“The Commission” by Philip Shenon on the Bush Administration’s Ignoring of 9/11 Warnings

[Time for change]

Philip Shenon’s recent book, “The Commission – The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation”, has been widely touted for its revelation that the Commission’s Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, greatly influenced the results of the investigation through his role as White House mole. Zelikow makes an excellent case for that in his book.

But an even more important issue covered in Shenon’s book is the stark and unexplained efforts made by the Bush administration to ignore all warnings of the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks have committed our nation to a monumentally expensive – in terms of human life, loss of our civil rights and international respect, and money – “War on Terror”, with no clear end in sight. Therefore, the Bush administration’s efforts to ignore the warnings of the attacks deserve close scrutiny. This post explores those efforts, as well as the 9/11 Commission’s failure to adequately deal with them, largely drawing from Shenon’s book.


HOW THE COMMISSION SELF-RESTRICTED ITS OWN INVESTIGATION

No discussion of the 9/11 Commission’s failure to document the Bush administration’s failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks would be complete without consideration of how the Commission tied its own hands in its efforts to placate the Bush administration:


Philip Zelikow as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission

At the heart of the Commission’s placating of the Bush administration was its choosing of Philip Zelikow as the Commission’s Executive Director. Zelikow made sure that he was in control of all aspects of the Commission’s work, especially those aspects involving the accountability of the Bush White House for the 9/11 attacks. Many would argue that Zelikow had more influence on the Commission’s final report than any of the commissioners, including the two co-chairmen, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.

I won’t go into the abundant evidence that Zelikow functioned as a White House mole during the investigation, which is thoroughly detailed in Shenon’s book. Suffice it here to recount Zelikow’s relationship to the Bush administration prior to his being named Executive Director of the Commission, which in itself should have disqualified him from his position on the basis of conflicts of interest.

Zelikow’s most well known conflict of interest was his close association with Condoleezza Rice, with whom he had previously co-authored a book. Since Rice’s activities prior to 9/11 clearly were a primary focus of the investigation, that placed Zelikow in a position of investigating his good friend.

Zelikow was also a member of George W. Bush’s transition team. Shenon explains the importance of that fact:

(Richard) Clarke understood that with Zelikow in charge, there was no hope that the commission would carry out an impartial investigation of the Bush administration’s bungling of terrorist threats in the months before September 11… It was not just that Zelikow was a close friend of Rice’s from the First Bush presidency. That was the least of it… Clarke wondered if the commission understood that it was Zelikow who, in his work on Bush’s transition team in early 2001, had been the architect of the demotion of Clarke and his counterterrorism team within the NSC…

In other words, Zelikow as Executive Director would be in a position to investigate the role that he himself played in marginalizing the Bush administration’s most aggressive advocates for taking the terrorist threat seriously.

And lastly, there is that fact that Zelikow, in his role on the Bush transition team, was the primary author of a paper that justified preemptive war, which the Bush administration used a few months later to justify its invasion of Iraq.

Kean and Hamilton presumably did not know much of this history when they hired Zelikow. However, after finding out about it very early in the investigation, they chose to keep him on.


Decision not to subpoena high ranking people

Another important decision that contributed to the failure of the 9/11 Commission to uncover the truth was the decision by the commissioners to not issue subpoenas to certain high ranking officials. The routine issuing of subpoenas should have been a no-brainer. Shenon describes the opinions of the Commission’s Democratic commissioners – with the exception of Lee Hamilton – on that issue:

To Jamie Gorelick, it was obvious: Every request made to the Bush administration for documents or other information should include a subpoena. Subpoenas did not have to be seen as threatening if they were used routinely, she argued: a subpoena was simply evidence of the commission’s determination to get what it needed. She explained there was a “nice” way of doing it… If the commission held off on subpoenas until late in the investigation, she warned, there would be no time to go to court to enforce them. The other Democrats, apart from Hamilton, agreed.

Shenon describes Kean and Hamilton’s attitude on this issue:

But Kean and Hamilton had already made up their minds on this issue, too. There would be no routine subpoenas, they decreed; subpoenas would be seen as too confrontational, perhaps choking off cooperation from the Bush administration…

And not only would the commissioners refuse to issue subpoenas to George Bush and Dick Cheney, but they even gave in to Bush’s demand that he and Cheney talk with the Commission together. That, of course, would ensure that their stories didn’t conflict with each other.

In other words, though the Commission was charged with investigating the events that led up to the 9/11 attacks, they allowed those who were most responsible for those events to dictate crucial rules of the investigation.


Allowing Condoleezza Rice to “run out the clock”

By the time that Condoleezza Rice finally agreed to testify before the 9/11 Commission, she had a lot to answer for. Most important was her failure to take the terrorist threat seriously prior to 9/11. Shenon explains that on the subject of terrorism:

Either she committed nothing to paper or e-mail on the subject… or terrorist threats were simply not an issue that had interested her before 9/11. Her speeches and public appearances in the months before the attacks suggested the latter… Bin laden’s terrorist network was seen by Rice as only a secondary threat, barely worth mentioning…

But if Rice had left almost no paper trail on terrorism in 2001… Clarke wrote down much of what he saw and heard at the White House, almost to the point of obsession when it came to al-Qaeda… a rich narrative of what had gone so wrong at the NSC in the months before 9/11… Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden… But Rice rebuffed Clarke… She told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing (of Bush) could wait… She pushed Clarke so far away from the center of power that his warnings through 2001 about an imminent terrorist attack could be – and were – ignored.

Given Richard Clarke’s accusations about Rice’s refusal to take terrorism seriously, and given the Presidential Daily Brief of August 6th, titled “Bin laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.”, the Commission had a lot of questions to ask of Rice. In particular, they wanted to know if she had notified the Bush administration of the threat prior to August 6th, and why the administration did so little to prepare against an attack even after August 6th. Yet the Commission’s rules limited itself terribly. Shenon explains:

The commission had promised to limit her testimony to a single appearance… Given the time constraints, Rice’s strategy was an obvious one… With the more aggressive Democrats, she would try to run out the clock – talk and talk and talk, giving them no chance to ask follow-up questions before the ten minutes that each of the commissioners had been allotted had run out.

THE AUGUST 6 DAILY PRESIDENTIAL BRIEF (PDB)

Rice’s testimony before the commission on the unimportance of the August 6 PDB

Condoleezza Rice did indeed run out the clock. In response to Democratic commissioner and former Senator Bob Kerrey’s questions about this issue, Shenon describes Rice’s response:

She returned to the point she had tried to make so often before – that the warnings of an attack were so vague in 2001 that there was little for domestic agencies to respond to. “You have no time, you have no place, you have no how”, she said. But Kerry knew that was not true. The August 6 PDB had specified that al-Qaeda was considering domestic hijackings and that there were warnings of terrorist surveillance of buildings in New York. There was a place. There was a how.

No matter. The end result of Rice’s ‘run out the clock’ strategy, according to Shenon, was “By the end of the hearings it seemed a draw”.


The confusing testimony of George Tenet

Of course, Rice wasn’t the only person who had knowledge of the content and importance of the August 6th PDB. The PDB originated from the CIA. Perhaps the CIA Director, George Tenet, could shed some light on the situation.

But Tenet was of no help to the Commission on this issue. At first he steadfastly and incredibly maintained that he did not talk to President Bush during the whole month of August. Then it came out that he had visited Bush at his Crawford ranch in August 2001.

Given the title of the August 6th PDB and what the Commission knew of its content, it was of course not believable that Tenet had not talked to Bush about it during the whole month of August. It was similarly unbelievable that he could not recall making a trip to Crawford Texas to visit with Bush at his ranch, even though it was his first such trip. And finally, the believability of all this is further put into question by the fact that Tenet notes in his memoirs of 2007, “At the Center of the Storm”, that “A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events”.

So, what was going on with Tenet? Shenon makes a big deal about his unreliability as a witness, saying that the commissioners concluded that either he was perjuring himself to the commission, or else his memory was faulty to the point of dementia.

But it seems to me that there is a very simple explanation, strangely not discussed by Shenon: Tenet was in a terrible bind. If he admitted to his August 2001 discussions with Bush about the terrorist threat, that would be a stark indictment of the Bush administration’s failure to take any steps to address that threat. It was an election year, and Tenet was still working for the Bush administration at the time. It would have taken a good deal of courage to tell the truth. But by 2007, when Tenet finished his memoirs, protecting the Bush administration was no longer a priority for him.


Last minute revelations by the CIA about the August 6th PDB

So, it came down to the last days prior to the due date for the Commission’s report, and the Commission still had no conclusions regarding the Bush administration’s failure to respond to numerous warnings about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It was at this point that Zelikow was overheard by one of the Commission’s staffers breaking the Commission’s rules by trying to obtain information from the CIA authors of the August 6th PDB, on his own, in the absence of any witnesses. According to the staffer who heard Zelikow, he used leading questions in an attempt to elicit a response that would clear the Bush administration of blame for its failure to respond to the warnings in the August 6th PDB.

When the rest of the Commission found out about this, some demanded the opportunity to talk to the PDB authors themselves. Zelikow vigorously fought that request, saying that the authors of the PDB were very reluctant to discuss the issue further. But that was one argument that Zelikow lost. Arrangements were made to talk to the PDB authors, “Barbara S” and “Dwayne D”. Here is Shenon’s account of what the Commission found out:

Barbara S. and Dwayne D. were as confused and appalled as anyone over the repeated claims by Rice and others at the White House that the August 6 PDB was simply a “historical” overview of domestic terrorist threats… It was meant to remind President Bush that al-Qaeda remained a dire threat in August 2001 and that a domestic attack was a distinct possibility…

Despite Zelikow’s earlier claim that they had been reluctant to be interviewed the two analysts were willing, even eager, to answer questions about the PDB… Ben-Viste came quickly to understand what Zelikow had been so nervous about: They were contradicting Condoleezza Rice. Despite Rice’s claim that Bush had effectively ordered up the PDB, supposedly a sign of how concerned the president had been about terrorist threats that summer, Barbara S. and Dwayne D. said the PDB was ordered up “in-house” at the CIA in hopes that the White House would pay more attention to the threat…

The PDB was meant to tell the president that the threat was current. The president, they said, should have taken no comfort from the passages in the document – written in the present tense – that referred to “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

No matter. As a result of Zelikow’s vehement objections, that information never made it into the Commission’s report.


SEPTEMBER 11: THE FAILURE TO INTERCEPT FLIGHT 77

Of the many failures of the Bush administration on 9/11 itself, one of the strangest was its failure to intercept Flight 77 before it hit the Pentagon. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) testified to the 9/11 Commission that they notified the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) at 9:24 a.m. that Flight 77 was hijacked. NORAD verified that claim in a press release on September 18th, and further verified it in testimony at the 9/11 hearings twenty months later. The question therefore arises as to why NORAD didn’t immediately give an order to scramble planes to intercept Flight 77, since there was still plenty of time to do so. Indeed, since standard operating procedure would require that action, and since that would be the course of action expected of a military intent on preventing an attack on its capital city, the failure of the U.S. military to intercept Flight 77 is a major reason why many people believe that… well, that efforts by the U.S. military to stop the attacks were... not very enthusiastic.


Kean and Hamilton’s explanation

But Kean and Hamilton claim that the FAA lied about their account of Flight 77 in their testimony before the 9/11 Commission, especially with regard to their claim that the FAA notified NORAD at 9:24 that Flight 77 had been hijacked. In their own book, “Without Precedent – The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission”, Kean and Hamilton explain:

Yet our staff determined that there was no notification to NORAD that American 77 was a hijacking before the crash time at 9:37; instead, at 9:34, there was notification that American 77 was lost ….

These inaccurate notification times explained in part the military’s puzzling account of its own actions on 9/11… At 9:24, NORAD scrambled air force jets from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, directing them to fly east over the Atlantic Ocean… NORAD claimed that the Langley jets were scrambled in pursuit of United 93 and American 77. Yet that was impossible. At 9:24, NORAD had not yet been notified that American 77 had been hijacked…

So why were air force jets scrambled from Langley at 9:24? … Our staff found that the people at NEADS had been told that American 11 had turned and was headed south toward Washington, when in fact American 11 had already crashed into the World Trade Center. The air force jets from Langley were thus pursuing a phantom aircraft – American 11, not United 93 or American 77.

Get it? In order to explain why NORAD gave an order to scramble jets from Langley at 9:24 (immediately after being notified of the missing Flight 77, according to NORAD) and why planes were up in the air by 9:30, and yet made no attempt intercept Flight 77, Kean and Hamilton claim that NORAD was responding NOT to notification of Flight 77 heading to Washington from the west, but rather to a phantom plane coming from the north. And furthermore, to explain why those planes were nowhere in the vicinity by the time that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37, they claim that NORAD mistakenly ordered the planes to fly east over the Atlantic Ocean.

Other than the sheer “Alice in Wonderland” aura of that account, there are numerous additional problems with it. I won’t get into those problems here, but if you’re interested you can read about them in this post, in the section titled “Several problems with Kean and Hamilton’s account”.


Norm Mineta’s account of the few minutes prior to Flight 77 striking the Pentagon

It just so happened that the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Norman Minetta, was having a conversation with Dick Cheney at the time that Flight 77 was barreling towards the Pentagon. He testified before the 9/11 Commission as to what he observed that day. Here is Mineta’s account:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

What orders were the “young man” and Cheney referring to? Kean and Hamilton claim that the FAA never notified anyone of the hijacking of Flight 77. It seems that the failure of the Bush administration to respond to warnings of terrorist attacks in the months preceding 9/11 were repeated on 9/11 itself.


OTHER EVIDENCE OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S DISINTEREST IN TERRORISM PRIOR TO 9/11

Senator Rudman’s account

Former Republican Senator Warren Rudman knew something about the Bush administration’s response to warnings of the 9/11 attacks, as described by Shenon:

Rudman had firsthand knowledge of how little attention the Bush administration had paid to domestic terrorist threats before 9/11. He had tried to deliver some of those warnings himself to President Bush in early 2001 and, to Rudman’s astonishment, was rebuffed…

Throughout the Clinton administration, Rudman had been one of the Republican members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which meant he had been briefed in detail by the CIA about the al-Qaeda threat… Rudman had been co-chairman of a Pentagon-chartered commission on terrorist threats that released a report in January 2001 that predicted a catastrophic terrorist strike on American soil… Rudman had wanted to share those findings with President Bush… But he could not get past Condoleezza Rice… She met with Rudman at the White House, heard his presentations about the committee’s findings, and agreed to pass on his request to see the president. After that, Rudman heard nothing… He contacted Rice’s office again several more times to push for a meeting with Bush… The new president was described as being too busy with other, more pressing issues.

The Zaccarias Moussaoui connection

Another account of totally unexplained lack of interest in terrorist threats by the Bush administration prior to 9/11 comes from Minneapolis FBI agent Colleen Rowley. Minneapolis FBI agents were suspicious that Moussaoui posed a terrorist threat, largely because he sought flight training while expressing no interest in learning how to takeoff or land a plane. Here are excerpts from a memo from Rowley to FBI Director Robert Mueller, in which Rowley describes how FBI headquarters obstructed the efforts of the Minneapolis FBI to obtain a search warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer:

The fact is that key FBI Headquarters personnel whose job it was to assist and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations and the obtaining and use of FISA searches continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis' by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant, long after the French intelligence service provided its information and probable cause became clear. HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause. In all of their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of Al Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes!

Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law enforcement authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass the FBI HQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook to directly notify the CIA's Counter Terrorist Center, FBI HQ personnel actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval!

Comparisons with the Clinton administration’s efforts against terrorism

In chapter 56, the third to the last chapter in his book, Shenon sums up the findings of the commission with respect to comparison of the relative interests in terrorism of the Clinton and Bush administrations prior to 9/11:

The staff uncovered dozens of instances in which Clinton addressed terrorism, which he described as “the enemy of our generation”… Bush, by comparison, almost never mentioned terrorism in his public speeches… both on the 2000 campaign trail and after he became president. When Bush did refer to it, it was usually in the context of… how it demonstrated the need for a missile defense system against rogue states like North Korea, Iran, or Iraq.

CONCLUSIONS

Thus it is clear that the Bush administration was warned on multiple occasions prior to 9/11, and by multiple sources, of the dangers of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Yet in case after case, little or no interest was expressed in those warnings, and nothing was done in response to them. Even on the day of 9/11 itself, the same pattern seemed to hold. So evident are the numerous warnings and failures to respond to them that the very BEST interpretation that could reasonably be given to the Bush administration is that it failed miserably in its (non)-attempt to prevent the worst attack on U.S. soil since 1814.

Yet despite all that, the 9/11 Commission was determined to present a “balanced” report that would not “point fingers” and would do no damage to the Bush administration. Shenon notes in the last three chapters of his book:

The team could see that a direct comparison between the two presidents would annoy, maybe even infuriate, the Bush White House… Zelikow insisted that it (the comparisons between Clinton and Bush) come out – all of it… Zelikow was not backing down, and the comparison between Bush and Clinton came out of the final draft…

Much as the staff felt beaten down by Zelikow, so did the other Democratic commissioners. By the end, they had given up the fight to document the more serious failures of Bush, Rice, and others in the administration in the months before 9/11. Zelikow would never have permitted it. Nor, they realized, would Kean and Hamilton…

The commission’s report did not make the accusation that the White House had most feared: that Bush and his administration had mishandled terrorist threats before 9/11.

[valerief]

1. I don't think the WH ignored them. I think they sat back and enjoyed them.

You know, just relaxing and waiting for the fireworks show to start.

[Time for change]

4. Yes, I agree

I think if you read between the lines of this post it will be evident that that's what I am saying. Or rather, not so much that they enjoyed it (though I don't doubt that), but rather that the effort it took to "ignore" the warnings was so great that it had to have been purposeful.

At least, that's the way I tried to write it.

[fascisthunter]

5. They Probably took Bets

on how many Americans would die...

[MetaTrope]

2. The ignored warnings seem less damning to me

than the fact that the Bush administration shut down all tracking of bin Laden's movements and al Qaeda financing within weeks of coming into office.

[glitch]

7. And placed Rumsfeld as a bottleneck to any Norad response.

Any analysis of that move is damning.

[bdf]

11. The Rumsfeld order was the BACKUP plan

The real diversion, and the most damning indictment of all, was the scheduling of two military exercises that day. Exercises that, in the past, were held months apart.

The first exercise put half the US over the border into Canada dealing with a simulated attack by Russian aircraft over the North Pole. Now you know why some in the media bemoaned that the US no longer had enough fighters because they'd cut numbers after the cold war. It was true that there weren't as many fighters as usual but that wasn't because of budget cuts, it was because of Operation Northern Vigilance on that day.

The second exercise dealt with something that Condi Lies 'R' Us claimed to be inconceivable: simultaneous hijacking of aircraft in the north-eastern sector with the object of using them as missiles. Operation Vigilant Guardian.

The damning part comes from who was in charge of both exercises. You'd expect it to be USAF generals, but it wasn't. If not them, then generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it wasn't. If not them, then Rumsfeld (famed for his micromanagement of the Iraq war), but it wasn't. If not him then Dubya (famed for playing dress-up), but it wasn't. It was Richard B Cheney.

The same Cheney who, as Secretary of Defence, asked Paul Wolfowitz (then assistant SecDef for Policy) to draw up a strategy plan in 1992. That plan essentially said "We're the only superpower now, so nobody can prevent us doing whatever we want. Let's invade Iraq and steal its oil, and use it as a staging post for invading the surrounding countries so we can steal their oil."

The same Cheney who was one of the founding members of Project for a New American Century. The other founding members have all been key figures in, or policy advisors to, the Bush maladministration. A group which wrote a letter to Clinton begging him to invade Iraq and steal its oil. A group which released a strategy policy in 2000 which essentially reiterated, and expanded upon, the Wolfowitz 1992 strategy (they expanded it to include the whole world and to cover all types of resources, but also stated that it was primarily about oil). In that document is the smoking gun. A phrase concerning the transformation of the US military into a gang of marauding, pillaging thugs who would go around the world stealing resources:

the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event&emdash;like a new Pearl Harbor.

So, because of their apparent stupidity in ignoring warnings from over 40 intelligence agencies around the world, because they held two military exercises on the same day, and because Osama got incredibly lucky by choosing that day to attack, they got the new Pearl Harbor they had been having wet dreams about for nearly a decade.

It is obvious that Cheney was intimately involved in not only the planning but also the execution of the 9-11 atrocity. It cannot be said too often or too loudly: Cheney fucking did it!.

[Time for change]

12. And there was no mention of this in the 9/11 Commission Report

Nor did Shenon mention it in his book.

Nor did Kean and Hamilton mention it in their book.

[yardwork]

26. Thank you for this great post, and welcome to DU!

[Kaleko]

28. Good, crisp summary, bdf. Appreciated by many here, I'm sure.

[wildbilln864]

3. A definite k&r! nt

:banghead:

[JohnyCanuck]

8. I should say so (as I do both) n/t

[speedoo]

6. Happy to make rec #5.

It's a terrific book. A must read IMO.

[mmm413]

9. This is a great book

The one thing in it that struck me was Tenent insisting that he didn't talk to Bush at all during August of 2001, the same time that Bush received the August 6 PDB. Turned out Tenent saw him TWICE that month. So apparently Bush was so disinterested in the PDB they didn't discuss it. OR, despite his meetings with Tenent, in which it had to have come up, Bush chose to ignore the whole matter.

[noise]

10. Tenet is something else

He blamed watchlisting/cable traffic procedures on CIA failure to alert the FBI that two al Qaeda operatives were in the US. Are we to believe Tenet had no curiosity as to what two al Qaeda operatives were doing in the US? He wouldn't have wanted updates from the FBI? He had time to give urgent briefings to Rice but couldn't spare 5 minutes to call Pickard?

[Time for change]

13. I'm pretty sure the latter is the case

All the evidence points to the fact that Bush had no interest in this subject whatsoever. It was almost as if he wanted the attacks to occur. ;)

[Psyop Samurai]

14. No, no, no!!... It's all those separate agencies...

...and their unwieldy organizational structure that prevented effective communication. Remember too that often really important stuff happens "deep in the bowels" of an agency. How in heaven's name are we to formulate an effective response given the inscrutable nature of bowel movements?

:(

What's needed is to streamline the process with a new department of Homeland Security, which (thanks to plans already drawn up "just in case") has been quickly accomplished. Beyond that, we must dedicate ourselves to the task of implementing the Commission's recommendations. We recognize their selfless dedication, and are thankful for their work which has helped to heal a nation.

:patriot: :hi:

[Time for change]

15. Yes, that's the prevalent view in this country

Due to massive efforts by our corporate media. :(

Well, maybe this will break open some day.
:hi:

[Joanne98]

16. Bush was pre-occupied. He was strutting around his ranch, with his cowboy hat on,

with his chainsaw and his truck, pretending to be Ronald Reagan.

And there was something else he was thinking about. Something both him and Cheney were getting very worried about. It was around that time, that people were beginning to notice there was something funny about Enron..

Enron timeline...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Enron_scandal#2001

June 12 Skilling jokes about the California electricity crisis at a Las Vegas conference.

June 21 Skilling is hit in the face with a pie during a visit to California.

July 13 Chief executive of Enron Broadband Services Ken Rice sells 386,000 Enron shares.

July 23 Enron's stock price closes below $47, a critical point for the Raptor partnerships.

July 27 Director Robert Belfer sells 100,000 Enron shares.

August 7 Officials from a German Enron subsidiary meet with the Dick Cheney energy task force.

August 14 Citing "personal reasons," Skilling resigns as CEO. Lay replaces him, stating "Absolutely no accounting issue, no trading issue, no reserve issue, no previously unknown problem issues" are involved.

August 15 Sherron Watkins, a vice president for corporate development, puts a one-page letter in Lay's suggestion box, questioning Enron's accounting practices.

August 16 Lay discusses Skilling's departure with employees.

August 20 Watkins phones a former co-worker at Arthur Andersen about her worries.

Lay exercises 25,000 share options at $20.78 ($519,000 total value); the stock closes at $36.25. One of Lay's lawyers states later that some of the stock was used to repay an Enron line of credit.

August 21 Lay emails employees, stating "one of my highest priorities is to restore investor confidence in Enron. This should result in a significantly higher stock price."
He exercises 68,620 share options at $21.56 ($1,479,477 total value); the stock closes at $36.88. One of Lay's lawyers states later that Lay never sold the shares, which are now practically worthless.
David B. Duncan, the lead partner on the Enron account for Arthur Andersen, meets with three other AA officials to discuss the Watkins call. A memo states they "agreed to consult our firm's legal adviser about what actions to take."

August 22 Watkins meets with Lay, giving him a seven-page letter stating that Enron may be an "elaborate accounting hoax," and advises him not to involve Vinson & Elkins, Enron's law firm, because of potential conflicts of interest.
V&E is asked if an inquiry is necessary, but told not to bother "second-guessing the accounting advice and treatment."

September 17 Jeffrey Skilling sells 500,000 Enron shares.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Enron_scandal#2001

Notice that on August 7th, Cheney was meeting with Enron.

[Time for change]

29. That's a relevant timeline

And I think there is one more date that is very important:

March 30, 2003: U.S. invades Iraq.

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

17. Bookmarked

- before I even looked at your piece, Time for change.

I knew this would be a keeper and, great work as usual. :hi:

Thanks.

[Time for change]

20. Thank you Sees Clearly

That's very nice of you to say.

:hi:

[Uncle Joe]

18. Well done, Time for change.

Kicked and recommended.

[Time for change]

24. Thank you Uncle Joe

[bleever]

19. What an excellent synopsis.

Recommended, and thank you.

[Time for change]

35. Thank you bleever

I wanted to add some more of my opinions to this, but I was really afraid of having it sent to the dungeon, as were my posts that dealt with David Ray Griffin's book and the book written by Kean and Hamilton.

[Imagevision]

21. The new world order is definitly in play, think I'll pick up a gun...

[robertpaulsen]

22. Why after 7 years do we not even know the IDENTITY of the brave "young man" daring to question Dick?

And yes, what about the fucking orders?

:argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh::argh:

[Time for change]

23. That's an excellent question

Clearly, this is a subject that neither our corporate media nor the 9/11 Commission want discussed. Not even Philip Shenon mentioned it in his book -- perhaps he was told that he couldn't get the book published if he did.

Or maybe the young man is dead, of an unfortunate suicide.

It would be a good question to ask Mineta. Perhaps he knows.

[yardwork]

25. Dismissed by too many people as mere "conspiracy theory."

[Disturbed]

27. It was LIHOP. These criminals didn't even put airlines on

High Alert. The 911 Commission was a Whitewash.

The Busholini Regime is the most criminal & corrupt of any in US History & most of Congress was complicit, as well as the US Corrupt Media.

[puebloknot]

37. In the English alphabet, M follows L. It's not much of a stretch ... nt

[young_at_heart]

30. Under no circumstances must we "annoy" Bush!

"The team could see that a direct comparison between the two presidents would annoy, maybe even infuriate, the Bush White House."

[Time for change]

32. Yes, thank God they didn't do that!

:banghead:

[Kurovski]

31. K&R. (nt)

[puebloknot]

33. K&R Thanks for a great compilation of this important information.

LIHOP and MIHOP are sisters under the skin. Merely carelessly letting it happen is criminal. Orchestrating it is another level of criminality.

There are too many unanswered questions. I haven't read the Shenon book. Will do so.

[Time for change]

34. Have you read David Ray Griffin's book?

"The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions"

In my opinion, that was much more illuminating than Shenon's book, though Shenon's book was illuminating in its own right. I posted about that book a couple years ago, but it was forthwith sent to the dungeon. It covered in depth many important issues that Shenon didn't touch, either because he wasn't interested or because he knew that his book would get no official approval if he went into those areas.

The main difference between the two is that Griffin went deeply into MIHOP/LIHOP, whereas Shenon didn't touch those subjects (thought it's possible that you could pick up an argument for LIHOP reading his book if you read between the lines.

Griffin's book was also very easy to read, relative to the complexity of the subject.

[puebloknot]

36. I read Griffin's "A New Pearl Harbor" a few years ago, and it confirmed ...

... my deepest feelings that something's rotten in someplace other than Denmark. That book simply laid out a whole series of questions that should be asked in official circles to get to the bottom of the matter.

Although this is merely a personal observation, I remember watching the planes hitting the Towers on the morning of 9/11, and my first reaction was not, "We are under attack by foreign terrorists." It was, "This is phony. This is manufactured." I couldn't believe, at first, that it wasn't a CGI event to go with our morning coffee. And when I realized it was really happening, after a recent stolen presidential election, it was not difficult to fast forward in my mind to the idea that the enemy is a local one. That supposition remains, and is supported by mountains of evidence.

I haven't read Griffin's later book that you mention here. Fatigue and depression over the whole matter have kept me from wanting to dig into it. But I will.

I hold great hope that my grandchildren (yet unborn) or their children will someday know the truth of 9/11. But we're still speculating over the Kennedy/MLK assasinations, and we still don't have answers, 40 plus years on.

Your "dungeon" comment outlines one of the more disturbing aspects to all this, and that is that even among progressives, the "conspiracy theorist" meme is alive and well. No one wants to have their intellectual credentials tarnished by joining with the madding crowd that keeps pointing out the nakedness of the emperor. We're a civilized country, after all. Shit happens, but to think that there's a wizard behind the curtain making shit is just too far out. Shit is in the natural order of things. Sufficient unto the day is the evil we know and can prove. People need to get a life and stop wasting their energy on always digging below the surface of things. Or so "they" say.

People in Germany, circa 1935 and forward, held the same high opinion of *their* civilized country. Dissenters were "forthwith sent to the dungeon," quite literally. They didn't want kooks with credentials poisoning the minds of the young.

And so it is in America today. I appreciate the intelligence and balance behind your work. Unfortunately, *you* are writing from a dungeon, in some ways, in that those who most need to consider your ideas will watch sound-byte television assurances that all is well, instead. But the Power of One is a principle that lives on, and the small fire you may light with one of your articles may be the one that will grow into redeeming fire for the country and the world.

Warm regards!

[Time for change]

38. I'm with you on all of that

Small fires. That's about all most of us can do -- until we get some better ideas.

:)

[Octafish]

39. Zelikow is a BFEE turd of the first stank -- ''Myth Creator''

Thank you for a another most outstanding post, Time for change. If it were in my power, you would head the FCC, if not the Department of Justice or the Library of Congress.

Regarding Zelikow: The guy is a BFEE turd of the first rank. He made his bones in "Myth Creation," a not-so-new field in communication management or propaganda.

Zelikow: Creating Public Myth

Information Warfare, Psy-ops and the Power of Myth

By Mike Whitney

EXCERPT...

"The Pentagon’s bold new approach to psychological operations (psy-ops) appears to have derived from the theories of former State Dept official, Philip Zelikow (who also served on the 9-11 Commission) Zelikow is an expert on “the creation and maintenance of ‘public myths’ or ‘public presumptions’. His theory analyzes how consciousness is shaped by “searing events” which take on “transcendent importance” and, therefore, move the public in the direction chosen by the policymakers.

“In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he (Zelikow) co-authored an article called ‘Catastrophic Terrorism’ in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade center had succeeded ‘the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. ‘It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet bomb test in 1949. The US might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or US counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently”. (Wikipedia)... "

SNIP...

"M&W: "According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the 'real threat' from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The 'unstated threat' was the 'threat against Israel‚' Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. 'The American government,' he added, 'doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.'"

SNIP...

Z

SOURCE:

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message436243/pg1

I was going to do a big thing on Zelikow a while back, but, if memory serves, you nailed the neocon slimeball. Perhaps after the Olympics we can further correct the crooked record.

Thanks again for a truly outstanding post, Time for change!

[Time for change]

40. Thank you Octafish -- This whole thing just blows my mind

The amount of power these people have to cover their tracks is just mind boggling, isn't it?

Thanks for the FCC and the AG job. I really wouldn't know where to start, but I'm sure we could all do a lot better than those currently in charge.

[Supersedeas]

41. The Commission: Personal Duty to Watch Condi's Back