sept 11 2001

House Republicans Refuse To Vote On Resolution Honoring The Seals Who Killed Bin Laden

The measure already passed the Senate by a 97-0 vote and wouldn’t take much time to pass on the House floor either:

House Republicans say they have no plans to follow the Senate in passing a resolution honoring the military mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

The decision by GOP leaders follows new rules they enacted in January scrapping the tradition of congratulatory measures, which they complained clogged up the House floor.

The Senate on Tuesday passed a resolution, 97-0, commending “the men and women of the United States Armed Forces and the United States intelligence community for the tremendous commitment, perseverance, professionalism and sacrifice they displayed in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice.” The measure commended President Obama and reaffirmed the Senate’s commitment “to disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda.” It also recognized former President George W. Bush’s efforts after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The lack of House action drew criticism from some Democrats, who said an exception to the new rules was more than warranted for the killing of America’s No. 1 enemy.

Republicans had no problems a couple of years ago pushing a resolution to recognize “the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith”, shouldn’t the brave men and women who were in harms way deserve the same amount of attention? I guess not, especially since John Boehner considers every lost soldier a “small price to pay”. Absolutely disgusting.

News

Watch What You Photograph Or You Might Get Questioned

As a photographer stories like this really get my blood boiling:

A few weeks ago, on his way to work, Matt Urick stopped to snap a few pictures of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's headquarters. He thought the building was ugly but might make for an interesting photo. The uniformed officer who ran up to him didn't agree. He told Urick he was not allowed to photograph federal buildings.

Urick wanted to tell the guard that there are pictures of the building on HUD's Web site, that every angle of the building is visible in street views on Google Maps and that he was merely an amateur photographer, not a threat. But Urick kept all this to himself.

"A lot of these guys have guns and are enforcing laws they obviously don't understand, and they are not to be reasoned with," he said. After detaining Urick for a few minutes and conferring with a colleague on a radio, the officer let him go.

The Washington Post story has a lot more accounts of similar incidents.

What really gets me about this is that these officers are still stopping and detaining photographers, despite the courts saying it is perfectly legal:

Courts have long ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of citizens to take photographs in public places. Even after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, law enforcement agencies have reiterated that right in official policies.

So why do so many police and security guards believe they are in the right? Well it boils down to that post-9/11 mentality:

Media

Sorry George – Not Buying It

George Stephanopoulos has “corrected” Rudy Giuliani’s statement that ‘no domestic terrorist attacks happened under Bush’.

The two key changes are as follows. First the title:

Then:
Rudy Giuliani: 'No Domestic Attacks Under Bush.... One Under Obama'
Now:
Rudy Giuliani Wrong in Saying ‘No Domestic Attacks Under Bush’

And then George added in a new paragraph.

Then:

“What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,” Giuliani said. “Number two, he should correct the things that Bush didn’t do right. Sending people to Yemen was wrong, not getting this whole intelligence thing corrected.”

The former Republican presidential candidate is specifically taking issue with the fact that the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is being tried in a civil court instead of a military tribunal.

Now:

“What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,” Giuliani said. “Number two, he should correct the things that Bush didn’t do right. Sending people to Yemen was wrong, not getting this whole intelligence thing corrected.”

Giuliani seems to have forgotten about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Politics

Rand Paul’s Spokesman Resigns Over Racist Remarks

Classy guy here:

The spokesman for U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul resigned Thursday after the campaign acknowledged that he maintained a page on a Web site that included racist remarks and suggested the government bore some responsibility for the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Christopher Hightower's resignation came five hours after he told the Courier-Journal that he had never been a member of the Web site, myspace.com, and that none of the things attributed to him on the site were his.

Just how classy?

The page in question at myspace, a social networking site, used a derogatory word to refer to African-Americans in a poem.

"I won't be your n-----. I won't be your slave," the poem reads in part.

Adams declined comment on the poem.

The person who maintained the page also didn't remove something posted by a friend around the time of Martin Luther King Day in 2008. It included a photo of a lynching and the words, "Happy N----- Day."

Yup that’s the story of the spokesman for the son of Ron Paul. Very interesting indeed.

Ft. Hood Truthers

And they came out already, starting with Hannity, who is claiming that President Obama knew about Maj. Hasan.

As Cesca reminds us:

After 9/11, everyone -- everyone -- supported President Bush. But it's clear that the wingnuts and Republicans will never give our current president the same deference.

But what about George Bush – did he know? Maybe we can start a new form of “Ft. Hood truthers” here, ones that have a little more evidence on their side:

The FBI and the Army last year investigated contacts between a Yemen-based militant Islamist prayer leader and the Army psychiatrist accused of last week’s deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, but they dropped the case after concluding that he didn’t pose a terrorist threat, a senior federal law enforcement official said Monday.

The disclosure on Monday that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan communicated with an imam who had ties to Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers was sure to raise the question of whether U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies had information that, if properly shared and investigated, might have helped to prevent the attack.

A Democrat Wanted Bush To “Fail”

The right is all in a happy frenzy over this from FOX:

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: "I certainly hope he doesn't succeed."

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.

"We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I'm wanting them to turn against him," Greenberg admitted.

Hmmm, well there is a difference between telling a focus group and telling a nation audience on public airwaves the same thing, but that isn’t what really caught my eye. Check out the next part of the article:

Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"

So once a national disaster struck, instead of political pettiness, the Democrat puts country ahead of party and backs the president.

Aren’t we in a nation disaster now? What about the economy, which provoked the unprecedented act of a presidential candidate from a major party suspending his campaign to fly back to DC in order to try and help fix it? Republicans and Democrats have been calling the economy a disaster, but that doesn’t matter when it comes to bashing the President.

Wow Republicans, thanks for pointing this out and proving which party puts country first.

Now We Got A Witness

This is a Bush administration official with direct knowledge admitting that we torture detainees:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Military Nation

Hopefully Obama will take a look at this once he takes office:

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Spying - Not Just For Terrorism!

It is time for a full criminal hearing into the Bush White House. Here is the latest revelation on the NSA wiretapping:

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

In the court filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper.

(emphasis added)

Think Progress reminds us of this argument for the spying:

Abusing The Tools To Fight Terrorism

Today's Washington Post:

When the FBI asked Congress this spring to provide $3.6 million in the war spending bill for its Gulfstream V jet, it said the money was needed to ensure that the aircraft, packed with state-of-the-art security and communications gear, could continue to fly counterterrorism agents on "crucial missions" into Iraq.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the bureau has made similar annual requests to maintain and fuel the $40 million jet on grounds that it had a "tremendous impact" on combating terrorism by rapidly deploying FBI agents to "fast-moving investigations and crisis situations" in places such as Afghanistan.

But the jet that the FBI originally sold to lawmakers in the late 1990s as an essential tool for battling terrorism is now routinely used to ferry FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to speeches, public appearances and field office visits.

So we are using a state of the art jet, designed to monitor and combat terrorism, to taxi around the FBI director.

Well this sounds somewhat familiar to me. As matter of fact, this story strikes a very similar note to this one:

In June of 2006, [Michael] Leavitt [Secretary of Health and Human services] came under criticism for misappropriation of the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionâ€™s (CDC) Gulfstream III Emergency Response aircraft to, primarily, promote the newly reformed Medicare plan.

And Then There Was One

One leader of a nation that devised a sinister plan to lie to their people and invade a nation that is:

Tony Blair said Thursday he would step down as prime minister on June 27, closing a decade of power in which he fostered peace in Northern Ireland and followed the United States to a war in Iraq that cost him much of his popularity.

In a somber farewell, Blair made way for Treasury chief Gordon Brown to take the top post. The British leader looked overcome with emotion, struggling to retain his trademark broad grin as loud cheers rang out.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, it was right, Blair said, to "stand shoulder to shoulder with our oldest ally, and I did so out of belief."

"Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right," Blair told party workers and supporters at Trimdon Labour Club in his Sedgefield constituency in northern England. "I may have been wrong, but that's your call. But believe one thing if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country."

It will be interesting to see what Blair's successor decides to do with Iraq. If he takes office then pulls all U.K. troops from Iraq then we will most likely have to increase the "surge". This will put a real damper on the GOP September deadline.

28%

Looks like George hit a new low! From the WSJ:

President Bush's approval rating slipped to new lows in the most recent Harris Interactive survey, but he's not alone: For the first time since the series began, all of the political figures and institutions included in the survey have negative performance ratings.

Of the 1,001 American adults polled online April 20-23, only 28% had a positive view of Mr. Bush's job performance, down from 32% in February and from a high of 88% in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The current rating is his weakest showing since his inauguration.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice garnered ...

And yet he "knows" what Americans want. Apparently not, or he would have resigned by now.

This is a Man Worth Supporting

Remember the failed Bernard Kerik nomination to run homeland security? Guess who was pushing the nomination through, regardless of legal troubles?

When former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged President Bush to make Bernard B. Kerik the next secretary of homeland security, White House aides knew Kerik as the take-charge top cop from Sept. 11, 2001. But it did not take them long to compile an extensive dossier of damaging information about the would-be Cabinet officer.

They learned about questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption. Most disturbing, according to people close to the process, was Kerik's friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime. The businessman had told federal authorities that Kerik received gifts, including $165,000 in apartment renovations, from a New Jersey family with alleged Mafia ties.

Alarmed about the raft of allegations, several White House aides tried to raise red flags. But the normal investigation process was short-circuited, the sources said. Bush's top lawyer, Alberto R. Gonzales, took charge of the vetting, repeatedly grilling Kerik about the issues that had been raised. In the end, despite the concerns, the White House moved forward with his nomination -- only to have it collapse a week later.

Wow no wonder Gonzales deserves to remain as our nation's top law enforcement official. He is great at judging people.

OMG Condi Lied. Are You Shocked?

I doubt it. Earlier I posted on this article:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.

(emphasis mine)

Well here we go yet again. This is from tomorrow's New York Times:

A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The account by Sean McCormack came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, 2001, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. McCormack also said records show that the Sept. 11 commission was informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.

Condi's Convenient Amnesia

This sure isn't a way to defend the claims in Woodward's new book:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.

Rice was President Bush's national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial" outlines a July 10 meeting among Rice, Tenet and the CIA's top counterterror officer.

"I don't know that this meeting took place, but what I really don't know, what I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond," Rice said.

Way to try and spin it there Condi. The problem is the American people already know you are a liar (mushroom clouds ring a bell?). I am sure that she remembers damn good and well what happened. This is just her defense (ie. Scooter Libby defense).