Another Possibility with Mukasey’s 9/11 Story
While we’re talking about Mukasey’s claim that Bush could have prevent 9/11 and didn’t, I want to raise one more possibility. Mukasey’s story, remember, is that the US had noted a phone call from an Afghan safe house to somewhere in the US–but the US couldn’t track the call because didn’t know where the phone call went.
And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went."
Glenn Greenwald (who has been flogging this issue heroically), reviews the 9/11 Commission report and concludes that such an intercept didn’t happen.
Critically, the 9/11 Commission Report — intended to be a comprehensive account of all relevant pre-9/11 activities — makes no mention whatsoever of the episode Mukasey described. What has been long publicly reported in great detail are multiple calls that were made between a global communications hub in Yemen and the U.S. — calls which the NSA did intercept without warrants (because, contrary to Mukasey’s lie, FISA does not and never did require a warrant for eavesdropping on foreign targets) but which, for some unknown reason, the NSA failed to share with the FBI and other agencies. But the critical pre-9/11 episode Mukasey described last week is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Report or anywhere else. It just does not exist. [emphasis Glenn’s]
And Glenn is not alone. Chairman Conyers says he doesn’t know anything about it.
And Philip Zelikow says he doesn’t know what Mukasey is talking about.
Not sure of course what the AG had in mind, although the most important signals intelligence leads related to our report — that related to the Hazmi-Mihdhar issues of January 2000 or to al Qaeda activities or transits connected to Iran — was not of this character. If, as he says, the USG didn’t know where the call went in the US, neither did we. So unless we had some reason to link this information to the 9/11 story ….
In general, as with several covert action issues for instance, the Commission sought (and succeeded) in publishing details about sensitive intelligence matters where the details were material to the investigative mandate in our law.
Thus far, Lee Hamilton refuses to answer Glenn’s question, and Glenn hasn’t yet gotten a response from Tom Kean. Given that evidence, then, the most likely possibility is that Mukasey’s talking outtahisarse.
But I’d like to suggest another possibility. As Philip Shenon’s book makes clear, one of the most serious problems with the scope of the 9/11 Commission’s inquiry is that it did not review the NSA’s files on Al Qaeda until just before the release of the report. Shenon describes how Colonel Lorry Fenner, an Air Force officer who had worked with the NSA, realized early on that the Commission needed to review the NSA’s files., and grew increasingly disturbed when she realized no one was working on the NSA’s files.
Lorry Fenner was dumfounded by what she was hearing. No one from the commission–no one–would drive the twenty-seven miles from downtown Washington north to the headquarters of the NSA, in Fort Meade, Maryland, to review its vast archives of material on al-Qaeda and terrorist threats.
[snip]
Philip Zelikow had made it clear that he was fixated on George Tenet and the CIA’s performance before 9/11, and his obsessions drove the workings of the rest of the staff.
[snip]
It was all the more frustrating to Fenner given the obvious willingness of the NSA, unlike so many other parts of the government, to cooperate with the 9/11 commission. The NSA’s director, General Michael Hayden, had thrown open its archives on al-Qaeda; Zelikow and others were impressed by his eagerness to help. But perversely, the more eager General Hayden was to cooperate, the less interested Zelikow and others at the commission seemed to be in what was buried in the NSA files.
Fenner started to investigate the files herself–secretly. When she discovered records of early cooperation between Iran, Hezballah, and Al Qaeda, she grew alarmed that the Commission was missing important details. Fenner got other of the staffers to read the files. Until finally, in June 2004, after significant portions of the Commission report had already been drafted, Fenner and the other staffers revealed what they had found to Zelikow. He immediately arranged a trip to the NSA for several staffers to go through the records, in one long day.
To his credit, Zelikow immediately understood the implications of what Fenner had discovered: A huge archive of the intelligence community on al-Qaeda and terrorist threats had not been adequately reviewed. And he understood there was almost not time left to do it.
The staffers were able to get some mention of the connections between Iran and Al Qaeda into the report. Shenon’s narrative continues, citing from the final report.
"We believe this topic requires future investigation by the U.S. government." What was left unsaid in the report, although the staff knew it perfectly well, was that the NSA archives almost certainly contained other vital information about al-Qaeda and its history. But there was no time left to search for it. [my emphasis]
In other words, on the matter of what the NSA intercepted before 9/11, on that matter above all, the 9/11 Commission report is not complete. The Commission (in spite of the laudable efforts by Fenner) did not adequately review all the NSA archives relating to Al Qaeda. Particularly since the Report calls explicitly for more investigation (at least of the ties between Iran and Al Qaeda), it is perfectly plausible that someone has subsequently reviewed those files and found something new, something not included in the Commission Report.
Which would make the collection of responses that Glenn has elicited thus far all the more fascinating. As Glenn notes, Zelikow does not deny knowledge of such an intercept–and he certainly doesn’t deny the possibility that such an intercept exists. Zelikow simply says that the Commission published "details about sensitive intelligence matters where the details were material to the investigative mandate in our law." [my emphasis] Suggesting that if something fell outside the Commission’s investigative mandate, they didn’t get it, and therefore didn’t publish it.
And then there’s Hamilton’s response. Even before the 9/11 Commission, Hamilton was famous for his service as a spineless Democrat who, on bipartisan committees, routinely gets rolled by Republicans trying to cover something up (see, for example, how his friend Dick Cheney rolled him when they co-chaired the House investigation into Iran-Contra). As Shenon’s book shows, Hamilton continued that tradition of cowing to bipartisanship on the Commission. When Glenn called for comment, Hamilton refused to respond, ever, because he had not read Mukasey’s speech.
When asked if he would comment today or whenever he had time, he said he was not going to comment on this ever, since he had not read Mukasey’s speech. [my emphasis]
Which leaves Kean, from whom Glenn is still waiting a response (after Kean asked him to email his question, suggesting Kean was unwilling to respond except in writing). So, to review:
- Mukasey claims he knows about this intercept
- Zelikow issued a non-denial denial
- Hamilton refused to respond
- Kean may or may not respond
- Conyers has never heard of this intercept
These responses could mean any of several things–that Zelikow purposely directed the 9/11 Commission away from damning intercepts; that Zelikow’s focus away from NSA was perfectly innocent, but that after the report came out, someone did do a review of those files and found an incredibly damning intercept … but didn’t tell anyone aside from the Commission leaders and, apparently Michael Mukasey. Hell, perhaps discussion of this secret intercept is one of the things that Jello Jay got briefed on, when he was briefed on FISA with just the Republicans after the illegal program was exposed. These responses could mean any of a variety of things.
But the inattention of the 9/11 Commission to NSA intercepts and Mukasey’s claims about an intercept that has never before been revealed leaves open a possibility besides the one Glenn deals with–that it never happened. Indeed, it leaves open the distinct possibility that the Bush Administration–either before or after the 9/11 Commission–discovered the smoking gun intercept that, if they had noticed it, could have prevented 9/11. And that they found this intercept, but never told Democrats or the American people about it.
But even if you are correct, EW, it doesn’t alter the fact that Mukasey deliberately indicated that it was FISA that prevented the intercept and, thereby enabled 9/11.
Yes. Maybe. I’ve got to eat dinner, then I want to find something I seem to remember…
Hi EmptyWheel, I have been researching this issue for years. I can tell you that the two hijackers involved were Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi (both on American 77, which hit the Pentagon), there was not just one call, but several (and they were intercepted by the NSA, which drafted dispatches to the US intelligence community about some of them), that the safe house was not in Afghanistan, but Sana’a, Yemen (Tel: 967 1 200 578), and it was run by a guy named Ahmed al-Hada, Almihdhar’s father-in-law. It was also not just a safe house, it was al-Qaeda’s main global communications hub and Osama himself placed dozens of calls to it. In addition, it was involved in the embassy bombings and the attack on the Cole, as was Almihdhar. And this was all known before 9/11.
We made a detailed timeline, which you can find here:
http://www.cooperativeresearch….._yemen_hub
That’s a lot of reading, so you can find a summary here:
http://www.iraqtimeline.com/blog/?p=41
Sorry for putting this response here (when it really belongs somewhere slightly different), but I’m new to this site and was having problems accessing some parts (problems just a problem with my computer or something).
Glenn seems to rigorously question whether Mukasey understands FISA at all because FISA specifically allows said intercepts:
Here’s my own outtamyarse guess of what’s going on (all speculative):
There was an intercept that was, in fact, the smoking gun. But it didn’t get translated, because, of course, there were approximately .4 Arabic translators leading up to 9/11.
And, I suspect, the illegal program includes something beyond content wiretapping for those who are associated with targets. In other words, if a safe house person calls San Diego, then that San Diego number is AUTOMATICALLY added to the tap list. And voila! You’ve got some English conversations whereas before you had only Arabic conversations. So Mukasey, further, may be right that new FISA would allow us to do what old FISA didn’t–it would allow us to start tapping those who suspected terrorists call without, first, seeing whether the recipient of those calls is also a terrorist. This is utterly consistent with everything we know about the program.
If I’m right, it would suggest several things.
1) There is a smoking gun that, if Bush had only had enough translators, they would have found. They could have prevented 9/11.
2) Only Republicans (and, I suspect, Jello Jay and Lee Hamilton, and maybe one or two more people) know this. Can’t tell Democrats that Bush missed the big smoking gun, can you?
3) A big part of new FISA (and the illegal program) is designed to get around the fact that we don’t have enough translators, and that Bush didn’t make it a priority (note, after Richard Clarke got so worried about the Millenium plot, they did intercept useful information, which says that they COULD have raised the concern level and get stuff translated).
4) This is why they were so opposed to Feingold’s reverse wiretapping amendment–because it would have prevented the heart of what new FISA is supposed to do–allow us to wiretap people in the US without a warrant, simply because someone of concern in Afghanistan called us.
And could this also be why Mukasey is so adamantly opposed to the legislation regulating the use of the States Secret privilege?
That same legislation that would allow Judge Walker to review the Administration’s evidence purporting States Secret would be revealed but might instead reveal that the Administration and General Mikey Hayden’s good ol’ NSA had the info necessary to prevent 9/11 but were asleep at the wheel (a position that Junya knows only too well)?
When asked if he would comment today or whenever he had time, he said he was not going to comment on this ever, since he had not read Mukasey’s speech.
I must say, that sentence really stood out for me when I read Glenn’s article. Ever, Mr. Hamilton? Then perhaps he is also not interested in reading or knowing what Mukasey said about an intercept? I’d have expected at least passing curiosity.
I had the same reaction. Leahy is pretending it has nothing to do with him. He’s saying he’ll never read Mukasey’s speech and even if he does, he’ll never answer a reporter’s question about how it conflicts with a major report issued by a commission he co-chaired. Seems about as mealy-mouthed as Rockefeller’s support for Cheney’s Protect Our Telecom’s Amnesty legislation.
Zelikow takes a more Rovian tack: issues a statement appropriate on its face, but which is irrelevant to the question asked, while suggesting the question’s premises are wrong. A tactic central to legions of lawyer jokes, and an accurate description of Tony Snow’s daily work.
Passing curiosity is not what people hire Lee Hamilton to have.
Umm, kind of like cows. Capable of being perfectly smart creatures, no doubt, but what would be the point?
That would be reasonable of Zelikow were the NSA’s files not relevant. Your comment suggests quite the opposite, which makes Zelikow’s response accurate, but deceptive. Which is how he comes across in recent narratives that question how fully his relationship with Rice, which conflicted with the Commission’s investigation of her pre-9/11 role, were revealed before and during the Commission’s work.
If the Commission negligently ignored a treasure trove of data at the NSA, it suggests a Machiavellian aspect to Mukasey’s revelation of the purported
Afghan safe house phone call. Apart from his false claim that FISA would not have prevented tapping it.
Mukasey gets a fact out into the open that ought to demonstrate how the government under Bush (and his predecessors) was unable to coordinate vital data. Instead, he uses it to punish those who would protect civil rights and hold accountable those who illegally abuse them. Which suggests an important avenue to pursue is how this “reveal” got into Mukasey’s speech in the first place.
It’s also possible that Zelikow found out, after the fact, that 9/11 Commission did miss this, and he’s just saying it to CYA for the moment when it comes out that 9/11 Commission missed it.
I’m coming in late and perhaps this is covered down-thread, but Philip Shennon’s book makes it pretty clear that when pitching himself for the Commission CoS job, Zelikow was not at all forthcoming about his prior relationship with Rice, nor about his role during the transition in downgrading the role of Richard Clarke’s NSC al Qaeda task force in the incoming administration. IIRC Clarke’s response upon hearing that Zelikow was named CoS was “The fix is in!”
The 800 pound gorilla here is that they saw the intercept, knew what it meant, and read about goats and sheep instead of stop it. All in the name of the Unitary Executive.
If “they” saw the intercept in time, translated and dealt with it in time, and whomever they sent it to could coordinate it with other data in time. This is a replay of the several Pearl Harbor investigations, and would have been regarded as that by everybody involved.
I am not convinced that 9/11 was preventable. I am convinced that this administration has hidden relevant facts about its contribution to it happening. They don’t do nuance. Any contribution on their part would have blunted their carefully pared and focused message: “We was wronged and if we’re men, we’ll hit back. That means a fightin’ war, not eatin’ keesh or jist talkin’ to ‘em.”
Wait a minute! Many people, including (especially Keith Olbermann) have been raking McCain over the coals for the “gaff” linking Iran and Al Qaeda. (You know, the one that required intervention by Lieberman.) But now you tell me that the NSA had documented links between Iran and Al Qaeda in 2000. What’s up with that? What happened to the Sunnis hate Shi’ites meme?
The NSA information is 8-20 years old. The Iranians are fundamentally pragmatic power players. They even made deals with us when it suited them (Iran-Contra, remember that?). Right now, the Iranians have good reason to be pissed at al Qaeda.
Yes, yes. But that doesn’t change the “fact” that saying that McCain’s an idiot because “all Sunnis hate all Shi’ites, therefore Al Qaeda can’t be trained by Iran” is simplistic to the point of being BS.
McCain is idiotic to suggest that Iran currently is funding Al Qaeda in Iraq because right now in Iraq Sunni extremists and Shiite extremists are very much on different sides of the fence. And once again, WE are giving AQI more support (by supporting “the Awakening” without fully vetting whether or how Sunni tribes have given up their ties to AQ) than Iran is.
Yes. Iran has been a longtime supporter of Iraqi Shia’s, who were a frustrated majority, out of power during Sadam’s Sunni regime.
It’s also Iran’s neighborhood, meaning that informal as well as formal ties across their common borders are pervasive and in many ways uncontrollable by a central government. The US publicizes isolated examples of that interaction as if unusual and proof of Iranian government-controlled aggression. It must feel secure in the belief that all Americans and our country’s allies are as informed as Bush and McBush.
IIRC, according to Shennon in The Commission, a number of the Saudi muscle hijackers passed through Iran while en route to the USA prior to 9/11. Thus there was at least that much of a connection that recently.
Basic tradecraft and/or personal reasons would suggest a couple of things that might explain transit through Iran, other than because they received support there. Travel through poorly secured airports where you could mingle with the crowd and “wash” your identity and the appearance of purposely traveling from “home” to “work”. Especially if the airport were in a country not cooperating with US or Interpol. The attackers were largely Sunni Arabs. Why leave a trail through a Sunni Arab country when you can appear to have come from or through a Persian Shia one?
The list actually seems pretty long. It’s all an educated guess, at least it would be for an Arabic-speaking terrorism expert. How many of those do we have now, much less in 2001.
McCain is conflating Iran/Iraq, Sunni/Shia, and Shia/Shia conflicts into gobbledygook, a conjoined enemy whose parts vary depending only on who he needs to praise or attack at the moment.
Iran may have had connections with various terrorist organizations, but not necessarily in support of specific attacks against the US or US interests. They were more likely interested in enhancing their regional influence, which Mr. Bush’s war has expanded exponentially.
OK. But what started all the recent crap was McCain saying that Al Qaeda (in Iraq) was crossing into Iran to get training and then coming back to Iraq. KO made fun of him purely on the grounds that Iran hates Al Qaeda (due to the factional difference) and would never do this. I must admit that I bought this simplistic criticism since I, too, thought Iran would never (past or present) cooperate with Al Qaeda. It was a shock to learn that they have cooperated in the past and that such is documented (as opposed to invented on the fly to support some new war).
McCain is a freaking idiot. He is seriously not very bright. He has a long history of spewing a bunch of mixed up nonsensical crap when on his own devices and then sorting it out later after aides have told him what he meant. This has been going on forever.
The coordination between Iran and Al Qaeda does exist. Most interstingly, some early Muj, in the period when they were becoming AQ, got bombing lessons from Hezbollah. But the stuff close to 9/11 was simply that Iran had allowed several of the hijackers to transit Iran to get to Afghanistan. Shenon’s book describes the staffers wavering about putting it in, because they didn’t want BushCo to take it as a big casus belli, which it shouldn’t be.
It is true that Al Qaeda and Iran had closer relations than Al Qaeda and Iraq–but that’s not saying much. By far the most interesting connection, though, is that someone whose training camps Iran supports gave AQ training in bombing. It’s not all that different, if you think abotu it, from Muj who would later go onto be affiliated iwth AQ getting weapons training from the CIA-sponsored camps in pre-Soviet withdrawal Afghanistan.
Wasn’t a good deal of the “cooperation” also not really with al-Qaida proper (the 9/11 guys), but with the early incarnations of Zarqawi’s group (well before it morphed into “al-Qaida in Iraq”) which had camps near the Iranian border or something?
No–the 9/11 Commission (as distinct from the claims in the Iraq NIE) were about the hijackers proper–at least the claim that they made through passage to Afghanistan.
I was just talking about generally as to “al-Qaida”, (or whatever McCain now refers to as al-Qaida) and historically, not necessarily as to the 9/11 hijackers. SI still may be wrong and misremembering that, but I think I was being much more broad than you seem to be.
Oh crap. WAS it another Pearl Harbor, an attack that was consciously allowed to happen??
There’s also this passage in the McConnell Mukasey letter to Reid (telling him what they were going to recommend Bush veto).
This sounds like the old Mihdar stuff, so it could be Mukasey’s just confusing stuff in his brain.
I think there’s a reference that’s exactly on point elsewhere–still looking for it.
jesus, e’wheel,
you’ve used your “magic powers of reason” to suggest a plausible explanation for what almost certainly was the case:
malignant neglect by the bush administration, especially the national security council (of which zelikow was, i believe, a member in 2001),
was responsible for the success of the sept 11 suicide bombing of the world trade center –
remember richard clarke’s comment in the 9/11 commission hearings that the sept 11 attack could have been prevented if the president or the national security adviser had understood the need to “shake the [bureaucratic] trees”? –
would zelikow, when serving as the executive director of the 9/11 commission, actually try to stiff his commission’s into not looking into his and his boss’s negligence?
well, of course he wouldn’t.
alas, despite zelikow’s best efforts at the time,
this pandora’s box of doubt about what the 9/11 commission was not told has been opened,
and,
“questions occur”.
in time i believe we will learn that, not only was the attack on the world trade center with airplanes-as-bombs preventable,
but the possibility of its prevention was deliberately quashed by the bush white house as a means of providing it with the political clout to undertake radical government action,
in both foreign and domestic policy.
the bush/cheney administration was an american administration in search of a justification to create an authoritarian government in the u.s.
the attack of sept 11, 2001 provided precisely the justification they were seeking.
Man, I dunno. Maybe, but I have always had a hard time in making the jump from the obvious gross incompetence to willful desire. Call me crazy, but I just can’t believe that even these jackals are that demented.
According to Shennon IIRC, Zelikow was the key transition figure dealing with the NSC and assumed he’d get some kind of senior national security position, but to his great regret didn’t. As I noted above in comment # 30, he conveniently forgot to make Kean and Hamilton aware of his transition role when interviewing for the CoS job. He also “forgot” to mention that he’d co-written a book with Condi.
In short, yes. According to Shennon came into the investigation determined to pin the tail of blame on the CIA donkey, and actively discouraged the pulling on threads that did not support his preferred narrative. He also actively worked to minimize cross-fertilization between the various staff teams, thus making it difficult for them to connect dots, and aggressively minimized the rest of the staff’s access to the commissioners. There was a lot of conflict over Zelikow’s edits of various staff members’ work when the latter felt he was distorting the conntent of their drafts.
I don’t know about the LIHOP ‘let it happen on purpose’ theories or the MIHOP (’make it happen on purpose’) theories, but what do you think about the possibility that some of the hijackers were in fact Americans? or at least potential green card holders? Would this change the ‘war footing’ that the Bush Administration has straddled for so long?
Actually Terry McDermott suggests as much (it is not his intention, I am sure) by invoking a cousin to the “nondenial denial”–his “non-debunking debunking” of Atta in America before 2000:
Terry McDermott author of Perfect Soldiers wrote in the LA Time Op ed in August 2005
[My bolding]
The problem with McDermott’s debunking: he has two women telling him they married Atta. I think even one person saying such after 9/11 would be shocking. Do any of your recall woman saying post-9/11 that they married Atta? None did around my area. Then again, maybe it was because I was working within a few subway stops of Boston’s Logan Airport on 9/11/2001.
If I were McDermott, my first thought would be to ask the women to prove it to me–the timelines be damned. Do you women have photos? marriage licenses? premarital blood test results? (this last category was once a requirement in Massachusetts in order to apply for a marriage license. This 100+ year old public health law was quietly removed from the books some time after 9/11 during Romney’s tenure as governor).
McDermott could have proved the government’s timeline of Atta/el-Amir’s presence in the US was wrong with these women’s documents. Or he could have proved these women were mistaken and communicated as much had he written one more sentence: “I checked out their stories and they are lacking proof.” He does not write this, however. Instead McDermott allows us to think they are crazy. Acutually let’s quote him again:
“I don’t think they are all lying. Maybe none of them are.”
What is this?!! Maybe McDermott knows they are telling the truth and he does not want the truth out? McDermott line above blurs the issue of whether he did any fact checking of the women’s story, or any of the other supposed eye witnesses. His ‘Nothing to see here. Move along’ approach makes me suspicious. It seems antithetical to good reporting. In any case it does not debunk the supposed eye witnesses. Someone should look into it.
If some or all the 9/11 suicide pilots were carrying valid US green cards or American passports, (and McDermott has certainly not even lifted a finger to discover whether this could be the case), doesn’t this scenario change 9/11 to a domestic terrorism event with no special Wartime powers for the president?
(BTW, have the airlines released the actual flight manifests yet? Do we have the actual names the terrorists used to board those planes on 9/11?)
A debate that got the hit-and-run treatment from Bush was whether the correct response to 9/11 (besides the attack in Afghanistan, which the world considered an appropriate, proportionate response) was enhanced “police” powers and intense detective work – the UK model – or all out war, with the wrong country no less, because “bombin’ them caves ain’t enough for the tee vee people”.
The idea that a response needed to be “proportionate” in order to be domestically and internationally acceptable – as well as legal – got sideswiped via the WMD issue. It was the “imminent” threat of the Condi-ballyhooed “mushroom cloud” that blew proportionality out of the water.
We need to have that spiked debate. We cannot and ought not continue the current war, much less start new ones.
Agreed.
No doubt, the mushroom cloud was just a shiny object to distract everyone. According to PNAC/Federalist members, the War President’s powers grow during a war, so a law enforcement response to terrorism is a waste of an opportunity to produce a Unitary Executive.
Just wondering how far along this crazy path of degraded Constitutional protections we would be had a domestic American terrorist– like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh– been the ringleader of 9/11. If the terrorists were inconveniently American, could PNAC/Federalists maintain their War President sham?
I think McDermott owes the public an update. Better yet, let someone else borrow his notes and investigate.
Wouldn’t it be great if they’d DADT’d the translators because they were gay?
They didn’t start their real campaign against teh gays who apparently were the only ones who spoke Arabic until after 9/11, when they knew how dire it was–though it is still a distinct possibility. Eventually we’re headed there anyway, where they fire the guy with his finger in the dike because he’s gay. (Sorry about the homophonic imagery there, just came out that way.)
(She typed between bites of a hamburger.)
OT, and certainly made to give one unusual nocturnal…ahmmm…dreams, from the GQ Blog on men.style.com, I give you:
“Girls” seem to be Turdblossom’s undoing:
My heart bleeds. Not.
He should have been a lot more intimidated by Babs. Like back under his rock.
Just to boost those nocturnal dreams a bit, let’s not forget the story by the proud owner of Karl Rove’s father’s solid gold cock ring!
With the price of gold rising, Turdblossom is hoping for a marvelous inheritance.
That is over the top! Or rather, under the bottom!
The hypotheticals in the thread seem to add considerable plausibility that what Conyer’s letter asks Mukasey concerns more than a rhetorical rovianStyle device at the CommonwealthClub speech, though I have yet to see a transcript; so, maybe Mukasey’s ruffled moment was a blend of reactions, partly realizing the defiance of the acerbic undertone of the remark was going to awaken further opposition research. The Chron’s Egelko is an astute writer, and a good listener, like several writers in the thread; but BE reported only fragments of the address, I believe; Conyers letter’s depiction of the comments seems aligned with this, and footnotes to Egelko’s article that day. Having seen much of Hamilton in the late IranContra proceedings video, I have kept some measure of respect for his otherwise maligned Specterish wont to compromise. If I recall a thread inTNH, even the work of Benveniste and Gorelick on the commission revealed to the historians the vast measure of neutralizing that blueribbon 911entity demonstrated, though a clip of audio by both of the latter impressed me as the public phase of the hearings tapered. The 911commission had numerous disputes about what the public would see; and in that respect I appreciate the most recent reminders from MadDOg about the MukaseyMcConnell letter which recently repeated that same chorus we were hearing those many years ago about StateSecrets; it is welcome BLeonard is offering encouragement to congress to sort thru this, and NPelosi has posted the Conyers letter. I take the 0.4 FTE Arabic translators as a prorated estimate; I thought it was the hearing at Hayden’s hire which contained his mention of a larger number but less than fifty, so for the times perhaps inadequate, unless one’s ‘hairWereOnFire’, agreeing with the thrust of the <1 characterization.
Here’s Conyer’s letter.
LooHoo,I will look at your link; my rambling remarks were based on reading all those letters. The speech transcript is still an unfound item in my work; plus, a few things from the 911 commish, which are on a mothballed computer around here. I am glad you put the link there again, and will compare it for concordance with the AdobeAcrobat file I downloaded from Conyers’ site today; I took it from his place instead of the simple versions on the Gavel. Regards,JL
LH, The reason I looked at the Acrobat version on the Conyers site was its footnote 2 about the Egelko article; I was hoping Conyers had a link to the actual speech transcript; but I suspect the CommonwealthC has proprietary rights to that material like conference sponsors retain over presenters remarks.
I looked high and low last Friday when I wrote the initial post on the speech, could find nothing more than the brief news clip I attached to the post. Maybe there is something out there since..
More discrepancies on authority for Yoo’s issuance of torture memo. From the Esquire Q & A:
However, from today’s WaPo article by Eggen and White:
So, back to my nitpicking questions on the authority of Yoo to issue the torture tome; if neither Ashcroft nor Thompson “were aware of the 81-page memo when it was written and sent to the Pentagon”, is Yoo really authorized to issue it for the OLC? Is it even really an OLC opinion if not? Now, the truth is, we don’t know enough, nor enough established, facts to reach accurate conclusions, but they really are germane and critical questions.
Yes. And who stamped Yoo’s opinion secret? Was it done before or after the the document’s as yet unknown vetting?
So is Ashcroft lying or suffering from a convenient memory? My guess is neither; Addington/Cheney already considered him unreliable well before the March ‘04 “rebellion”. Did he temporarily grant Yoo authority, formally or “informally” (and would that be effective?) as acting AAG, and hence give him authority? Or did Bybee delegate the authority to Yoo before he left and before his replacement came on board, and then run out the door to that seat on the federal bench, a reliable vote for Unitary Man ™, safe from all but impeachment?
Or is Yoo lying through his babyish smile and did he never have the requisite authority, safe behind the adoption of his views by Cheney, who ultimately obtained the elected president’s adoption of them, too? The DOJ and White House have repeatedly said they “reject” these views. Are they being jesuitical, as is their wont, and still using similar policies, but from a different “perspective/view”?
It’s questions like that, apart from exercising normal oversight responsibilities, that would justify Congress’ demand to see all the legal memoranda that the administration claims provide the foundation for its policies. Always remembering that it disrespects the law whenever it’s not needed for CYA or to punish their enemies, meaning they may well have a policy unsupported by any “law” as we understand it.
The way he said “The AG approved it” was a red flag to me. Not “he reviewed it,” but “he approved it.” Add in Ashcroft’s version of how he approved the illegal wiretap program, and it’s possible they either considered his “delegation” of power to Yoo “approval” or they just shoved something under his face, made him sign it, and then hid it.
Yes. A lot can be hidden in that simple, past tense, “approved”. When did Ashcroft approve it, how and how knowingly? As you imply, calling Ashcroft an absentee landlord would be generous.
One would think that major work would be reviewed and signed off on before it goes to the client, especially when one is giving advise on a novel, controversial subject – notwithstanding claims of it being so “ordinary” that the advice was “boilerplate”. Any law firm that routinely issued formal opinions without a review committee’s go ahead would fairly quickly exhaust its malpractice insurance. Yoo implies that happened, but only by conflating separate phrases: his references to “normal processes” don’t seem to include Ashcroft’s approval.
Law enforcement by “trust me, boss, we wrote it right and nobody here would think of abusing the law; that’s not what we do.” The experiences of minorities like Ernesto Miranda and Abner Louima don’t bear that out; quite the opposite. Since they’re people, there’s always some cop (or other professional), willing to take a short cut, who cuts off a broom handle in order to probe a little more deeply into a suspect’s veracity.
I think it’s pretty clear that Mukasey was sort of speaking abstractly that they missed some intelligence and is trying to make his case based on that. What’s great about it is that, by trying to put it into concrete terms, it just exposes all the holes in argument that FISA wasn’t working before.
As for the whole pre-9/11 stuff, I’m more bothered by Bush’s response to the attacks than by the fact that his missed the signs beforehand. Remember Bush was MIA on the day of the attacks. The terrorists were all being tracked by the FBI and the CIA, but they failed to communicate with each other. What did Bush do to address this? He created a whole other department outside of both agencies. Then he created the DHS, the biggest, stupidest bureaucracy in the history of the world – and then put Chertoff in charge, just to make sure it would suck. When Richard Clarke tried to address the problems leading up to the attacks, he was smeared all over. And then, of course, all the other stuff, like Guantanamo, and Iraq, etc.?
Here’s a link I just found, supposedly to the audio of Mukasey’s Commonwealth Club speech on March 27. I haven’t listened to it yet.
http://www.commonwealthclub.or…..audio.html
Thanks, that’s it. FISA talk starts at 40 minutes and the key passage starts at 50 minutes. They move on to a new topic after a long pause immediately after the 3000 people not coming home that day and a radio ID from the moderator.
Which makes the need to gag the telcoms (and force them into silence with retroactive immunity) all the more transparent. We actually need to SAVE the telcoms for retroactive immunity, so they will be free to tell the American people what actually happened. That sounds os weird.
I truly do not understand how giving immunity to the phone companies is a persuasive argument. Who gives a shit about these companies? I thought everybody hated phone companies. (Every one but Senators, apparently).
“Immunity for telecoms!” is generally regarded as code, as an indirect way to give immunity in fact to the serial lawbreaking of senior White House officials. Giving telecoms immunity (without requiring full cooperation and disclosure) would allow them to keep secret the details about their illegal domestic spying, which would keep hidden the evidence needed to prosecute those officials.
EW,
You continue to amaze. I think you hit this one on the head. I can easily imagine Hayden opening the doors wide to hide the inconvenient. I speculate that if it (the smoking intercept) had been discovered and revealed by the commission it would justify a bigger future budget and condemnation of the machine left behind by Clinton. I can almmost hear Hayden claiming that this is why we need the data mining programs. “Is the fourth amendment worth thousands of lives saved?” he might say.
Mukasey was fairly well treated by the regulars at this blog when he was first being vetted. Was this a convenient oops to lead to more questions?
Well, that would NOT be by all the regulars at this blog, thank you very much.
Ditto. I think those who agreed with Scott Horton, that Mukasey could well be a shining light in the darkness of the Bush administration, were a minority. Primarily, that’s because they believed that any replacement Coach Cheney brought onto the field would be drawn from the same bench as Gonzales, Addington, Yoo and Haynes.
Mr. Horton has publicly acknowledged that his hopes were misplaced and that he was wrong. Mukasey is unlike Gonzales only in that he’s competent: he’s Tom Hagen, not brother ‘Fredo.
EW, great post, great thread.
O/T
Just to let all know that Ohio is working to correct election issues and “watch” the politics at play…the following headline should encourage all:
http://www.dispatchpolitics.co…..38;sid=101
Enjoy!
How can that be? Presumably there are billing records, etc. Also, presumably all calls out of an Al Qaeda safehouse would be recorded, including their dial tones. Something’s crazy with this.
Mr. Conyers has apparently asked Mr. Mukasey that same question. Here’s hoping he won’t take fuggedaboutit for an answer.
bmaz and others (#28 and ff):
it does seem incredible, doesn’t it, that an american president would deliberately look the other way about the possibility of terrorists strikes in the u.s. in order to acquire a provocation to use for political purposes.
i argue this from time to time, in part just because no one else will likes to make the argument. and the possibility needs to be THOROUGHLY discussed, as it will be in historical time.
but i also make this argument because i really do not see how anyone could fail to reach the same conclusion.
in any event,
there really are two hypotheses about the president’s failure to stop the sept 11 attack on the world trade center:
– a weak hypothesis (easier to prove) involving what bmaz calls “gross negligence”
and a strong hypothesis “willful ignorance” or “willful neglect” (both harder to prove and, a high barrier here, harder to convince people to believe, even if true).
events prove the weak hypothesis almost prima facie – the attack did occur with the fbi and cia in possession of detailed information that would have made it easy to unravel and prevent the attack.
prior to the attack national security adviser condeleeza rice heard repeatedly from her counterterrorisim expert, richard clarke, and from the director of the cia, george tenet, that a terrorist attack was imminent.
with respect to the strong hypothesis, i have no direct proof that bush and his administration deliberately avoided putting government security forces on high alert and they avoided doing so in order to incur an attack that they knew could be exploited for political purposes –
but a few relevant facts and a knowledge of human nature suffice with me to suggest the high probability that the president and his administration did, in fact, sit back and wait for some terrorist attack.
as an aside for clarification, i am NOT arguing the bush admin knew about the sept 11 conspiracy;
i am arguing that the bush admin was committed to looking the other way until the nation had incurred an attack on american soil that they could use as political fuel.
with respect to that strong hypothesis:
– bush was briefed in august, 2001 by the cia about the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack. he chose not to act; he chose not even to credit his informer with useful info (”now that you’ve covered your ass..”).
if you lined up 1,000 americans and provided them with this info, how many do you think would fail to act upon it? none or almost none i would say. how is it that an american PRESIDENT could fail to act on this info?
disinterested? foolish? ignorant? cautious? skeptical?distracted? etc, etc? maybe. and to be sure, any of these could have explained the prez’s failure to act.
but wouldn’t willful ignorance for political gain also explain that failure?
bush and his national security adviser, c. rice, were personally close. is it really credible that the two would not have discussed in some depth and with some frequency the warnings rice was receiving from clarke and tenet?
here some historical info might be useful.
hasn’t it been bruited about among historians, and, of course, conspiricists, that FDRs allowed the attack on pearl harbor to occur in order to provoke american reaction to japan and germany ? did he,in fact? i don’t recall how that question was answered.
though it’s not directly persuasive in this argument, didn’t lyndon johnson use the tonkin gulf “attack” as a pretext for increasing american presence in vietnam?
finally, there is the nature/personality of president bush himself. george bush strikes me as an extremely willful person and a very ruthless politician. bush strikes me, and cheney even more so, as precisely the sort of leader who would look the other way hoping a provocation would occur that he could exploit.
and, for whatever reason, in sept 2001, an attack did occur on american soil which attack bush was able to exploit for the remaining seven years of his presidency – and even beyond to the next election.
as bush was fond of saying to republican gatherings after sept 11: for him, as president, the terrorist attack on the world trade center was like “winning the trifecta”.
maybe i should just add “lucky” to the list of adjectives above and let it go at that.
When you are raised in a family that made it’s original fortunes on war efforts from WWII and from oil, there is a “beneficial” view of defense contracting and a need for “the machine” that drives it. The view that it builds and drives an economic growth for the few…
His response is “nurture” based.
I was going to congratulate you on your family fortunes. Then I realized you were describing a family far less admirable, and far less rich in what counts, than your own.
You made my day!
That fortune, a big chunk of which was originally Ohio-based (like John D. Rockefeller) machinery, steel and oil, dates back to at least the 1850’s. A big chunk also comes from Wall Street investment banking and, as you say, from guns and military sales.
The blue-blooded Connecticut and Ohio Bushes have been sharing private rail cars with the reclusive Rockefeller and sending their scions to Yale since before the Civil War. One of those many inconvenient truths that Mr. Bush has tried to hide with his barbecues, brush clearin’ and retractable Texas twang.
Yep, you are quite correct in the financial history. And yes, was originally Ohio based (along with Conn), seeing as Ohio held the largest number of patents in the 1850’s and was a manufacturing and research boom time for the state. As far as W is concerned, I think the mentally of the family since WWII has been a huge social impact on him along with the cultural impact of the Texas oil $$$.
Loved that quote! Spot on!
As I recall from Kitty Kelly’s and Kevin Phillips’ books on the Bush family, GHWB’s paternal grandfather, Samuel Bush, came from the Cleveland area. The majority of the family fortune, however, was the doing of his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, who originally came from St. Louis. Walker was the one who originally owned the Kennebunkport property.
I think the strongest support of your “weak hypothesis” which is in my opinion almost impossible to prove, but most likely true is the fact that this President and his cohorts began a war (that’s where innocent people die, folks) with Iraq based on evidence that was later proven false, based on the assertion that al-quida and 9/11 were connected despite current proof and several reports that there was at that time NO connection between the two. In my opinion this behavior has the same degree of depravity, or lack of conscience required. Second strong evidence is who made money as a result of the Iraq war and the very obvious gutting of the wealth of that nation. Money has been stolen, and many people who were supporters of bushco got filthy rich as a result of this war.
Those two points support the second hypothesis. It’s not so hard to believe that an administration who started a war on false evidence (of which they were aware) and for false reasons (Al-quida connection) decided to take a nation to war. That is kill people knowingly.
Try Cheney, too. What pipedreams do you suppose were in the notes from the meeting of the Big Oil Guys? Those notes presumably about public policy done on the public dime that we never got to see?
I don’t think there’s much question that the Bush-Cheney Cabal was looking for an excuse to gin up an excuse to invade Iraq from January 21, 2001, onward. However, I think you’re overlooking a few factors that support your “weak hypothesis.”
1) There was a powerful reality distortion field surrounding the neocons who made up most of the national security team of the incoming administration as a result of the group-think that permeated (and still permeates) that crowd.
2) One element of that field was the operating assumption that the Clinton national security team were a bunch of bumbling idiots, and that therefore anything the out-goers thought was a serious threat wasn’t, and vice versa. Thus the blowing off of Richard Clarke et al as he buttonholed everyone in sight about al Qaeda and bin Laden “as if his hair was on fire,” as someone was quoted as saying.
3) While Philip Shennon in his book The Commission, makes a pretty strong case that the CIA had acquired considerable useful and specific knowledge that something was up (contrary to the preconceived conclusion that Zelikow did his best to convey in the Commission’s report), they were responsible for one huge fuck-up, early in 2000 IIRC, in not passing on the information had about several attendees at the Malaysia planning meeting coming to the USA through Los Angeles. Had that info found its way to the State Dept and the FBI and those guys nailed either at the point of entry or later in country, the plot might have been blown. That’s definitely not a certainty, however.
Regarding Pearl Harbor, I read a lot of stuff about that over the years, and in general my personal view is that FDR may have been trying to entice Japan into doing something stupid but that he never expected them to hit Pearl Harbor first. More likely the Philippines. PH was enabled by the same kind of unconscious comm snafus we saw at 9/11.
I think Mukasey in confused…the only references I’ve heard to a safe house in Afganistan had to do with Qatani (sp) and others after 9/11 not before…the Qatani torture transcript refers to a safehouse in Afganistan.
“Al-Jehani, identified by some as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations in the gulf region, appeared cradling a Kalashnikov in a famous al-Qaeda martyrdom video found in an Afghanistan safe house in 2001.”
http://www.time.com/time/magaz…..hix-sphere
Glenn has just put up a post with a response from a DOJ spokesperson.
It’s a pretty lame response. Kind of the Bush legal team special, where they reference their own reference, rather than any actual event or fact.
Take the time to stop by MadCowMorningNews and read about Mohammed Atta. Note: MadCow may be too out-there for some.
The site says that Atta was followed for years. The NSA had files on him that they destroyed based on advice from NSA counsel. (similar to destroying the torture tapes) We don’t know what the Bush Administration knew before 9-11, so we can’t rule out that 9-11 was easily avoidable and we should wonder if the Bush Administration was complicit.
What has the Bush Admin done since 2001 to suggest that they could not possibly have been complicit? = a short list
What has the Bush Admin done since 2001 to suggest that they might possibly have been complicit? = a long list
From N.N. Taleb’s remarkable book “Fooled By Randomness”, in a section called Skills in Predicting Past History.
“A more vicious effect of such hindsight bias is that those who are very good at PREDICTING the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future, and feel confident about their ability to do so. This is why events like those of September 11, 2001, never teach us that we live in a world where important events are not predictable—even the Twin Towers’ collapse appears to have been predictable THEN.”