These are the people claiming that Bush “dropped the ball before 9/11,” didn’t “connect the dots” and so forth. So here’s the administration not letting that happen again. It’s better to be forewarned and have everybody prepared and maybe stymie an attack than not to do that and then the Democrats still come out and say, “They don’t know what they’re doing. They should have implemented reform,” whatever it is they’re saying. It’s just incomprehensible. It’s impossible almost to keep up with —
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Two stories in the Washington Post, the New York Times. They admitted (laughing). Get this, now. These stories admitted there’s a conspiracy, that the Bush team is
“Gathering and then analyzing,” this process prohibited by Gorelick in the past and the Bush team looked at all the information,
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LA Times piece: “Some of the surveillance files that triggered the nation’s latest terrorism alert were reviewed and updated by Al-Qaeda just months ago and dovetailed with other fresh intelligence that indicates the terrorism network remains intent on launching a major U.S. attack during a presidential election campaign.” This from U.S. authorities yesterday. Now, we’ve got to give the LA Times credit. It’s not often we do this, but they deserve credit because the New York Times and the Washington Post today both run stories making it sound like this false, phony, old, out-of-date information used for political purposes and make the counterterrorism people of this country look like idiots, frankly, and the LA Times gets this right. The question I have: let’s say hypothetically, let’s say there was no new updated information but we just learned of this and it is three or four years old.
When did we first hear about the possibility of Al-Qaeda hijacking jets and flying them into buildings? We heard about that when? Nineteen ninety-five — 1995 — and the September 11 attacks occur in Gorelick memo. There are others obviously as well. So what if this information was three or four years old and it hadn’t been updated, but we just now learned about it? So what? But it’s irrelevant anyway because it is updated information from as recently as January. “One senior Department of Homeland Security official said, ‘It’s like you have this blank piece of paper, and it’s filling up with more and more dots. It all points to an attack.'”
On Monday, yesterday, Tom Ridge told the Today Show that “on a scale of one to ten, the quality of the intelligence prompting the alert was a ten.” It had to be. These people moved into fast gear. “One senior U.S. defense official also on Monday said that one of these two terrorists was caught with sketches, maps and about 500 diagrams of buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington. More than ten buildings in New York had been sketched and diagrammed many times, he said. Said there was also a diagram of the 52-story Bank of America Center in San Francisco.” The intelligence data says they have been casing joint, in essence. They’ve been outside and inside these buildings. They’ve been figuring out who works where at what time, where would be the greatest likelihood of the greatest number of casualties, what time would the attack generate the highest number of casualties, all of these things, and the LA Times has that.
The files included details about when and how to attack the buildings to inflict the most casualties. Also the New York Times. The New York Times with their story today trying to cast aspersions on this whole story, trying to say it’s pumped up, and yet is it not true they have some of the most severe independent security of any building in New York? They have ramped up security. They have more security that they’ve bought and paid for around their building in Times Square than a lot of other buildings — in fact, than
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