pre 9/11 security

[Sebboe]

Just something to think about....

CONDI RICE AND THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING TASK FORCE

In her testimony before the 9/11 Commission today, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice defended the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 record by referring, on two occasions, to a task force headed by Vice President Cheney that was to review all of the recommendations for domestic preparedness in the event of an attack on the US. She said:

The vice president was, a little later in, I think, in May, tasked by the president to put together a group to look at all of the recommendations that had been made about domestic preparedness and all of the questions associated with that; to take the Gilmore report and the Hart-Rudman report and so forth and to try to make recommendations about what might have been done.

And again, Cheney’s comprehensive task force:

Now, the vice president was asked by the president, and that was tasked in May, to put all of this together and to see if he could put together, from all of the recommendations, a program for protection of the homeland against WMD, what else needed to be done.

Ms. Rice is correct about Cheney’s mission. President Bush announced the Cheney-led homeland-security task force on May 8, 2001. Moreover, Bush announced that "I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Cheney would run the task force, and Bush would review its conclusions.

One thing that Rice left out, though: the task force never met.

As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in 2002:
“Neither Cheney’s review nor Bush’s took place.”

Michael Elliott of Time Magazine reported the same thing:
“MAY 8: Bush creates a new Office of National Preparedness for terrorism and promises a government review, led by Dick Cheney, into the consequences of a domestic attack. It never happens.”

Rice was testifying under oath. She didn’t claim that it met, so she did not technically perjure herself—but she was being dishonest. And it’s clear that she knew what she was doing: saying that Cheney was "tasked by the president" without mentioning that Cheney didn’t follow through is an artful way of giving the false impression of focus and activity.

The 9/11 commissioners should have called her on it. But they shouldn’t have had to. Rice’s testimony was another deliberate attempt to mislead the public and cover up the Bush administration’s miserable record in fighting terror before the 9/11 attacks.

[Aristotle]

Originally posted by Sebboe
Rice’s testimony was another deliberate attempt to mislead the public and cover up the Bush administration’s miserable record in fighting terror before the 9/11 attacks.

Aha. You mean the whole whopping 7 and a half months?

The blame or credit for virtually anything significant that happens to the US during the first year of a new Presidency goes to the prior administration. Why? Because it takes at least a year for a new President to get a cabinet and political appointments in place (and confirmed), for his people to fully review what was being done by the former President, and for the enormous bureaucracy that is the US Federal Government to adjust to having new bosses from the top down.

This bureacracy is so massive and lacking in agility that it takes months just to get things like telephone lines and stationary sorted out when there is a change as major as a new President.

This isn't the President's fault. This is the fault of the overbloated federal government we continually feed with more money and power than it needs or should possess.

When a new President comes into office, information and intelligence that is available to him is completely the product of the previous administration. The new President then acts upon that information because it is the ONLY information he has and he must logically assume the prior President was not asleep at the switch.

President Clinton utterly destroyed our entire intelligence industry. He phased out "on the ground" agents and instead built up our reliance on technological information gathering. He got rid of spies because he felt satellites were good enough. Well, intercepting communications via satellites means you are at the mercy of the quality of information you intercept.

A perfect example is the WMDs in Iraq. Saddam's own ministers and scientists told him they had WMDs. They were lying to him. They were scamming him for money. Since we were intercepting transmissions between Saddam and his scientists (who were telling him about the weapons they were "building") we were intercepting inaccurate information. If we had actual spies in country, they could have verified exactly what was being made and where.

President Clinton instituted an executive order that made it illegal for our intelligence agencies to hire anyone we knew or suspected was guilty of a felony. Thus, if someone approached us with amazing information about an enemy, we were not allowed to purchase it (or hire the person to get more information) if the person was guilty of a felony or was suspected of being guilty of a felony.

Guess what, folks. People willing to betray their country for money usually aren't very savory people. Such people are often felons. You hire them and pay them because the information is extremely valuable. That executive order was absolutely CRIPPLING to our intelligence industry.

More importantly, it is completely ridiculous to sit around trying to place blame on Clinton or Bush. Neither of them could have prevented what happened on 9/11, short of us conquering most of the Middle East militarily.

The 9/11 commission is an absurdity that is nothing more than a high stakes "blame game" being played out so lifetime politicians and bureaucrats can wage war upon each other.

Here's a Hint: When people are willing to kill themselves to hurt you, they WILL hurt you. It doesn't matter how flawless your intelligence gathering is. It doesn't matter how marvellous your security is. They will eventually succeed because their WILL trumps your CAPABILITY.

The only way to stop terrorism is to utterly destroy those who are willing to engage in such acts against us. You simply cannot play defense in situations like this. It will never work. A 99.9999% successful defense still results in catastrophic losses the remaining .0001% of the time.