9/11: What Who Went Wrong

Sweetness and Light brings attention to what one of the "root causes" of 9/11 is up to these days: getting removed from a case he was adjudicating.

Appeals Panel Removes Judge Presiding Over Indian Lawsuit

By JOHN FILES
Published: July 12, 2006

WASHINGTON, July 11 — A federal appeals panel on Tuesday ordered the removal of the judge from a decade-long lawsuit involving trust accounts that the Interior Department administers for Indians.

The panel found that the judge, Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court here, lacked objectivity and ordered the case reassigned.
[snip]
Judge Lamberth issued a ruling last July that called the Interior Department a dinosaur, adding that it was “the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago.”

I've always had very little patience for the braindead DNC/Kos talking frothing point that 9/11 happened "on Bush's watch!!!" because 1) bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed's 9/11 plan had been in the works since 1996 when Bush was still playing with his baseball cards in Texas; 2) due to the contested election, Bush was not able to actually have his first cabinet meeting until June of 2001, and even then, had left in place George Tenet, a Clinton legacy, at the CIA; and 3) even Leftist uber-hero Richard Clarke's candid admission before the 9/11 commission exonerated him from culpability:

SLADE GORTON, Commission member: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

CLARKE: No.

Six months after 9/11, noted RNC party organ/Rovian propaganda peddler Newsweek summarized Judge Lamberth's culpability thusly:

NEWSWEEK has learned there was one other major complication as America headed into that threat-spiked summer. In Washington, Royce Lamberth, chief judge of the special federal court that reviews national-security wiretaps, erupted in anger when he found that an FBI official was misrepresenting petitions for taps on terror suspects. Lamberth prodded Ashcroft to launch an investigation, which reverberated throughout the bureau. From the summer of 2000 on into the following year, sources said, the FBI was forced to shut down wiretaps of Qaeda-related suspects connected to the 1998 African embassy bombing investigation. “It was a major problem,” said one source familiar with the case, who estimated that 10 to 20 Qaeda wiretaps had to be shut down, as well as wiretaps into a separate New York investigation of Hamas. The effect was to stymie terror surveillance at exactly the moment it was needed most: requests from both Phoenix and Minneapolis for wiretaps were turned down.

But, whatever, 9/11 happened on Bush's watch, yada yada yada....