The finger pointing over NW 253 continues, and the spread of "Blame Bush" continues. From a NY Times article we learn this:
WASHINGTON — The finger-pointing began in earnest on Wednesday over who in the alphabet soup of American security agencies knew what and when about the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up an airliner.
Okay, that's a start.
The crown jewel of intelligence reform after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the center was the hub whose mission was to unite every scrap of data on threats and suspects, to make sure an extremist like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber, would never penetrate the United States’ defenses.
“N.C.T.C. is supposed to be the nerve center,” said Amy B. Zegart, who studies intelligence at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s the fusion center of all fusion centers. So if something was missed, that’s where the blame is going to go.”
Fair enough, or at least so far.
“It’s totally frustrating,” said Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the national Sept. 11 commission. “It’s almost like the words being used to describe what went wrong are exactly the same.”
Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint Congressional inquiry into Sept. 11, called the emerging story “eerily similar to the disconnects and missteps we investigated.”
“There seems to have been the same failure to put the pieces of the puzzle together and get them to the right people in time,” Ms. Hill said.
Now the trap has been set.
But two critical pieces of information appear never to have been connected: National Security Agency intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen talking about using a Nigerian man for an attack, and a warning from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father to American diplomats in Nigeria about the son’s radicalization in Yemen. If the National Counterterrorism Center or any other agency had those two items and never linked them, Congress and the public will want to know why.
The echoes of Sept. 11 are obvious. Before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the N.S.A., the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation all had gathered bits of intelligence about the future hijackers. The C.I.A. sounded the alarm about an impending attack, including the now-famous President’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001, titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
The trap is sprung. This is just Bush redux. Concentrate on the past. Pay no attention to climate of surrender the Left has created for the past year.
The author, Scott Shane, may or may not be aware of this bit of information from NSA Rice:
We convened on 5 July a special meeting of domestic federal law enforcement agencies because we could not rule out the possibility that the attack would be in the U.S." In fact, that was the meeting that we asked him to convene.
"At the special meeting on July 5 were the FBI, Secret Service, FAA, Customs, Coast Guard, and Immigration. We told them that we thought a spectacular al Qaeda terrorist attack was coming in the near future." That had been had been George Tenet's language. "We asked that they take special measures to increase security and surveillance. Thus, the White House did ensure that domestic law enforcement including the FAA knew that the CSG believed that a major al Qaeda attack was coming, and it could be in the U.S., and did ask that special measures be taken."
Link
So the August 6 PDB was redundant. It was old news to Bush who rightfully indicated his displeasure. Yet the press continues to talk about it as if the July 5 meeting and warning never happened.
That is either disingenuous or demonstrates ignorance of the facts. Reporters and newspapers should do better. But I don't think you will ever see a Lame Stream Media editor or reporter question such dim bulb reporting.
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