Those of you who aren’t fans of native son John Ashcroft would have appreciated Philip Shenon’s revelations about Ashcroft’s role–or lack thereof–in preventing the 9/11 attacks. Ashcroft was angrily determined not to be pestered with any information about possible al-Qaeda attacks.
New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, speaking at the Women’s Democratic Forum about his new book, The Commission: the Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission, began his talk by saying that when acting F.B.I. director Thomas J. Pickard tried to talk to Ashcroft at the Justice Department in June of 2001 about the abundant indications that al-Qaeda was planning an attack, Ashcroft rebuffed him, told him that he didn’t want to hear anything about it. Apparently Ashcroft felt there was nothing he could do about al-Qaeda and he didn’t want Pickard to bring up the subject again.
When Pickard persisted, however, at the next briefing in mentioning the danger of an attack, Ashcroft angrily put an end to the conversation and declared that he never wanted, ever again, to hear about al-Qaeda.
Nor was Ashcroft’s resistance on the subject any anomaly in the Bush government. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor–Sandy Berger’s replacement in that role–was of the same mindset–exactly the opposite of Berger. It was as if Bushco thought of al-Qaeda as something so-last-administration, so-out-of-fashion.
Condoleezza, whom the 9/11 widows that called themselves the Jersey Girls dubbed Kinda-Lies-a-Lot, has a lot to answer for. Whereas Sandy Berger had high officials meeting daily when there were reports around Christmas of 1999 of an imminent attack, Rice ignored warnings–and Shenon was surprised to discover how many more of them there had been than just that famous President’s Daily Brief of August 6, 2001.
Berger had made sure that Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counter terrorism man, had instant access to the President. Rice demoted Clark, in effect keeping him away from Bush. Apathy like hers and Bush’s, not to mention incompetence, abounded at every turn.
Zacharias Moussaui, for example, enrolled in flight school, with practically no previous flight experience, wanting to know how to fly a 747. His flight instructor took one look, called the FBI, and told them that this was the kind of guy who might someday try to fly a plane into the World Trade Center. The F.B.I. arrested Moussaui for being here beyond his visa time, but mid-level people at the Bureau muffed their chance. They took minimal interest, refusing to examine his laptop. Doing so would have revealed the al-Qaeda plans.
So the job of the Commission was to see what went wrong. Supposedly. Only the man who was in charge of running the Commission on a day-to-day basis was, you might say, a Bush mole. Philip Zelikow had far more ties to the Bush White House than anybody knew when he was recommended for the job. Although the lower level workers on the Commission were bright, aggressive investigators, Zelikow sometimes steered them away from relevant paths, and he certainly allowed no contact between them and the press.
Investigators did as good a job as they could have under the circumstances, and the commissioners were surprisingly united, though they came from both parties. They have John Ashcroft to thank for that. When they went gunning for him for having refused to listen to Pickard, he counterattacked and said all the apathy at Justice had been caused by one of the commissioners who had been there at the time: Jaime Gorelick. The commissioners were so offended, especially the Republicans, by the disingenuous attack, that they became, and stayed, a cohesive group.
Shenon’s conclusions about the investigation are that far more warnings were available about what was about to happen than most Americans realize; that the investigators missed a considerable amount of information–at the NSA, for example–because of Zelikow being in charge; that the disinterest in government circles that made 9/11 possible has changed to careful scrutiny of young Arab men; and that the conspiracy theories (that the whole tragedy was allowed or even planned at the highest levels of our government) are not credible.
On this last point, Shenon says he spoke to aeronautical engineers who said that the hole in the Pentagon, for example, was big enough for a 747, so there’s no reason to posit a missile strike. In fact, said Shenon, if that 747 didn’t hit the Pentagon, where did that plane and all its occupants go. He’s been around D.C. too many years and seen too much incompetence to believe that such a disappearing act could be successfully pulled off.