# 9-11 and the commission



## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

This is a great article well worth the read, this woman feels the way all of us should....... READ IT
Divided We Fall 
The 9/11 Commission becomes another Beltway soap opera.

BY DEBRA BURLINGAME 
Tuesday, June 22, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

"Is this real world or exercise?"

Those haunting words were heard on audiotape at the 9/11 Commission hearings last week. It was what the duty officer on the other end of the phone at the Northeast Air Defense Sector of Norad wanted to know when alerted about a hijacking by Boston Center, the Air Route Traffic Control Center handling American Airlines flight 11, the first plane to disappear from radar screens on Sept. 11, 2001. The time was 8:38 a.m., 25 minutes into the first attack of the first battle of the first day in the war on terror. One hour and 25 minutes later, 3,000 men, women and children would be dead.

This was indeed the real world. But somehow the 9/11 Commission hearings have succeeded in turning this, the most stunning and deadly attack on the U.S. homeland, into another Beltway soap opera--awash in politics and finger-pointing, complete with media satellite trucks, conspiracy-theory hecklers and witnesses made to feel the heat by having to stand and take an oath under bright lights. How have we gotten from that real world terror to this self-destructive exercise in such a short amount of time?

The 9/11 Commission was chartered a year and a half ago, amid much controversy, for the purpose of preparing "a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks." I vehemently supported its creation and was angry with the Bush administration for initially opposing efforts to make it happen.

When a group of dedicated New Jersey women whom I'd never met organized a rally in a park near the Capitol, I was there under the hot summer sun, carrying a poster that said, "The men who murdered my brother were listed in the San Diego phone book." It had a large picture of him, Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 757 with a big smile on his face. Chic was the captain of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. The picture was especially meaningful to me because he was smiling at our dad, who took the picture. It is the way I like to think of Chic, in the cockpit of a jet, smiling, the way he would have looked if Hani Hanjour, the young Saudi who had once lived in San Diego and who steered Chic's plane into the Pentagon's west wall, had knocked on the door at the end of an ordinary flight and asked for a cockpit tour. So, yes, I was mad. Damn mad. And I wanted to know how the hell this could have happened.

Today, the great hopes I had for an independent, bipartisan investigation into the events of 9/11 have given way to great sadness. After the Senate and House Joint Inquiry into intelligence activities leading up to 9/11 was published in 2002, I had a different perspective about who was responsible for the attacks. It was everyone, and no one. It was the systemic and institutional problems in the information-gathering, analysis and reporting structures of our dozen or more intelligence agencies. It was the legal barriers that prevented law enforcement and intelligence services from talking to each other. It was Cold War modalities that no longer applied to very evil men with apocalyptic delusions operating in adaptive networks with cell phones and laptops, and supported by millions and millions of dollars. It was our own fat complacency, refusing to see what was happening around us as American soldiers, sailors and civilians were being blown up abroad. It was the airline lobbyists who looked after their well-heeled clients as we fashioned airline security measures that called upon ACLU lawyers rather than law enforcement experts for advice about passenger screening. 
I am no longer angry at the Bush administration, or at any Americans for that matter. I'd read the Joint Inquiry and wept. I now knew that Chic's murder was a long time in preparation. In 1998, while on a trip to Africa, I stood in front of the American Embassy in Kenya just two weeks after it was blown to pieces. Little did I know that the men who did it had my dear brother's fate in the works, even as I stood there. No, I am no longer angry at any Americans.

After the hearings last week, I witnessed once again how the nation's media stake out a position, set it up in a box, the size and shape and color of which senior editors and producers have a bigger say in dictating than the reporters who are filling it, then rearrange the contents to conform with their version of the truth come what may. The hardworking commission staff presented a chilling tutorial about the history of al Qaeda and how it is currently constituted. We learned that Osama bin Laden remains intensely interested in nuclear weapons and "dirty bombs," that he has actively sought biological weapons material and shown an interest in the widely available industrial materials that are found in chemical weapons. We learned that Islamic jihadists rationalize the killing of Muslim children who are the collateral damage in their thirst for more blood and that they tell parents to be grateful that their children are martyrs in paradise. The media took this information--and there was more, far more--and stuffed it out of sight in the box called "Bush's Phony War in Iraq."

Some of the tenacious family members who started it all in that park in Washington were there last week. They are still angry, and who among us can say that they shouldn't be? But there is something wrong here. Upon hearing the voice of that duty officer asking a standard protocol question, "Is this real world or exercise?" with the kind of military-trained blankness crisis personnel are noted for, a few of them snorted with contempt. They mistook the calm demeanor of a professional with no use for prepositions for the clueless question of a fool. And that contempt, for all the people whom they feel contributed to a loss of life on the day their loved ones didn't come home, is what they carry around with them now. It mirrors what is happening, not just at the 9/11 Commission hearings, but in newsrooms across the country, this corrosive tendency to tear down our rescuers, our public servants, our heroes.

According to some of the headlines after this last round of hearings, on the morning of 9/11, errors in judgment as well as communication breakdowns up and down the line at the FAA created chaos and confusion, preventing Norad commanders from scrambling jets in time to intercept the four doomed airliners. What media reports do not make clear is that the tragic outcome was based on a combination of factors: Four missing planes were airborne within the same time frame, need-to-know information crucial to understanding the scope of the attack was not available to all involved air traffic control centers--each of which looks at only one piece of a very big sky--and everything was compounded by the need to manage 4,873 other planes during the attacks and eventually put them on the ground. That feat was accomplished just one hour and 15 minutes into the crisis, itself an unprecedented event nothing short of astonishing. In sum, the nationwide air traffic control system was stressed to the limit. 
The decisive factor was the loss of the transponders, the radar signatures which identify the airline, flight number and altitude. Without this radar signal, the planes were virtually invisible. After they were gone, the location and altitude of the missing planes was anyone's guess. In the words of the Norad officer at Otis Air Force base who was ordered to scramble F-15s to look for American Flight 11, "I don't know where I'm scrambling these guys to. I need a direction, a destination." No matter how much notice they might have received, searching for a target without a vector is like looking for a needle in a haystack. They were circling in military airspace off the Eastern Seaboard because they simply didn't know where to go.

As the 9/11 Commission's staff statement reported, these valiant men and women "struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet." Now they are being blamed because these improvised efforts didn't work. Even worse, they are being told that their hard-fought but doomed efforts amounted to incompetence and poor judgment that cost lives. What a rotten deal.

And how outrageous for any commissioner to lambaste the FAA administrator who had his hands full with a system carrying tens of thousands of passengers, with invisible rogue airplanes hurtling through unsterilized airspace, and who was tasked with making critical judgments based on scarce or no information and unverifiable facts that changed from moment to moment. The session's low point was when former senator Bob Kerrey--previously a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee--subjected this aviation crisis veteran to a dressing down for not revamping response policy based on the 1995 intelligence that Ramzi Yousef was planning to blow up 12 commercial airliners over the Atlantic ocean. If simultaneous Pan Am 103-type bombings were such a definitive and actionable foreshadowing of things to come, where were Mr. Kerrey and the rest of Congress in making this a priority in both the legislative agenda and the national consciousness? Instead of hotheaded preambles as the cameras rolled at the 9/11 hearings, where were his impassioned speeches in the well of the Senate, inveighing against the toothless 1997 presidential report on airline security? That report expressly mentioned 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, the Bojinka plot to blow up planes and terrorists "who are not afraid to die to carry out their plans," yet none of its meager recommendations were enacted.

It was a strange and unsettling experience last week to hear commission members, witnesses, and even some 9/11 family members nonchalantly describing the inability to shoot down four airliners carrying a total of 261 passengers and crew as a regrettable "failure." One 9/11 relative described Norad's failure to shoot American 77 out of the sky as "emotionally devastating." A closer examination of a shoot-down scenario reveals how futile this lives-for-lives trade-off really is. American 77, the airplane most talked about as a "missed opportunity," wasn't observed after it disappeared from radar over northern Indiana at 8:55 a.m. until it was six miles from the Capitol. While the commissioners were able to squeeze an ambiguous statement from Norad's commander, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, that "given more time" all four planes could have been intercepted, the truth is, they can't shoot at something they can't find, no matter how frantically people are looking for it. 
By the time American 77 was sighted, it was one minute from impact and circling right over Crystal City, a vast complex of high rise offices, apartment buildings, hotels, shopping malls and an underground metro system where thousands of Pentagon employees arrive for work every day--a kind of sprawling version of the World Trade Center complex. Assuming the fighter jets could have located the plane and confirmed its identity (not all that easy with those other planes flying at nearby Dulles and National airports)--I would ask those who have been the most vocal in complaining about fighters scrambling "too late" to imagine the kind of grilling Gen. Eberhart might have received after a 200,000-pound aircraft filled with 66,000 pounds of jet fuel was blown out of the sky directly over what might have later been dubbed "Ground Zero II."

As the 9/11 Commission puts the finishing touches on its findings and recommendations due next month, I am steeling myself for the media's breathless rush to publish all the shocking revelations that show how incompetent we are as a nation. While I am skeptical of the commission's stated determination to keep politics out of its final report, I have no doubt whatsoever that with the presidential election just months away, those editors and producers who package the news will find it impossible not to do what they've done since Watergate changed the face of journalism: find a smoking gun, present it to the American people, and congratulate the effort as "what distinguishes us from our enemies." Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and his murdering tribe will sit back with satisfaction as they watch the infidels tear themselves apart.

*Yes, let's have a debate, but let's stop this self-battering, :beer: which is weakening us in the only place where al Qaeda can never penetrate, the core of who we are. *Instead of pulling together at such a crucial time to prevent even more lethal attacks in the future, we are displaying a divisiveness that energizes our adversaries. They know us better than we know them. Their strategic kills in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and beyond are aimed at breaking our resolve to root them out at home and hunt them down abroad before they can do us more harm. We will not win every battle, but we will only prevail in the war on terror when we unite, not as Republicans and Democrats, but as Americans.

Ms. Burlingame is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.


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## Militant_Tiger (Feb 23, 2004)

i really love how the republicans can face hard facts, the most realistic evidence on this that we've had yet and still the president and vice president refuse to admit that it is true. there was no al queda/iraq connection and no amount of denial is going to make it true. bush is out of reasons for going in in the first place


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Mt you are either living in a cave or haven't been paying attention to the news, even the Democrats like Lee Hamilton on the 9-11 commission have stated "that Iraq and Al qeada have a relationship going back to the early 90's." What the media is touting as big news is that the commission did not find any *proof *that Saddam was involved in the specific 9-11 terroist act. There is no doubt that he was helping Al Queada.
Read the report.


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## Militant_Tiger (Feb 23, 2004)

i've been covering this story pretty well and thats what all the news stated from it, therefore thats what my opinion on it is


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## pointer99 (Jan 16, 2004)

Militant_Tiger said:


> i really love how the republicans can face hard facts, the most realistic evidence on this that we've had yet and still the president and vice president refuse to admit that it is true. there was no al queda/iraq connection and no amount of denial is going to make it true. bush is out of reasons for going in in the first place


Militant tiger.......i think you may have overlooked this evidence.

* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.

(Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")

* As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.

* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

*Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

* Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."

* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.

* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.

So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway station


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Which has become more politicized - the major media or the 9/11 Commission? I say the Media :******: but they are both guilty!

The answer was clear last week: The New York Times, NPR, the BBC, the television troika (Jennings, Brokaw and Rather), the "news'' columns of the Wall Street Journal . . . in short, all the usual suspects in the media.

Note the big headline on the front page of Thursday's New York Times: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie."

The Times wasn't the only one to get out the big type. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link is Dismissed," proclaimed the Washington Post. "No signs of Iraq-Al-Qaeda Ties Found," reported the Los Angeles Times. And so loudly on. (And earnest liberals wonder why folks increasingly turn to the Fox channel or talk radio.)

As for the "discovery" that Saddam Hussein's intelligence apparatus had no direct connection with 9/11, well, the administration has never claimed that it did. ("No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th." - George W. Bush, September 17, 2003.)

What the administration did claim was that Saddam's ties to terrorism go back at least a decade, which is when Iraq made the State Department's list of terrorist-supporting states. The administration also pointed out that Saddam's agents established contacts with al-Qaida, a fact that no one seriously disputes - including the 9/11 Commission, however its actual findings may have been distorted by the major media, or anybody with an interest in hunting this president.

Indeed, the commission's investigators confirmed that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Osama bin Laden himself in the Sudan as early as 1994.

*All this editorializing in the guise of news was too much for even the usually patient Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission and Mr. Integrity himself:*

"I must say I have trouble understanding the flak over this. The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's government. We don't disagree with that. What we have said is . . . we don't have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these al-Qaida operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States. *So it seems to me the sharp differences that the press has drawn, the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me."*

Indeed, they are not apparent at all - unless you're a believer in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, et al. "Challenges Bush," blared the subhead on the New York Times story about the 9/11 Commission's report.

  Once again straw men are strewn about everywhere as the major media all agree that a claim the Bush administration never made now has been refuted!

Remember the fuss over the small but critical word "imminent" some time back? Not too long ago everybody who was anybody in The Media or the opposition (or do I repeat myself?) was claiming that the administration had taken us to war to avert an "imminent" threat that never really existed!

The only problem was that the administration had never claimed the threat represented by Saddam Hussein's rogue regime was imminent - more like grave and growing. Even today the occasional critic who never got the word may still throw that old canard into the election-year cauldron.

Conclusion: *After all this time and these investigations, the Major Media still haven't connected the dots:*

No, Saddam Hussein's regime may not have had anything to do with the surprise attack on the American mainland September 11, 2001 - as opposed to various attacks on our embassies in Africa, on the USS Cole, and on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. No more than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy had anything to do with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. And yet they were all in it together - Japanese militarists, German Nazis, Italian fascisti, and the whole worldwide web that constituted the fascist threat to freedom in those days.

Our enemy at the time was no single regime or nation but a whole international movement that had declared war on freedom and even civilization itself. Just as today it is a radical Islamic movement that seeks to dominate the Muslim world and mobilize it against Western civilization.

Only slowly did this country awaken to the fascist threat, but even by 1941 a still largely isolationist America was drafting a citizen army, staging maneuvers, sending lend-lease shipments to Britain, and conducting an undeclared naval war against the Nazis in the North Atlantic.

Then, as now, Americans debated intensely about just how serious the threat was, and who posed it. Then, as now, a large segment of pubic opinion - and of the media - just didn't get it, and refused to connect the dots.


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

"The extensive investigation by the bipartisan commission formed to study the 9-11 attacks has just reported that there was no meaningful relation between Iraq and Al Qaeda of any kind," said Al Gore in his latest furious denunciation of George W. Bush. (Perhaps someone should ask George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and Bob Dole, losing nominees who never made such furious denunciations of the presidents who beat them, to do an intervention on Gore.)

Gore was just parroting the line of The New York Times, which a week before ran the headline "Panel finds no Iraq-Al Qaeda tie" over a story on the 9-11 Commission staff report that quoted the sentence, "They do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."

But Gore and the Times were dead wrong. The commission's key sentence was, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." The staff report listed a number of contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and there were others, as well, documented in Stephen Hayes's new book "The Connection."

Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman who is the commission's vice chairman, said: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between Al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein government. We don't disagree with that. What we have said is what the governor (Commission Chairman Thomas Kean) just said, we don't have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative, relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these Al Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States."

*Not a hard story to get right, but the Times and many other media outlets got it wrong*. Bush and Cheney have in fact been careful not to claim that Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated on 9-11. Yet Democrats and many in the media claim they have. Their argument -- I heard it recently from Clinton National Security Council staffer Nancy Soderberg -- is that by mentioning Iraq-Al Qaeda ties many times, Bush and Cheney are trying to fool the public into believing that they collaborated on 9-11. So while they don't claim collaboration on 9-11, they do. Words evidently mean the opposite of what they mean. George Orwell's Winston Smith would feel at home.

*The media and the Democrats have been using one Big Lie after another to attack Bush. *Another example: the Times' White House reporter wrote that Bush claimed the threat from Iraq was imminent. But Bush actually said was the threat wasn't imminent, and then he proceeded to argue that we should act anyway. *It's interesting that no one at the Times caught this obvious error. * uke:

It is common knowledge that about 90 percent of journalists vote Democratic, and it is common sense that this must affect their news coverage. A recent survey of journalists found that only 7 percent call themselves conservative versus 34 percent liberal and 59 percent moderates, and that the large majority of moderates took liberal stands on issues. Ordinarily most journalists try to be fair and accurate. But it's hard to resist the conclusion that at least some have crossed the line and are, consciously or unconsciously, actively trying to defeat the president.

*The good news is that the public is on to this*. The recent Pew Research Center poll showed that the credibility of most major media has declined since 2000. (Among the exceptions are U.S. News & World Report and Fox News Channel, two organizations that I work for and that, unlike most other media outlets, have staffs with significant numbers of Republicans as well as Democrats.) And the voting public does not seem to be buying the line, :beer: repeated with almost religious intensity, that it has been absolutely and positively proven there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq on 9-11. In a June 22-23 Fox News poll, voters said they believed there was a partnership between Iraq and al Qaeda by a 56 percent to 28 percent margin, and by a 68 percent to 23 percent margin they say it was very or somewhat likely that Saddam had prior knowledge of 9-11.

Believed, likely -- people understand that these are matters of uncertainty, that decisions have to be made without perfect knowledge and that the 9-11 Commission's failure to find evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda tie on 9-11 is not final proof that there was not one.


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

This sums it up well....
9/11 REPORT OUT TODAY

Well, today the 9/11 Commission releases their report. This is the report that has taken months and untold millions of dollars to reach the same conclusion about 9/11 that we had before. We just simply weren't prepared for a terrorist attack inside this country. We were asleep at the switch on September 11, 2001. Let's alert the media.

Politics...more specifically, partisan politics. Don't forget for a minute that it was Democrats that initially pushed this idea of a Commission, and along with the mainstream media forced Bush into going along with it. Once the commission held hearings, it was the partisan liberal Democrats like Richard Ben-Veniste, Jamie Gorelick and Timothy Roemer that carried the water for the DNC and the Kerry campaign in nailing the Bush administration to the wall. *Clinton was in office for 8 years before the attacks and Bush 8 1/2 months...but we all know who they were blaming*. :eyeroll:

Early media reports say that the report will blame neither the Bush or Clinton administrations. There's your primary indication that the report is flawed. Any logical appraisal of Bill Clinton's inaction after the first World Trade Center bombing would lead you to the conclusion that Clinton's failure to act decisively certainly had an affect on later events. Can you just imagine what the left would be saying today if it had been George Bush 41, instead of Bill Clinton, who took no action when offered custody of Osama bin Laden?

Then you have this video that was released to the public. It shows how easily these Islamic terrorists waltzed right through our "airport security." Well here's a newsflash for you....airport security is no better today! *Instead of racially profiling Arabs and Muslims and scrutinizing people who look like terrorists, the TSA is strip searching little old ladies*. There is nothing in place today that would have stopped the hijackings on September 11th. *Here we are three years later, and we're gotten exactly nowhere. *
The 575-page report will be for sale in bookstores. Save your money...and your time.

A "MUST READ" BOOK FOR YOUR NIGHTSTAND

Are you constantly having to argue with your leftist friends who love to spout the "there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda" line? Here's your ammunition. *Stephen F. Hayes has written a concise and hard-hitting book "The Connection. How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America." *(Harper Collins). Head to Amazon.com and the book will be in your eagerly-awaiting hands by Monday. You simply cannot read this book and then voice a heart-felt opinion that there was no connection between Hussein and al Qaeda. Read it and you'll have all the information you need to cause your leftist, appeasement-oriented Democratic friends sputtering in confusion. :lol:

Now ... a word for you Bush-hating Democrats out there. Save your money. Take the $19.95 list price for this book and give it to a homeless person somewhere. You aren't willing to learn. You don't want to know the truth. You're comfortable with your "Bush lied" mantra and you aren't going to let anything, let alone the facts, invade your political comfort zone. You're going to continue to parrot the "there were no WMDs" line, even though those weapons have been found. You'll repeat with your last breath the "Bush stole the election" nonsense, even though every single Florida recount, even the recount conducted by a consortium of leftist newspapers, has shown that Gore lost. Your hatred of George Bush is stronger than your desire to know the truth. Your belief in your own moral and intellectual superiority prohibits any admission that you might have actually been wrong. So ... save the twenty bucks. Use it to take a few fellow-travelers to see Michael Moore's film. I understand that film is being shown in dark rooms. You should feel comfortable there ... *safe from the truth.*


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