At 11:05 PM 4/11/2004 -0700 Doug Pensinger wrote:http://tinyurl.com/2gwad
"Bush told reporters with him in Texas that the Aug. 6, 2001, memo about
Osama bin Laden's desire to attack the United States "was no indication of
a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack."
Damned Al Qaeda forgot to send him a programme.
What would you have done? Invade Saudi Arabia?
It should be noted that an unfortunate consequence of declassifying just
this PDB is that we aren't given any context. For example, how does the
threat assessment in this PDB compare to threat assessments in other PDB's
of the same time period - threats which never materialized? Of course,
this PDB stands out in retrospect, but what would have been a reasonable
reaction in the context of the time?
Personally, I think that it is silly to be treating the 9/11 Commission
like one giant partisan blame game. Rather than tripping over themselves
to try and blame the Bush Administration for 9/11 in an election year and
to utterly absolve the Clinton Administration, the focus should be on
making improvements for the future.
JDG
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That is exactly where the focus has been. Read some of the staff reports. Also, for the most part, the commissioners have been non partisan in assessing what went wrong. And make no mistake my friends, the US government at almost every level bears some responsibility for the events of Sept 11, 2001, as does the media and the citizenry. Almost no one, with the exception of a very few career civil servants crying in the wind, paid attention to the threat that Al Queda posed to this country.
john
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