Last week has seen some important events – the assassination of Yassin, the Taiwan election, Clarke’s testimony – and consequently, a substantial part of this week’s winning posts deal with such issues. C. Glen Williams of Art Machine attacks Bush…

Last week has seen some important events – the assassination of Yassin, the Taiwan election, Clarke’s testimony – and consequently, a substantial part of this week’s winning posts deal with such issues. C. Glen Williams of Art Machine attacks Bush…

Especially when one reads articles about the 9/11 commssion proceedings like the one in the NY Times today:

The Bush administration has refused to discuss details of the Oval Office intelligence briefings in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The reports, known as the President’s Daily Brief, are among the most highly classified documents in the executive branch.

But under an agreement with the White House last year, one member of the commission, Jamie S. Gorelick, former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was allowed to read through a full library of the briefings, and two other commissioners were allowed a partial review.

Ms. Gorelick said at the hearing Tuesday that information in the documents “would set your hair on fire, and not just George Tenet’s hair on fire,” referring to the director of central intelligence.

Though barred under secrecy regulations from discussing much of what was in the reports, she said that there had been “an extraordinary spike” of intelligence warning about Qaeda attacks in the Daily Brief during 2001 and that “it plateaued at a spike level for months.”

Ms. Gorelick’s comments came as the commission released a staff report finding that Mr. Rumsfeld did not order the preparation of any new military plans against Al Qaeda or its Taliban sponsors during the seven months between his arrival at the Pentagon and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report said that despite the intelligence alerts throughout the year, there was an impression among specialists at the Pentagon that Mr. Rumsfeld and his new team were “not especially interested in the counterterrorism agenda.”

A separate staff report on the government’s diplomatic response to the terrorist threat found that Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and her deputies rebuffed a proposal by aides in early 2001 that the administration step up its support for anti-Taliban rebels in Afghanistan. The report said that Ms. Rice had instead spent more than seven months trying to formulate policies to deal with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, policies that were still not in place by Sept. 11 and, White House aides said, might have taken as long as three years to implement.

And Blair, that is indeed a telling comment from Spokesmodel Scott: “We didn’t do anything about that spike of terrorism because we didn’t want to just stop the terrorists from attacking America, we wanted to SUPER EXTREME kill them. So, you see, we were much more serious about terrorism than Clarke.”

Peanut nailed this one.

Information about the Aug 6, 2001 memo surfaced in May, 2001.

I believe that should be May, 2002.

http://www.bushflash.com/hercubush.html

Wonder if Andrew Sullivan will link to it?

Is it just me, or does that month on the ranch seem more and more like “plausible deniability”?

Thanks for a great piece. The 9/11 timeline site is an incredible resource.

As I was reading your recap of George’s endless summer, I couldn’t help but think of one of the more outrageous things I heard coming from Scott McClellan’s mouth at yesterday’s White House press briefing as he tried to discredit Richard Clarke:

It was very early on when Dr. Rice — the first week of the administration, Dr. Rice asked for the ideas that Dick Clarke had in mind, or the previous policies of the previous administration. But we wanted to go beyond that. We didn’t feel it was sufficient to simply roll back al Qaeda; we pursued a policy to eliminate al Qaeda. And that’s what the NSC worked on from very early in this administration. We took the threats posed by al Qaeda very seriously. And we acted on those threats. Certainly, during that spring and summertime, there was a spike in the terrorist threat, and – go ahead.

And here Scott takes a new question.

http://complete911timeline.org/

The timeline is meticulous and all the source articles are archived at the site. No wonder the RNC flying monkeys out smearing Richard Clarke haven’t factually refuted anything: any claim that they were on the ball and he was the screwup can be debunked virtually immediately.