Impeech Bush! The Secrets Of 9/11 Exposed By Msnbc

Post-9/11 Era Forum

The Secrets of September 11
The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?
MSNBC

http://www.msnbc.com/news/907379.asp?0cv=CB10

April 30 — Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the September 11 terror attacks, administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the attacks.

AT THE CENTER of the dispute is a more-than-800-page secret report prepared by a joint congressional inquiry detailing the intelligence and law-enforcement failures that preceded the attacks—including provocative, if unheeded warnings, given President Bush and his top advisers during the summer of 2001.
The report was completed last December; only a bare-bones list of “findings” with virtually no details was made public. But nearly six months later, a “working group” of Bush administration intelligence officials assigned to review the document has taken a hard line against further public disclosure. By refusing to declassify many of its most significant conclusions, the administration has essentially thwarted congressional plans to release the report by the end of this month, congressional and administration sources tell NEWSWEEK. In some cases, these sources say, the administration has even sought to “reclassify” some material that was already discussed in public testimony—a move one Senate staffer described as “ludicrous.” The administration’s stand has infuriated the two members of Congress who oversaw the report—Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and Republican Rep. Porter Goss. The two are now preparing a letter of complaint to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Graham is “increasingly frustrated” by the administration’s “unwillingness to release what he regards as important information the public should have about 9-11,” a spokesman said. In Graham’s view, the Bush administration isn’t protecting legitimate issues of national security but information that could be a political “embarrassment,” the aide said. Graham, who last year served as Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, recently told NEWSWEEK: “There has been a cover-up of this.”
Graham’s stand may not be terribly surprising, given that the Florida Democrat is running for president and is seeking to use the issue himself politically. But he has found a strong ally in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Goss, a staunch Republican (and former CIA officer) who in the past has consistently defended the administration’s handling of 9-11 issues and is considered especially close to Cheney.
“I find this process horrendously frustrating,” Goss said in an interview. He was particularly piqued that the administration was refusing to declassify material that top intelligence officials had already testified about. “Senior intelligence officials said things in public hearings that they [administration officials] don’t want us to put in the report,” said Goss. “That’s not something I can rationally accept without further public explanation.”
Unlike Graham, Goss insists there are no political “gotchas” in the report, only a large volume of important information about the performance and shortcomings of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies prior to September 11.
And even congressional staffers close to the process say it is unclear whether the administration’s resistance to public disclosure reflects fear of political damage or simply an ingrained “culture of secrecy” that permeates the intelligence community—and has strong proponents at the highest levels of the White House.
The mammoth report reflects nearly 10 months of investigative work by a special staff hired jointly by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and overseen by Eleanor Hill, a former federal prosecutor and Pentagon inspector general. Hill’s team got access to hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents from the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other executive-branch agencies. The staff also conducted scores of interviews with senior officials, field agents and intelligence officers. (They were not, however, given access to some top White House aides, such as national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice or other principals like Secretary of State Colin Powell or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.) The team’s report was approved by the two intelligence committees last Dec. 10. But because the document relied so heavily on secret material, the administration “working group,” overseen by CIA director George Tenet, had to first “scrub” the document and determine which portions could be declassified.
More than two months later, the working group came back with its decisions—and some members were flabbergasted. Entire portions remained classified. Some of the report—including some dealing with matters that had been extensively aired in public, such as the now famous FBI “Phoenix memo” of July 2001 reporting that Middle Eastern nationals might be enrolling in U.S. flight schools—were “reclassified.” Hill has since submitted proposed changes to the working group, pointing out the illogic of trying to pull back material that was already in the public domain. But officials have indicated the “review” process is likely to drag on for months—with no guarantees that the “working group” will be any more amenable to public disclosure.
A U.S. intelligence official cited international distractions as at least one reason for the delays. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there have been two wars going on,” the official said. The official added: “We’re working this [report] to try to get it out without putting lives at risk and without endangering sources and methods.” Asked why the working group was refusing to permit disclosure of material that had already been made public, the official said: “Just because something had been inadvertently released, doesn’t make it unclassified.”
The administration’s tough stand, some sources say, doesn’t augur well for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks—which is conducting its own investigation into the events of 9-11. Already, flaps have developed on that front, as well. When one commissioner, former congressman Tim Roemer, last week sought to review transcripts of some of the joint inquiry’s closed-door hearings, he was denied access—because the commission staff had agreed to a White House request to allow its lawyers to first review the material to determine if the president wants to invoke executive privilege to keep the material out of the panel’s hands.
“I think it’s outrageous,” says Roemer, who plans to raise the matter at a commission hearing this week. But a commission staffer says he expected the White House review to be finished by the end of the week, and it was unclear whether the president’s lawyers would try to invoke executive privilege—a stand that would almost certainly provoke a major legal battle with the panel.
The tensions over the release of 9-11 related material seems especially relevant—if not ironic—in light of recent reports that the president’s political advisers have devised an unusual re-election strategy that essentially uses the story of September 11 as the liftoff for his campaign. The White House is delaying the Republican nominating convention, scheduled for New York City, until the first week in September 2004—the latest in the party’s history. That would allow Bush’s acceptance speech, now slated for Sept. 2, to meld seamlessly into 9-11 commemoration events due to take place in the city the next week.
Some sources who have read the still-secret congressional report say some sections would not play quite so neatly into White House plans. One portion deals extensively with the stream of U.S. intelligence-agency reports in the summer of 2001 suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning an upcoming attack against the United States—and implicitly raises questions about how Bush and his top aides responded. One such CIA briefing, in July 2001, was particularly chilling and prophetic. It predicted that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike “in the coming weeks,” the congressional investigators found. The intelligence briefing went on to say: “The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”
The substance of that intelligence report was first disclosed at a public hearing last September by staff director Hill. But at the last minute, Hill was blocked from saying precisely who within the Bush White House got the briefing when CIA director Tenet classified the names of the recipients. (One source says the recipients of the briefing included Bush himself.) As a result, Hill was only able to say the briefing was given to “senior government officials.”
That issue is now being refought in the context over the full report. The report names names, gives dates and provides a body of new information about the handling of many other crucial intelligence briefings—including one in early August 2001 given to national-security adviser Rice that discussed Al Qaeda operations within the United States and the possibility that the group’s members might seek to hijack airplanes. The administration “working group” is still refusing to declassify information about the briefings, sources said, and has even expressed regret that some of the material was ever provided to congressional investigators in the first place.

A NEW HAND IN HOMELAND SECURITY
The White House is once again shuffling the deck in the staffing of top terrorism jobs, NEWSWEEK has learned. Gen. John A. Gordon—who has wielded broad if largely unseen powers as deputy national-security advisor in charge of combating terrorism—is moving up to become White House homeland-security adviser, a post formerly held by Tom Ridge. The new job is expected to give the brusque and secretive Gordon even more power as a “principal” with direct access to Bush. (Ridge is now secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.) Sources say Gordon beat out ex-FBI official James Kallstrom—an old ally of former FBI director Louis Freeh—for the key post.
The elevation of Gordon is the latest sign of the increasing prominence of intelligence-community veterans throughout the upper reaches of the government under Bush. (FBI director Robert Mueller, for example, recently reached outside the ranks of his law-enforcement agents to select Maureen A. Baginski, a former National Security Agency deputy director, to oversee FBI intelligence efforts.) For his part, Gordon was a former deputy CIA director with a reputation as a “a results-oriented guy” who has little patience for bureaucratic procedures, according to one former government official who has worked with him.
Gordon’s departure, however, leaves vacancies at the two top White House counterterrorism jobs: Gordon’s old post and that of his former deputy, Rand Beers, who resigned the week the war in Iraq began. On the surface, the vacancies seem conspicuous in an administration that has made combating terrorism the centerpiece of its policies. But sources say a vigorous search has been underway and replacements are likely to be named shortly.

9/11 panel will be asked about documents

WASHINGTON, April 30 (UPI) -- Officials of the blue ribbon commission set up to investigate the Sept. 11 terror attacks will be questioned at its meeting Thursday about a decision to let the U.S. government screen materials before releasing them to commission members.

One commissioner, and representatives of the families of the 3,000 killed in the attacks, are concerned that Justice Department officials were allowed to review transcripts of congressional testimony, before deciding whether commissioners should see them.

"There's no entity that should be going through the basic material that the commission is to review and filtering it to decide if or when we should be able to see it," commission member and former Democratic Indiana Congressman Tim Roemer told United Press International. "By statute we are entitled to that information."

The transcripts at issue are of sessions of the special joint inquiry by house and senate intelligence committees into the institutional and other failures that allowed the 19 members of the al-Qaida terror network to enter the country, hijack four planes and crash them into buildings in New York and Washington.

Although the sessions were closed for national security reasons, all the commission members have security clearances.

Roemer was actually present at the hearings, as he was then a member of the house intelligence committee.

All the documents were released to the commissioners on Wednesday after a five-day period, but Kristen Breitweizer, a representative of the families, says the delay is still the cause of concern for them.

"Our problem was the delay," she told UPI. "Why did the Justice Department need five days? They've had months to look at those transcripts."

"Every day's delay (to the commission's work) is another day we're at risk."

Roemer said he is worried that commission officials, by striking the deal they did with the administration, have set a dangerous precedent.

"That's just not the way we should be conducting this inquiry," he said, pointing out that "it weakens the position of the commission -- both politically and symbolically -- in future negotiations. If people can negotiate this kind of delay to existing information ... which we should have complete and full access to, how are we going to get new information?"

Breitweizer agrees there are worrying implications for the future. "This is not the last time that the commission is going to be asking for documents," she said. "If every one expects that they can force delay by putting up a fight, it is going to impede the commission's work."

Al Felzenberg, the commission spokesman, said U.S. government officials asked for, and were granted, the chance to review the documents, "as a courtesy."

"We don't think that a delay of five to seven days is an excessive burden on the commission," he told UPI. "The (commission) chairman (former GOP New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean) thought that was appropriate ... This is not unusual in government."

Felzenberg says the affair is a storm in a tea cup. "I don't think this is a setback ... Because (the work of the commission) is so important to the American people, there's a lot of interest in every detail."

Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock agrees.

"The vast majority of documents were released to the commission without any delay," said Comstock.

She says the documents that were delayed needed to be reviewed "in case they raised any privilege issues."

But Breitweizer points out there would be no basis for claiming executive privilege as the transcripts had already been made available to members of the intelligence committee. "On the merits, (the administration) did not have a leg to stand on in asserting executive privilege ... we knew that. So why the delay?" she asks.

Asked how any question of privilege could attach to transcripts of evidence already given by officials to congress, Comstock said, "It was just an abundance of caution."

Breitweizer said she is sympathetic to the motives of commission officials, but remains concerned.

"My understanding is that they have a good working relationship with the administration and this (delay) was extended as a courtesy to maintain that. I understand that. But by the same token, we want to make sure that this doesn't set a precedent ...

She says she will raise the issue at Thursday's meeting of the commission, but in the meantime she is glad the issue appears to have been resolved.

Felzenberg says that Thursday's meeting of the 10-member commission will also review staffing issues -- the panel has nearly finished hiring its full staff compliment -- and set a date for the next public hearing, expected in mid- to-late May.

Apparently Senator Graham Also Agrees With Me That Bush Covered up 9-11 (he must be crazy also)

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/04/28/W...ve_Graham.shtml

Graham said last week that the Bush administration is paralyzed by "an excessive sense of what constitutes national security."

He said the administration is also afraid of embarrassment: "They do not want to have documents released that indicate in detail some of the missteps that led to Sept. 11."

Graham now mentions White House secrecy in virtually every campaign speech. He complains not only about the documents related to the Sept. 11 report, but about an executive order Bush signed in March that keeps sealed millions of other executive documents.

Heres the link to the article showing how Bush is changing laws to hide information
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...20731-2001Oct31

PUT 2 & 2 TOGETHER

isn't it convenient that Bush made this law right before the 9-11commission started their investigation

Uuuummmmm....No, ill just vote for him again, but thanks anyway.

Bush went to war - any smart person would know that his chance of winning the 2004 elections is VERY slim WITHOUT any of this.
Interesting non the less.

I'm going to vote for Bush so we can tick the French off some more for attacking WWI graves