LIHOP (and possibly MIHOP) Finally Makes The New York Times

This story firmly supports the LIHOP theory.

But don't be alarmed, all you MIHOP theorists. It does nothing to dismiss the possibility of MIHOP. It does nothing to disprove facilitation by members of our government.

What it does prove is that the attacks of 9/11 were clearly on the radar by elements of our intelligence agencies, while the execute branch was stonewalling the issue.

Think about it. The head of the CIA tells the National Security Advisor of an IMMINENT attack - and she brushes them off?

Taken in concert with the testimony of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and the facts regarding Able Danger, we clearly have high ranking member of our military - including a 2-star general, personally intervening to protect Atta - or the persona of Atta - patsy or not - therefore adding the MIHOP element to this story.

This is a huge story - and one 9/11 activists should be making as much noise as possible about:

New York Times

October 1, 2006
9/11 Panel Members Weren’t Told of Meeting

By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

Since release of the book, “State of Denial,” the White House and Ms. Rice have disputed major elements of Mr. Woodward’s account, with Ms. Rice insisting through spokesmen that there had been no such exchange in a private meeting with Mr. Tenet and that he had expressed none of the frustration attributed to him in Mr. Woodward’s book.

“It really didn’t match Secretary Rice’s recollection of the meeting at all,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to President Bush, in an interview on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

“It kind of left us scratching our heads because we don’t believe that’s an accurate account,” he said.

Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book.

Nor has there been any comment from J. Cofer Black, Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, who is reported in the book to have attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.

He is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” Mr. Black did not return calls left at the security firm Blackwater, which he joined last year.

The book says that Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting — calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House — because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings that summer about a terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”

The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise last week. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel.

In interviews Saturday and today, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House had dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former House member from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”

Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.

He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.

Mr. Zelikow said that it was “entirely plausible” that a meeting occurred on July 10, during a period that summer in which intelligence agencies were being flooded with warnings of a terrorist attack against the United States or its allies.

But he said the commissioners and their staff had heard nothing in their private interviews with Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black to suggest that they had made such a dire presentation to Ms. Rice or that she had rebuffed them.

“If we had heard something that drew our attention to this meeting, it would have been a huge thing,” he said. “Repeatedly Tenet and Black said they could not remember what had transpired in some of those meetings.”

Democratic lawmakers have seized on Mr. Woodward’s book in arguing that the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq and paid too little attention to terrorist threats in the months before Sept. 11.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS that there had been “rumors” of such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice in the summer of 2001.

Mr. Woodward’s book, he said, raised the question of “why didn’t Condi Rice and George Tenet tell the 9/11 commission about that? They were obliged to do that and they didn’t.”

i have no idea why this blog posted 3 times

i hope the powers-that-be will delete the extra copies

Got it.

Deed is done.

there is a bug in drupal

there is a bug in drupal where if you click submit multiple times it will submit it for each time it is clicked.. it is supposed to be addressed in the next major build..

Heating up . . .

and pickin' up speed!

Clearly Eelect Year Wrangling

IT is clear that all of this 9/11 nonsense is simply election year wrangling. The republican blame the democrats. The democrats blame the republicans.

But - the good news for US is that as they ratchet up the accusations, more and more facts come out, and the closer we come to someone exposing something REALLY damning - even inadvertantly.

this is a dangerous game of polictians are playing. by opening 9/11 up to debate - and accusations - and counter accusations - they are playing with FIRE.

Another volley?

This also might be another volley in the info war between the Bush administation and the CIA, over who takes the blame.

The most prominent example so far, that first uncovered many of these revelations was Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies". While he paints himself as the noble defender of truth, and drops some heavy bombs on the Administration, his sympathy and support of the CIA is entirely evident.

When the Administration blamed 9/11 on intelligence failures, Clarke put our his response. The Administration responded by controlling both 9/11 investigations to the extent that the focus was again intelligence failures. The CIA responded with a number of document leaks that suggested Administration foreknowledge. The Administration fired back with the Armitage/Plame leak. That's when the battle really stepped into high gear.

Now we should ask ourselves why the NYT published this article. While it may serve to raise suspicion of the Administration, is may also be covering for the role of intelligence. Just a possibility. But not unfounded. Intelligence agencies have certainly seen many Administrations come and go, and have stronger ties to the media.

Beware the limited hang out.

International Truth Movement
http://www.truthmove.org

Just remember......

when Porter Goss took over the CIA (and i assume we all know who HE is) his first order of business was removing over 80 senior CIA analysts for "not being loyal to the president."

(kind of a mind-boggling admission by the white house that certain influences in the CIA may actually be concerned with 'truth' over 'loyalty')

Once again, maybe not 'truth', but their version.

Yes, Porter Goss initiated the biggest offensive in the battle I was discussing. But even after the purge the battle goes on.

I think that the purge was more about getting rid of exactly those people who were leaking docs to the press, and waging this battle, or maybe defensive, against the administration relative to intel on 9/11 and Iraq. And I don't think the response of the CIA has been to care about the truth but only to cover its ass.

Certainly a possiblity considering the recent history of these relationships.