The Memory Hole on the Classified 9/11 Report
The good people at thememoryhole.org are carrying the public (for now) information relating to the 9/11 investigation: Documents from Congress’ joint inquiry into 9/11. Note especially in the transcribed statement from Eleanor Hill, staff director of the investigation committee, the following:
According to the White House and the D.C.I., director of central intelligence, the president’s knowledge of intelligence information relevant to this inquiry remains classified, even when the substance of that intelligence information has been declassified.
See, if it were widely known that Bush had been personally briefed on the danger represented by al Qaeda prior to 9/11, including specific information relating to plans to hijack airliners and plow them into buildings, people might start wondering why he didn’t do more to prevent that, which in turn might hurt his [re-]election prospects.
Fortunately, it has been determined by the White House that [re-]electing Bush is essential to our national security, so any such information can remain classified. Don’t you feel safer?
May 14th, 2003 at 9:28 pm
People seem so interested in somehow linking, with whatever strained assumptions they can muster, Bush and his inner circle with having some specific detailed knowledge of a imminent terrorist plan to fly commercial airplanes into signature buildings in several major cities, and Bush simply did something equivalent to a yawn in response, and said “Whatever….so what’s next on our meeting agenda”!
Why is it so hard to believe the avalanche of documentation (such as those included here)that clearly showed a disconnect between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies such as the CIA and FBI, in which key pieces of the puzzle were not shared. So critical leads were dropped, links between certain terrorist players were lost in the maze, and the tracking of individuals to specific locations was not followed.
What was left was a fuzzy picture of some sort of likely terrorist event, but with no credible certainty of exactly where, when or how it would happen. Do people really understand the number of threats against the US and its interests that take place from week to week, with varying degrees of viability?
This has all been regurgitated across many months and many media outlets. It’s painfully obvious that agencies such as the FBI and CIA were woefully inadequate in sharing and linking up relevant data to try to develop the recognition of a very specific threat for the President to act on. And yes, even today this information hole still appears to be alive and well in many ways.
This particular conspiracy theory has been a dead horse so long that there is nothing left to beat but a bleached skeleton! Can we all just move on to something more interesting, if not credible?
May 14th, 2003 at 9:43 pm
And by the way, its likely that some of the President’s particular briefings on this matter have probably remained classified simply because a Democratic party that is desperate enough to complain about an aircraft carrier possibly being turned in a different direction to accomodate Bush’s PR opportunity, would not hesitate to try to manufacture some kind of “a-ha” trap by looking at what he was told and then work to convince people that he should have sorted through the vagueness of those briefs and then seen an obvious plot unfolding!
Wow, what a long sentence!
May 14th, 2003 at 10:00 pm
Well, I think both of you, Craig and Tommy, are correct. I tend to agree that the idea of Bush actually having shrugged off knowledge of a coming attack is pretty silly. Was he briefed that something like 9-11 might have occurred? Probably. But like you say, I’m sure he was run through hundreds of other threats against the US and I think I’d actually prefer we remain skeptical of our evaluation of these threats (although perhaps more thorough) instead of, say, having a police state.
This does not however change the fact that the President is very definitely classifying that which should be public knowledge for the sake of his own re-election campain — precisely because the Democrats would likely find something to blow way our of proportion. Petty on the Democrats’ part, but that’s not even close to a justification for this level of exploitation of executive priviledge.
September 12th, 2003 at 7:13 am
Well, if all of you, Craig, Tom and Matt, are correct, then let’s have the White House declassify all of the report, so the American people can read the facts and come to their own conclusions. Are we a free society or not? Can informed Americans be trusted to having the truth or not? The truth will set us free, so let’s have the truth.