A List Of Actionable Items [Apr 11, 2004]

The White House has a tradition, if it wants to inform the citizenry about something really important, of releasing key documents on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday, when most Americans are absolutely glued to the news. That was certainly the case this Saturday past, which will forever be known as Declassification Of The August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing Day. And what a declassification it was!

We’re now aware that President Bush, in advance of September 11, knew that several members of Al Queda had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, that Osama bin Ladin is undeterred by failure and plans operations years in advance, and that FBI information, based on 70 separate investigations, indicated “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.” Is it any wonder, then, that the President spent August 2001 agonizing over the ethics of stem-cell research?

The mainstream news media, for some reason, hasn’t revealed pages three and four of the briefing, either because they’re being careful, or because they’re cowards. But this is a blog, and the rules of traditional journalism don’t apply to me. If anything, blogs are the true newspapers of our time, hearkening back to a golden age in American media when all news was rigorously fact-checked and uncolored by partisan bias. I have access to the full briefing, or at least to quotes from the full briefing, which I got off the comment page of a website that was linked to the comment page of another website. A summary follows.

--In a 1999 Project For the New American Century “position paper,” Richard Perle and Dick Cheney wrote that the U.S should be prepared for a day when 19 men of Arab descent, armed with box cutters, would board commercial airline flights with the intent to crash the planes into major U.S. buildings.

--A CIA agent, posing as a Florida flight instructor, said that several 9-11 hijackers showed great proficiency in all areas except one. According to the agent, the hijackers said, “we’re not going to land the planes anyway, so why bother?”

--In April 2001 one of the hijackers was caught on videotape, at a convenience store manned by the FBI, asking what the odds would be of him surviving if a plane he were piloting were “shot down over Western Pennsylvania.”

--A CIA agent took Mohammed Atta out to lunch in July, where he bragged that he was going to “fly a plane into the World Trade Center,” adding, “don’t tell anyone, it’s a surprise.”

--On August 1, Donald Rumsfeld wrote, in an email to Paul Wolfowitz, “After Al Queda attacks the Pentagon, we should talk to the President about an Iraq invasion.” Wolfowitz wrote back, “When is that attack going to be again?” Rumsfeld replied: “September 11, like we discussed.”

President Bush, shame on your vile house.

Impeach.