It Usually Starts with John Ashcroft
The pre-9/11 timeline has never made less sense

http://www.reason.com/links/links101006.shtml

Jeff A. Taylor
10/11/2006

As the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui conclusively proved, amazing things happen when you ask people to tell the truth or go to jail. Testimony by FBI officials in a real criminal court revealed long-buried facts that show that federal officials had far more information about the 9/11 plot than anyone had suspected.

Now, thanks to Bob Woodward's book State of Denial, we have learned that immediately prior to the Moussaoui-inspired August 2001 attempts by the Minneapolis FBI office to raise an alarm about terror attacks, the CIA was in Washington briefing top Bush administration officials like John Ashcroft and Condoleezza Rice about terror threats.

What's more, at least one crucial July 10, 2001 CIA briefing given to Rice completely escaped the 9/11 Commission report. That would be the same 9/11 Commission that John Ashcroft stonewalled in 2004 and now rips in his new book Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice.

As UPI reports:

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft this week became the only Cabinet-level Bush official to attack the Sept. 11 Commission, writing in his memoirs it "seemed obsessed with trying to lay the blame for the terrorist attacks at the feet of the Bush administration, while virtually absolving the previous administration of responsibility."

Ashcroft also writes that the commission's hearings "were not so much about discovering the truth as they were about assessing blame and grandstanding," adding that they "degenerated into show trials."

GOP Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former senator from Washington State, told United Press International Thursday that he found the charges "extraordinary," recalling that President Bush had personally repudiated Ashcroft's tactics in his sparring with the commission.

"Most of the criticism (the commission received) was the exact opposite: that we didn't blame anyone," he said. "Our job was to write a factual account which readers could use to assess blame for themselves."

Ashcroft "may very well have been the worst witness we interviewed," he said, adding he was "very unresponsive and unhelpful."

What alternate reality are we in where the 9/11 panel's perfunctory, at best, stenography of the 9/11 principals is some sort of partisan witch hunt? Welcome to the world of John Ashcroft, who is now emerging as the epicenter of the pre-9/11 "no warning" cover story.

As Attorney General in 2001, Ashcroft was at the intersection of law enforcement and counter-terrorism. Contrary to the Ashcroft-constructed myth that a Clinton administration-built wall existed between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, info did pass back and forth between the two sides. Only believers in that myth would be surprised to learn that on or around July 17, 2001 Ashcroft was briefed by the CIA on terror threats. In keeping with the myth, Ashcroft denies ever getting such info.

McClatchy Newspapers reported last week:

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

David Ayres, who was Ashcroft's chief of staff at the Justice Department, said that the former attorney general also has no recollection of a July 17, 2001, terrorist threat briefing. Later, Ayres said that Ashcroft could recall only a July 5 briefing on threats to U.S. interests abroad.

He said Ashcroft doesn't remember any briefing that summer that indicated that al-Qaida was planning to attack within the United States.

End Part I