Blinking Red

White House saw chain of reports on bin Laden – ‘The system was blinking red,’ CIA chief told panel” [by Dana Priest, Washington Post]:

In January 2001, two surveillance photographs from the Kuala Lumpur meeting were shown to an informant who was helping both the CIA and FBI. He helped them understand that Al-Midhar was at the meeting along with a man identified as “Khallad” — who by then was known to have planned the Cole bombing. But “we found no effort by the CIA to renew the long-abandoned search for Midhar or his traveling companions,” the report noted.

Also, contrary to the previous testimony of CIA Director Tenet, the agency did not tell the FBI about this discovery until late August 2001, according to the report.

Al-Midhar had left the United States in June 2000 but had plans to return.

“It is possible that if, in January 2001, agencies had resumed their search for him” or placed him on a terrorist watch list, “they might have found him” before he applied for a new visa in June 2001, the report said.

In mid-May 2001, during the height of threat reporting, a CIA official went back through the Al-Midhar files, discovered he had a U.S. visa and that Alhazmi had come to Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000.

The agency did not tell the FBI about this discovery until late August 2001.

FBI Agent Urged Search for Hijacker – Request Was Turned Down Before Attacks, Panel Is Told” [by Dan Eggen and Dana Priest, Washington Post]:

On Sept. 11, after the World Trade Center was struck, the FBI agent and his colleagues received the passenger manifests from the four fatal flights. Yesterday he told the panel that he yelled angrily: “This is the same Almihdhar we’ve been talking about for three months!

Mid-May 2001: during the height of threat reporting.

Al-Midhar applied for a new visa in June 2001.

The easy path to the United States for three of the 9/11 hijackers” [by Edward T. Pound, US News & World Report]:

Three of the hijackers in the September 11 terrorist attacks obtained visas in Saudi Arabia through a brand-new program designed to make it easier for qualified visa applicants to visit the United States, an American government official said tonight.

The Visa Express program, put in place just four months before the attacks, allowed the three hijackers to arrange their visas through a State Department-designated travel agency, the official says. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers obtained their U.S. travel visas in Saudi Arabia.

None of the three men, the American government official says, was ever questioned by U.S. consular officers in Saudi Arabia. Each took his travel papers and passport to a commercial travel agency, which submitted the applications to the State Department.

Visa Express “is a bad idea,” says Jessica Vaughan, a former consular officer. “The issuing officer has no idea whether the person applying for the visa is actually the person (listed) in the documents and application.” …

Of the 15 hijackers who obtained their non-immigrant visas in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. official says, 11 received them before the Visa Express program was put into place, in June. The three Saudi nationals who obtained visas through the express program were:

… Khalid al-Midhar, 25, who, the Justice Department says, arrived in the U.S. in July 2001, traveling on a business visa. The FBI believes that al-Midhar was one of five men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

The official says that the names of the four men–and the names of all the hijackers who obtained their U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia–were run through the State Department’s CLASS database (for Consular Lookout and Support System). The database contains regularly updated records and intelligence information on foreign nationals. “There was no derogatory information in the files,” the official said. …

As the terrorist attacks demonstrated, the information contained in CLASS was far from adequate. …

The names of the hijackers were run through the State Department’s database. There was no derogatory information in the files.

Panel Clears Handling of Bin Laden Kin on 9/11,” [by MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times]:

The six chartered flights that rushed scores of Saudi citizens out of the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were handled properly by the Bush administration, the independent commission investigating the attacks said in a statement on Tuesday.

A flight on Sept. 20, 2001, carried 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Osama bin Laden, according to the statement. But all 142 passengers on the flights, mostly Saudi citizens, were screened by law enforcement officials, the statement said, to ensure that they were not security threats and not wanted for questioning. The flights were “dealt with in a professional manner” by the government, the commission said. …

Among other critics, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said last September that some of the Saudis who were allowed to leave may have had ties to terrorism. “This is just another example of our country coddling the Saudis and giving them special privileges that others would never get,” he said.

But according to the statement, the F.B.I. checked “a variety of databases” and searched the aircraft. The statement said that it was not clear whether anyone checked a watch list maintained by the State Department, but that a check after the departure showed no matches.

FBI let ‘top targets’ leave U.S. after 9-11” [by Paul Sperry, WorldNetDaily]:

“As far as we know, they contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States,” [FBI Director] Mueller testified in June 2002 before the joint congressional inquiry into 9-11.

The congressional panel, however, found that some of the hijackers had contacts with more than a dozen FBI persons of interest who helped them find housing, open bank accounts, obtain drivers licenses and locate flight schools, among other things. Some of their facilitators were Saudi nationals. Details of Saudi activities were censored from the final 9-11 report by the White House.

In one of her more explosive queries, Edmonds, the former FBI translator, suggests she has information the FBI allowed “several top targets of FBI investigations related to support networks of terrorist activities” leave the country after the 9-11 attacks “without ever being questioned.”

Newsnight transcript, BBC News

Michael Springman [former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia]:

In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General’s office. I was met with silence. …

What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.

The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department’s faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can’t be looking into some Saudi connections?

Life Imitating Art

I just heard the old Kenny Rogers cornball “Coward of the County” on the radio, and the message sounded so familiar: peaceful fella mindin’ his own bidness, painfully meek, suffering outrage after outrage until finally an unspeakable assault spurs him onto vengeance–and my, what vengeance! In the final chorus, the protagonist speaks to his dearly departed pappy, who died in prison after years of raising hell and warned the boy to always “turn the other cheek”:

    I promised you dad not to do the things you’ve done
    I’ll walk away from trouble when I can
    Now please don’t think I’m weak
    I couldn’t turn the other cheek
    Papa, I sure hope you understand
    Sometimes you gotta fight when you’re a man.

Whence this sense of deja vu? Oh yes, Ariel Sharon is a man of peace, George Bush is a man of peace, but doggone it, sometimes you can just push a man too far! What did they ever do to them Ay-rabs? Etc., etc., etc. To think that neoconservatism, such a highborn philosophy, has transmogrified the public discourse into a Kenny Rogers song. Unintended consequences and all that…

Back to Iraq

How to boost troop morale, Rumsfeld style:

“Because we’re in the midst of a major troop rotation, we have a planned increase in the number of U.S. troops,” Rumsfeld said at a hastily arranged Pentagon press conference.

The first casualties of what Rumsfeld called “taking advantage of the overlap” were a few hundred soldiers from the Army’s First Armored Division. Pentagon officials told the Daily News those troops were at Baghdad International Airport preparing to return to their home base in Germany this week when the plug was pulled.

“They were on the tarmac waiting for their plane when they were told to pick up their gear, head back to camp and get ready to go back into the field,” the official said. “Can you imagine the effect on morale that had?”

I wonder if Rumsfeld ran this move by the Army mental health advisory team investigating the abnormally high suicide rate among American soldiers in Iraq? I’m sure he must have because we all know how the Bushies Support the TroopsTM!

Iraqi Radioactive Scrap Sale!

Lest we be accused of ignoring the good news coming out of Iraq, lets all celebrate this latest triumph of the incompetents running Operation Poorly Planned Occupation.

Radioactive Scrap From Iraq Shows Up in Europe

Iraq’s nuclear facilities remain unguarded, and radioactive materials are being taken out of the country, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency reported after reviewing satellite images and equipment that has turned up in European scrapyards.
[…]
According to ElBaradei’s letter, satellite imagery shows “extensive removal of equipment and in some instances, removal of entire buildings,” in Iraq.

In addition, “large quanitities of scrap, some of it contaminated, have been transfered out of Iraq from sites” previously monitored by the IAEA.

In January, the IAEA confirmed that Iraq was the likely source of radioactive material known as yellowcake that was found in a shipment of scrap metal at Rotterdam harbor.
[…]
The IAEA has been unable to investigate, monitor or protect Iraqi nuclear materials since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003. The United States has refused to allow the IAEA or other U.N. weapons inspectors into the country, claiming that the coalition has taken over responsibility for illict weapons searches.

Now, anyone who says the Bush administration doesn’t have the safety and security of the world as their highest goal in life just wants the terrorists to win and hates freedom. Clearly, ElBaradei and those IAEA whiners hate freedom and want to ruin troop morale and give aid and comfort to the enemy or they’d shut up already with the negativity.

Here’s Your Liberation, Towelhead

    Iraqi ‘beaten to death’ by US troops

    An Iraqi has died of his wounds after US troops beat him with truncheons because he refused to remove a picture of wanted Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada Sadr from his car, police said today.

    The motorist was stopped late yesterday by US troops conducting search operations on a street in the centre of the central city of Kut, Lieutenant Mohamad Abdel Abbas said.

    After the man refused to remove Sadr’s picture from his car, the soldiers forced him out of the vehicle and started beating him with truncheons, he said.

What will the warmongers and alleged free speech enthusiasts at the Volokh Conspiracy say about this? Not a damn syllable. Count on it. And I point this out not just because of the personal disappointment I have felt over the last few years about people I once admired, including some of the Volokhers, but because their rank inconsistency in support of war taints everything they have ever done or will do. Notice I wrote “taints,” not “contradicts”; all of their work still stands on its logical/factual merits, of course, but their hypocrisy has discredited the entire libertarian movement in the eyes of potential sympathizers. They should never be forgiven for that.

(Link courtesy of LRC blog.)

Turkey with Mustard on Wry

So the prez doubled the amount of mustard gas actually found at that Libyan turkey farm. Really, so what? What if it had been a million tons of mustard gas? I’m gonna keep telling you this till you beg me to stop:

1. Chemical weapons are archaic, largely ineffective battlefield tools that have no business hanging under the same mendacious rubric as nuclear weapons.

2. Possession of deadly agents is one thing; possession of delivery devices is quite another.

3. If the possession of so-called WMD legitimates preemptive violence, then we’re in trouble. Hell, our government is using radiological weapons right now!

Gadhafi’s turkey farm is a friggin’ petting zoo compared to what the U.S. government has in its cages.