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http://www.rense.com/general25/bushfled.htm
Bush Fled 'Harm's Way' After 911 Attacks
By Edwin Chen
LA Times Staff Writer
5-22-2
WASHINGTON - President Bush spoke publicly for the first time Tuesday
about his fears for himself and his family in the hours after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling a German television reporter he
was "trying to get out of harm's way" before returning to the White
House.
In an interview with ARD German Television, Bush said that in the
immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, "I was concerned about things like, is my wife safe? You
know, I was worried about that. I was worried about things such as my
parents. I was worried about my [twin] girls."
Among the flying public grounded that day were the president's
parents, who found themselves stranded in Wisconsin. Bush was able to
reach his father, as well as First Lady Laura Bush, who was in
Washington. But as he discussed his personal reactions, Bush also
wanted there to be no doubt about his focus on the task at hand.
"At the same time, you need to know about me that I was also thinking
clearly about how to respond," he said.
Bush granted the interview as a prelude to his weeklong trip to
Europe, which begins today. After a stop in Berlin, he travels to
Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris and Rome.
Bush's initial conduct on Sept. 11 came under scrutiny because he did
not immediately return to Washington. When the first airliner crashed
into the World Trade Center, he was in Sarasota, Fla., to speak on
education reform.
Bush and his entourage flew to two highly secure Air Force bases--one
in Louisiana, the other in Nebraska--before arriving in Washington
that evening.
"I mean, I was trying to get out of harm's way," Bush said.
"We were concerned about threats on the president. We were worried
about future attacks, and there's a lot of belief that Flight 93 was
headed to the White House," Bush added, referring to the hijacked
commercial airliner that crashed in western Pennsylvania.
http://www.latimes.com
Comment
>From James Roger Brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
5-22-2
In all civilizations there are some jobs where nothing else comes
first. President, Commander-in-Chief, and Soldier are prominent among
them. George W. Bush told us that he wanted to be President and that
he was qualified. We now have a complete confirmed profile of a
cowardly man so absorbed in bringing to life the political agenda of
his elitist constituents that he only protects his own in the reality
of a national disaster about which he was forewarned and did nothing
to stop. At least the Emperors Nero and Bill Clinton could play
musical instruments while the fires burned. George W. Bush cares only
about power and the corruption that can benefit him and his nickname
buddies. Just as on September 11, 2001, and every day since, ordinary
American citizens are on their own in protecting themselves from the
political, economic, and military consequences of what flows out of
the government cesspool Washington, D. C. has become.
*****
http://www.newsmax.com
Dan Rather: Bush Issued Fake Terror Alert To Cover 911 Bungle
5-24-2
"CBS Evening News" anchorman Dan Rather accused the Bush
administration Wednesday morning of issuing an unwarranted FBI
terrorist alert to New York City yesterday primarily to distract from
questions about its handling of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence
information.
Appearing on the "Imus in the Morning" radio show, Rather said
he "believed" his network's report a week ago that the White House
received a CIA briefing before 9-11 on possible al-Qaeda hijackings
prompted the administration to issue the alert for political damage
control.
"I can believe that the president and the people around him were
surprised and peeved, to say the least," Rather contended, "that the
information got out last week with [CBS's] report that President Bush
had been briefed about some things that, in retrospect after Sept.
11, would indicate that, well, maybe somebody should have done
something."
The CBS newsman continued:
"And I can also believe that, as with every president, somebody's in
the White House scratching their heads saying, 'How can we change the
subject.' Now, the subject has been changed, suddenly and very
effectively, from 'How is it that the FBI and the CIA didn't move on
the information they had? Where was the president briefed about what,
when?'
"The subject's been changed," Rather explained, "from that, to
suddenly one administration official after another, and each
escalating it, [issuing] a new set of warnings."
The CBS anchor said he doubted the confluence of events was
coincidental:
"Maybe these two things are not connected, but surely the people in
the administration could forgive us for perhaps thinking, well,
perhaps there's some connection here."
Prior to outlining his terrorist alert conspiracy theory, Rather
sounded dismissive about the latest warning that had Manhattan in a
virtual traffic lockdown Wednesday morning.
"We're on some kind of alert because somebody heard something that
somebody may blow something up. [But] as a citizen, what are we
supposed to do with that information?"
Rather also defended Democrat calls for a 9-11 investigation into the
Bush White House, saying:
"We're not interested in just looking in the rearview mirror so we
can nail somebody, you know - 'What did you know and when did you
know it?'
"But this is pretty important stuff," he insisted. "Given the stories
about intelligence failures that we already have heard about, who can
argue that we don't need some kind of commission ... led by
professionals that goes into how the situation with al-Qaeda was
handled before Sept. 11, what mistakes were made and what we can
learn from that."
Rather insisted that curiosity about a possible Bush 9-11 cover-up
had nothing to do with partisan politics.
"That's not playing partisan politics. There's already too much of
that. That's trying to get information that can help us all in the
future."
The CBS newsman also accused Attorney General John Ashcroft of taking
advantage of insider information about terrorist warnings to fly on
private jets, while the public was kept in the dark about the secret
alert, telling Imus:
"If the attorney general is given information that convinces
him, 'Hey, I don't want to be on any commercial airliners just now.
I'm gonna take government planes everywhere.' If the attorney general
was told that ... then it raises a question. Why wasn't the public
alerted?"
"Some people probably would not have flown" had they also received
the Ashcroft warning, he complained.
After the CBS news anchor's interview, NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim
Miklaszewski called Imus to correct the record, explaining that
Ashcroft's decision not to fly commercial aircraft last summer was
prompted by threats against his life - and had no connection
whatsoever to pre-Sept. 11 intelligence information.
*****
LIARS, MORONS, OR BOTH?
Tue May 21, 9:02 PM ET
By Ted Rall
The Beginning of the End for George W. Bush
NEW YORK-It only lasted a few seconds, but on May 17 George W. Bush
had a Bill Clinton moment, and it was magical. "Had I known that the
enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning,"
George W. Bush reassured us, "I would have done everything in my
power to protect the American people." Did he realize how much he
sounded like his prevaricating predecessor? Were the subject
something other than the murder of 3,000 innocent people, such
desperate dissembling would be absolutely hilarious.
In the circus of insolent hypocrites which is the Bush
Administration, the best lines are reserved for the ringmaster. On
that same day the creepy Dick Cheney (news - web sites) warned
Democrats not to "seek political advantage by making incendiary
suggestions...that the White House had advance information that would
have prevented the tragic attacks of 9-11. Such commentary," Cheney
emphasized, "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of
national leaders in a time of war."
First: what war? And when it comes to "political advantage," it's the
Bushies, not the Democrats, who have taken advantage of 9-11 to
further a partisan political agenda. They used the dead of New York,
Pennsylvania and Washington to push such Republican platform planks
as "fast track" signing authority on free trade agreements, Internet
censorship, tax cuts for the super rich and drilling for oil in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To be sure, there's a war going on:
a PR war. And now that Democrats are finally scoring a few points of
their own, the Bushies who have been slamdunking for months are
screaming foul.
"Bush Knew," the New York Post screamed last week. Did he? Hell if I
know. Here's a man who subverted constitutional law in order to seize
the White House in a judicial coup d'�tat, who claimed while
campaigning to be a "compassionate conservative" but turned into a
Genghis Khan right-winger as soon as he took office, and who told us
upfront after 9-11 that his administration would routinely lie for
the sake of the "war on terror." No one can deny that the Bushies and
their corporate sponsors benefited enormously from 9-11; the post-
Taliban Afghan pipeline deal (closed March 7 in Islamabad) alone is
worth billions of dollars. Under normal circumstances, even the
suggestion that a president would deliberately stand idly by as his
citizens were slaughtered en masse would be appalling. George W.
Bush, however, tells Congress to go to hell whenever it requests
documents or summons his staff to testify. Such a man is capable of
anything.
There's no smoking gun-evidence that Bush was told about the exact
specifics of 9-11-so far. But it's hard to escape an inevitable,
disturbing conclusion that itself bears consideration: We are in the
hands of liars, morons or both.
When Terrormemogate first hit the airwaves, the administration
trotted out National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (news - web
sites), who serves as chief of Bush's Counterterrorism Security
Group, to face the media. Rice repeatedly asserted that pre-9-11
threats of airplane hijackings had been so vague as to be useless.
This is somewhat believable: any firefighter can tell you that false
alarms outnumber real fires.
Given such a generalized threat, you'd order your Air Force to a
state of high alert. "Traditional" hijackings, after all, tend to end
badly. You'd keep planes in the air and many more on the ground,
ready to scramble at a second's notice. Then, if and when the
predicted hijackings materialized, you could track the planes and
order them shot down if necessary. If months went by without any
hijackings, you might decide to lower the nation's state of
readiness.
On the morning of September 11th, though, just eight fighters were
assigned to defend The United States of America's 3,618,770-square-
mile air space. And they were piloted by weekend warriors, members of
the Air National Guard. The jets weren't even in the air-they were
sitting on the ground at the time of the attacks. Our state of
readiness, despite the huge military defense budget that sucks
millions away from starving children, compared unfavorably to
Thailand's.
By Rice's own admission, the Bush Administration ignored the vague,
imprecise threats of which Bush was informed during his month-long
August vacation, simply because they didn't specify exact times and
dates. To hear her tell it, our government-our safety-is in the hands
of idiots.
"Administration officials insisted all last week that turning a plane
into a suicide bomb was something that nobody had contemplated," Time
magazine reports in its May 27th issue. "But that just isn't so. In
1995, authorities in the Philippines scuppered a plan-masterminded by
Razmi Yousef, who had also plotted the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing-for mass hijackings of American planes over the Pacific.
Evidence developed during the investigation of Yousef and his
partner, Abdul Hakim Murad, uncovered a plan to crash a plane into
CIA (news - web sites) headquarters in Langley, Va. And as long ago
as 1994, in an incident that is well known among terrorism experts,
French authorities foiled a plot by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group
to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower."
So Rice was either clueless or lying: everybody knew that Islamist
jihadis had plotted suicide hijackings well before 9-11.
Nevertheless, the Bushies did nothing to improve airline security.
They did nothing to prepare for the possibility of hijackings,
whether suicide or traditional. They didn't even tell the airlines
what they knew. Then, after 9-11, they covered up the fact that they
had received numerous warnings.
Moron Bush or Liar Bush-would one of you please resign?
(Ted Rall's new book, a graphic travelogue about his recent coverage
of the Afghan war titled "To Afghanistan (news - web sites) and
Back," is out now. Ordering and review-copy information are available
at nbmpub.com.)
*****
http://www.gordonthomas.ie/
Bush: The Ignored Warning That Will Come To Haunt Him
By Gordon Thomas
Globe-Intel
5-24-2
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authorised the leak of sensitive
documents which reveal America's spy agencies were warned about a
terrorist strike weeks before September 11. The controversial move
has now directly embroiled President George Bush in the 'how-much-did-
he-know?' debate over the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.
Sharon's reaction is a calculated response to growing claims that
Mossad has been running spy operations within the United States and
also reveals a split in the special relationship between the two
leaders.
Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-
Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the
information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions
before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24,
less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed
by German intelligence, BND, said that "terrorists plan to hijack
commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of
American and Israeli culture." The warning alert was passed to the
CIA.
The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks
and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the
CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according
to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn
Washington "in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on
airports and government buildings." Mossad's fury at the failure of
the US intelligence community to act has been compounded by the
revelation that the Bush administration had ordered the FBI Only a
Week Before the September attacks to curtail investigations on two of
Osama Bin-Laden's close relatives living in the US state of Virginia
at the time.
Sharon's decision to allow the story of Bush's prior knowledge of the
attack to be leaked comes at a time when Israel is smarting over what
Sharon sees as Bush pressurising the Jewish state into an
accommodation with Arafat.
The feeling in Tel Aviv is that Bush's much hyped war on terrorism
does not actually fit into the aggressive policy Israel wants to
pursue.
Sharon has already suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of his
archrival, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as the central
committee of their Likud Party ruled out the establishment of a
Palestinian state last Sunday.
The party's decision, formalized in a resolution backed by Netanyahu,
directly contradicted Sharon's own stated acceptance of a Palestinian
state as the eventual conclusion of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
It came as Sharon faces mounting domestic and international pressure
to find a way to stop more than 19 months of bloodshed and launch
talks with the Palestinians.
The support he was expecting from America failed to materialise, said
a source close to Mossad. "Ariel Sharon is furious because he thinks
Bush has not supported him as fully as he could. His coalition is
falling apart, Netanyahu has sneaked ahead of him and the Israelis
are generally fed up of living in fear. Sharon is quite clear where
the blame lies - in the White House. "Now he has really stirred
things up by putting Bush right at the centre of this storm by
actively allowing these sensitive documents to be leaked to the
world. He feels he needs to teach Bush a lesson and this will
certainly complicate America's peace efforts in the region," he said.
According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad
was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the
September 11 hijackers.
The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior
Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central
Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in
the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda
organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art
students, launched massive undercover operations throughout America.
Other documents leaked to the Sunday Express from several
intelligence agencies including the Drugs Enforcement Agency show
that two Mossad cells of six Egyptian and Yemeni born Jews, trained
at a secret base in Israel's Negev Desert on how to penetrate Osama
bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
One team flew to Amsterdam and were under the control of Mossad's
Europe Station. This is based at Schipol Airport within the El Al
complex. They later made contact in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the
lead hijacker on September 11. The second group flew directly to New
York. From there they travelled South to Florida and infiltrated the
Bin laden organisation. In August last year, the Mossad team in
Europe flew with some of the Hamburg terrorists into Boston, a month
before the attack on the twin towers.
By then the Mossad team had established an attack on the US
was "imminent". It reported this to its Tel Aviv controller through
the Israeli Embassy in Washington using a system of secure
communications. In early September Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy sent a
warning to the CIA of the possibility of such an attack. The warning
was noted and acknowledged. But CIA chief George Tenet is understood
to have described it as "too non-specific." The FBI was also
informed. Halevy sent a second alert to the CIA that reached
Washington on or around September 7.
A spokesman for the FBI refused to discuss specific details of the
Mossad operation but said: "There are Congressional hearings with
regard to possible intelligence failures arising from September 11.
We can't verify your information because it is part of an ongoing
investigation."
Neither the DEA or the CIA would comment on the record, but a senior
US intelligence source said: "Anyone can be wise after the event but
it was extremely difficult to act on a non specific threat given in a
couple of tips from Israeli intelligence. It would be interesting to
know if they could have been more specific with their information.
''Their surveillance teams must have observed Atta and his
accomplices going to flying schools. I guess we might never know the
real truth."
The spying operations first came to the attention of the DEA in
January 2001 according to a classified 90-page dossier which has been
seen by the Sunday Express. The names, passport details and other
personal records of some of the Israeli-born spies are also detailed
in the dossier.
GORDON THOMAS - read more of his amazing work - Seeds of Fire: China
And The Story Behind the Attack on America - Gideon's Spies : The
Secret History of the Mossad - The Jesus Conspiracy
*****
http://www.thenation.com
� 2002 The Nation Company, L.P.
COMMENT | June 10, 2002
McKinney Redux
During the long months of post-September 11 presidential
invincibility, no member of Congress climbed further out on the what-
did-Bush-know-when limb than Representative Cynthia McKinney. "We
know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September
11," the Georgia Democrat said in March. "What did this
Administration know and when did it know it, about the events of
September 11? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent
people of New York who were needlessly murdered?"
The disclosure that President Bush was warned in August that Al Qaeda
was seeking to hijack domestic aircraft did not confirm all
McKinney's intimations--which extended to talk about how the Bush
family might have profited from the attacks. Yet she was freed to
stake a claim of vindication. "It now becomes clear why the Bush
Administration has been vigorously opposing Congressional hearings.
The Bush Administration has been engaged in a conspiracy of silence.
If committed and patriotic people had not been pushing for
disclosure, today's revelations would have been hidden by the White
House."
McKinney's initial calls for an investigation of what Bush knew
prompted a storm of criticism. "McKinney has made herself too easy a
target for mockery," Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page
editor Cynthia Tucker announced in April. "She no longer deserves
serious analysis." After Bush aides condemned McKinney's "ludicrous,
baseless views," National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg
diagnosed her as suffering from "paranoid, America-hating, crypto-
Marxist conspiratorial delusions." Barely a month after the McKinney-
bashing peaked, however, the Journal-Constitution headline
read: "Bush warned by US intelligence before 9/11 of possible bin
Laden plot to hijack planes," while Senate Intelligence Committee
vice chairman Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, said, "I
believe, and others believe, if [information on threats] had been
acted on properly, we may have had a different situation on September
11."
There were no apologies to McKinney. Brushing aside complaints from
Atlanta civil rights activists, Georgia Senator Zell Miller continued
to characterize his fellow Democrat as "loony." McKinney's critics
kept exploiting the opening she gave them with her unfounded
rumination on the prospect that something other than ineptness might
explain the Administration's failure to warn Americans about
terrorist threats. But her willingness to go after the Administration
when few Democrats dared earned her folk-hero status among dissenters
from the Bush-can-do-no-wrong mantra: The popular democrats.com
website now greets visitors with a We Believe Cynthia icon.
In Georgia, where McKinney faces a July primary challenge from a
former judge who labels her "off-the-wall and unproductive," a recent
Journal-Constitution headline read, "Revelations Give Boost to
McKinney." Letters to the editor, even from former critics, hail her
prescience. And Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis, who
once steered clear of McKinney's call for an investigation, says, "I
hate to put it in this vein, but she may have the last laugh."
JOHN NICHOLS
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