Wednesday, July 12, 2006

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....

3 Comments:

Blogger dday said...

"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..."

You mean to tell me that a government is not allowed to function until they hold a cabinet meeting? No duties can be proscribed until all of them meet in public?

Actually, I shouldn't argue that, but just send along confirmation of this total myth you've concocted:

Special Event

President Bush Holds First Cabinet Meeting

Aired January 31, 2001 - 2:25 p.m. ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JOIE CHEN, CNN ANCHOR: Standing by now to go to Washington and to the White House. We're expecting any moment now for President Bush to begin his first Cabinet meeting, although there will be a couple of empty seats at the table.

CNN White House correspondent Kelly Wallace is standing by and, -- but, we want to go immediately into the Cabinet room where, as you see, these pictures. These are live picture from the Cabinet room. So, if they don't look very prim and proper and setup that is because you're looking at live picture of the Cabinet room.

You see the secretary of state, Mr. Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, on either side of President Bush. Let's listen to him talk...


The only two not at this cabinet meeting, held 11 days after the inauguration on January 31, were John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson. Ashcroft was confirmed the next day.

So this "there wasn't a cabinet meeting until June," which you've said to me before, is complete and utter bullshit, used by you as a means to innoculate an asleep-at-the-wheel President from criticism prior to 9-11.

I eagerly await your correction.

10:55 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hmm, dday...how about this:

http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/light/20041116.htm

"...it is the subcabinet that bears the brunt of the frustration and delay. Nominees to the subcabinet, defined as any position below that of secretary, waited almost nine months on average to enter office in Mr. Bush's first term. The federal hierarchy was not so much headless during the period as neckless. On July 11, 2001, for example, barely a quarter of the presidential appointees who would be involved in the war on terrorism had been either nominated or confirmed; on Sept. 11, the percentage was still well below half."

The issue isn't that President Bush didn't have Cabinet Secretaries, it was a lack of undersecretaries, a lack of worker bees. BTW, your feckless condescension is really quite unbecoming. I think it should go without saying that the wheels of change from the Clinton administration into the Bush administration had a bunch of sticks stuck in the spokes.

And by the way, do I really need to go and look up the confirmation dates of all the important undersecretaries for you?

10:23 PM  
Blogger dday said...

Let's reiterate. The line was:

"Bush was not able to actually have his first cabinet meeting until June of 2001."

That is false. You want to have a discussion about undersecretaries, fine. But this is such a typical tactic, to be a moving target, dissembling and then justifying the dissembly by changing the subject.

Also, the blame of the "no cabinet meeting" myth is often the election controversy in 2000, when in fact the article makes clear that this is a common Presidential problem that has been growing for 40 years by the sheer number of appointments requiring confirmation.

As long as we're changing the subject, I do know that Clinton told Bush that terrorism and Al Qaeda would be his biggest challenge, and that Dick Clarke made all hands on deck aware of the urgent need for a principals meeting on the subject.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB147/index.htm

By the Undersecretary for Near East policy wasn't around, so the whole country was helpless.

8:55 PM  

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