Condoleezza Rice's much-anticipated testimony before the 9/11 Commission was widely touted as having deflected the critique proffered by former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke – that the Bushies were too fixated on Iraq to pay much attention to Al Qaeda. A few days after her appearance, however, it looks like she committed a fatal error when she inadvertently blurted out the truth.
RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.
BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
RICE: I would like to finish my point here.
BEN-VENISTE: I didn't know there was a point.
This brings to mind a recent novel explanation for numerous US intelligence reports that seemed to verify Saddam's possession of WMD – his flunkies and scientific servitors had duped him into believing that such programs were in the making, if not a reality, when in fact it was all an elaborate sham. From what we are beginning to understand, this "Emperor's New Clothes" scenario is more aptly applied to George W. Bush in the crucial months and days before 9/11.
Somewhere in the chain of command there was a bottleneck, and this raises two questions: where – and why?
It seems logical to assign the task of the nation's security from terrorist attacks to the National Security Advisor, but Condi, as made clear in her testimony, is not taking responsibility. Whether the bottleneck was located in her office, or originated further down the federal hierarchy, answering the question of why is the ostensible purpose of the 9/11 Commission – which is charged with discovering how this vast "intelligence failure" occurred, and how to prevent it from ever happening again. But what if there was no failure involved here, but instead a great success: a concerted effort to divert attention away from Al Qaeda (and toward Iraq) that succeeded – with crucial inside help provided by operatives working in the upper and mid-level echelons of the US government.
These bits of "chatter" were given low priority and left untranslated until September 12. Given what we now know about the threat level at that point, how can such a "glitch" be explained?
In spinning the contents of the declassified PDB, the administration's fallback position is that there is no specific information about a hijacking, or using aircraft as bombs: White House flacks are basically reiterating Rice's testimony. But Edmonds blows their entire case out of the water.
No wonder the commissioners seemed unimpressed by Bad Barbie's suave circumlocutions.
The question of what did the President know and when did he know it is of interest, but the real issue is what didn't he know – and who kept it from him? Which devolves into a more basic inquiry: just who is running the US government, anyway, if anyone?
The administration line is that 9/11 couldn't have been prevented, that it was merely a question of the CIA and the FBI not cooperating, not to mention all those inconvenient obstacles in the way of government agencies snooping and spying. The Bad Barbie avers that 9/11 happened because we didn't have a PATRIOT Act back then, but if Clarke, Edmonds, and their fellow whistleblowers are telling even a semblance of the truth, there's a lot more to it than that.
Edmonds has been speaking out for nearly a year, and her story is now getting major coverage (albeit still mostly in the overseas media) in addition to the respectful attention of the 9/11 Commission. Perhaps this new openness, this glasnost in the field of 9/11 studies, will throw the spotlight on another long-ignored claim that advance warning of 9/11 was in the possession of more than just Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts.
I have covered all of this ground rather extensively in my book, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, but I want to say here what I wasn't quite ready to say at the time the book was written.
It is clear to me that, in the words of the declassified PDB, there is "a pattern of suspicious activity" here that goes beyond anything that might be construed as sheer incompetence and/or bad luck. The amount of fairly high-level obstructionism that occurred in the crucial prelude to 9/11 – the spring and summer of 2001 – that made an effective effort to quash Al Qaeda utterly impossible, is suspicious in and of itself: why didn't the FBI carry out the President's clear orders? Combined with the Edmonds revelations and the Israeli "art student" gambit, what we are faced with is the possibility of an organized effort to create an environment in which the terrorists were not only observed by one or more foreign intelligence agencies, but were protected and nurtured. Our foreign policy, in Iraq and elsewhere, is still nurturing them.
Former counter-terrorism chief Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have both noted how the neoconservative element in this administration sought from the beginning to divert attention away from Al Qaeda and toward Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Our propaganda apparatus churned out "intelligence" that was often crudely faked. The neocon media cranked out war manifestoes with prolific ease, as the US media became the government's echo chamber, and battalions of neocon thinktankers and policy wonks swung into action. While this above-ground army of foreign lobbyists and neoconservative ideologues openly sought to drag us into what they call "World War IV" – a global conflict pitting Islam against the US and Israel – an underground division of the same army had done the necessary spadework, effectively diverting attention away from the 9/11 plotters.
The "Bush knew" crowd may think itself vindicated by recent developments, but, as I have pointed out above, this is hardly the case: more than ever, it seems that Bush didn't know, because he was deliberately kept in the dark. Not that he doesn't have to take ultimate responsibility for what happened on his watch. In any case, the evidence points to some level of foreign involvement, albeit not from Iraq: Turkey and Israel are the main suspects, although, for intelligence purposes, there seems little to distinguish the two.
As we subject the mysterious prehistory of 9/11 to a close reexamination, the official mythology of that seminal event begins to crumble. Behind the phony façade the truth peeks out, shyly, at first, and then with growing confidence. The 19 terrorists who blew up the Pentagon and took down the World Trade Center couldn't have pulled it off alone: they had to have some form of state assistance, if only passive compliance.
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