The tapes prove Nixon knew about and was involved in the entire Watergate illegality, now this about Bush. Not surprising, of course. There’s always a paper trail.
Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive.
[…]
The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.
“CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11.”
Let see I believe Clinton was still in office until 1-20-2001, so that’s about four months out of the year.
You have a little fleck of spittle on your lower lip.
Nope… nope… a little to the left. Ok, that got it.
No surprise there, they all are liars!
Sheila
http://www.survivingsurvivalism.com
It’s convenient that these documents are being released at the same time the justice department is being investigated. They’ve been holding on to this until they need a distraction.
So much for the hollow election promise of being “open and transparent”.
Why does the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue see past misbehavior by his predecessors as justification for being far worse?…
Blame it on someone else, then quietly repeat the same behavior to a previously unimaginable level. That’s not a good record to run on, so the finger-pointing and blame flinging will continue in an effort to hide the real problems.
Mr. Bill was right…this guy’s an amateur: he can’t/won’t keep his own promises, let alone follow the rules of a silly thing known as the Constitution, and when caught he just spews more half-truths and obfuscations.
Disregard reality, divide the voters, deny any all wrong-doing… what a legacy!.
Only smart enough to be dangerous, he is.
So, whats your point… Clinton passed up the same opportunity in 1999. At that point, according to other sources, Osama wasn’t a target of the United States, only the CIA. Details in this 60 minutes report, copy & paste link… dvorak blocks links due to spammers like Sheila’s link above http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/05/14/60-minutes-clinton-administration-passed-opportunity-kill-bin-laden-1
I don’t think Sheila is considered spam or they would’ve blocked her already. Also as you see, posted links work if the www is removed.
“the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding”
There’s your moral kids! Deny us funding and everybody dies.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN?
Business as usual for the Obama Administration: Blame Bush!
Election move. They need to remind everyone why they voted for Obama in the first place. He wasn’t GW…. or was he?
CHANGE!!!
This country is fucked, and its the electoral system that is doing the fucking.
Clinton, Bush, Obama, Romney, they’re two sides of the same wooden nickel.
Whichever one wins/loses we’re just in for a wider ass-hole.
The 12,400 rich have got richer, the 1%ers got to grab what they could as it flowed past and we 99%ers got our wallets and our future picked clean.
Since we don’t get to make any of the decisions, I don’t see the direction of that flow changing any time soon; its just going to slow down to a trickle as we all run out of money.
I hope the chinese get it righter than we did.
(The only possible retribution is that the super-volcanoes under Yellowstone, Long Valley and the Valles Caldera will each ruin the real-estate values for a few millennia, and it apparently happens a lot faster that we thought.)
Lying Bush was focussed on funding the Star Wars missle defense money pit to pay back election grease money to the defense suppliers.
Clinton was forced to not act on Bin Laden because the puke’s would cry out election season military action.
It’s a pathetic, predictable set of events that are driven from GOP central.
Richard Clarke wrote in his book that he advised against taking action against Al Qaeda camps because he was worried that Osama would ‘boogie to Baghdad.’ Yet we were told there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
The budget concerns are in April 2000, because of recess due to conventions and elections. So not Bush’s fault. Instead, there was a decision made to approve drones for intelligence only. Nowhere does it say that they had armed drones available at that point. It’s not clear what the offensive option desired by the CIA actually was.
From reading the article, it is clear that it is a cherry-picked hit piece.
Oh yea, one of the author’s bullet points is that the CIA warned an attack was imminent in days. That was in June 2001. I’m sure the President should have rushed back from vacation in August after that.
In order to stop the plot, the President would have had to fire Norm Mineta or not appoint him to the Cabinet to begin with, have a SecTrans who allows for racial profiling, and have the airports catch the hijackers. Alternatively, would have needed to engage in military action against Afghanistan, based on 3 year old embassy bombings or 1 year old destruction of USS Cole. This after the Clinton Administration declared that they could not bring an indictment against Bin Laden, which is why they didn’t accept Sudanese offer of handover.
More from the It’s all Bush’s fault files:
In May 1999, the military again contemplated a cruise missile strike against Bin Ladin in the Qandahar area…we intensely tracked and reported on Bin Ladin’s whereabouts for almost a week… from May 13-19. Again, the military was concerned about the precision…respect to identification of particular buildings as well as potential collateral damage to surrounding facilities, resulting in policy officials not authorizing a strike.
Wasn’t Clinton at war in Kosovo at the time?
Oh it get’s better! In 1998, 2 years before leaving office, Clinton was told in his Presidential Daily Brief that Al Qaeda was planning an aircraft hijacking, and had already successfully tested getting past security at an airport. Within two weeks, Clinton bombed Iraq!
“We should have done it last night. We may well regret the decision not to go ahead.”
About a planned missile strike to take out Bin Laden. Dec 1998.
Bin Laden would later praise the author of this line and recommend his book to be read by all.
I’m sure we’ll regret not acting last night. this is the third time you and your officers have put ubl in this govt’s sights and they have balked each time at doing the job….the policymakers also seem obsessed with having others…Saudis, pakis, etc. do what we won’t do.
Perhaps this is why Clinton got so angry at Chris Wallace when asked about the Path to 9/11.
What I want to know is who is the third group that they redacted?
The same guy had no emails regarding Bin Laden in this release, just a search for the bomber named Khailad, who may or may not be Khalid.
June 2001, Attack coming in days, US installations were warned and security was heightened. Bin Laden went in to hiding because he feared a US airstrike.
Later memos said the planned big attack was postponed. They expected the Arabian peninsula to be the location, though a big meeting in Genoa was also suspected.
So by 1998 we had a ‘half dozen’ opportunities to take out Bin Laden that the Clinton Administration turned down, compared to a memo for President Bush warning of imminent attacks with no specific date or place, and the general place was wrong.
Now in Aug 2001, on the 7th Presidential Daily Brief says Bin Laden determined to strike in US, says he wants to copy the WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef, in that he wanted to hit the US. Then it mentions the LA airport attack in 2000 and recruiting in New York. The internal intelligence doc from the day before also mentions hijacking or other types of attacks, and surveillance of federal buildings in New York, as well as a call about Al Qaeda had explosives in the US for an attack.
Aug 23, someone who was arrested had trained in flying a 747, and asked about doors not opening and tried to get on a London to JFK flight.
Next day, they say no further info is available with regards to time or place, beyond ‘there were indications that Al Qaeda was considering mounting terrorist operations in the United States.’
This is the thread by which liberals say Bush ignored Al Qaeda threat.
Please copy/paste from the GOP sheeple library in one long post. These piecemeal diatribes are pretty fucking annoying and inefficient.
This sheeple library you speak of is the source documents that I was reading one at a time from the linked article.
Uhm….ONE YEAR before 9/11 was September 2000…..George W. Bush was NOT President….Bill Clinton was. Clinton, who multiple times had the opportunity to kill OBL, chose to do nothing about Bin Laden. Com’on Dvorak…don’t be a dumbass and get your facts (and your math!) straight.
Exactly right, Hegemondus. Every document this article points to about castrating CIA efforts to monitor Bin Laden were from 2000, those were the Clinton years.
Salon is notoriously left leaning. You have to take anything they write with a grain of salt.
Compare that to Clinton vetoed half a dozen attempts to get Bin Laden, according to the head of the Bin Laden Station.
“This is the third time you and your officers have put ubl in the govt’s sights and they have balked each time at doing the job.”
This is the Clinton administration that instead of taking out Bin Laden elected to bomb Iraq. Bombed Kosovo instead of an op to capture Bin Laden. And just as the station chief complained that they were balking at damage to a mosque, in Kosovo they avoided a bombing run to protect a painting by a famous artist.
“The tapes prove Nixon knew about and was involved in the entire Watergate illegality, now this about Bush.”
WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DOES NIXON HAVE TO DO WITH BUSH?!
We’re talking about Bush JUNIOR who was probably still in high school when Nixon left office in disgrace. I absolutly fail to see what the f**k Nixon has to do with GW Bush – or enve GH Bush senior! Is it possible you have some sort of agenda to fill there, Uncle Dave?
If you want to talk about criminals, try looking in your own back yard. You won’t have to look very far to find absolute reprehensible a-holes like Nancy Pelosi. Or how about your hero, ex-president Bill Clinton who was actually successfully IMPEACHED! Wanna look at that a little bit closer? (Ya! I didn’t think you did.)
“WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DOES NIXON HAVE TO DO WITH BUSH?!”
Both of their lies came to light as a result of documents (tapes with Nixon and docs with Bush) it turned out they couldn’t control or destroy. It’s becoming harder and harder for this kind of activity to stay secret.
Just imagine what dirty secrets we will discover about the Obama regime…
LOL and Rush will write half of them.
True, but even things are not secret may as well be.
How many people know that the CIA assassinated JFK? And yet, technically it’s not a secret since you can buy dozens of books that pretty well lay it out. And some of the principal operatives have confessed.
And yet, most people just remember that Peter Jennings said Oswald did it.
Uncle Dave, you simply don’t understand. I suppose I should have expected this from a clueless establishment-trained journalist. Obviously, you have a leftist agenda that you want to assert. But come on! Bush (either one) and Nixon have about as much to do with each other as Lincoln and Reagan. Same party but that’s it!!!
So why do you, completely out of the blue, bring up Nixon? Is it because Nixon was a Republican?! Maybe it’s because Nixon was cornered in a lie with audio tape evidence. (Need I remind you that Nixon was never officially impeached over Watergate? Sure, he should have been but he wasn’t, you know.)
Would you care to guess how Clinton got cornered, busted and eventually impeached?! Maybe you forgot that Clinton was only the second U.S. preident – and Democrat – to have ever been impeached. Why not bring up Clinton’s oval office tape recorded conversations or any of his history? Is that not also relevant? Or maybe it’s not convenient enough.
Are you starting to see the light now?
Nixon and Bush simply used tape recorders in their oval office conversations like pretty much every other U.S. President since at least JFK. Only Clinton and Nixon happend to get their little winkies in a twist because they decided to cover up and lie about things. However, liberal dems (like you) probably only see Clinton as having got in trouble for getting a blow job out of wedlock while in the oval office – not because he lied about it.
To liberals it’s only convenient to focus on some facts and forget others when those other facts don’t suit the leftist agenda. Liberals never want to consider that if hero’s like their beloved Bill Clinton would lie about something so trivial as a cigar fisting up some skanks hole that he just might lie about anything! In many ways, Clinton is just as bad if not worse than Nixon. At least we can now see the motivation for Nixon – he was in real trouble! But are we ever reminded of that other dumb-ass President who lied about absolute bullshit?!
You, Uncle Dave, have failed miserasbly to connect the dots as to why you bring up Nixon in any of this. If your argument is because they both used tape recorders then that’s a pretty piss poor argument. That is, unless you want to color the story with your opinion! So admit it. You’re a liberal with an agenda.
(I might be able to accept a libtard leftist if he/she just admits to what he/she is – a snake! Please don’t confuse a leftist for a Democrat either – that’s just their commonality which is not a whole lot unlike Republicans and most religous fools.)
Really? This is that hard to understand? Sheesh!
– Nixon lied about his involvement in Watergate. The tapes proved it.
– Bush lied as discussed in the article. The documents proved it.
Period. Seems pretty clear to me.
Yes, others, like Clinton, lied. Nixon’s was over epic level corruption rampant in his White House brought down because his involvement was documented, like Bush’s. Their lies wouldn’t be known without it all being recorded in one way or another.
And for the record, I am not an establishment-trained journalist. I am, or rather was until I retired from it in my 30’s a millionaire and went on to do other things, an establishment-trained software engineer.
As for my politics, I hold views that vary left or right depending on the topic. What I despise is corruption, lying, etc. On any side. It’s just the Republicans make themselves such easy targets.
Did you read the same article? The documents were from 2000 when Clinton was president.
The other docs are 7 out of hundreds of thousands of CIA and NSA intelligence briefs that never reach the office of the president unless specifically read into by the CIA director. This was the entire point behind creating Homeland Security.
This entire article is full of old information anyone paying any attention already knew. Clinton slashed our intelligence budget and hindered information gathering by banning the paying of informants. A handful of people in the intelligence community wrote a couple memos about increased suspicious activities from Islamic terror cells. None of which contained any specific intelligence on an impending attack and none of which was analyzed together, which is easy for us to do now in hindsight. Again, the entire reason they created Homeland Security to coordinate and analyze intelligence across divisions and agencies.
Umm,
re-writing history?
PApers show that BUSH SR> knew about the problems..
AS the USA made promises 10 years BEFORE BUSH SR. about the war in Afghanistan against the Russians..THAT WE BACKED..
Then declined to follow thru on the promises…”It would cost to much”.
Even tho we BACKEd the War, and supplied materials(guns/weapons/…) we couldnt afford to rebuild infrastructure in Afghanistan..
Bush was lying? I’m shocked, shocked.
Yes. What’s the World coming to?
I am amazed at how many people have commented on this story yet obviously didn’t read it. Every document cited is from the Clinton presidency. Bush was not sworn in until End of Jan 2001. Docs are from 2000.
ummm.. a full year before 9/11/2001 would have still been Clinton…just sayin
Not only that, but the documents linked from the article reveal that it was Clinton who wasn’t trying to get Bin Laden. Had at least 6 chances where they elected not to try plus an op to capture him they cancelled.
What’s strange is thru all the liberal foaming at the mouth, and John Kerry claiming Bush did it all wrong took his eye off the ball by invading Iraq, etc, and the Bush Admin didn’t leak this helpful info. Compare that to Obama leaking at will about his cyberwar and drone strikes.
So both political parties are worse than the other.
We already knew that.
Bush is a criminal.
Mysteriously absent are any comments that the Sudanese offered Bin Laden’s head on a silver platter to then President Bill Clinton long before Bush ever came into office.
Guyver, good point, but please re-read the authors statement.
“the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11”
Some simple math tells us a full year before 9/11/2001 is 9/11/2000. Bush wasn’t even elected until Nov. 7, 2000.
“[The CIA] didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him.”
Shame on Bush for not funding the CIA while he was Gov. of Texas.
The author of this so-called news story is a complete idiot.
It’s worse than that. They had him 3 years before 9/11. Six different times the White House balked.
if you read the documents, the CIA funding issue was in April of 2000. a full 9 months before Bush took office and 18 months before 9/11. The first raw intelligence report was issued in December, 1998, over 2 years before Bush took office about OBL planning an attack on the US. This is an incredibly lazy piece of writing. Someone should take a look in the mirror before calling someone else a liar.
Bush was the WOODEN-HEADED PUPPET ON A STRING – with Cheney PULLING HIS STRINGS !!!
Uncle Dave, you haven’t pointed out any lies. Just a hack article that was written headline first, spun facts later.
Actually taking the time and reading the documents might have helped Uncle Dave with his article. The documents in question clearly happened prior to Bush being sworn in in January, 2011.
Just another piece of pablum that goes to show you not to believe everything you read on line. Maybe including Uncle Daves mini biography about being a millionaire that retired in his 30’s. Once the lies start, it’s hard to believe anything they say.