Tenet Allegedly Warned Rice Of "Imminent" [...] "Spectacular Attacks Against The United States"

Source: alaskareport.com

April 30, 2007

Washington, D.C. - Former CIA Director George Tenet says he warned then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice in the summer of 2001 that "multiple, spectacular attacks" from the al Qaeda terrorist network were imminent and urged a pre-emptive strike on the terrorist network.

In an interview aired Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes," Tenet said he told Rice that the United States needed "to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan," where al Qaeda was based before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

"Essentially, the briefing says there are going to be multiple, spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are likely," he said.

But he said Rice delegated his request to subordinates. And Tenet said he never brought the issue up with President Bush, whom he briefed nearly every day on the threats facing the United States, "because the United States government doesn't work that way."

"The president is not the action officer," he said. "You bring the action to the national security advisor and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they're going to implement."

Tenet's interview comes ahead of the publication of his new book, "At the Center of the Storm," in which he defends his leadership of the top U.S. intelligence agency against criticism stemming from the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq.

United States government doesn't work that way?

How ignorant these guys are to think We are gonna buy that one. These people are just so....shameless it makes Me sick.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

I...

Would like someone to ask George Tenet, on the air, whether or not he thinks the Administration, at the very least, allowed the attacks to happen. After all, isn't that the pertinent question to ask considering he's the one bringing up prior warnings of an impending attack?

I would like to see his facial expression.


It's Not The Crime That Kills You, But The Cover-Up

Absolutley, that is the right question

Wouldn't it seem to make sense for Condoleeza (OK at least to Me it would) to ask Tenet; " Well George, how serious do you believe these threats are"? And since Tenet had warned Condoleeza, don't you suppose that Cheney had known about this as well? Unless the "way this government works" is such that Rice is the (only?) one who can tell the president these warnings. The rest of the NSA has to keep quiet, I suppose.
Like, don't say anything about....Valerie Plame.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

I was thinking...

Today that Rice is one of Bush's handlers.


It's Not The Crime That Kills You, But The Cover-Up

Is it possible that Tenet is worried....

....about the possibility of 9/11 Truth going mainstream and that there will have to be fall guys?.....and he doesn't want to be one of them....and so is doing a preemptive strike (oh, the irony) to head that off at the pass?

I've thought...

Long and hard about Georgie. To be quite honest, I don't know what to make of it.

First of all, he condones torture, so that's no good. Secondly, he sat behind Colin Powell to make his presentation before the U.N. look legitimate when he knew perfectly well it wasn't.

Georgie is no innocent bystander.

He was also aware of the presence of two of the alleged hijackers.

Now, if we find out that on 7/10/2001, Tenet and Black warned Condi about 2 people living in San Diego, and they were going to take part in a suicide mission soon that involved commercial airliners, then I would be floored.

Of course, that's just a theory. :D

Thirdly, watch someone who knows what he's talking about.

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/ExCIA_analyst_Forged_yellowcake_memo_leads...

Could this be what Ray's talking about?

http://www.yourbbsucks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9441


It's Not The Crime That Kills You, But The Cover-Up

Mueller of the FBI claimed of not knowing these warnings

This is just a snippet from Nafeez Ahmad's book;
"The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001"

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of Al-Qaeda terrorists training in U.S. flight schools, and had apparently been surveilling their activities for years, they did not attempt to apprehend them—despite the escalating warnings of an imminent attack by Osama bin Laden’s operatives. This was a consequence of a decision by the FBI command. ABC News reported that only a few weeks before the attacks in early August, the FBI office in Phoenix alerted FBI headquarters to the unusual influx of Arab students with Al-Qaeda connections training at local flight schools. This warning was ignored. It therefore appears that Mueller had attempted to mislead the public about the scope of the FBI’s knowledge.

However, his admission that such knowledge could have empowered the U.S. to avert the attacks, taken into account with the fact that the FBI did indeed possess such knowledge, brings up the pertinent question of why the FBI failed to do so, despite being perfectly capable of doing so, according to the FBI Director’s own indirect admission. In what seems to be an attempt to explain away the FBI’s rather shocking inaction, while Osama bin Laden’s terrorist lackeys were undergoing extensive training at U.S. military facilities, financed by Saudi authorities as Newsweek reports—and while innumerable credible warnings received by the U.S. intelligence community repeatedly predicted air attacks on “symbols of American culture” by bin Laden-linked terrorists, via the hijacking of civilian planes—the senior U.S. government official cited above claimed that “there was no information to indicate the flight students had been planning suicide hijacking attacks.” The Post recorded him as follows: “We were unable to marry any information from investigations or the intelligence community that talked to their use of this expertise in the events that we saw unfold on the 11th.

In this context, to interpret the FBI’s failure to act as mere incompetence, compounded by bureaucracy, strains the limits of reason. It also flies in the face of the most elementary methods of intelligence gathering. As demonstrated in the preceding documentation, there was abundant intelligence information predicting an imminent attack by Al-Qaeda operatives on U.S. soil. Moreover, this information indicated that Osama bin Laden was orchestrating the hijacking of civilian planes to be used as bombs against key U.S. buildings in Washington and New York. Reports show that this information was “taken seriously” by “the American intelligence community.” Hence, U.S. intelligence agencies were already well aware that plans to implement Project Bojinka were in progress—and had accordingly intensified surveillance in direct response.

The FBI and the CIA had known quite specifically that key targets of the plan were buildings constituting “symbols of American culture” located in Washington and New York, including the World Trade Centre. Furthermore, as a consequence of surveillance, the FBI had known for several years that suspected terrorists with ties to bin Laden were undergoing training at U.S. flight schools and secure U.S. military facilities—and in the latter case, with high-level U.S. military clearance, financed by the Saudi Arabian government. Marrying this information together, as we have done here, clearly demonstrates that the obvious course of action was to apprehend, interrogate and follow up investigations into the Al-Qaeda operatives under surveillance, particularly those training at U.S. flight schools.

Yet nothing of the sort was done. Despite being under direct surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community during 2000 and 2001—surveillance which intensified after receipt of credible warnings of an imminent Project Bojinka-style attack by Al-Qaeda—these hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, were allowed to travel freely into and out of the U.S. They were apparently granted high-level clearance to undergo military training at secure U.S. facilities with Saudi government funding as well.

The freedom with which Al-Qaeda operatives entered and left the U.S. should be understood in the context of testimony from Michael Springmann, former head of the Visa Bureau at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, between 1987 and 1989. Springmann, has had 20 years of experience in the U.S. government, and is now a practising lawyer in Washington DC. He stated on BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ that: “In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country.

In another interview with CBC’s Radio One, he stated that according to confirmation he received from U.S. government officials, the “CIA was recruiting terrorists to fight against the then Soviets.” Osama bin Laden, moreover, “was their asset, and was working with them.” There were “as many as a hundred” recruits, people “with no ties to any place in particular… Afghanistan was the end user of their facilities. They were coming to the U.S. for training as terrorists. The countries that had supplied them did not want them back.” Springmann testified that CIA officials had consistently violated State Department regulations to issue visas to these people.

“CBC: Does this demonstrate a relationship between the CIA and Osama Bin Laden dating back as far as 1987?

“SPRINGMANN: That’s right, and as you recall, they believe that this fellow Sheikh Abdurrahman who was tied to the first New York World Trade Center bombing had gotten his visa from a CIA case officer in the Sudan. And that the 15 or so people who came from Saudi Arabia to participate in the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon had gotten visas through the American consulate general in Jeddah.

“CBC: So what does that suggest, that this pipeline was never rolled up, that it’s still operating?

“SPRINGMANN: Exactly. I thought that it had been, because I’d raised sufficient hell that I thought that they’d done it. I had complained to the Embassy in Riyadh, I had complained to diplomatic security in Washington, I had complained to the General Accounting Office, I had complained to the State Department Inspector-General’s Office, I had complained to the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department and apparently the reverberations from this were heard all over the State Department.

“CBC: If what you say may be true, many of the terrorists who allegedly flew those planes into those targets, got their U.S. visas through the CIA and your U.S. consulate in Jeddah. That suggests a relationship ongoing as recently as obviously September. But what was the CIA presumably recruiting these people for as recently as September 11th?

“SPRINGMANN: That I don’t know. And that’s one of the things that I tried to find out through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests starting ten years ago. At the time the State Department and the CIA stonewalled my requests. They’re still doing so.

“CBC: If the CIA had a relationship with the people responsible for September 11th, are you suggesting therein that they are somehow complicit?

“SPRINGMANN: Yes, either through omission or through failure to act… By the attempts to cover me up and shut me down, this convinced me more and more that this was not a pipedream, this was not imagination...

“CBC: But when you take the events of 87, when visas were being issued to people unqualified for them, it suggests that happened again to the same people responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington, that’s a quantum leap. How do you justify that?

“SPRINGMANN: For all I know, for all we know, this may have not been the intended consequence, it could’ve been a mistake, it could’ve been a misjudgement. Or for all we know, it could’ve been an effort to get the U.S. directly involved in some fashion. I mean it’s only a few thousand dead and what’s this against the greater gain for the United States in the Middle East?

“CBC: But you’re quite sure that Mohamed Atta and others had their visas issued in Jeddah?

“SPRINGMANN: Well this is what I was told by reading an article in the Los Angeles Times.

Despite Springmann’s prolific warnings and complaints that had alerted the State Department to his opposition to these events, the U.S. government responded not by rolling up the pipeline, but by opening it up even further. This occurred in the face of increasing evidence of Saudi connections to terrorism. The St. Petersburg Times reports that: “After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the visa situation became murkier. FBI agents complained that their Saudi counterparts hampered investigations into terror attacks, including a 1996 bombing on Dhahran that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. The Americans also suspected that the Saudi monarchy was doing little to root out terrorism on Saudi soil and to stop anti-American threats…

“Yet, instead of tightening visa requirements, the U.S. government made it easier for Saudi visitors to come to America. Under a program called U.S. Visa Express, introduced four months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudis were allowed to arrange visas through 10 travel agencies—often without coming to the U.S. Embassy or consulate for interviews.”
So Tenet gave warnings and Mueller claimed not knowing any, but there is evidence showing how investigations by lower FBI agents were ignored or blocked from going further in these same investigations. Now since the FBI had claimed no connection between Bin Laden and 9/11, I certainly believe this claim was made to deflect scrutiny away from the FBI on the subject of these blocked investigations. At first I believed the supposed "non-connection" claim between OBL and 9/11, but now I understand it was meant to be a smokescreen.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.