Home > U.S. Clamps Secrecy on Warnings Before 9/11
Newsday August 7, 2003
U.S. Clamps Secrecy on Warnings Before 9/11
Marie Cocco Newsday
It’s not just the Saudi secret that’s being kept.
The recent report of the joint congressional
committee that probed intelligence failures before
the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon reveals what the Bush
administration doesn’t want Americans to know
about the American government.
You would not know this from media accounts about
this report. They have dwelled on what the Bush
administration doesn’t want us to know about the
Saudi government.
This is the famous 28-page chapter, a series of
blank lines across page after page, that the
president refuses to declassify despite the
pleadings of the bipartisan group of lawmakers and
the Saudi government itself.
The dustup over Saudi secrets is exquisitely
convenient. It obscures George W. Bush’s
relentless hold on U.S. secrets and on information
he maintains should be secret, though it has not
necessarily been before now.
The report’s appendix hints at what these secrets
are, and why they are kept. "Access Limitations
Encountered by the Joint Inquiry," the section is
titled.
The White House refused to provide contents of the
president’s daily brief. This would clear up
questions about how much specific information
President Bush received about an impending attack
during the spring and summer of 2001 - a period in
which the intelligence community was reporting
with alarm that a "spectacular" attack against the
United States involving "mass casualties" was in
the works.
"Ultimately, this bar was extended to the point
where CIA personnel were not allowed to be
interviewed regarding the simple process by which
the (brief) is prepared," the panel said.
The committee managed, "inadvertently," it says,
to get some contents of a key briefing Bush
received in August 2001. It included "FBI
judgments about patterns of activity consistent
with preparations for hijackings or other types of
attacks; as well as information acquired in May
2001 that indicated a group of Bin Ladin (sic)
supporters was planning attacks in the United
States with explosives." In an extraordinary
footnote, the panel cites public statements by
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that
characterized the August briefing as general and
having provided historical perspective on Osama
bin Laden’s methods of terror.
The lawmakers, though, were barred from
interviewing Rice. They sought to "obtain a better
understanding of the development of
counterterrorism policy in the Bush administration
before September 11, 2001." The panel was forced
to submit written questions to a deputy.
Lawmakers also were barred from getting
information on an intelligence reform commission
chaired by former National Security Adviser Brent
Scowcroft. The Scowcroft commission’s findings
already had been widely reported in the press.
The administration blocked the congressional
investigators from obtaining information showing
how intelligence agency funding requests were
handled by the White House budget office, dating
back to the Reagan administration. The lawmakers
were kept from interviewing an FBI informant who
had contact with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers
while they were living in San Diego.
Not once, but twice, the panel was forced to
tangle in court with the Justice Department over
information about its handling of Zacarias
Moussaoui.
Moussaoui was detained nearly a month before the
attack and now is charged as the "20th hijacker."
The Justice Department argued, to no avail, that
Congress is covered by a local rule in Virginia,
where the Moussaoui case is being heard, that bars
prosecutors and defense lawyers from making out-
of-court statements. The rule contains explicit
language stating that it doesn’t cover "hearings
or the lawful issuance of reports" by legislative
or investigative bodies.
The inquiry’s report devotes 15 pages to
describing a pattern of Bush administration
denials and delaying tactics that prevented a
fuller account of national failure before the
attack. Last month the independent 9/11 commission
still probing the attack issued a similar
compendium of complaint.
Worry, if you will, about those 28 pages involving
the Saudi sheiks. But a deeper, darker problem is
our own government’s refusal to fill in the blanks
about itself.
© Copyright 2003 by TruthOut.org