Heads-Up To Ashcroft Proves Threat Was Known Before 9/11
by Harley Sorensen
Special to SF Gate
Monday, 3 June, 2002
Don't let them fool you, folks: They knew.
They might have been surprised by the ferocity of the attacks, but
the highest-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration
knew before Sept. 11 that something terrible was going to happen soon.
Bush knew something was going to happen involving airplanes. He
just didn't know what or exactly when. His attorney general, John
Ashcroft, knew. His national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, knew.
They all knew.
And, in spite of its apparent ineptness, the FBI knew, too.
Not only did they all know, but they told us. Obliquely. And we didn't
pay attention. Why would we? Then, as now, terrorist threats were a
dime a dozen.
Is this my opinion? No, it's published fact.
On July 26, 2001, cbsnews.com reported that John Ashcroft had
stopped flying on commercial airlines.
Ashcroft used to fly commercial, just as Janet Reno did. So why,
two months before Sept. 11, did he start taking chartered government
planes?
CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart asked the Justice
Department.
Because of a "threat assessment" by the FBI, he was told. But
"neither the FBI nor the Justice Department ... would identify what the
threat was, when it was detected or who made it," CBS News reported.
The FBI did advise Ashcroft to stay off commercial aircraft. The rest
of us just had to take our chances.
The FBI obviously knew something was in the wind. Why else would
it have Ashcroft use a $1,600-plus per hour G-3 Gulfstream when he
could have flown commercial, as he always did before, for a fraction of
the cost?
Ashcroft demonstrated an amazing lack of curiosity when asked if
he knew anything about the threat. "Frankly, I don't," he told reporters.
So our nation's chief law enforcement officer was told that flying
commercial was hazardous to his health, and yet he appeared not to
care what the threat was, who made it, how, or why?
Note that it was the FBI that warned Ashcroft before Sept. 11. That's
the same FBI now claiming it didn't "connect the dots" before Sept. 11.
Had we in the press been on our toes, we might have realized that if
flying commercial posed a threat to John Ashcroft, it also posed a threat
to the population at large.
But the CBSNews.com story was largely ignored. CBS ran it once,
briefly. A number of CBS affiliates repeated the story, even more briefly.
That was it. As near as I can tell, no other major news outlet ran the
story of a danger to commercial air travel so severe that our attorney
general was told to stay away from it.
When the furor broke recently over who knew what, or when,
President Bush chose his words carefully. "Had I known that the enemy
was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning," he said, "I
would have done everything in my power to protect the American
people."
Note the phrase, "use airplanes to kill." It suggests he thought the
bad guys were going to use airplanes in some other way, perhaps, for
example, as a trading chip to win the release of those responsible for
the first World Trade Center bombing.
On Sunday talk shows recently, Condoleezza Rice used similar
language, indicating Bush had known ahead of time that terrorists were
about to attack. She didn't say that, of course, but her careful use of
language suggested that Bush knew trouble was brewing but simply
didn't know the extent of it.
On July 5, 2001, according to a recent Washington Post article, the
White House called together officials from a dozen federal agencies to
give them a warning.
"Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going
to happen soon," the officials were told by the government's top
counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke.
Clarke considered the threat sufficiently important to direct every
counterintelligence office to cancel vacations and get ready for
immediate action, the Post reported.
Several senators, including Dianne Feinstein, have called for a
full-fledged investigation into what the government knew before Sept. 11.
Incredibly, the Bush people are saying they don't want to be
bothered by yet another investigation. Asking questions and demanding
answers will help the terrorists, they say.
Even more incredibly, the public is buying it.
The public's gullibility knows no bounds. Recently, the families of the
people who died on Flight 93 on Sept. 11 were allowed -- finally! -- to
hear the final 30 minutes of the cockpit voice recorder on that flight
before it crashed in Pennsylvania.
But they weren't allowed to record it or even take notes. Why?
Because (they were told) the tape might be used in evidence against
Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker."
Is there even a dollop of logic in that explanation? It's like saying we
can't watch video of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center
because that video might be used in a trial.
Yet, the public seems to buy such specious "explanations" when
uttered by a government official.
We need a full-blown investigation of who know what before Sept.
11. We need explanations of such things as the FBI warning Ashcroft
off commercial jets, while simultaneously ignoring strident warnings
from its own agents in Minneapolis, Phoenix and Oklahoma. These
things don't add up.
And we should not let the people we'll investigate -- the Bush
administration in particular -- dictate the ground rules. Who are they to
be telling us what what questions we can ask and how we can ask
them? They work for us, not us for them.
One final note: The government has responded to the FBI's apparent
mistakes before Sept. 11 by expanding that agency's size and power.
If you think that's a good idea, and if you approve of all the
extraordinary powers the government is giving itself these days, just
remember that the next president with the power to spy on Americans,
to listen in on lawyer-client conversations, to arrest and detain without
probable cause, and so on, may be named Hillary.
Still think it's a good idea?
Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist and iconoclast. His column
appears Mondays. E-mail him at harleysorensen@yahoo.com.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes.)
truthout.org |
