9/11 hijackers could have been stopped, says ex-aide

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1175675,00.html

9/11 hijackers could have been stopped, says ex-aide

In an interview with the Guardian a former White House insider insists, over administration denials, that Bush took his eye off al-Qaida

Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday March 23, 2004
The Guardian

If the Bush White House had heeded warnings in early 2001 about the threat from al-Qaida at least two of the September 11 hijackers would "probably have been caught" and "there was a chance" the attacks could have been prevented, the president's former top counter-terrorism adviser told the Guardian yesterday. <snip>

Mr Clarke said that despite the extent of the support offered by Tony Blair, British influence in Washington was small. He conceded that without British pressure Mr Bush might not have issued a major policy statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but dismissed this as a hollow gesture.

"He went out there and read the words like he was seeing them for the first time," Mr Clarke said. "There hasn't been a lot of follow through, and I don't think the Brits got very much. They got the minimum possible out of us." <snip>


The White House mounted a counter-attack yesterday, rebutting many of Mr Clarke's allegations. The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the administration had spent much of 2001 developing a strategy "to eliminate al-Qaida". But Mr Clarke said that plan had been inherited from the Clinton administration in January 2001, and that the White House had done little to act on it.

"The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it," Mr Clarke said. "I asked - on January 24 in writing to Condi - urgently for a meeting on cabinet level, 'the principals committee', to review the plan and I was told I can't have that."

Instead Mr Clarke was told a meeting of deputy secretaries would be arranged to "frame" the al-Qaida issue for discussion. He said even that meeting did not take place until April - although the White House says it was in March - and a top-level cabinet meeting did not take place until September 4.

Instead the regular meetings of the national security "principals committee", which includes the heads of the CIA, FBI, state department and defence department, over the first eight months of the administration focused on what Mr Clarke considered to be cold war issues. <snip>


Read the full transcript of the interview http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1175790,00.html

I could be wrong, of course, but it really does seem to be confirmed everyday now.

If the Bush Administration in the Summer of 2001 had let the public know something to the affect of "Terrorists may be considering hijacking planes and ramming them into builds" then perhaps the passengers and crew of the fated flights would have fought the hijackers rather than go with then paradigm of "let the hijackers fly to an airport and then we'll neogiate"

Dupish. Go here -

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=436805