Reply #26: Bush Officials May Have Covered Up Rice-Tenet Meeting from 911 Commission.

[Octafish]

Who could've predicted history could repeat itself?

Besides Rice. And Rumsfeld. And Ashcroft. And Cheney. And Bush.

Bush Officials May Have Covered Up Rice-Tenet Meeting From 9/11 Commission

(Our guest blogger, Peter Rundlet, was a Counsel to the 9/11 Commission.)

Most of the world has now seen the infamous picture of President Bush tending to his ranch on August 6, 2001, the day he received the ultra-classified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) that included a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.” And most Americans have also heard of the so-called “Phoenix Memo” that an FBI agent in Phoenix sent to FBI headquarters on July 10, 2001, which advised of the “possibility of a coordinated effort” by bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools.

As a Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, I became very familiar with both the PDB and the Phoenix Memo, as well as the tragic consequences of the failure to detect and stop the plot. A mixture of shock, anger, and sadness overcame me when I read about revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book about a special surprise visit that George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black made to Condi Rice, also on July 10, 2001:

They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and “sounded the loudest warning” to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.

Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, “They felt the brushoff.”

SNIP...

Was it covered up? It is hard to come to a different conclusion. If one could suspend disbelief to accept that all three officials forgot about the meeting when they were interviewed, then one possibility is that the memory of one of them was later jogged by notes or documents that describe the meeting. If such documents exist, the 9/11 Commission should have seen them. According to Woodward’s book, Cofer Black exonerates them all this way: “Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork about the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.” The notion that both the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry that investigated the intelligence prior to 9/11 did not want to know about such essential information is simply absurd. At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot.

– Peter Rundlet

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/30/911-meeting/

Thanks for caring, Karenina.



We've got the Truth on our side, but it's really nice having a real friend along.