Quote:
Originally posted by John D Harris:
In a Lisa Meyer report of a couple of days ago, she showed a video of what the CIA believed to be OBL in real time (1999 or 2000), we had ships equipted with cruise missles in striking distance, but the shot was not taken.
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Tenet today said this about that:
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March 24, 2004
C.I.A. Chief Defends Efforts Against Al Qaeda Before 9/11
By TERENCE NEILAN
he director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, was questioned today about his role in fighting terror under the Bush and Clinton administrations as the special commission investigating the attacks of 9/11 began its second day of hearings in Washington.
In early testimony, Mr. Tenet said that even if Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, had been been captured or killed in 2001, he did not think it would have prevented the 9/11 attacks, a point made to the panel on Tuesday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Later, in answer to a question by one of the bipartisan commission's 10 members, Jamie S. Gorelick, Mr. Tenet said that the predominant intelligence reporting had taken "us overseas, but we could not discount the possibility of an attack on the homeland, although the data just didn't exist with any specificity to take you there."
He added, "And this was what was maddening about this."
In questioning that at times appeared to reflected partisan divisions on the panel, Mr. Tenet told James R. Thompson, a Republican former governor of Illinois, that to his knowledge, Mr. Bush had never been given any information by anyone, especially the Central Intelligence Agency, that would have allowed him to predict the 9/11 hijacking attacks.
Tougher questions came from Timothy J. Roemer, a former Congressman from Indiana, one of five Democrats on the panel.
Mr. Roemer cited declassified intelligence reports containing uncorroborated information that Mr. bin Laden had wanted to hijack airplanes to gain the release of militants held by the United States and indicating that bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with explosives.
"Why weren't we concentrating more on those kinds of possibilities?" Mr. Roemer asked Mr. Tenet. "You were running around saying something spectacular is going to happen. You were worried about this. You were on record from 1998 on saying you were at war with Al Qaeda, but why wasn't the United States government more about those attacks?"
Mr. Tenet in effect sidestepped the question, advising Mr. Roemer to put those questions to a later witness, Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to Presidents Bush and Clinton.
Mr. Clarke's testimony this afternoon is perhaps the mostly highly anticipated of the day, as he goes before the panel amid a furor sparked by recent criticism of the Bush administration that he has leveled in interviews and a book.
Todays' proceedings of the independent, bipartisan panel, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, follows a remarkable day of questioning on Tuesday, in which officials like the former secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright, and Mr. Rumsfeld defended their actions in handling the threat of terrorism against the United States.
At the same time, the commission issued a staff report on Tuesday that said, among other things, that intelligence reports in 2001 had warned of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda, and that Mr. Rumsfeld had not ordered any new preparation against Al Qaeda or the Taliban from the time he took over the Pentagon in early 2001 until the 9/11 attacks.
In his book, published on Monday, Mr. Clarke says the Bush administration not only failed to take Al Qaeda seriously before the attacks, it followed up with "an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."
On Sept. 12, 2001, Mr. Clarke writes, Mr. Bush approached him in the White House Situation Room and three times asked him to "look into" whether Iraq had been involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"And in a very intimidating way, I mean, that we should come back with that answer," Mr. Clarke, who also served under President Bill Clinton, said in a later television interview.
Stung by Mr. Clarke's assertions, the Bush administration quickly staged a counterattack, sending out top officials, including the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to the morning television talk shows to rebut Mr. Clarke's charges. Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed on the syndicated Rush Limbaugh radio program on Monday and noted that there had been several terror attacks during Mr. Clarke's watch in the Clinton administration.
The rebuttal was continued on Tuesday before the panel by Mr. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
The charges in Mr. Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," were dismissed by administration officials as politically motivated and the work of a disgruntled former employee.
But today Mr. Clarke will have the opportunity to reaffirm his charges, even though he can expect sharp questioning from the 10-member bipartisan panel.
This morning represented the second opportunity this for Mr. Tenet, who also served under Mr. Clinton, to state his position on what was known before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
In testimony before a Senate panel on March 9, Mr. Tenet said he did not think the administration had misrepresented facts to justify going to war. At the same time he said that he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct what he regarded as public misstatements on intelligence by Mr. Cheney and others, and that he would do so again.