The Democrat Thread

[StrangeSox]

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/10/why_i_left_the_gop/

 

This was a good piece but man is Salon's new web design harsh on my eyes.

[StrangeSox]

The Deafness Before The Storm

 

The Bush administration was even more negligent than we thought:

I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

 

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

 

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

 

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

[Y2HH]

The Deafness Before The Storm

 

The Bush administration was even more negligent than we thought:

 

To be fair, the US government gets about 500 threats like these a day, if you and these people are actually inferring they "should have known" that these were actually going to happen...

 

I'll just shake my head and leave it at that.

[StrangeSox]

To be fair, the US government gets about 500 threats like these a day, if you and these people are actually inferring they "should have known" that these were actually going to happen...

 

I'll just shake my head and leave it at that.

 

"An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day."

 

It's not about picking up on one particular threat out of many, it's about them becoming hyper-focused on Saddam Hussein right after taking office, leading them to ignore more credible threats, and continuing to focus on Saddam after 9/11.

 

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/index.htm

[Balta1701]

So that's based on one anonymous source with an axe to grind?

[StrangeSox]

That GWU link contains analysis of some National Security Archives that were released a year or two back. This seems like more confirmation of the idea that they were focused on regime change in Iraq from the day they took office.

 

Rumsfeld’s notes were prepared in close consultation with senior DOD officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. Among other insights, the materials posted today by the National Security Archive shed light on the intense focus on Iraq by high-level Bush administration officials long before the attacks of 9/11, and Washington’s confidence in perception management as a successful strategy for overcoming public and allied resistance to its plans.

 

This compilation further shows:

 

The preliminary strategy Rumsfeld imparted to Franks while directing him to develop a new war plan for Iraq

 

Secretary of State Powell’s awareness, three days into a new administration, that Iraq “regime change” would be a principal focus of the Bush presidency

 

Administration determination to exploit the perceived propaganda value of intercepted aluminum tubes – falsely identified as nuclear related – before completion of even a preliminary determination of their end use

 

The difficulty of winning European support for attacking Iraq (except that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair) without real evidence that Baghdad was implicated in 9/11

 

The State Department’s analytical unit observing that a decision by Tony Blair to join a U.S. war on Iraq “could bring a radicalization of British Muslims, the great majority of whom opposed the September 11 attacks but are increasingly restive about what they see as an anti-Islamic campaign”

 

Pentagon interest in the perception of an Iraq invasion as a “just war” and State Department insights into the improbability of that outcome

[Balta1701]

Wanting to conduct their stupid, stupid, stupid war in Iraq doesn't necessarily equate to they thought UBL was faking being a threat to help Saddam.

 

I believe the 9/11 commission report showed that they also were much more focused on the threat from ballistic missiles than they were from terrorism as well, but again, that's different from what's written there.

[StrangeSox]

I read it more as them willing to do anything to rationalize their focus on Saddam. UBL working with Saddam was a quick, superficial way to dismiss other concerns and keep focusing on Saddam and his nuclear weapons.

 

edit: It's two people:

 

"An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews"

 

edit2: and he cites a brief that specifically references this crazy idea in the paragraph following my excerpt.

Edited September 11, 2012 by StrangeSox

[Balta1701]

I read it more as them willing to do anything to rationalize their focus on Saddam. UBL working with Saddam was a quick, superficial way to dismiss other concerns and keep focusing on Saddam and his nuclear weapons.

 

edit: It's two people:

 

"An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews"

 

edit2: and he cites a brief that specifically references this crazy idea in the paragraph following my excerpt.

Just remember...anonymous quotes from sources with no information about who they are, what other motivations they have, what their history is of truth-telling, or why they're the ones telling this story while no one else has said so in 11 years...

 

Sounds exactly like how they sold the Iraq war.

[Balta1701]

I'll endorse this Peter Bergen perspective from 9 years ago:

The fact that the Bush team was strangely somnambulant about the al Qaeda threat is puzzling. It is not as if they were uninterested in national security, were ill-informed or inexperienced, or did not care about the safety of their countrymen; quite the contrary. Nor did they lack enough information to act; indeed, the Bush team likes to highlight the fact that the president was being constantly briefed about al Qaeda as evidence that he was engaged on the issue. Bush administration officials deny that they failed to take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating the record that in their public utterances and private meetings, the al Qaeda threat barely registered. The real question then, is why, in the face of all this information about the threat, did the most experienced national security team in memory downgrade the problem?

 

The short answer is: They were in denial. Bush administration officials entered office believing that the great threats facing the country were a remilitarized China and a few, festering rogue states, especially Iraq--states that might try to challenge American hegemony with long-range missiles or, secondarily, by supporting terrorists. Al Qaeda not only didn't fit into this worldview, it also posed a direct challenge to it. If a network of stateless terrorists using truck bombs and other low-tech weapons represented the top threat to America's physical security, it would have been hard to argue that our chief security strategy should be to thwart states by building a missile defense--a goal to which Republican hawks had been committed for nearly two decades.

 

In other words, bin Laden and al Qaeda were politically and ideologically inconvenient and impossible to square with the Bush worldview--a textbook case of cognitive dissonance.

[StrangeSox]

Except all that corroborating evidence.

[StrangeSox]

I'll endorse this Peter Bergen perspective from 9 years ago:

 

And how does this new information that they rationalized away their cognitive dissonance not fit exactly with Bergen's perspective?

[Balta1701]

And how does this new information that they rationalized away their cognitive dissonance not fit exactly with Bergen's perspective?

"Believing Bin Laden was just some tool to make them take their eyes off of Iraq" might fit ok, but it's a step farther than anything that's been really stated before by anyone.

[StrangeSox]

"Believing Bin Laden was just some tool to make them take their eyes off of Iraq" might fit ok, but it's a step farther than anything that's been really stated before by anyone.

 

Eichenwald claims to have read some of the still-classified briefs. Given that he's claiming to directly quote from it, I'm assuming he read the 6/29 one.

 

While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

 

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name.

 

I understand your skepticism of unnamed sources, but there's more to this than one guy saying something to a reporter.

[StrangeSox]

DICK CHENEY BOMBSHELL: BARACK OBAMA CAUSED 9/11 BY IGNORING ALL HIS DAILY BRIEFINGS

 

I

[lostfan]

To be fair, the US government gets about 500 threats like these a day, if you and these people are actually inferring they "should have known" that these were actually going to happen...

 

I'll just shake my head and leave it at that.

No sir, not really. Not at that level and not anything that developed and finished.

[Y2HH]

No sir, not really. Not at that level and not anything that developed and finished.

 

I've read and heard otherwise. I heard they get threats all the time. They had no way of knowing how developed/finished it was, either...until after the fact.

[StrangeSox]

Fyi lostfan works directly in this field.

 

saying that they get a bunch of threats doesn't address the single-mindedness of that administration, though. They literally couldn't conceive of al q type terrorism as a serious threat, only on Saddam and his fictional wmd's. Bin laden did not fit into their world view.

[Y2HH]

Fyi lostfan works directly in this field.

 

saying that they get a bunch of threats doesn't address the single-mindedness of that administration, though. They literally couldn't conceive of al q type terrorism as a serious threat, only on Saddam and his fictional wmd's. Bin laden did not fit into their world view.

 

What field is that, counter terrorism?

 

Wouldn't this be a mix of FBI and NSA, amongst 50 other government bureaucratic groups that collect/compile and sift through such information? I'm sure it's not just few guys in an administration.

 

I think you guys are way simplifying the complexity of what happened in order to take a shot at GW...and I find it weak.

Edited September 13, 2012 by Y2HH

[BigSqwert]

What field is that, counter terrorism?

 

Wouldn't this be a mix of FBI and NSA, amongst 50 other government bureaucratic groups that collect/compile and sift through such information? I'm sure it's not just few guys in an administration.

 

I think you guys are way simplifying the complexity of what happened in order to take a shot at GW...and I find it weak.

Admittedly haven't read this whole debate but I'd imagine there are quite a few threats daily but only a certain few elevate all the way up to the executive branch. I'd imagine this is one of those cases.

[Y2HH]

Admittedly haven't read this whole debate but I'd imagine there are quite a few threats daily but only a certain few elevate all the way up to the executive branch. I'd imagine this is one of those cases.

 

I'm sure, but threats of terrorism from that group have been ongoing for years prior and even after the attack.

 

I'm not one to defend GW Bush, because there is PLENTY to knock him for, but this is just reaching as far as I'm concerned. It's like knocking Obama about a birth certificate when there are ACTUAL issues you can take him to task on. It's weak minded, IMO.

 

Edit: It's worse than that, because it's armchair quarterbacking IN hindsight.

Edited September 13, 2012 by Y2HH

[StrangeSox]

He works in intelligence, yes.

 

GW and his administration deserves every shot possible over this. With the National Security Archives releases a year or so ago and now this latest article that quotes several still-classified memos, it's abundantly clear that his administration was focused on Iraq from the day they took office. They could not conceive of other types of threats and saw regime change in Iraq as their main foreign policy goal even before 9/11. This isn't about their terrible half-truths and lies to drum up support for invading Iraq in 2003 but their entire mindset.

 

The CIA had to write memos that specifically addressed the bizarre idea that Bin Laden was running a false-flag operation against the US to distract them from Saddam. Those memos were, apparently, ignored. That's how narrow Bush's (and Rumsfeld et al.) view was.

 

It's not monday-morning QB'ing to look back and see what their pre-9/11 memos said. It's not looking at the 8/6/01 memo in complete exclusion from everything else and saying "they should have known!" It's looking at the pattern; it's seeing the memos that indicate Colin Powell was aware that regime change in Iraq was a priority three days into the administration; it's seeing new memos and insiders coming forward to express the same sentiments, that they were singularly focused on Iraq; it's seeing the information that shows their first thoughts after 9/11 were "invade Iraq."

 

How Bush ever got a positive reputation when it came to foreign policy and counter-terrorism will always be baffling.

Edited September 13, 2012 by StrangeSox

[BigSqwert]

I'm sure, but threats of terrorism from that group have been ongoing for years prior and even after the attack.

 

I'm not one to defend GW Bush, because there is PLENTY to knock him for, but this is just reaching as far as I'm concerned. It's like knocking Obama about a birth certificate when there are ACTUAL issues you can take him to task on. It's weak minded, IMO.

 

Edit: It's worse than that, because it's armchair quarterbacking IN hindsight.

Equating Obama's birth certificate to events that killed over 3000 Americans on our soil seems a bit silly.

[Y2HH]

He works in intelligence, yes.

 

GW and his administration deserves every shot possible over this. With the National Security Archives releases a year or so ago and now this latest article that quotes several still-classified memos, it's abundantly clear that his administration was focused on Iraq from the day they took office. They could not conceive of other types of threats and saw regime change in Iraq as their main foreign policy goal even before 9/11. This isn't about their terrible half-truths and lies to drum up support for invading Iraq in 2003 but their entire mindset.

 

The CIA had to write memos that specifically addressed the bizarre idea that Bin Laden was running a false-flag operation against the US to distract them from Saddam. Those memos were, apparently, ignored. That's how narrow Bush's (and Rumsfeld et al.) view was.

 

It's not monday-morning QB'ing to look back and see what their pre-9/11 memos said. It's not looking at the 8/6/01 memo in complete exclusion from everything else and saying "they should have known!" It's looking at the pattern; it's seeing the memos that indicate Colin Powell was aware that regime change in Iraq was a priority three days into the administration; it's seeing new memos and insiders coming forward to express the same sentiments, that they were singularly focused on Iraq; it's seeing the information that shows their first thoughts after 9/11 were "invade Iraq."

 

How Bush ever got a positive reputation when it came to foreign policy and counter-terrorism will always be baffling.

 

I disagree, and for the reasons I've already stated.

 

This is entirely weak minded reasoning in hindsight. IE, it's easy to blame them now, but this happened so early on into his administration, it's as if you're pretending they ignored threats from AQ for YEARS because they were focused on Iraq...it's just twisting reality to suit your agenda. GW was hardly in office when 9/11 hit...you make it sound the exact opposite. It's fabrication and stretching of truth, and like I said, weak.

Edited September 13, 2012 by Y2HH

[StrangeSox]

I'm sure, but threats of terrorism from that group have been ongoing for years prior and even after the attack.

 

Right, but the story that's come out in the years since 9/11 is that his administration basically ignored those threats despite Clinton's team's warnings. They focused on Iraq and their PNAC project instead.

 

I'm not one to defend GW Bush, because there is PLENTY to knock him for, but this is just reaching as far as I'm concerned. It's like knocking Obama about a birth certificate when there are ACTUAL issues you can take him to task on. It's weak minded, IMO.

 

How is criticizing Bush's foreign policy and intelligence blunders even remotely like birtherism? How is their obsession with Iraq that blinded them to anything else not an "actual" issue? What is more important than how their administration viewed foreign policy and intelligence about domestic threats?