http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6093000282.html

wo Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice
Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page A17


On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called "findings" that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance -- Black called it an "out of cycle" session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice -- would get her attention.

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had been considering action against bin Laden, including using a new secret weapon: the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire Hellfire missiles to kill him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it and who would have authority to shoot.

Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.

The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about.

Philip D. Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting, but it was not clear to him what immediate action really would have meant. In 2005 Rice hired Zelikow as a top aide at the State Department.

Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

Black later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

Editor's Note: How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush's "neocons" and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that "what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-6119343,00.html

Rice: No Memory of CIA Warning of Attack

Monday October 2, 2006 9:16 AM


By ANNE GEARAN

AP Diplomatic Writer

SHANNON, Ireland (AP) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

``What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,'' Rice said.

Rice was President Bush's national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward's book ``State of Denial'' outlines a July 10 meeting among Rice, Tenet and the CIA's top counterterror officer.

``I don't know that this meeting took place, but what I really don't know, what I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond,'' Rice said.

Speaking to reporters en route to Saudi Arabia and other stops in the Middle East, Rice said she met with Tenet daily at that point, and has no memory of the wake-up call from Tenet described in the book.

``It kind of doesn't ring true that you have to shock me into something I was very involved in,'' Rice said.

There was near constant discussion of possible attacks overseas, and high alarm, Rice said.

The meeting between Tenet, Rice and Cofer Black of the CIA was not mentioned in the reports from several investigations of the Sept. 11 attacks, but Woodward wrote that it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the ``starkest warning they had given the White House'' on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.

Tenet asked for the meeting after receiving a disturbing briefing from Black, according to the book.

Black reportedly laid out secret intercepts and other data ``showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaida would soon attack the United States.'' Tenet was so worried that he called Rice from his car and asked to see her right away, the book said.

``Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice,'' Woodward wrote of the session. ``She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.''

Rice referred to the session as ``the supposed meeting'' and noted that it is not part of the independent Sept. 11 Commission's report.

``I remember that George was very worried and he expressed that,'' Rice told reporters. ``We were all very worried because the threat reporting was quite intense. The problem was that it was also quite nebulous.''

Rice, who was promoted to secretary of state in Bush's second term, also said she never argued that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should be fired. The book's suggestion that Rumsfeld would not take her calls is ``ludicrous,'' Rice said.

Rumsfeld and Rice are not close, and he is often considered her rival in administration decision making. Woodward wrote that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card twice tried to get Bush to sack Rumsfeld and replace him with Bush family counselor James A. Baker III, and that both then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice backed the plan.

Woodward interviewed Rice for his new book.

Rice's latest Middle East trip is focused on strengthening support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and other moderate Arab leaders after a series of setbacks for democratic and moderate forces in the region.

Her trip includes visits to allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt and a meeting of other friendly nations that ring the Persian Gulf, before visits to Israel and the West Bank.

Rice is looking for new ways to improve Abbas' standing in his standoff with Hamas radicals trounced Abbas' secular Fatah Party in Palestinian elections in January. Abbas was elected separately and retains his position, but he has been hamstrung by the divided government and a cutoff of Western aid.

The Bush administration and Israel are increasingly convinced Hamas will crumble, and look to Abbas to capitalize. Rice may ask other countries to do more to bolster Abbas' security forces, and she hopes to breathe life into stalled agreements and talks that would help Palestinians move more freely across their borders with Israel.

Iran's nuclear ambitions will also be part of Rice's discussions, as an unofficial deadline passes this week for Iran to heed a U.N. Security Council demand to shelve disputed nuclear activities.

Rice said Sunday she may close her trip Friday with a meeting of world powers in Europe to look at what to do next. The United States wants to press for U.N. Security Council sanctions, but it is not clear she has full support from other permanent members of the council.

^---

On the Net:

State Department: http://www.state.gov

In case you missed it, here's a great quote from this week:

J. Cofer Black, the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, who was the former point man for the U.S. government's international counterterrorism policy in the first term of the Bush administration, says that "there were things the [9/11] commission wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...opinion/columns

www.onlinejournal.com

Special Reports
The real “state of denial”:
9/11 red herrings as bipartisan election-year volleyball
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor

Oct 6, 2006, 01:17

With US mid-term elections one month away, it is not surprising to find Washington’s elite criminal factions (neocon and neoliberal) engaged in a new game of political chicken over 9/11 red herrings. The appearance of bickering hides the fact that operatives of both factions are lying. Both sides are cynically continuing the massive bipartisan cover-up of 9/11 and the “war on terrorism."

Undeniable fact: all of Washington “knew” about 9/11

It is an amply documented fact -- no news whatsoever -- that the Bush administration had absolute foreknowledge of 9/11, and deliberately ignored warnings received within the US and from officials and intelligence agencies outside the US.

As written by Michel Chossudovsky, “the foreknowledge issue itself is a red herring, a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue . . . Of course the Bush administration knew." Of course Washington “knew” about its own false flag operation. Of course Washington “knew” about using its own covert intelligence network. Of course Washington “knows” that 9/11 was an intelligence “success," not an intelligence “failure."

The media’s spotlight on “foreknowledge” and “lapses” serve to distract public attention from the deliberate cover-up of these facts:

9/11 and the “war on terrorism” was and is a long-planned US operation carried out and sponsored by Washington consensus; official US geostrategic policy, carried out by the Bush administration, with unanimous bipartisan involvement from the US Congress, and with support from Wall Street.

“Islamic terrorism," including Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, is a creation of Anglo-American military intelligence. These networks have functioned in this role for the past two decades, and continue to carry out this role today.

Al-Qaeda is an apparatus that is supported by Pakistan’s ISI, which is itself is connected to the CIA.

Pakistan’s ISI chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad, who wired funds for the 9/11 operation to alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, met and dined with members of the Bush administration, the CIA (George Tenet), and key members of the US Congress, Republicans as well as Democrats. In other words, Washington in its entirety is implicated in 9/11.

And this is just the bare tip of the iceberg of evidence.

Michel Chossudovsky’s America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ and Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire At The End of The Age Of Oil exhaustively detail why 9/11 happened, how the Bush administration carried it out, who has benefited, and what has happened to the world since. The case material contained in these two books alone, and at their related web sites (Center for Research on Globalization and From The Wilderness), leave no doubt that Washington is engaged in a massive and ever-more sophisticated cover-up, designed to smash remaining criminal evidence, destroy investigations and criticism, selectively eradicate history, and dispel and manipulate public discourse.

Against these undeniable proven facts, the current Washington disinformation circus is all the more cynical and contemptible.

Foreknowledge: irrelevance, regurgitated

The new book, State of Denial, written by infamous Washington insider, opportunist and disinformation asset Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, has set off a new media circus over 9/11 foreknowledge and “ignored and missed warnings” on the part of key members of the Bush administration. The “Bush incompetence” lie is the centerpiece of the neoliberal faction’s “war on terrorism” agenda, the central deception favored by the Democrats and “progressives."

The latest “fire storm” merely underscores the long-proven fact that the malignant Condoleezza Rice committed perjury about 9/11, and that Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft knew of the coming attacks in the summer of 2001. (CIA Director George Tenet, of course, “knew," and has lately done his best to recast himself as one of the “good guys.")

In turn, this is sending members of the 9/11 Commission cover-up, such as Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie Gorelick, scrambling to defend their own malfeasance with their own set of conflicting lies.

The new stories simple prove what is already known: the consensus is engaged in an obvious political cover-up, with players from both neocon and neoliberal factions reading from the same script, dancing to the same tune, taking turns playing “good cop/bad cop” -- lying every step of the way.

Clinton vs. Bush redux

The opportunistic Woodward book comes in the wake of a new attempt by the Clinton and Bush camps to reinvent a “rivalry." Clinton’s “blistering” TV tirade against the Republicans, and the Bush administration’s counterattack adds to the false debate -- the red herring -- over who could have “stopped Osama bin Laden."

This is public posturing to fool the American people into perceiving one side or the other of being stronger “anti-terrorists" and which side is more capable of “making us safe."

In addition to hiding the historical fact that the Bushes and Clintons have deep and long-standing criminal ties (taking turns heading criminal Washington for decades), this campaign deliberately clouds the fact that “Islamic terrorism” is an intelligence apparatus fully supported by Washington consensus for over two decades. Both wings of the American Empire are intent on expanding the “war on terrorism," and making America itself an overt police state.

New level of cover-up of Pakistan-US connection

Bob Woodward is not the only insider with a 9/11 book. Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf has come out with his own book, a cynical manipulation accusing former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage of threatening Pakistan with a “bomb you back into the stone age” threat that “forced” Pakistan’s cooperation with the “war on terrorism."

As exposed by Mike Ruppert of From the Wilderness, this bombshell of cooked half-truths and lies is a massive deception and sheer political smoke and mirrors that provide political cover for “adjusted” American Middle East geostrategy, recasting Pakistan (and its CIA-affiliated ISI) as a “reluctant” ally of the US, while hanging out Armitage (as the bully and war criminal that Washington already knows he is) -- in full knowledge that the American public doesn’t know and doesn’t care anyway.

The Bush administration is so threatened about this “bombshell book," that the giddy George W. Bush stood at the podium with Musharraf and encouraged people to buy the book. Peals of laughter are surely echoing through the halls of Langley, and Capitol Hill.

Denial and cover-up by consensus

While the players of one faction or the other tell bald-faced out in the open, one brands the other incompetent or inattentive in the “war on terrorism," the Washington/Wall Street consensus has been unshakeable and ironclad: Lie about 9/11, a fully bipartisan atrocity. Cover it up permanently, adding new layers, and limited hangout versions to suit political expediency. Continue and strengthen the “war on terrorism” in any way that expands Anglo-American geopolitical resource interests. Cook the American populace slowly and surely.

As pointed out by Michael Kane of From The Wilderness, “the American Republic is long dead, and fascism is no longer creeping in this country -- it is solidified and documented as the law of the land."

Both factions of the American elite hold the American populace, and the world, in contempt.

The true “state of denial” is one that fails to recognize this, five years and a world war later.

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