAD lacked adequate radar to locate them without that beamed signal. Dayton said NORAD also falsely claimed that during the hijackings, it had F-16 Combat Air Patrol planes in place at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and an AWAC command ship in the air to protect the nation's capital. Dayton, a former Minnesota state auditor, called the FAA's and NORAD's failures "the most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence that I've ever, under those extreme circumstances, witnessed in the public sector." 
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#32
07-31-2004, 08:04 PM
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http://www.motherjones.com/news/upda...07/07_400.html
Who's in Charge Here? What the 9-11 Commission Report does not explain is why, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials were essentially missing in action. By Gail Sheehy July 22, 2004 Unanswered Questions The 9/11 commission’s report is a devastating indictment of the nation’s response to Al Qaeda—but perhaps not devastating enough. Observers who closely followed the commission’s hearings, including family members of the victims, believe that there are still crucial investigative trails the commission didn’t pursue far enough. Here are three of the questions they would like to see answered: Who financed the attacks? Was the Saudi government involved? The commission did not undertake an in-depth investigation of the hijackers’ money trail—a matter Senator Bob Graham, who chaired an earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, considered to be among its most important jobs. The commission’s staff statement on terrorist financing, published June 2004, noted that “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding.” But it added that “we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded Al Qaeda.” Graham says his inquiry found "information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States." But 27 pages of that section of the Joint Inquiry's report were censored by the Bush administration on national security grounds. Says Graham, "My contention is that significant support was being given to all 19 [hijackers], but the FBI was not interested in answering that question for our inquiry.” Graham raises the further question: “Did [the FBI] have directions not to go there in their pursuit? If that foreign government happens to be Saudi Arabia, this would not be the only time that country got favorable treatment.” "[T]here remains unexplained a range of highly suspicious activities involving Saudi nationals who provided support for the hijackers while they lived among us," Graham continues. "The possibility that foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia's provided support to the hijackers is one of the most serious issues surrounding 9-11, and it deserves additional investigation." "Reasonable people may disagree over the interpretation of the available facts. I believe these questions require further investigation." "I again call on President Bush to authorize the release of these 27 pages of the Joint Inquiry report." Did airline managers try to cover up the hijackings—at a time when lives could still have been saved? The commission did not pursue crucial evidence on the airlines’ response to the hijackings, including a stunning tape made by American Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas as the first hijacked plane, Flight 11, was being overtaken. The tape was seized by the FBI, which has insisted on keeping it secret; Mother Jones learned of its content from family members of the 9/11 airline victims who were allowed to hear it, but not to take notes or record it. American Airlines top management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m. —25 minutes before the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower—that a group of men described by flight attendants as Middle Eastern had stabbed two crew members, clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit. But when airline managers were discussing the hijackings, family members who heard the tape say, their response was: “Don’t spread this around. Keep it close. Let’s keep it among ourselves.” “It was disgusting,” said one of the relatives, herself a veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. “The very first response was cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the place.” Why hasn’t anyone been fired or even reprimanded for the government’s failure to prevent or effectively respond to the attacks? Where was the leadership? The commission suggested the creation of a national antiterrorism “czar” who would coordinate intelligence on terrorist activities as well as spearhead the response to any attacks. But it sidestepped the more critical matter of accountability for past mistakes. With the exception of CIA director George Tenet, not one of the top leaders who bungled the government’s response to Al Qaeda has been forced out, and the White House has admitted to no mistakes. In our democracy, a terrorism “czar” would still take his orders from the president; no amount of bureaucratic reorganization can replace leadership from the top. “Who’s our quarterback” in case of a future terrorist attack? “Who’s in charge?” That was the core question members of the 9-11 commission put to every government official they interviewed. “The reason that you’re hearing such a tone of urgency in our voices is because the answer to the question was almost uniform,” said commissioner Jamie Gorelick at the press conference following today’s release of the 600 page final 9-11 Commission Report. The person in charge, she said the commissioners had been told over and over again, would be the president. “It is an impossible situation for that to remain the case,” Gorelick observed. Impossible, because the commission’s report clearly shows that on the morning of September 11, 2001, the president and the other top officials in charge of the systems to defend the country from attack were, in essence, missing in action: They did not communicate, did not coordinate a response to the catastrophe, and in some cases did not even get involved in discussions about the attacks until after all of the hijacked planes had crashed. Yet, even though the commission’s report paints a stark portrait of opportunities lost in defending against terrorism, many observers—especially the families of some 9/11 victims, who pushed hard for the commission’s creation—were disappointed in its failure to provide a timeline of the actions of the nation’s top leaders that morning. Such an analysis, they believe, would have shown conclusively that blame for failing to defend against the attacks goes all the way to the top. My involvement with the families goes back almost three years to my first interviews with the four widows who became known as “the Jersey girls.” They were among the families I followed to write my book, Middletown, America. As early as April, 2003, three of the widows--Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg, and Kristen Breitweiser--had been aghast to discover that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared to have effectively sat out one of the worst foreign assaults on the American homeland in the nation’s history. In what may be one of the most remarkable statements in the report, the commission concludes that “[t]he Secretary of Defense did not enter the chain of command until the morning’s key events were over.” Rumsfeld’s public testimony before the commission last March was bizarre. When Gorelick asked the Secretary of Defense what he had done to protect the nation—or even the Pentagon—during the “summer of threat” preceding the attacks, Rumsfeld replied simply that “it was a law-enforcement issue.” (So, observers were left to wonder, should the FBI be out with shoulder-launched missiles?) “We still don’t have a full accounting of Rumsfeld’s whereabouts and knowledge on the morning of 9-11,” Gorelick acknowledged after the commission’s final public hearing. “We don’t have answers to the questions that you’re asking. But I’m going to make sure it’s nailed down,” she promised. Yet the final published report offers no further details on Rumsfeld’s inactions or the reason he was “out of the loop” (as the secretary himself put it) that morning. The National Military Command Center (NMCC) inside the Pentagon was the nerve center of the military’s response to the attacks on 9-11. But the lead military officer that day, Brigadier General Montague Winfield, told the commission that the center had been leaderless.“For 30 minutes we couldn’t find [Secretary Rumsfeld].” Where was Rumsfeld on 9-11? I put the question to the commission's vice chair, Lee Hamilton, following the release of the report the commissioners call “the definitive account of 9-11.” “We investigated very carefully Mr. Rumsfeld’s actions,” said Hamilton. “He was having breakfast with Congressional leaders, and they hear a plane has hit the Pentagon, and he runs out.” “He had to have been told before the Pentagon was hit that two trade centers were hit and the country was under attack,” I suggested. Was the commission comfortable with the fact that the country’s Secretary of Defense was not in the chain of command or present in the Pentagon’s command center until all four suicide hijacked planes were down? “I’m not going to answer that question,” said Hamilton, and turned away. The commission did provide some detail on the movements of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, but none that offers much reassurance. The report shows that nothing Bush and Cheney did or said that day had any effect on the devastation planned by 19 suicide hijackers and their lethal leader—despite warnings going back to 1996 that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network were an urgent threat to America’s national security. When President Bush finally agreed to have a “conversation” with the 9-11 commissioners--provided it was not under oath, not recorded, and Cheney was at his side--the account the two top leaders gave was murky and unverifiable. On the crucial matter of whether fighters should be sent up to protect the nation’s capital, for example, the final report says that “the Vice President stated that he called the President to discuss the rules of engagement for ordering [air cover].” But, it continues, the two did not order air cover because it would “do no good unless pilots had instructions on whether they were authorized to shoot if the plane would not divert.” The job of issuing such instructions belonged to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The commission’s staff report had earlier cited the legal chain of command in case of hijackings: “If a hijack was confirmed, procedure called for … the President to empower the Secretary of Defense to send up a military escort, and if necessary, give pilots shoot-down orders.” The final report confirms the same chain of command and adds this detail: “The president apparently spoke to Secretary Rumsfeld for the first time that morning shortly after 10:00”--more than an hour after the first World Trade Center tower was hit, 20 minutes after the Pentagon was attacked, and moments before Flight 93 was wrestled to the ground by passengers. And even in this brief conversation, the urgent question at hand doesn’t seem to have come up: The report states that “no one can recall the content of this conversation but it was a brief call in which the subject of the shootdown authority was not discussed.” The President emphasized to the commissioners that he had authorized the shootdown of hijacked aircraft. But the final report states flatly that “there is no documentary evidence for this call.” It notes that neither Cheney’s chief of staff nor his wife Lynne, both of whom were taking notes that morning, made note of a call between the President and Vice President. Only when a military aide rushed into the White House bunker to announce--erroneously, as it turned out--that Flight 93 was 80 miles away from Washington, did Cheney apparently take it upon himself to give the order for fighter aircraft to engage the inbound plane. Don Rumsfeld is known as a take-charge kind of guy. Why was he so uncharacteristically passive in the face of terrorists who were able to kill nearly 3,000 Americans in one morning? It is impossible to answer, and now that the commission has rolled up its report, there will be no forum for follow-up questions. But it is worth noting the ideological context: For years, the secretary had focused on what he considered to be America’s most pressing national security need--and it wasn’t fighting Al Qaeda. Even before the 2000 presidential election, Rumsfeld commissioned a “blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence” along with his future deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and future-Vice President Cheney, as well as President Bush’s brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush. The plan shows that Bush intended to take military control of Persian Gulf oil, whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power, and intended to retain control of the region even if there was no threat. The report, written by the neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century, also advocated “regime change” in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and Iran. An unnamed British member of Parliament was quoted as saying of the report: “This is a blueprint for U.S. domination--a new world order of their making.” The report also complained that the changes it recommended were likely to take a long time, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In the summer of 2001, when security agencies were regularly warning of a catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s office “sponsored a study of ancient empires—Macedonia, Rome, the Mongols—to figure out how they maintained dominance,” according to the New York Times. Hours after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was given information that three of the names on the airplane passenger manifests were suspected al-Qaeda operatives. The notes he composed at the time asserted that he wanted the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL. [Usama bin Laden] Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” He presented the idea to Bush the next day. Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke later wrote in his book Against All Enemies, “At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld and [Assistant Defense Secretary] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.” Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld set up “a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.” In May, 2002, Time reported that “Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of September 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed.”
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#33
07-31-2004, 08:52 PM
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Which leads me to think that, despite popular belief, the most die-hard liberal around here isn't dissention or gldstwmn (or even myself)!  
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"Although the arrogance of fame lingers like a thick cloud around the famous, the sun always seems to shine for Stevie." -- Richard Dashut, 2014
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#34
07-31-2004, 09:53 PM
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#35
07-31-2004, 10:10 PM
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__________________
"Although the arrogance of fame lingers like a thick cloud around the famous, the sun always seems to shine for Stevie." -- Richard Dashut, 2014
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#36
07-31-2004, 11:46 PM
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#37
08-01-2004, 11:35 AM
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__________________
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#38
08-01-2004, 12:46 PM
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First Dean, then Nader, and now David Cobb... our Carne flip-flops more than John Kerry does! 
__________________
"Although the arrogance of fame lingers like a thick cloud around the famous, the sun always seems to shine for Stevie." -- Richard Dashut, 2014
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#39
08-01-2004, 01:44 PM
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 I was shocked that he supported Dean, especially with Dean's stance on capital punishment.
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#40
08-01-2004, 02:49 PM
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Clinton promised to change the policy on gays in the military. As soon as he took office he reversed himself when he couldn't take the pressure, and settled for that joke of a policy, "Don't ask, don't tell." Kerry claims he supports gay unions but he's against gay marriages. These guys want to have it both ways. They are the ones who are betraying the cause.
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#41
08-01-2004, 02:50 PM
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#42
08-01-2004, 02:53 PM
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I seem to recall before you drank the cool aid last week in Boston you were also considering voting Green.
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#43
08-01-2004, 02:54 PM
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I agree with the rest of your post, though.
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#44
08-01-2004, 02:57 PM
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One thing I can guarantee to you, though, is that Nader will not get my vote this year or ever again. He's pitiful.
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#45
08-01-2004, 02:58 PM
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Besides, perhaps you're too young to remember, but the right helping Nader is the same dirty tricks the Democrats used on Perot years ago. I don't recall the Republicans whining about having a strong third-party candidate as much as the Democrats do. It's this kind of hypocrisy and abandonment of principles that's turned me off to the War Party Lite. You like the Democrats? You can have them.
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