-Caveat Lector-

This is what the mass media is now reporting. It went from "Bush knew" to
"who knew?" to "the FBI knew" to "the CIA knew" to "the CIA says it told the
FBI" to "the FBI says it didn't get information from the CIA" to "the FBI
can spy on anyone for any reason without a warrant" to "Congress will go
ahead with its investigation" to "oh, wow, there's sooooo much data ... this
will take a long time" ... and now there are stories that the mastermind is
a Kuwaiti, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who masterminded the attacks (see last
paragraph). Wait ... I thought Osama masterminded the attacks? What happened
to that assertion? In another wire story, it mentions nothing about Osama
masterminding the 9-11 attacks, but it added that a tape of a dinner party
"proved" that he knew about them. Remember that tape? That hasn't been
mentioned in a while. It was about the least plausible of any of the
"evidence" the US has pulled out of its ... er, hat ... to implicate Osama
as the "mastermind." Now he's not even that. Oh, but he knew!

Well, yeah, but SO DID THE FBI, THE CIA, and who knows who else?

Dubya will probably be out of office before the smoke clears. And nobody
touches an ex-president - they achieve this impervious status at that point,
oh "noble statesmen" that they are considered at that point. Not Nixon. Not
Reagan. Not a damn one of 'em.

But maybe the floodgates haven't yet been closed by a wall of obfuscation.
Maybe ...

- jt

--
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020605/ap_on_go_co/attacks_intelligence_22

Panel: More Terror Data Than Thought
Wed Jun 5, 1:41 AM ET
By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Faced with tens of thousands of documents and more coming
in every day, leaders of a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks
say they are dealing with much more information than they anticipated.

But they said they didn't want that to delay their inquiry.

"We can do this while the war on terrorism is going on because if we don't,
we think the mistakes of the past will be revisited," said Sen. Richard
Shelby (news, bio, voting record), R-Ala., a strong CIA (news - web sites)
critic and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Shelby spoke Tuesday after the House and Senate intelligence committees
began an extraordinary joint inquiry into the intelligence lapses that
preceded Sept. 11 and how future terrorist attacks can be prevented.

"I think we're going to find that a lot of things were not done right by the
CIA, the FBI (news - web sites), INS" and perhaps other agencies, Sen. Jon
Kyl (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., said. "Some of this is pretty
serious" and "it will suggest ways we need to change."

Kyl said the joint committee already has interviewed Minnesota FBI agent
Coleen Rowley, who says FBI headquarters ignored her office's pleas in the
weeks before Sept. 11 to aggressively investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, now
charged as an accomplice in the suicide hijackings that killed more than
3,000 people.

Rowley is to testify publicly on Thursday before the Senate Judiciary
Committee (news - web sites).

No witnesses appeared at Tuesday's closed-door hearing in a tightly guarded
room of the Capitol, where lawmakers agreed on a series of goals and how
they would conduct the investigation.

At a news conference afterward, leaders of the intelligence panels stressed
bipartisan cooperation and promised to look for facts, not scapegoats.

Sen. Bob Graham (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, said there were three basic goals: "One, to lay out
for the American people what happened prior to and on Sept. 11. Two, what
does it mean? And three, then advocate to the American people and our
colleagues the necessary reforms."

The House intelligence chairman, Rep. Porter Goss (news, bio, voting
record), R-Fla., said the joint committee's staff was sifting through
millions of words from documents and had interviewed about 200 witnesses.

The good news, Goss said, "is we're getting great cooperation, great access.
The bad news is there's lots more information to deal with than we thought
when we started. But we'll get through that."

Further complicating the inquiry is that staff director Eleanor Hill began
work only on Monday. Her predecessor, L. Britt Snider, was forced to resign
in April.

Loch K. Johnson, assistant to Sen. Frank Church's 1975 investigation of the
CIA, said Goss and Graham appear to be rushing the investigation.

"It takes a good month to a month and a half to get staff, a month and a
half to get questions and a list of the people you want to interview, then
trying to make sense so you can craft some recommendations," said Johnson,
author of "Bombs, Bugs, Drugs and Thugs," a book about intelligence
agencies.

The hearings follow recent news reports that the FBI and CIA failed to
respond adequately to warning signs of possible terrorist activity before
Sept. 11, including the Moussaoui arrest and information developed by the
CIA in early 2000 about two of the hijackers.

Hours before the joint committee met, President Bush (news - web sites), in
his most explicit criticism yet of FBI and CIA actions before the attacks,
said, "I think it's clear that they weren't" communicating properly." But he
also said there was no evidence that the attacks could have been averted if
agencies had worked together better.

Goss said cooperation between the agencies has improved, but problems
remain.

"I would love to be able to say that we're going to have a squabble-free
solution to this. That's a dream, of course it is," said Goss, a former CIA
agent.

Goss and Graham are alternating as chairmen of the joint committee. The
panel plans to have staff briefings on specific issues starting Wednesday,
then call witnesses in closed hearings. Open hearings are scheduled to begin
June 25.

While lawmakers examine what led up to Sept. 11, government investigators
continue to piece together information to learn how Osama bin Laden (news -
web sites)'s al-Qaida followers planned the attacks.

Investigators believe they have identified a Kuwaiti lieutenant of bin Laden
as the likely mastermind, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said
Tuesday. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of helping plan the 1993 bombing of
the World Trade Center, is at large in Afghanistan (news - web sites) or
nearby, the official told The Associated Press.

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