Just a little reminder as we find ourselves knee-deep in conservative 911 revisionism over the next couple of days. It may come as a shock to the Rush Limbaughs of the world but the country actually formed a commission and held *gasp* hearings in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. The commission's final report was itself a summary of much of the testimony and investigative work that it implemented.
Some highlights from just that one day of public testimony covered in the March, 2004 Washington Post article I cite above:
President Bush's top counterterrorism adviser warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al Qaeda network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed yesterday.
Richard A. Clarke, who served as a senior White House counterterrorism official under three successive presidents, wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, urging "policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier," according to a summary of the letter included in a commission staff report. Clarke also cites the same plea in his new book.
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The CIA now says that a controversial August 2001 briefing summarizing potential attacks on the United States by al Qaeda was not requested by President Bush, as Rice and others had long claimed.
(In fact Rice held a news conference JUST to claim that the PDB was requested by Bush. Liar, liar...)
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Commission investigators disclosed that during the Clinton administration, the president and other White House officials signed a series of secret orders for covert action that, according to the top Clinton aides, authorized the killing of bin Laden by CIA proxies.
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In the summer of 2001, veteran counterterrorism officers privy to reports on al Qaeda threats "were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns," according to one of two staff reports issued by the commission yesterday. Senior CIA officials were also frustrated by some Bush appointees who were not familiar with surges in terrorist threat information and questioned their veracity, the report said.
And it goes on and on. Point is the producers of the ABC movie seem to want to pretend there was no 911 Commission while claiming, at the same time, that the work of the Commission supports the "truthiness" of their film.
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