[Mb-civic] What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us Robert Scheer

[Michael Butler]

latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer15feb15.story
ROBERT SCHEER
What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us
Robert Scheer

February 15, 2005

Would George W. Bush have been reelected president if the public understood
how much responsibility his administration bears for allowing the 9/11
attacks to succeed?

The answer is unknowable and, at this date, moot. Yet it was appalling to
learn last week that the White House suppressed until after the election a
damning report that exposes the administration as woefully incompetent if
not criminally negligent. Belatedly declassified excerpts from still-secret
sections of the 9/11 commission report, which focus on the failure of the
Federal Aviation Administration to heed multiple warnings that Al Qaeda
terrorists were planning to hijack planes as suicide weapons, make clear
that this tragedy could have been avoided.

For the last three years, administration apologists have tried to make the
FAA the scapegoat for the 9/11 attacks. But it is the president who
ultimately is responsible for national security, not a defanged agency that
is beholden to the industry it allegedly monitors.

The terrible fact is that the administration took none of the steps that
would have put the protection of human life ahead of a diverse set of
economic and political interests, which included not offending our friends
the Saudis and not hurting the share prices of airline corporations.

The warnings provided by intelligence agencies to the FAA were far clearer
and more specific than suggested by Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the
9/11 commission when she reluctantly conceded the existence of a
presidential briefing that warned of impending Al Qaeda attacks. Rice had
dismissed those warnings as "historical," but according to the newly
released section of the 9/11 report, an astonishing 52 of the 105 daily
intelligence briefings received by the FAA ‹ and available to Rice ‹ before
the Sept. 11 attacks made specific reference to Al Qaeda and Osama bin
Laden.

Given this shocking record of indifference on the part of the
administration, it is politically understandable that it tried to prevent
the formation of the 9/11 commission in the first place, and then for five
months prevented the declassification of key sections of the final report.
Commission members, including its Republican chairman, Thomas Kean, stated
in the past that there was no national security concern that justified
keeping those sections of the report from the public.

And let's be clear: The failure to fully disclose what is known about the
9/11 tragedy is not some minor bureaucratic transgression. Not since the
Soviets first detonated an atomic bomb more than half a century ago has a
single event so affected decision-making in this country, yet the main
questions as to how and why it happened remain mostly unanswered.

Even worse, what we do know calls into question our government's explanation
that a diabolical international terrorist conspiracy exploited our liberal,
naive society. What has emerged, instead, is a portrait of an often bumbling
terrorist gang allowed to wreak havoc because the top tiers of the
administration were so indifferent to the alarms, which former CIA Director
George Tenet described so graphically: "The system was blinking red."

Had the business-friendly administration put safety first and ordered a full
complement of air marshals into the air, over the obscene objections of
airlines loath to give up paid seats, nearly 3,000 people might not have
died that day. And had the president of the United States taken some time
from his epic ranch vacation that August to order a nationwide airport
alert, two bloody wars abroad, as well as an all-out assault on civil
liberties in this country, probably would not have happened.

Instead, an administration that resisted spending the tens of millions
required to fortify airline security before 9/11 is nearing the $300-billion
mark on Afghanistan and Iraq. And declassified documents have unmistakably
said the latter had nothing to do with 9/11. Meanwhile, those countries that
at least indirectly did, most notably "allies" Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,
have been let off the hook.

Indeed, the 9/11 commission was not allowed to get near that story: It is an
unnoticed but startling truth that the basic narrative on the tragedy
derives from the interrogations of key detainees whom the 9/11 commissioners
were not allowed to interview. Nor were they permitted to even take
testimony from the U.S. intelligence personnel who interrogated those
prisoners.

When the truth and governmental transparency are arbitrarily trumped by the
invocation of national security, the public is simply incapable of making
informed decisions on the most crucial decisions we face ‹ starting with
whom we elect as our commander in chief.

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