voxpopgirl

voxpopgirl
This Girl's Voice

Thursday, December 18, 2003

9/11 Chair & Bush admin. appointee: Attack was preventable

Thomas Kean, Republican and Bush appointee Chairman of the Independent Commission investigating the 9/11 attacks is saying that the 9/11 was preventable and is pointing his finger in the direction of some inside the Bush administration:

There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed."

This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right. As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done. This was not something that had to happen." [my italics]

When Kean was asked whether the American people should at least know if people sitting in the decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions, he replied, "Yes, the answer is yes. And we will."

Let's not forget it was Bush's National Security Advisor Condi Rice who insisted: " I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." A statement which was in direct contrast to a 1999 federal report entitled the "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?" [PDF file], and described the suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks al Qaeda might seek for the 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. The report warned that:

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House."

Accountability is not one of this administrations' strong suits.

Kicking Condi out of her office isn't an option for these guys; aside from her "airplanes as missiles" denial, she's been such a stand up gal, what with Bush being able to count on her to off-handedly dismiss attacks on Bush's State of the Union claim of Saddam's attempts to obtain plutonium from Niger as merely "16 words" that were "enormously overblown" which further resulted in her having to eat her own words weeks later, when it was confirmed by CIA Director George Tenet that on October 7th of last year prior to Bush's speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, Tenet directly struck out a reference to yellow cake from Niger and passed that word on to Steve Hadley -- you know, Condi's Deputy National Security Advisor who works out of her office...? Hadley's still there too.

And so is whoever broke the law and outed Ambassador Joe Wilson's CIA opertive wife, Valerie Plame, after Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to Africa to verify Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs, wrote an OpEd in the New York Times titled "What I Didn't Find In Africa".

Let's hear it for Smirky's campaign promise to restore honour and dignity to the White House.

In the meantime, this CBS News report says that Bush's 9/11 Chairman "promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton."

I bet Clinton shows up; but what are the odds of Bush not pulling that "executive privilege" rabbit of his imperial hat?

As Kristen Breitweiser -- one of four New Jersey 9/11 widows who lobbied Congress and the president to appoint the commission -- said,