DoD Staffer's Notes from 9/11 Obtained Under FOIA

[Jara sang]

http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/dod-staffers-notes-from-911-obtained.html

DoD Staffer's Notes from 9/11 Obtained Under FOIA

On July 23, 2005, I submitted an electronic Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense seeking DoD staffer Stephen Cambone's notes from meetings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Cambone's notes were cited heavily in the 9/11 Commission Report's reconstruction of the day's events. On February 10, 2006, I received a response from the DoD which includes partially-redacted copies of Cambone's notes. The documents can be viewed as a photo set on Flickr.

The released notes document Donald Rumsfeld's 2:40 PM instructions to General Myers to find the "best info fast . . . judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time - not only UBL " (as discussed on p. 334-335 of the 9/11 Commission Report and in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack).

In addition, the documents confirm the contents of CBS News' Sept. 4, 2002 report "Plans For Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted Rumsfeld's notes as stating: "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not." These lines were not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report or Woodward's Plan of Attack, and to my knowledge, have not been independently confirmed by any other source. After the Rathergate fiasco, I wondered if CBS had been fooled into publishing a story that, from a publicity perspective, seemed too good to be true.

Finally, these documents unveil a previously undisclosed part of the 2:40 PM discussion. Several lines below the "judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time" line, Cambone's notes from the conversation read: "Hard to get a good case."

In addition to being available as a photo set on Flickr, you can download the documents in PDF format below. BitTorrent users can also download a 6.9 MB zip file containing PDFs of all the documents.

[Terran1212]

1. This should be top news story on every American channel

[Jara sang]

2. Indeed, I'm surprised DoD released it.

[Terran1212]

3. Even DUers aren't paying attention to it

I guess cheney accidentally shooting a guy is more important!

This confirms what richard clarke said; he's no liar.

[Kagemusha]

4. No, we simply heard about these documents years ago.

We didn't have them, but we knew they existed, what the content was, and so on. This hasn't been a secret for quite some time.

I imagine that's precisely why the documents were released in the first place.