Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Bush & Blair Knew & Both Went on Vacation; Is the Code Red Terror Alert Legitimate?

host · 08-11-2006, 10:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aladdin Sane

This thread belongs in Paranoia.

MODsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!

If a reporter from a major news network, NBC, on it's website is saying exactly what I'm saying....and MSNBC news anchor, Keith Olbermann, is doing that....
then the theme and context of this thread is "mainstream". Some folks need to adjust to the fact that public opinion has shifted, and put their POV on the "fringe"...

I am providing the following to support the facts that the Bush administration, yesterday, intentionally broadcast a message of fear: 9/11...."nation at war".....as it has for 5 years, to get our attention, distract us, control us.

How would bullshit, fear mongering, propaganda that reminded our grandparents that, "ever since the Pearl Harbor attack....blah....blah....blah...." have been received by the American public;
say.....in November....uhhhh 1946.....four years and eleven months after Pearl Harbor, and fifteen months after the Japanese has surrendered ?

We need results....we hunger for leadership. As the following transcripts show, Mr. Bush's administration knew about this threast for several weeks before yesterday, a liquid bomb attack on an airline almost took place ten years ago, an investigative report concerning the fact that Homeland security was ill prepared to deal with screening for liquid bomb material, was shoen to former 9/11 Commission chairman, Tom Kean, five months ago, and he was reported to be very alarmed at how little progress was being made to detect these liquids.

Why are electronic devices allowed on U.S. planes, but not on British planes?

Why is POTUS Bush on vacation during the highest color coded alert ever issued in the U.S.
Just eleven months ago, as Katrina devastated New Orlean, Bush kept to his vacation schedule;
he visited a hospital in San Diego, he played guitar before the news cameras, he stopped in Arizona to share a birthday cake with John McCain, and finally, he flew over the Katrina impact area, as he ended his vacation....on schedule. Yesterday, he was able to fly to Wisconsin to attend a politcal fundraiser.....make a two minute statement about the absurd descripition of "Islamic Fascists", but the only time he has ever interrupted a sojourn at his Crawford ranch, that I know of, was to fly to Washington in the middle of a saturday night, to sign an unconstitutional law that pre-empted Michael Schiavo's custody of his brain dead wife.

I lived on Manhattan on 9/11. I put aside my furstration over the way Bush came into office after the Florida non-recount. It was uplifting to the spirit and brought hope to all of us who saw Bush speaking from atop the rubble that was, just days before, the WTC towers.

Mr. Bush lost me....I didn't lose him. Where is the progress after his promises? Empty, partisan , rhetoric is all that I see coming from this man....I can't believe anything that he or his appointees tell us. The Invasion of Iraq and the Katrina response are all any of us should need to make up our minds as to whether we trust Mr. Bush to lead us on substance, or on feelings.
There is no substance....there hasn't been any since he stayed in that classroom on 9/11. The only man in the country authorized to order the "shoot down" of an airliner that had become a potential weapon, sat glued to his seat with a "deer in the headlights" look on his face, and then did not leave an elementary school full of children, for a full half hour after the second plane had hit the WTC.

The "fringe" position here folks, is the belief that one can trust and support this U.S. leadership and still be in the "mainstream". The country has moved on from that POV. Welcome to the "fringe"!

Quote:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5634298
U.S. Authorities Brief Media on U.K. Plot

NPR.org, August 10, 2006 ·
CHERTOFF: Good morning. We'd like to provide you with the latest information we have on recent events in the United Kingdom and an update on the actions that we are taking to protect our citizens and to keep air travel safe and secure. We want to be as open as possible with the public about the facts.

......First of all, the United States government has raised the nation's threat level to our highest level of alert, severe, or red, for commercial flights originating in the United Kingdom and bound for the United States. We've made this adjustment to coordinate our alert level with that that is currently enforced in Britain. In Britain, as you've heard, they are now operating at their highest level, which is called critical..........

.......Accordingly, we are raising the threat level -- or we have raised the threat level with respect to aviation in general to high, or orange. That will cover all inbound international flights other than flights from Great Britain, and it will cover all flights within the United States itself.........

........And now I'd like to turn to Attorney General Gonzales.

ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES: Thank you, Michael.....

....Now, since 9/11, the threat reporting has consistently shown that there is a vicious and determined enemy that is intent on harming American lives. And every day is September 12th for those of us tasked with protecting America......

.....the entire intelligence community will continue to aggressively pursue every lead and shred of intelligence that arises from this or any other terrorism case. This has been our practice since 9/11, and today is no different from any other day in that sense.......

......As we have stated many times before, we are a nation at war. Today's actions are a stark reminder that the threat is real, and that we have a deadly enemy who still wakes every morning thinking of new ways to kill innocent men, women and children and dreams every night about wrecking the destruction on freedom-loving countries.......

CHERTOFF:.....but the whole point of this exercise is to continue to maintain the level of safety and security in air travel in this country that we have had since September 11th......

....Q: Secretary Chertoff, do you praise British authorities? What do you know about when they learned about this plot? And when did they inform the United States?

CHERTOFF: Let me -- again, I may be a little bit circumspect and say that some of the threads which led to this investigation have been pursued by British authorities for some considerable time. However, it is only recently, certainly within the last two weeks, maybe less, that the investigation revealed that this planning was taking the direction of targeting the United States.

Quote:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14303119/
Updated: 11:40 a.m. ET Aug. 11, 2006
'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for August 10

......OLBERMANN: Massive delays at American airports till further notice, even though there are no indications of any purported plots against domestic flights.

What about the delay in American politics?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This nation is at war with Islamic fascists.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: The president interrupting his vacation, not to reassure the nation nor go back to the capital, but merely to hit a fundraiser in Wisconsin. His press secretary said Mr. Bush knew of the British investigation as early as Sunday. Did his vice president know? His party national committee chair? Does that explain the unbridled rhetoric about the Democrats and the Connecticut Senate primary vote?......

.....Good evening from New York.

At first glance, it appears that British intelligence has thwarted the biggest terror attack since 9/11, discovering a plan, arresting its plotters, aimed at simultaneously blowing up nine different planes headed to the United States from Britain by using the components of liquid explosives smuggled in carry-on luggage by suicide bombers.

But in our fifth story on the COUNTDOWN, how much of the plot was actually operational, how much of it feasible, how much of the reaction political?

Tonight, a rational, but not cynical, look at an extraordinary day. The kind of mixed information we‘re struggling to balance, intelligence officials say the suspects were planning a test run in the next few days, but also that they had only started to look at plane timetables last week. And while police are testing chemicals at one of the suspects‘ homes in England, it is unclear whether the suspects actually had explosives yet.

But news of the arrests caused mass chaos, one way or the other, in airports on both sides of the Atlantic, all flights from Britain to the United States on red alert, hundreds of them canceled, passengers in England not allowed any hand luggage, only allowed to put necessities, but no liquids, into clear plastic bags to carry on board.

On our shores, commuters also told to ditch all liquids, except medicine and baby formula, even though there is no evidence of any reverse plot to put explosives on U.S. planes heading towards the U.K., nor anything domestic at all....

....For the past several days, the FBI has feverishly looked for any potential ties to people in the U.S., but has so far found none.

ROBERT MUELLER, DIRECTOR, FBI: We literally, in the last couple of weeks, have had hundreds of FBI agents around the country tracking down every lead. And we have not found, to date, any plotters here in the United States...

For more on the mechanics of the alleged plot, I‘m joined by MSNBC‘s terrorism analyst Roger Cressey, former director of the National Security Council staff.

Thanks again for your time, Roger.

ROGER CRESSEY, FORMER DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL: Good to see you, Keith.

OLBERMANN: Analyze the mechanics of this. Liquid explosives made from common household items, then mixed, detonated mid-flight. There are lot of questions about this. Would the liquid explosives remain stable until they were supposed to be used? How long? How many people would it take to detonate them? Obviously, these are parts of one big question. Was it technically feasible?

CRESSEY: The answer is yes, precedent setting from the 1990s, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center attack in 1993, conducted attacks on airlines in the Pacific using nitroglycerin with a detonator. That worked. The type of solutions they were going to combine, probably things like TATP, which is an explosive—a peroxide-based explosive that terrorist groups have been using for some time. And you combine it with a blasting cap, which would be relatively easy to put on board. Yes, technologically, it‘s definitely feasible.

OLBERMANN: Easier or more complicated than a shoe bomb? And easier or more complicated than a shoe bomber was to stop?

CRESSEY: More complicated than a shoe bomber, because there are more moving pieces. You have to bring all the pieces on individually and assemble it on the plane, which would have been somewhat challenging, but not impossible.

Easier to stop, in the sense that you‘ve got more moving pieces, so there‘s more opportunities for something to go wrong. So, you know, higher-end risk for the terrorists, but higher-end benefit, given the type of explosions they could have conducted.

OLBERMANN: You mentioned Ramzi Yousef, the guy behind the World Trade Center first bombing in 1993. Congressman DiFazio of Oregon pointed this out that he tried this, as you mentioned again, in the thing that wound up blowing up a Japanese man about 10 years ago. I can‘t bring a soda bottle or a water bottle into a baseball stadium. How come I have not been banned from bringing liquids on planes for the last 10 years?

CRESSEY: Well, I think this question‘s going to get a lot of attention in the coming days, because the security structure we have in place at the airports is not designed to deal with this type of threat.

The scanning equipment is looking for other things. The TSA administrator

I‘m sorry, the TSA officials are trained for other type of things to look at.

So there is a gap in our security regarding these type of potential materials, and we need to have a real close look at how we can fix it.

OLBERMANN: The mechanics of unraveling what kind of plot this was, whatever kind of plot it was, suspects don‘t have an established link to al Qaeda that we know of, but the British knew about this, not for days or weeks, but for months, that they were following these guys. They made a conscious decision, Roll this up right now. Does that suggest to you, from your experience, that there were informants inside the plot?

CRESSEY: I think it‘s either going to be informants inside the plot, some form of electronic surveillance, or maybe surveillance through the Internet. But the fact that they were able to identify them early on in their process and follow them makes me believe there was a human element here.

The good news, Keith, is that these guys were close to the execution phase. Whether or not they would have been successful, we wouldn‘t know, and hopefully, thankfully, we wouldn‘t find out. But they were close enough, and they were serious enough, that it seemed like the right time to disrupt them.

OLBERMANN: There‘s a report just coming in from “TIME” magazine that although the Brits have been looking at this for months, that after MI-5 had tracked these guys all this time, that it was the U.S. that picked up chatter and contact, essentially suggested to Great Britain that it was time to move. Now, does that tell you anything about the process by which this was rolled up?

CRESSEY: Well, I think the real issue here is going to be the role of Pakistan and al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, because as much as this was a home-grown threat, British-born Pakistanis, there was a Pakistan element to it, and that means probably al Qaeda.

So one theory, then, would be, based on the “TIME” magazine report, electronic intercepts, things like that, and a potential go-signal that was given from Pakistan to the plotters to begin their process. If that‘s the case, then we have a stronger al Qaeda connection than we had at the beginning of the day.

OLBERMANN: Lastly, credibility. I don‘t mean to suggest in the slightest that this was made up out of thin air, but we have seen time and time again, we have talked about this, instances of earth-shaking terrorist plots being announced, genuine fear being built in this country and other countries, and it turns out later the plotters were nowhere near as ready nor as sophisticated as originally advertised.

I‘m thinking of the morons in Florida who couldn‘t tell the difference between an al Qaeda agent and an FBI plant. The—their informants, they seem to (INAUDIBLE) looked less like spies and more like enablers, even entrappers.

Your best guess on this. Are you unequivocally sure that this was different than your standard thing that we‘ve heard about for the last nearly five years?

CRESSEY: I haven‘t seen the intelligence reports, so I‘m never unequivocally sure anymore. But based on what we learned today, I think this was the real deal. These weren‘t a bunch of clowns sitting around the mosque trying to decide (INAUDIBLE) undertake jihad on their own. The scope and the magnitude of what they were trying to do has all the hallmarks of an al Qaeda-inspired or maybe an al Qaeda-directed operation.

And lastly, Keith, the British, frankly, are a little more—are better than us when it comes to the credibility question. So I‘ll trust them.

OLBERMANN: Counterterrorism expert Roger Cressey. As always, Roger, great thanks for your time tonight.

CRESSEY: Thanks, Keith.

OLBERMANN: We do not know what‘s true and what‘s not, we do not know how serious this purported threat was or is. But this we do know, air travel in this country today was one collective long, long nervous wait in line.

And for four years and 11 months, national security has been the favorite political club of the current administration. So would it be a surprise that even before this latest news broke, we were getting the spin on it from Washington?

You are watching COUNTDOWN on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

OLBERMANN: It may be days, weeks, even longer before the full details of the alleged airline terror plot are sketched out for us, including just how imminent and realistic the threat was or is.

The impact on flying, domestic and international, no delay in nailing that.

Our fourth story on the COUNTDOWN tonight, no problems in the skies today, but on the ground, chaos. New airport screening rules are now in effect in the U.S., the Transportation Security Administration prohibiting passengers from carrying liquids or gels on board, with limited exceptions. More on that presently from our correspondent, Tom Costello.

But it stands in contrast to rules in Britain. There, everything must now be checked, except for necessities like money and travel documents, which are placed into clear plastic bags. If detonation of a homemade device is the concern, it‘s unclear why electronics have also not been banned on U.S. flights.

To Tom Costello now. He is at Reagan National Airport in Washington.

Tom, good evening.

TOM COSTELLO, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: Keith, good evening to you.

And, in fact, this is the notice that, if you are flying today, you very may well have gotten. It says, “Effective immediately, passengers may not have liquids or gels, including beverages, shampoos, suntan lotion, creams, toothpaste, and hair gel.” You can‘t put toothpaste in your carry-on any more.

Well, as you can imagine, this new directive, affecting every airport nationwide, caused massive security backups today, and in some cases, those backups exceeded two hours.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

......Keith, back to you.

OLBERMANN: Tom, as you pointed out, no liquid, no toothpaste. Why, unlike the British, no ban on electronics?

COSTELLO: Yes, you can still bring your iPod, you could still bring your laptop. And theoretically, one of the theories in terms of how they would have detonated a device, involved electronics.

At some point, this becomes a very serious conversation about, where does it end? If you can‘t bring toothpaste, if you can‘t bring your Visine or your contact lenses, if you can‘t listen to an iPod, at some point, there is going to be a very big discussion in this country about how much we are truly giving up.

OLBERMANN: Selfish question. I‘m flying in the morning. I know I‘m not supposed to be alone out there. What are all of us expecting for delays at security? Any estimate, based on what we saw today? Should I leave now and let you finish this newscast?

COSTELLO: I would suggest—yes, that is exactly what I was going to suggest. I would say at least two hours. Based on what I saw this morning, I frankly would give myself three hours. I think it‘s going to take a while to kind of work this whole thing out. At the moment, I would say two to three hours. Hopefully by Monday, it eases up a bit.

OLBERMANN: Tom Costello at Reagan National Airport in Washington for us. Great thanks for staying with us.

COSTELLO: OK.

OLBERMANN: The TSA says it was sent scrambling to enact the new rules banning the liquids overnight, even though a federal investigation proved months ago just how easy it would be to smuggle such explosives past the screeners.

And could it just be coincidence that the president finds about this plot, then his vice president and the Republican chairman start slamming Democrats for being soft on terror, then the public is informed about the plot? Could it really be just coincidence?....

...OLBERMANN: Today, after British officials revealed the latest alleged plot, after they had arrested two dozen suspects, the U.S. government banned passengers from bringing any liquids, not counting medicine and baby formula, aboard domestic flights.

If today‘s events make you wonder whether we might again be accused of being too focused on yesterday‘s threats rather than anticipating tomorrow‘s, you would not be alone.

Five months ago, our senior investigative correspondent, Lisa Myers, wanted to find out how the government was dealing with the then-anticipated threat of explosive components smuggled on board. And, more than a decade ago, Ramzi Yousef concocted a plot of mixing his own liquid explosives in mid-flight and blowing up or crippling a series of airliners over an ocean.

None of this is new, as a second look at Lisa‘s report from March of this year suggests.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LISA MYERS, MSNBC CHIEF INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over):

Imagine this, inside a passenger plane. Government sources tell NBC NEWS that federal investigators recently were able to carry materials needed to make a similar homemade bomb through security screening at 21 airports. In all 21 airports tested, no machine, no swab, no screener anywhere stopped the bomb materials from getting through. Even when investigators deliberately triggered extra screening of bags, no one stopped these materials.

We briefed Governor Tom Kean, chair of the 9/11 commission, on the results.

TOM KEAN, CHAIR, 9/11 COMMISSION: I‘m appalled and dismayed, and, yes, to a degree, it does surprise me, because I thought the Department of Homeland Security was making some progress on this, and evidently they‘re not.

MYERS: Investigators for the Government Accountability Office conducted the tests between October and January at the request of Congress. The goal, determine how vulnerable U.S. airlines are to a suicide bomber using cheap, readily available materials.

Investigators found recipes for homemade bombs from easily available public sources and bought chemicals and other materials over the counter.

(On camera): For security reasons, NBC will not reveal any of the ingredients or the airports tested. The report itself is classified. But Lee Hamilton, the vice chair of the 9/11 commission, says the fact that so many airports failed this test is a hugely important story, which the American traveler is entitled to know.

(Voice-over): NBC NEWS asked a bomb technician to gather the same materials and assemble an explosive device to determine its power. The materials for this bomb fit in the palm of one hand. We showed the results to Leo West, a former FBI bomb expert.

LEO WEST, FORMER FBI BOMB EXPERT: Well, potentially, an explosion of that type could lead to the destruction of the aircraft.

MYERS: The Transportation Security Administration would not comment on the tests but tells NBC NEWS that “detecting explosive materials and IEDs is TSA‘s top priority.”

The agency also says screeners are now receiving added training to help identify these materials. Not soon enough for Tom Kean.

KEAN: They need to do it yesterday, because we haven‘t got time.

MYERS: Given hardened cockpit doors and other improvements, experts say explosives now are the gravest threat posed by terrorists in the sky.

Lisa Myers, NBC NEWS, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OLBERMANN: That was in March on this broadcast, no outcry from the administration then. Heavy politicizing now, now that there is an apparently obvious threat from liquid explosives. We‘ll truth-squad the politics of the terror threat..

....OLBERMANN: If you have any trouble following your government‘s position on terror and your safety, let‘s clear it all up right now. In our third story on the COUNTDOWN.

<h3>A year ago on July 4 the president made it very clear that we are safe here at home thanks to his war in Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We‘re taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: However, if you think that means that we don‘t have to face them here at home, as the president said today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America.</h3>

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Now, where would anybody have gotten such an idea? And as the time line of the revelation of the purported liquid explosives airline plot becomes clearer, the political facts are underscored. You can say, without fear of contradiction that there is a political component to all this. The president had the details from London no later than Sunday, so when Republican Committee Chair Ken Mehlman and Vice President Dick Cheney eviscerated Connecticut Democrats for choosing Ned Lamont over Senator Joe Lieberman and brought al Qaeda into the equation they, at minimum, knew a terror act would be breaking shortly. Did the press secretary know it when he threw the president‘s own father under the wheels of the bus of history, last night?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

<h3>TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: The real question for the American people to ask themselves is: Do you take the war on terror seriously? With all the developments going on around the world, and if so, how do you fight it to win? There seem to be two approaches, and in the Connecticut race one of the approaches is ignore the difficulties and walk away.</h3> Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of the—of Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn‘t stay the course and that led to September 11.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Not surprisingly, today Mr. Snow was asked off camera, “Did you all know that this was going to break today, yesterday, when there was this massive response to the Connecticut primary, discussion of terrorism, al Qaeda?” A yes or no question. Mr. Snow‘s answer was neither, “I don‘t want to get into operational details. This was not—however, it was not explicit—let me put it this way, I don‘t want to encourage that line of thought. I don‘t think it‘s fully accurate, but I also don‘t want—I know it‘s frustrating, but we really don‘t want to get too much into who knew what, where, when.”

<h3>About a minute later, responding to a nonpolitical question, Mr. Snow let slip that Mr. Bush approved the red-alert status yesterday.</h3> ("host"adds....that would be on Aug. 9...)

Joining us now to help us measure the political element here that we mentioned, Jonathan Alter, NBC political analyst, also of “Newsweek,” also the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR‘s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.”

Jonathan, good evening.

JONATHAN ALTER, NBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Good evening, Keith.

OLBERMANN: Let us start with the strange statement from the president of making the mistake of thinking there‘s no threat against us. Who is he saying made that mistake? And at what point did they make it?

ALTER: Well, it‘s innuendo, you know, he‘s trying to implying that people who disagree with this policy on Iraq are somehow soft on terrorism. That‘s their game. That‘s the only card, politically, that they have to play. They play it extremely well. It did extremely well for them in both the 2002 and 2004 elections and they‘re going to play it again hard this year.....

......OLBERMANN: But, Roger Cressey put this neatly earlier and he‘s far less prone to calling a foul on this than am I. This administration has set the bar so low when it comes to trumpeting its terror arrests, he said, so we have a bit of a credibility gap here. This is the greatest threat since 9/11, the discovery of the recon photos of the financial buildings in New York and D.C. that was the greatest threat since 9/11, the rock-hard evidence of flights from Europe that were to be crashed into Vegas at Christmas time 2003, that was the greatest threat since 9/11. Is there a point at which most people start doubting the idea that no government would ever dream of scaring its own people unnecessarily?

ALTER: Well, you know, you mentioned my FDR book. I mean, I sometimes think the motto that these folks have is the only thing we have to “use” is fear itself. It works well for them. And yes, they do exploit it. You didn‘t even mention all the cases—you had John Ashcroft in Moscow at one point, I believe in 2002, you know, trumping something up from thousands of miles away.

OLBERMANN: The arrest of Padilla, yes.

ALTER: Yeah, so you‘ve got a whole series of events, but you know, in the same way that even paranoids have real enemies, even people who are exploiting things politically are still confronting a serious terrorism threat, and if Democrats don‘t want to be thrown into the briar patch on this issue again, they will be very careful to make sure that they don‘t, in the interest of scoring political points, forget that there are people out there who want to kill us and we‘ve got to keep that in mind.

OLBERMANN: So, let‘s also point one last finger here towards the media, ourselves, buying into the whole thing whole-hog, terror in the skies on the graphics on TV, but the Web sites and the newspapers have not been far behind. What about the role of the media in authenticating that for which we have only the word of two governments and no other evidence of our own?

ALTER: Well, I think at a certain level, the media always has to give the government, in this kind of case, the benefit of the doubt at first, then go back and ask a lot of hard questions, which you‘ve started quite appropriately to do here tonight, but to assume from the get go that the government is lying about security matters I think would be an excessively cynical posture, so that the key thing for the media is to perform that accountability function, so for instance, I don‘t know how many people, you know, know this, but air cargo—in other words, the cargo that‘s beneath everybody when they‘re on a plane is not checked in the united—less than 10 percent of it is checked, so we have these other huge security gaps, and it‘s the media‘s jobs to ask all the tough questions on all these issues.

OLBERMANN: Skeptical, not cynical.

ALTER: Exactly.

OLBERMANN: We‘ll try. Jonathan Alter of “Newsweek” and NBC NEWS, great thanks for your time, sir.

ALTER: Thanks, Keith.