It’s 9:53 AM, on September 11th, 2001. Sixteen minutes after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Secretary Rumsfeld is outside the building, helping out with the injured.
Monitors at the National Security Agency (NSA) intercept a phone call from an associate of Usama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The call is to someone in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.
CBS News
At 12:05 p.m., George Tenet informed Rumsfeld of the contents of the intercept. Rumsfeld felt that it was not enough information, or in his own idiosyncratic words, “no good basis for hanging hat.”
More solid information became available later in the afternoon when the CIA discovered “the passenger manifests for the hijacked airliners showed three of the hijackers were suspected al Qaeda operatives.”
By 2:40 p.m. Rumsfeld was swinging into action. According to an aide’s notes, Rumsfeld wanted the:
…”Go massive,” the notes quote him as saying. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
The next day Rumsfeld expanded on this theme:
Then, a few days later, according to the Washington Post:
Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, senior administration officials said.
The previously undisclosed Iraq directive is characteristic of an internal decision-making process that has been obscured from public view.
You should read the whole Washington Post article, which appeared on January 12, 2003, two months before the war.
Here is another snip, that demonstrates clearly how the facts were fixed around the policy.
The administration has embarked on something “quite extraordinary in American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for justification should be extraordinarily high,” said G. John Ikenberry, an international relations professor at Georgetown University. But “the external presentation and the justification for it really seems to be lacking,” he said. “The external presentation appears to mirror the internal decision-making quite a bit.”
And this presciently sums it all up:
“I do believe certain people have grown theological about this,” said another administration official who opposed focusing so intently on Iraq. “It’s almost a religion — that it will be the end of our society if we don’t take action now.”
What say you?
It’s about oil.
“It’s almost a religion — that it will be the end of our society if we don’t take action now.”
From the neocon POV, society — as we know it — will come to an end if we don’t control the oil we depend upon. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Energy Task Force meetings that Darth holds close to his heart were all about the reality of Peak Oil and the need for the American Empire to secure the resources required to continue fueling its hummers and SUV’s. It’s really that simple. It only looks complicated when you factor in all the side benefits of enriching your cronies and the necessity of subverting the Constitution to attain world dominance.
Mr. President, if God is talking to you, you’re clearly not listening.
The tyranny of the minority. Those occupying the Executive Branch have broken the faith.
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a luster to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
Written by Moina Michael, November 1918
Never forgive, never forget.
It all depends on what “fixing the facts” means, don’t it?
To Rumsfeld, Bush, and their cronies, to be master of the word is to be master of the truth.
Booman, good article. Sometimes the blogs focus so much on the current news people forget to address important past news and present it in a cohesive way.
The Fletcher Memorial Home
Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
and build them a home a little place of their own
the fletcher memorial
home for incurable tyrants and kings
and they can appear to themselves every day
on closed circuit t.v.
to make sure they’re still real
it’s the only connection they feel
Sweet Pink Floyd reference! And here I thought I was probably the only one who actually bought the Final Cut…
I guess I am showing my age by saying that I bought The Final Çut the day it was released. It is an album as likely to be in the chickenhawk music collection as Dylan’s “Masters of War.”
You age is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. I was born between ‘Animals’ and ‘The Wall’ and have been trying ever since to catch up with all the great music I missed out on.
I was listening to The Wall just the other day, and thought that ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ would make a great rallying song for the movement to get a timetable on getting troops back from Iraq.
the first time I ever heard Animals all the way through — it was 1979 and I was sitting in a jeep with a friend of mine looking out over the lights of Tucson from a nice little place in the desert foothills…
Even though I have only been here at BT a short while, I consider it my shelter from pigs on the wing.
From Animals:
“Hey you, Whitehouse: haha, charade you are”
Now, just to be accurate, this was aimed at a specific British person named Whitehouse–but out of context, it fits the current state of our nation perfectly.
that have all those yellow ribbons on them could be called “Just The Facts” with all this information and quotes in it. I have to stop myself all the time from taking out a pen and writing on those stickers and bumper stickers, “enlist YOUR kid”.
These quotes are why I have never been able to get terribly excited about the DSM stuff. It’s exciting in that it confirms what I already knew long ago, and was clear to anyone willing to take any interest at all in whether our government lied and misrepresented its way into a “preventitive” war. History will not look kindly on the events of the last four years, but unfortunately we are suffering in the meantime while most of America just doesn’t care.
The choice was crystal clear and all this information was clearly available on November 2, 2004, and about 75% of America chose to look the other way, more concerned about things like whether the “faggots” will be able to legally dedicate their lives to each other or that they might miss their latest reality TV episode if they have to go vote after work.
Sorry for the downer of a comment. I hope I am wrong and that America is awakening to the horrible abuses of power that have been despicably thrust upon us by the presidency that I have no doubt history will judge as among the worst ever. When I come to places like Booman or Kos it revives my hope that we will overcome this disaster on the shoulders of people like those who frequent these blogs. So, thanks for keeping up the good fight while people like me still wallow in a state of semi-depression 8 months after the election.
I started that comment thinking I was going to ask an honest question, thus the title to the comment. Sorry, no questions included! Just cynicism. 🙁
this is all very interesting, but like the DSM, there is no new information here.
</snark>
Great find!
“Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq.”
Colin, it’s even worse that you were so intimately aware, and had such standing as our f–king Secretary of State, yet not only stood silently by but abetted the fixation actively and loudly on the floor of the United Nations.
Imho, that makes you guiltier than Rumsfeld, Cheney et al. because you weren’t deluded while they were (not that that excuses them in any way either, egotistical bastards who should be living “in the tropics” with “everything anyone could want” with their buddies at Guantanamo).
You could make the case that Powell thought he might be able to put the brakes on the runaway train, at least at first. I agree that he should have resigned rather than give the dog and pony show at the UN. If he believed the intel he was given (knowing the characters involved) he was naive at best. Or he was just in on it too, in which case we agree.
I don’t see how Rumsfeld and Cheney could be deluded – They knew exactly what they were doing.
Every.Step.Of.The.Way.
I don’t see how you get more guilty than the people plotting for the war from even before 9/11.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, there were “feel pieces” everywhere. USA Today was the exception. They wrote a groundbreaking piece of reporting, “Iraq course set from tight White House circle” which started of thus:
The article was the result of a widespread investigation. It goes on to say:
The decision to target Saddam “kind of evolved, but it’s not clear and neat,” a senior administration official says, calling it “policymaking by osmosis.”
“There wasn’t a flash moment. There’s no decision meeting,” national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. “But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually … before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem.”
That’s right! Condi on the record confirming that the decision was made long before the time of the Downing Street Memos.
It continues:
This confirms what the Downing Street Memos show–that Britain, our closest ally, had no influence or involvement in setting the policy, but only in strategizing about how to sell it to the world.
It goes on:
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls that “stunning.”
“If we are about to make a decision that could risk American lives, we need full and accurate information on which to base that decision,” he says in a letter sent Tuesday to leaders of the committee and CIA Director George Tenet.
Yes, that Dick Durbin.
The whole decision was based on overblown fears and a pre-fixed agenda that had nothing to do with al Qaeda:
Whether Saddam was involved in the attacks on Sept. 11 — and the evidence on that is still unclear — wasn’t the central question. Instead, within days after the attacks on New York and Washington one year ago, the president and his top aides turned their sights on Baghdad as the biggest future threat to a nation that suddenly seemed all-too-vulnerable to terrorists and international outlaws.
Despite the high stakes, the decision was reached with surprising speed. The policy would take longer to unveil than to devise; Bush would suggest his intentions in January with a State of the Union speech that labeled Iraq part of an “axis of evil.”
They write constitutions to prevent this sort of thing.
Impeachable offenses?
You bethca!
Damn us Liberals.
Seriously.
Here we go again.
We have more “facts”. We love facts. We believe the “truth shall set you free”.
Breaking news: Facts don’t do jack.
Facts are great for supporting ACTION. They don’t do anything by themselves. Either use them to counter the other guy’s action, or use them to support our own.
That means:
We Liberals seem to understand step 4. But the trick is the facts aren’t relevant without a reason to know the facts. Facts without purpose are trivia. At least pop-culture ‘facts’ have entertainment value.
Liberal facts like global warming, PNAC agendas, DSM news, falsified evidence for illegal wars, torture in the name of freedom — they aren’t entertaining. They are important. But without a way to deal with knowing those facts, they’re just little guilt trips we’re asking folks to carry around. No wonder they don’t catch the public’s attention. No wonder its so easy for some folks to just outright dismiss them — who’d want to believe these things?
Asking the media to force-feed raw facts down the throats of the people isn’t going to make these unpleasant facts more desirable.
We need to push a reason why folks would want to know these facts.
Maybe a call for impeachment is the right approach. Get folks asking “Why impeachment?” then they’ll want to understand the facts so they can support or oppose it. Maybe a stupid push for war in Iran will do it. That will make the question “Can we trust the White House is playing straight with us?” become more relevant. Maybe its the war in Iraq and lousy recruitment numbers. If we re-examine our reason for being in Iraq, we can pin down what vital national interest it serves, and reassess the best way to achieve it.
Whatever it is, it needs to answer the question “Why do I want to know this?”.
This diary is a great story. I’ll share it with my friends who are true believers. But until we come up with an answer to “Why do I want to know this?”, its like asking a NASCAR fan to know who won the last Cricket tournament.
Facts speak for themselves. But for a fact to speak loudly, it must be clear why it is relevant.
OK, although I think you and I are on the same side, so to speak, you start off your writing with a hightly dubious fact: Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
No Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon. This information plus many other parts of the official 911 story do not add up.
Although I’m all for impeaching Bush and Cheney forthwith, we got some more truth telling to be done that probably does not have diddly to do with Bush.