The Truth about 911

Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable


By PHILIP SHENON


Published: April 5, 2004



WASHINGTON, April 4 — The leaders of the independent commission investigating the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed
the attacks could probably have been prevented.

Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush's closest political
advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity
to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions
likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a
long-awaited public hearing this week.


In a joint television interview, the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former 
Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former 
Democratic House member from Indiana, indicated that their final report this summer 
would find that the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable.


They also suggested that Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, would be 
questioned aggressively on Thursday about why the administration had not taken more 
action against Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, and about discrepancies between her public 
statements and those of Richard A. Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism 
chief, who has accused the administration of largely ignoring terrorist threats in 
2001.


"The whole story might have been different," Mr. Kean said on the NBC News program 
"Meet the Press," outlining a series of intelligence and law enforcement blunders in 
the months and years before the attacks.


"There are so many threads and so many things, individual things, that happened," he 
said. "If we had been able to put those people on the watch list of the airlines, the 
two who were in the country; again, if we'd stopped some of these people at the 
borders; if we had acted earlier on Al Qaeda when Al Qaeda was smaller and just 
getting started."


Mr. Kean also cited the "lack of coordination within the F.B.I." and the bureau's 
failures to grapple with the implications of the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias 
Moussaoui, a French citizen who was arrested while in flight school and was later 
linked to the terrorist cell that carried out the attacks.


Commission officials say current and former officials of the F.B.I., especially the
former director Louis J. Freeh, and Attorney General John Ashcroft are expected to be
harshly questioned by the 10-member panel at a hearing later this month about the 
Moussaoui case and other law enforcement failures before Sept. 11. Mr. Hamilton,
a former chairman of the House Intelligence and International Relations committees, 
said, "There are a lot of ifs; you can string together a whole bunch of ifs, and if
things had broken right in all kinds of different ways, as the governor has identified,
and frankly if you'd had a little luck, it probably could have been prevented." He said
the panel would "make a final judgment on that, I believe, when the commission reports."
Mr. Kean has made similar remarks in the past, but commission officials said it appeared
to be the first time Mr. Hamilton, the chief Democrat on the panel, had said publicly
that he believed the attacks could have been prevented. Mr. Kean and other members of 
the commission also agreed in interviews Sunday that the Bush administration's skepticism
about the Clinton administration's national security policies might have led the Bush
White House to pay too little attention to the threat of Al Qaeda.

Also appearing on "Meet the Press," Karen P. Hughes, one of Mr. Bush's closest political 
advisers and an important strategist for his re-election campaign, rejected the suggestion
that the attacks could have been prevented.

"I just don't think, based on everything I know, and I was there, that there was anything 
that anyone in government could have done to have put together the pieces before the horror 
of that day," Ms. Hughes said. "If we could have in either administration, either in the 
eight years of the Clinton administration or the seven and a half months of the Bush 
administration, I'm convinced we would have done so."


Conclusion: All the garbage that propaganda queens like Karen Hughes promote is directly
responsible for 911. The sleazy effort to make no distinction between the Clinton and Bush
Administrations is nothing more than an effort to cover up the truth. Clinton worked with 
competent people like Richard Clarke. Bush worked with the people who failed to prevent 911.
Needless to say, Karen Hughes is like those ignorant, partisan, Congressional Republican 
leaders that attack competent counter-terrorists like Mr. Clarke, but prominent Republicans
like Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
appeared on the ABC News program "This Week," where he indicated that he did not recall any 
contradictions between Mr. Clarke's testimony to the Sept. 11 commission and information he 
had previously provided to the joint Congressional investigation of the attacks. Asked if he 
would join his Republican colleagues in attacking Mr. Clarke's credibility, Senator Lugar 
replied, "I wouldn't go there."