All the news that's fit to pixellate

Now it gets interesting.

The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said today that he was ordering an internal inquiry into complaints by a senior agent in Minneapolis that officials at headquarters repeatedly held back agents in Minneapolis who sought to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui aggressively in the days before the Sept. 11 hijackings.

The agent, Coleen Rowley, general counsel in the Minneapolis office, also said in a detailed 13-page letter to the Congressional committee that is investigating the government's preparedness for the Sept. 11 attacks that Mr. Mueller had misrepresented the bureau's handling of Mr. Moussaoui's case after his arrest on immigration charges three weeks before the hijackings, according to officials who have reviewed her letter...

Ms. Rowley said Minneapolis agents became so frustrated by inaction at F.B.I. headquarters at one point that they went directly to the Central Intelligence Agency for help in building their case against Mr. Moussaoui. Going behind the backs of their superiors was a breach of bureau protocol, and officials at headquarters reprimanded the Minneapolis agents, the officials said.

This is the whole point of the John O'Neill story as well: not, as the would-be builders of straw men would have it, that the Bushies knew Sept. 11 was going to happen and allowed it for political and personal gain, but that FBI investigations into al Qaeda and Saudi-sponsored terrorism were either mishandled--a suggestion the Times seems much more comfortable with at this point--or were deliberately stymied due to pipeline negotiations and/or generally not wanting to offend our Good Friends the Saudis.

(A note on those conspiracy theories: if Bush knew it was all coming, why did he look--in the words of one man-on-the-street interviewee I saw after he gave his first talk to the country after Sept. 11--like such a "scared little mouse" that day? Why did he spend the day flying from one hidey-hole to another? If he knew it was going to happen, wouldn't he have been prepared to stride forth like John Wayne and impress us all with his forceful leadership?)

(I know, I know--a lot of people were impressed by his forceful leadership. What can I say? The human capacity for self-deception is truly a wondrous thing to behold.)

* * *

As for the recent spate of terror warnings--none of which, if you read the stories closely, are based on any sort of new information--even Dan Rather gets it, for Chrissakes.

* * *

More fodder for the Trust Your Government, They're Here to Help file:

The U.S. military used two kinds of nerve gas and a biological toxin in tests on Navy ships in the 1960s, the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time Thursday. Officials said veterans harmed by exposure to the agents could be eligible for health benefits.

But that was, you know, in the past. They did things differently then.

* * *

However, to give the military its due: it looks like the professional hawks have managed to calm the chickenhawks down. For now.

The uniformed leaders of the U.S. military believe they have persuaded the Pentagon's civilian leadership to put off an invasion of Iraq until next year at the earliest and perhaps not to do it at all, according to senior Pentagon officials.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have waged a determined behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade the Bush administration to reconsider an aggressive posture toward Iraq in which war was regarded as all but inevitable. This included a secret briefing at the White House earlier this month for President Bush by Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who as head of the Central Command would oversee any U.S. military campaign against Iraq.

* * *

And now for something completely different:

Four thousand feet up a mountain deep in the Siberian taiga, the middle-aged man appears in a velvet crimson robe, long brown hair framing a beatific smile. He sits down in a log cabin perched on the brow of the hill. It is a room with a stunning view. The snowy Sayan mountains sparkle in the distance. The silver and pink of the birch forests shimmer in the clear sunlight. Down to the right, the pure blue water of Lake Tiberkul mesmerises. Behind the cabin, for much further than the eye can see - a thousand kilometres - the Siberian wilderness stretches, bereft of human habitation.

"It's all very complicated," he starts quietly. "But to keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ. That which was promised must come to pass. And it was promised in Israel 2,000 years ago that I would return, that I would come back to finish what was started. I am not God. And it is a mistake to see Jesus as God. But I am the living word of God the Father. Everything that God wants to say, he says through me."

* * *

Most links above via the always invaluable Cursor. Have a great holiday weekend, everyone. I myself plan to enjoy the astonishingly beautiful weather with which the greatest city in the world is currently blessed, even if there is a really-urgent-well-sort-of-not-really terrorist warning in effect. If I have time, I might even try to get down to the Brooklyn Bridge. (And I may have some really big news about a new project to share with you in the next week or two, so keep checking this space.)

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 11:25 AM| link

Stop me before I link again

From Robert Parry:

Major national news outlets are continuing to coddle George W. Bush even as new disclosures show that Bush and his senior advisers failed to respond effectively to warnings last year about Osama bin Laden’s plans to attack the United States.

This defensiveness about Bush was apparent in the immediate framing of the revelations as “The Blame Game,” a title used by CNN on May 16, as the stories broke, and atop a New York Times lead editorial on May 17. The implication to the public was that Democrats were trying to make political hay from the Sept. 11 tragedy by blaming Bush.

That's just a teaser. There's much more, and you should go read it. Now.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:58 AM| link

More

Don't miss this story in this morning's Times. I'm going to steal a summary from Media Whores Online, because they understand what the Times seems to be overlooking:

In a stunning revelation, the New York Times has reported that among the two FBI office counterterrorism chiefs who received the now famously neglected Phoenix memorandum last July was none other than John O'Neill -- then the top counterterrorist officer in the FBI's New York City's office, and the FBI's leading expert on Osama bin Laden.

O'Neill knew perfectly well what Al Qaeda was up to, and had been knocking on doors (and, at times, heads) for years to get his colleagues and superiors to understand what he did.

The last straw came in July 2001, when (as he told the French authors Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard in an interview), O'Neill became fully aware that the Bush administration, anxious over negotiations for a Caspian Sea oil pipe line, had decided to back off of tracking bin Laden and opposing the Taliban, lest it risk alienating powerful Saudi families. Instead of going after the Taliban and bin Laden, the Bush Administration decided to negotiate and try to buy off the Taliban and bin Laden.

Unfortunately for the Administration, the pipe-line negotiations broke down in August.

And on September 11, bin Laden struck.

What no one has known until now is that at the very moment that O'Neill was finally giving up, in July, he was being apprised of the Phoenix memorandum -- a memo, it seems, that practically nobody inside the Bush Administration was willing to treat seriously other than himself.

At the end of August, in disgust, O'Neill left the FBI to take what he somewhat ruefully regarded as his "retirement" job --as head of security at the World Trade Center. There, on September 11, John O'Neill died at the hands of his arch-enemy bin Laden's fiendish followers.

Connect the dots? Well, duh! O'Neill got the Phoenix message. No one would listen. No one. The Bushies had backed off bin Laden. So O'Neill changed jobs -- and went on to die a martyr's death. While all the people who ignored him, on up the chain to the Oval Office, live on -- ghoulishly making political hay out of his sacrifice and their own incompetence -- and, in a sense, their own perfidy.

But here's the really amazing thing -- having unearthed this blockbuster, the New York Times reporters David Johnston and Don Van Natta, Jr., simply bury it in their story.

They report, incredibly, that O'Neill simply "retired" back in August -- ignoring the well-known background, leaving the dots unconnected!!

What did O'Neill know back in July? Whom did he try to warn? What happened when he did so? What did his "retirement" -- and its tragic consequences -- have to do with his frustrated efforts to get Bush's people to listen to him about the Phoenix memo, and/or about everything else he knew about Osama bin Laden's clear and present danger to American lives?

Here are some questions that the Bush people don't want asked, by the New York Times, by a National Board of Investigation, or by anyone else.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:42 AM| link

What did the President know and when did Dick Cheney explain it to him?

I stole that line from Jay Leno, incidentally.

So. I can't leave you kids alone for a minute. I take a couple of days off, and suddenly the ground rules change, and everything is in a state of transition. I was too busy traversing the isle of Manhattan to pay it much mind--and I must say, it is lovely, on occasion, to wander around this city and briefly see it anew, through the eyes of a visitor for whom it is not all just so much background noise, to remember what it was like to be new here, and overwhelmed--and the first time I set foot in New York City, on a high school trip, was twenty four years ago, so it has been a significant while--but this is all, I think, a subject for another, more leisurely day. So let's get down to business.

First off, I'm going to risk a small prediction--not an overwhelming prediction, not a prediction that the Presidency Will Crumble or anything like that--but rather, just a prediction on how this is going to play out. First--and this is kind of cheating because it's obvious to anyone who's paying attention that this is already what's happening--every effort will be made to blame the bureaucracy, specifically high level FBI bureaucrats. I don't know who it will be yet, probably some functionary you've never heard of, but you can expect to see someone in the FBI, or some group of someones, being scapegoated and ceremonially sacrificed on the altar of public opinion. The president could have done his job, if only these buffoons had done theirs.

The second thing that's going to happen is the old Straw Man routine. We go through this one every time--when you can't refute an argument, the easiest thing to do is to pretend that your opponent said something else entirely. Rather than defend an administration which clearly had its head up its collective ass, you can expect conservatives to spend most of their time addressing the fringe conspiracy theories, as if those theories are actually the mainstream critique, as if Alan Colmes and Eleanor Clift and Paul Begala are out there arguing that Bush knew the towers were going to fall on September 11, and just sat back and let it happen, cackling maniacally at his great good fortune.

The real point is, of course, that Bush was asleep at the switch. In reality, it's probably unfair to hold him responsible, but life is notoriously unfair. That big chair in the Oval Office comes with a lot of responsibility. There's more to the job than restructuring the tax code and environmental laws to favor your rich pals and contributors. If you want to sit behind that desk, you'd goddamn well better be ready to take responsibility for what happens on your watch, particularly when you pretty much ignored every warning bell that went off beforehand. Not to mention when your surrogates have spent the last eight months trying to blame it all on your predecessor--on a supposedly weakened intelligence system, on the generally lax moral climate of those damned liberal hippie types which somehow gave rise to the, um, extremist religious zealotry of al Qaeda.

Here are some tidbits from the current Newsweek (with some of my comments interspersed):

* * *
On July 5, five days before the Phoenix memo, Bush directed Rice to figure out what was going on domestically. A month later, America learned for the first time last week—nine months after the attacks—Bush received a "presidential daily brief" in Crawford, Texas, that mentioned the possibility of an airline hijacking as a domestic threat. The Aug. 6 briefing was only "an analytic report that talked about [bin Laden’s] methods of operation, talked about what he had done historically," Rice said in a hastily called conference to contain the damage from the news.

(Hindsight is 20-20--but why weren't the airports on a high security alert at this point? Most of them were barely aware that there was a heightened probability of hijackings, and of course the public was not informed at all--even though John Ashcroft had stopped taking commercial flights in July, after receiving an unspecified "threat assessment" from the FBI.)

* * *

And under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being prodded back into its old law-and-order mind-set: violent crime, drugs, child porn. Counterterrorism, which had become a priority of the Clintonites (not that they did a better job of nailing bin Laden), seemed to be getting less attention. When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons.

The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden, among other actions.

(Rumsfeld also vetoed a request to divert $800 million into counterterrorism from the freaking missile defense program.)

* * *

While Bush may have a point in saying he heard no specific threat, other aspects of the administration’s story weren’t holding up. Last week Rice declared, "I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center ... All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking"; in other words, using passenger jets as hostages. In fact, the government had ample reason to believe that Al Qaeda was no longer interested in traditional terror. The CIA had learned as early as 1995 that Abdul Hakim Murad, an associate of ’93 WTC plotter Ramzi Yousef, had talked about plunging an airliner into the CIA building. Italian authorities had warned of a similar bid at last June’s Genoa summit of the G8 leaders—and they ringed the area with surface-to-air missiles, with CIA cooperation.

* * *

Even so, it’s too simple to say that postmortems now are somehow unfair or unpatriotic in "wartime America." The latest revelations could open up a Pandora’s box of questions about the administration’s pre- 9-11 performance on terror—questions with complicated and interesting roots.

By the end of the Clinton administration, the then national-security adviser Sandy Berger had become "totally preoccupied" with fears of a domestic terror attack, a colleague recalls. True, the Clintonites had failed to act decisively against Al Qaeda, but by the end they were certain of the danger it posed. When, in January 2001, Berger gave Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in detail, and, sources say, warned her: "You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other." Rice was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategy review. But the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like national missile defense (NMD) and Iraq.

* * *

And while hindsight may be 20-20, I think Daily News columnist Michael Daly put things into perspective pretty well yesterday in a column about Bush's month long vacation last August (at which point, he had spent 42% of his first eight months in office either on the ranch, at the family compound in Maine, or at Camp David):

A few public words from the President might have spurred that FBI agent in Phoenix to remind headquarters of the report he had submitted in July that Al Qaeda operatives could be training at American flight schools.

Somebody at the FBI even might have remembered a 1996 conspiracy case brought in New York against Osama Bin Laden associates who had plotted to blow up American airliners. The lead defendant was Ramzi Yousef, who also oversaw the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Yousef's co-defendant was Abdul Hakim Murad, and the evidence at trial detailed his involvement in another scheme. The case file included a summary of an interrogation by the Philippine police in 1995.

"Murad's idea is that he will board an American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger, then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters," the report stated. "There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute."

* * *

"I love to go walk out there, seeing the cows," Bush had been quoted saying. "Occasionally, they talk to me, being the good listener that I am."

The next day, Bush again paused to address the press.

"I've got a lot of national security concerns that we're working on — Iraq; Macedonia, very worrisome right now," he reported.

Bush still said nothing about the threat at home from Al Qaeda. He had all the networks' cameras on him and just a few words might well have jarred the FBI and others into connecting the three or four dots needed to save almost 3,000 lives.

Dots that on Aug. 16 came to include the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui on immigration charges. A Midwest flight school had reported that Moussaoui showed a suspicious lack of interest in taking off and landing. The arresting agent wrote that Moussaoui seemed "the type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Center."

Bush continued puttering around the ranch. He rose before dawn each morning. The rousting that got his immediate attention involved his dog, Barney...

* * *

To be continued, I'm sure...

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:22 AM| link

A quick Monday note

Already got an email asking why this week's cartoon isn't about the topic on everyone's lips--what did he know and when did he know it?

Well, it's like this: as regular readers of this space already know, I had company in town last week, and that meant that the cartoon had to be finished and sent out by mid-week. I spent most of the rest of the week taking my dad and his wife around New York City, and as insightful and amusing as a hastily thought out, last minute, dashed off j'accuse would undoubtedly have been, I just didn't have the time.

One quick thought, though: I think the link a couple of posts back to the Taliban pipeline story is far more important, far more revealing. To say that the Bushies should have seen this coming but did not suggests little but incompetence, and that's hardly a revelation. To understand that they may have been secretly negotiating with and/or planning to bomb the Taliban before Sept. 11--that's when you cross the line from incompetence to something far worse.

(An afterthought: that last bit isn't meant to suggest that this thing isn't hugely appalling on any number of levels. I'm sure most of you are pretty much up to speed already, being the informed and well-read sorts you are, but as always, there are a number of good links to various stories over at Cursor. And I'll get more up here once I'm caught up on my paying work.)

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 9:23 AM| link

A bank robbery in progress

"I’m being mugged by a bank," stated Greg Bates, publisher at Common Courage Press in Monroe ME. On April 1, Bank One and its subsidiary, American National Bank, seized $1.2 million belonging to 85 publishers including Common Courage. On April 23, the bank demanded publishers hand over the same amount again. It’s a demand a bank might make of any business caught in this situation, not just publishers. Bank One is the nation’s fifth largest bank holding company.

In an effort to resolve the matter quickly, some publishers tendered a generous offer. It would have allowed the bank to keep the $1.2 million already taken and be paid an additional $750,000 of publishers’ money over 10 months, amounting to about 80% of what the bank is after. Bank One turned it down cold.

"I’m not even a customer of the bank," expressed Bates in astonishment. "I never borrowed money from it. I demand that Bank One put the money back immediately. They knew the money didn’t belong to them when they took it. The bank is relying on forcing small publishers with shallow pockets to surrender rights to the money. This is like being stuck in the financial equivalent of a Franz Kafka novel," Bates said.

Common Courage and the 85 publishers use LPC Group as a distributor for their books. LPC had a loan from the bank, with about $2.7 million outstanding. No publisher had signed onto the loan. Most if not all were unaware that LPC had obtained it. The bank acknowledges that LPC was not behind in loan payments. It recalled the loan after deciding LPC was a bad credit risk, essentially asking publishers to pony up for its own bad business choices.

As with every month, on April 1, LPC deposited a $1.2 million payment it received from an independent warehouse for sales of the publishers’ books. Bank One, from documents in its possession, knew at the time that the payment was created from the sale of books owned by the publishers that were with LPC on consignment. It also knew that $1 million of the deposit was due to be sent out to publishers. Nonetheless, it seized the money the day it arrived in LPC’s account.

Bank One, still owed another $1.4 million, wants money from the next sales as well.

"This isn’t just our money," stated Bates, who so far is out $35,000—his share of the $1.2 million plus legal fees. "It includes royalties due our authors. In effect, the bank is stealing from writers, not just publishers."

Ironically, Common Courage publishes books about the excesses of corporations, including Merchants of Misery, which mentions Bank One. "Since hiring Jamie Dimon as CEO, they’ve certainly succeeded in taking predatory lending to the next level," Bates mused. "We are about to publish a book on Enron, showing that corporate evil is endemic to the global economy. Now we ourselves are grist for the mill. It’s a pretty high price for the right to say ‘I told you so’," he quipped.

Bank One’s position is straightforward. Yes, the contracts between publishers and LPC all stipulate that the books belong to the publishers and are under consignment. But the publishers failed to file forms with state governments that would have "perfected" the consignment. Had they done so prior to the loan from the bank in 1999, publishers would have had first claim to the books and resulting sales. That publishers were unaware of the
loan and had no way of knowing it was about to be made in ‘99 is irrelevant, according to the bank.

"Bull feathers," responded Bates. "Sucking money belonging to others out of an account is reprehensible. It’s as if a traveler momentarily set down his luggage in an airport. A stranger, who is owed money by the airport, walks up and grabs the luggage, claiming it as partial payment for the airport’s debt. Bank One’s position amounts to the thief arguing he has a right to the luggage because the traveler failed to attach a name tag to his possessions," Bates went on. "Contrary to the bank’s view, even a 5 year-old can tell you who rightfully owns what."

More info here.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:31 PM| link