Thursday, April 08, 2004
The Widows rip Condi a new one
It was Condi's job to get the information
Condi had to have known that airplanes could have been used as missiles
Unasked and answered question: Why no meetings to "shake the trees"?
Unasked and unanswered question: Why weren't the fighters scrambled?
Unasked and answered questions: How did some officials know to stop flying?
MATTHEWS: You once said that she was either lying or she’s incompetent. What do you think of her now? Do you think that’s still a fair judgment, I mean if it ever was one?
BREITWEISER: I have to say, with a laundry list of questions that that Commissioner Lehman asked her, she said she didn’t know a lot of things. And I would question what exactly did she know? And if she didn’t know it, who else would know it?
It’s her job to know that information. It’s her job to relay that information to the president and to actually, in our opinion, inform the public.
(via MSNBC)
Condi had to have known that airplanes could have been used as missiles
MATTHEWS: Let’s go through the points mentioned.
Condoleezza Rice today said that she’d never been briefed on planes being used as missiles. She reiterated that today, even though we know that Richard Clarke – and this has been uncontested – had prepared as far back as 1996 for planes being used as missiles at the Atlanta Olympics.
BREITWEISER: Not only the Atlanta Olympics, but they were doing workups for the Utah Olympics. So you know what? How does she not know that? You take the G8 Summit…
Unasked and answered question: Why no meetings to "shake the trees"?
KLEINBERG: Right. And the other thing that strikes me is that they’re talking about the FBI and the CIA not speaking to each other. Historically, that has been the case. What I don’t understand is that, considering that we knew that there was this threat, OK, why they didn’t have them in a meeting?
You know, Richard Clarke said that during the millennium plot, they had all of the principals involved in a meeting together to make sure that they could overcome that stone wall. Why couldn’t we do that? And why did they poo-poo it and they say no big deal and we didn’t need the meeting? How did they know that? Maybe if the FBI, the CIA, and the attorney general and everybody was in one room and they were talking about all of the issues – and where the threat was coming from-- they would have been able to pull at these threads.
Unasked and unanswered question: Why weren't the fighters scrambled?
MATTHEWS: I want to talk to you about the people who may have dropped the ball.
VAN AUKEN: Well, my first reaction is there’s another part to Condoleezza Rice’s statements, which was that they were focused on traditional hijackings. And they did nothing to thwart a traditional hijacking on that day either.
So when a plane misses its mark in the sky – you have a very crowded Northeast corridor – you can’t have errant planes running around there. Nobody sent up a fighter jet to go see what was happening, not to shoot the plane down, but to intercept it. So I don’t understand, if they were focused on traditional hijackings and even had that as a warning inside the PDB, why they were so slow to respond.
Unasked and answered questions: How did some officials know to stop flying?
LORIE VAN AUKEN, WIDOW OF 9/11 ATTACK: We also know that people stopped flying domestically. Ashcroft stopped flying. Pentagon officials stop flying the day before September 11. They were warned not fly on September 11. We think San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was told not to fly. That’s all domestic. You know, everybody keeps telling us how they were focused outward.
MATTHEWS: You’re talking about before 9/11 they were warned?
VAN AUKEN: Yes. Yes, right.
