Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Not Surprised

According to the New York Times the 9/11 Comission was not fully informed about the Pentagon's pre 9/11 intelligence.

Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks.

The former commission members said the information, if true, could rewrite an important chapter of the history of the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, 2001.

"I think this is a big deal," said John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the commission who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. "The issue is whether there was in fact surveillance before 9/11 of Atta and, if so, why weren't we told about it? Who made the decision not to brief the commission's staff or the commissioners?"

I can't say that I am very surprised at the this "revelation". I always suspected that immediately after the attack the WhitewashHouse spent most of its time trying to avoid responsibility for the failure to block or minimize the event. When you couple this information with the failure to act on the PDB, the failure to take FBI field warnings seriously, the failure of the air defense to scramble as intended and on and on you can imagine the scramble to cover their asses was going on 24x7. Any serious consideration of the all the facts available at the time indicated total incompetence on the part of the administration. The MSM deserves a lot of the "credit" for not pushing back on the spin machine that was working overtime. This latest information doesn't change my opinion that 9/11 and the success for terrorism that it represents is completely the fault of the coward Bush and his handlers. It just confirms it.

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