http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/08/pzn.01.html
Sworn to secrecy to keep the truth from the American public?ZAHN: Was John Kerry an intuitive campaigner?
KERREY: He's not as intuitive a politician as George Bush is. I mean, George W. Bush's father isn't as intuitive. I'm not as intuitive.
George Bush knows when to kiss the baby. And that's a hard thing to teach. In fact, it's an impossible thing to teach. He's very good on the street and he's good with the message. His message was, I will keep you safe, and the other guy won't. And when you are the incumbent, it's a much higher standard for an opponent to prove that you're wrong. So...
ZAHN: The American public, by and large, didn't think John Kerry was the guy to do that.
KERREY: That's correct, because the president had a case, a very simple case to make: I am the commander in chief. I won the war in Afghanistan, even though John Kerry supported it, even though, by the way, there's a credible case that the president's own negligence prior to 9/11 at least in part contributed to the disaster in the first place.
ZAHN: How so?
KERREY: Well, the 9/11 report says in chapter eight -- now that it's beyond the campaign, so the promise I had to keep this out of the campaign is over.
The 9/11 report in chapter eight says that, in the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn't do anything to harden our border security, didn't do anything to harden airport country, didn't do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn't do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn't warn the American people.
The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn't made.
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: But what we continue to hear from this administration is that the threat was much too diffuse. There was no way you could zero in on the fact that al Qaeda was going to use jets as bombs and ram them into buildings.
KERREY: That is a straw man.
The president says, if I had only known that 19 Islamic men would come into the United States of America and on the morning of 11 September hijack four American aircraft, fly two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into an unknown Pennsylvania that crashed in Shanksville, I would have moved heaven and earth. That's what he said.
Mr. President, you don't need to know that. This is an Islamic jihadist movement that has been organized since the early 1990s, declared war on the United States twice, in '96 and '98. You knew they were in the United States. You were warned by the CIA. You knew in July they were inside the United States. You were told again by briefing officers in August that it was a dire threat.
And what did you do? Nothing, so far as we could see on the 9/11 Commission. Now, that's in the report. And we took an oath not to talk about it during the campaign, I think correctly so, to increase the capacity of that commission's report to be heard by the people's Congress.
But the report, I think, it's difficult for a challenger. If I had been the challenger, it's difficult to make that case when you are running against an incumbent. He can stand back and say, oh, you're just grousing.
ZAHN: Oh, we couldn't connect the dots is what we heard.
Kinda ticks me off that the Commission members couldn't discuss this during the past year. Gee...wonder why?Tenet told us that in his world "the system was blinking red." By late July, Tenet said, it could not "get any worse."30 Not everyone was convinced. Some asked whether all these threats might just be deception. On June 30, the SEIB contained an article titled "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real." Yet Hadley told Tenet in July that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz questioned the reporting. Perhaps Bin Ladin was trying to study U.S. reactions. Tenet replied that he had already addressed the Defense Department's questions on this point; the reporting was convincing. To give a sense of his anxiety at the time, one senior official in the Counterterrorist Center told us that he and a colleague were considering resigning in order to go public with their concerns.31
30. AAL transcript, telephone call from Betty Ong to Nydia Gonzalez, Sept. 11, 2001.
31. See Nydia Gonzalez interview (Nov. 19, 2003); Craig Marquis interviews (Nov. 19, 2003; Apr. 26, 2004); AAL record, Dispatch Environmental Control/Weekly Flight Summary for Flight 11, Sept. 11, 2001; AAL transcript, telephone call from Bill Halleck to BOS ATC, Sept. 11, 2001.The Air Carrier Standard Security Program required airlines to immediately notify the FAA and FBI upon receiving information that an act or suspected act of airplane piracy was being committed.
s while you wait*
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