From the Latest Communist Demonstration

Over the weekend in San Francisco.

Vide.

(Thanks, Charles.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 04/12/04 06:08:34 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

No Record of Bush Military Claim: Media Feeding Frenzy Starting Again

From Insight on the News, dated Apr. 27:

.... There are no written records of Kerry's magical first Purple Heart on file at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, the nation's primary repository for such documentation. A Purple Heart normally is not requested but is awarded de facto for a wound inflicted by the enemy — a wound serious enough to require medical attention. The Naval Historical Center keeps all documents connected to such awards to U.S. Navy and Marine personnel. These typewritten "casualty cards" list the date, location and prognosis of the wound for which the Purple Heart is given, and they are produced by the medical facility that provides treatment for the combat wound at the hands of the enemy. There are two such cards for Kerry — for his slight wounds on Feb. 20 and March 13, 1969, but none for his December 1968 claim....

Oops. Sorry. That should have been No Record of Kerry military claim: Media will go nowhere near it.

Partisan hypocrites.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 04/12/04 05:44:05 PM
Categorized as John Kerry & Media.

Somewhere! Must Be Somewhere! Where Is It? Where!

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCLIV

Searching desperately for something to use against George W. Bush.

The White House released the August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief, Apr. 9 (italics in original).

Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladentold followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [deleted text] service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told [deleted text] service at the same time that Bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate theoperation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qa'ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in and traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

— Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

Yes, Faithful Reader. That's it. That's all. But the release of the actual text hasn't stopped mainstream media from trying their best to find something, anything, in it to use to bash George Bush over the head.

Here, for instance, is an interview, Apr. 10, with Bill Schneider (brackets and ellipsis in original).

(CNN) — The White House has released part of a key intelligence report on Osama Bin Laden that says the head of al Qaeda had been determined to conduct terror attacks in the United States since 1997. CNN's Carol Lin talked to senior political analyst Bill Schneider about the implications of the memo's contents.

LIN: Bill, you heard the body of the top secret memo that was just released by the White House. How damaging could this be?

SCHNEIDER: I think it could be seriously damaging. What this says is, the White House knew what bin Laden was capable of planning, where he intended to do it, which was New York or Washington, D.C., how he was going to do it. There was only one thing missing, which was exactly when he was going to do it, which turns out to be September 11.

Critics and members of the commission will say, the White House should have been far more aggressive to prevent, what sounds from this memo, like an imminent strike, obviously years in the planning, but a real danger to the United States, particularly in New York and Washington. And they will, I think, make it a cause for very severe criticism.

LIN: Does the [memo] support [former chief counterterrorism aide] Richard Clarke's criticism of President Bush that he and his administration were not taking al Qaeda seriously?

SCHNEIDER: I think it sounds exactly like Richard Clarke. I think Richard Clarke's testimony sounds almost exactly like what is in this presidential briefing. He was repeating what the president had been told on August 6. And he was urging the president to take these threats very seriously.

As I say, just about everything that happened in broad outline is in this memo, the only thing missing is that it would happen on September 11.

LIN: Do you have any idea how more specific security briefings can be with the president? I mean, given that ... every day the president hears about threats against the United States. It is impossible to act on every single document that crosses his desk. Is there an argument to be made by the White House that lots of information crosses [his] desk, [and that] not all of it is credible.

Even [CNN's] Suzanne [Malveaux] was saying a portion of this has not been corroborated. The part where [the memo says] bin Laden back in 1998 was saying that [he] wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of two extremists, is uncorroborated information as it stood in this memo.

SCHNEIDER: A couple of things. One is [that] the White House, I think, can argue and probably will argue and probably has evidence to argue that this information was uncorroborated. I think [it] can come forth with other material from briefings indicating that [it] received lots of warnings of this type and therefore it was not clear that this particular warning should be taken more seriously than others.

On the other hand, Osama bin Laden had already carried out attacks, not on the American homeland, but overseas on the USS Cole and the US embassies [in Kenya and Tanzania], and he clearly was associated here, associated his organization with the attempts on Los Angeles International Airport at the millennium. So I think there are pretty clear indications that this wasn't hypothetical. This man had acted and had tried to act on the United States homeland.

Yo, Bill. WAKE UP! It's not the Dark Ages of the 1990s anymore: we can read these things for ourselves, just as soon as you do, and we don't need you to tell us what it says.

Next, a Boston Globe article, yesterday.

The CIA told President Bush five weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that Al Qaeda had been planning to attack the United States since 1997, and appeared to have been laying plans "for hijackings or other types of attacks," according to a top-secret memo declassified yesterday by the White House.

Replying to mounting pressure from the independent commission investigating the attacks, the administration took the extraordinarily rare step of making public a copy for Aug. 6, 2001, of the president's daily briefing, one of the most closely guarded documents in the intelligence world. Generally, only the president and a small group of top security officials are allowed to see the memo.

Titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," the briefing told Bush that the FBI was conducting "approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related," and that the CIA and FBI were investigating a tip that Osama bin Laden's supporters were planning attacks in the United States.

The memo also said the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks."

The document, a little more than a page long, summarized a series of indicators that bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader, was trying to hit the United States. It also said that Al Qaeda members "have resided or travelled in the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."

It did not mention using hijacked planes as missiles. And it did not give specific times or places for any attack.

"There is nothing in here we could show was tied to the 9/11 plot," a senior official said on condition of anonymity via a telephone conference call.

"The presence of individuals associated with Al Qaeda in the US was not new information. This had been well-known for years."

The contents of the Aug. 6 briefing were the primary focus of the three hours of testimony Thursday that Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser, gave before the 9/11 Commission.

Rice insisted that the briefing was purely "historical" and that it contained no specific threats that should have served as cause for additional action by the administration. But several family members of victims, and panelists on the commission, said the document should be declassified so that the public itself could determine the report's significance.

Although the briefing consists mostly of information that was years old, it also highlighted two events in 2001 that had piqued US interest in Al Qaeda.

One was "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." The White House official said that the FBI had observed two Yemeni men taking pictures of the federal courthouse in which Al Qaeda defendants from the 1998 East African embassy bombings had been convicted. However, he added, the bureau later determined that the men were tourists.

The other was that someone had called the US Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001, saying "a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives." But a senior official said there were many such calls. "A call-in to an embassy threat was not particularly alarming," the official said. "The president was told the FBI and the CIA were investigating."

After Sept. 11, the offficial added, intelligence officials combed through the Al Qaeda threat information that had been collected and found that there was no connection between the United Arab Emirates caller and the attacks.

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief for the National Security Council, has accused the administration of dragging its feet in response to his warnings that they had to address Al Qaeda's threat more urgently.

His critique of the administration, delivered in his memoir "Against All Enemies" and in testimony before the 9/11 Commission two weeks ago, put new pressure on the White House to reveal more about what it knew and did about the Al Qaeda threat in the months before the terror attacks.

In her testimony last week, Rice said the Bush administration had conducted a comprehensive review of Clinton-era policy toward Al Qaeda that culminated in adopting many of Clarke's ideas on Sept. 4, 2001 — a week before the attacks. She also said that the White House also needed more time to rework its policies toward the Taliban, the network's patrons in Afghanistan, and its supporters in Pakistan.

In addition, she said that the briefing, which the CIA created with FBI help after President Bush asked about the risk of an Al Qaeda attack inside the United States, did not constitute a call to arms for further action than the FBI investigations underway.

"I also understood that that was what the FBI was doing, that the FBI was pursuing these Al Qaeda cells," Rice said Thursday. "I believe in the August 6th memorandum, it says that there were 70 full field investigations underway of these cells. And so there was no recommendation that we do something about this; the FBI was pursuing it."

The senior administration official declined to answer questions about how the president had reacted to the Aug. 6 briefing.

That briefing was delivered at the end of a spring and summer in which US officials were at high alert because of a surge in "chatter" among Al Qaeda operatives that a big attack was coming.

The White House directed the FAA to send out at least five warnings that operatives be on the lookout for hijackings during that period, Rice said. The briefing memo says: "We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of the 'Blind Shaykh' 'Umar' 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists."

The 9/11 Commission will question past and present FBI directors later this week.

Rice testified last week that the White House had instructed the FBI over the summer of 2001 to be at "battle stations" in case of signs of Al Qaeda activity. But a Democratic commission member, Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general, said that the information may not have reached several field offices.

One of Clarke's criticisms was that Rice did not convene a Cabinet-level "principals meeting" during that threat spike, as the Clinton administration did during the threat spike before Al Qaeda's thwarted plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in late 1999. Such a meeting would be aimed at ensuring that the federal bureaucracy had taken the issue seriously, Clarke said.

Rice, however, argued that the "millennium plot" had been thwarted because of a sharp-eyed customs agent whose bureau had not been on alert at the time.

The Bush administration insisted its decision to declassify the memo was not a precedent for the release of other presidential daily briefings, much as it announced that its decision to reverse its resistance to allowing Rice to testify before the 9/11 Commission was also a unique event.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

Finally, from the Democrats on staff at al-Jazeera, Apr 10.

The White House has released a classified intelligence document that warned of a possible al-Qaida strike inside the United States a month before the September 11 attacks.

The document titled Bin Ladin Determined to Strike Inside the United States was de-classified on Saturday amid an escalating row over whether the Bush administration had received any prior warnings about the attacks and if they had been ignored.

National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted in her public testimony to the 9/11 commission last week that the document relating to the 6 August 2001 presidential briefing contained mostly historical information and did not warn of any coming attacks.

Contradictory

But the page-and-a-half memo contradicts Rice, revealing that President George Bush had been warned of an al-Qaida plan to attack the US.

The report said it had not been able to corroborate some of the "more sensational threat reporting" such as a report in 1998 that bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of those responsible for the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Centre.

"The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives," the documents said.

Unspecific

The document gave neither a time nor a suspected target for such an attack.

But the document's contents are nevertheless damning for the Bush administration and could further dent its credibility.

Contrary to Rice's claim that the memo contained only historical intelligence, the warning in the document was based on a May 2001 intelligence report that suggested bin Ladin followers wanted to cross from Canada into the US.

It said bin Ladin had implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that he would "bring the fighting to America."

"Clandestine, foreign government and media reports indicate bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US," the document further said.

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

Apparently, all the branches — foreign and domestic — of the Democratic Establishment are on the same page here.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 04/12/04 07:24:06 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.