Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The president smells "the sniff of politics in the air," but as the 9/11 story hits Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike demand "a sniff of truth."
May 17, 2002 | The White House shifted desperately into firefighting mode Thursday, after the administration admitted on Wednesday evening that it had received a warning in August that al-Qaida might try to hijack American airliners. But as the day went on, White House efforts at spin control raised more questions than they answered, and congressional Republicans joined Democrats in challenging President Bush to make public other pre-9/11 intelligence his administration had received.
It seemed a particularly bad day for White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who recited what began as the official White House talking points in a noon press conference. But they would not hold up well to the day's scrutiny.
Fleischer's first troublesome assertion was his bizarre defense, repeated later by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, that neither law enforcement nor intelligence agencies could have possibly guessed that a "traditional hijacking" might lead to what ultimately happened on Sept. 11.
"The possibility of a traditional hijacking, in the pre-September 11th sense, has long been a concern of the government, dating back decades," Fleischer said. "The president did not -- not -- receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen."
But while the president may not have been able to foresee such a scenario, intelligence experts surely could. The idea of using "airplanes as missiles" was not unprecedented. Before the attacks, in just one concurrent example, an FBI agent in Minneapolis warned that Zacarias Moussaoui -- the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested after telling instructors at a Minnesota flight school that he wanted to learn how to fly, but not land, a 747 -- could decide to "fly something into the World Trade Center."
Fleischer's second talking point was that intelligence sources had warned of attacks overseas and had only received "generalized" threats of domestic hijackings. But that would later be undermined in a briefing by Rice, who gave a detailed account of the lengths the Federal Aviation Administration went to alert airlines of an increased risk of domestic hijackings throughout the summer.
In fact, the possibility of a coordinated plot to hijack a number of domestic airliners surfaced as early as 1995, when officials in the Philippines seized a computer left behind by the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, Ramzi Yousef, after an apartment fire. Yousef had sketched a plot to hijack up to 11 American planes simultaneously and blow them up over the Pacific Ocean.
There was also some dispute about how much information the White House shared with intelligence committee members on Capitol Hill.
"Members of the Intelligence Committee were provided with this generalized information on threat reporting, including potential hijackings," Fleischer said.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., told reporters that indeed, the White House had provided all the information it received to congressional intelligence committee members. But that was disputed by Republican and Democratic intelligence committee members in the Senate.
"The fact that they've waited this long to get it out is troubling," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., also disagreed with Fleisher's characterization, saying the Senate "did not have identical information," as the White House. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Bob Graham, D-Fla., said a broad memo was given to his committee in August, but it contained "no mention of domestic hijacking. What we got was a summary of a summary of a summary," he said."
Get Salon in your mailbox!