by Ann Coulter
In an interview with Deborah Norville about Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Jersey Girl Breitweiser complained: “[R]eally, she spent the day just saying that, `No, I didn’t do anything wrong. No one asked me to do this. How would I know?’ ” In the same interview, Jersey Girl Patty Casazza demanded to know why Rice didn’t stop the attack on the basis of the now-famous August 6 “PDB,” or Presidential Daily Briefing. Casazza said the August PDB “certainly stated that Osama bin Laden was all set to do an at-tack on the homeland here in the United States,” and “with that information, I don’t know how you wouldn’t have, you know, put up a better defense.”
If this PDB was so important, why has the media shied away from printing it? The New York Times never had room, just one day, to print the entire PDB? All you ever hear about is the title: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” (Midwest Girl Determined to Succeed in Hollywood.) In fact, the full PDB is a Cliffs Notes history lesson on al Qaeda. It reads like a homework assignment that should have been done earlier but wasn’t and instead got quickly cobbled together at midnight by hitting the encyclopedia: “[Bin Laden] prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks.” And there you have it! The entire 9/11 plot!
Indeed, all the information about bin Laden in the August PDB comes from the nineties. Not one fact in the PDB is more recent than 1999. Thus, for example, the memo recites these facts:
• “Bin Ladin [sic] since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.”
• “The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.”
• “Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens and a senior EIJ (Egyptian Islamic Jihad) member lived in California in the mid-1990’s.”
While the PDB had a lot of old news about bin Laden, it didn’t have much to say about his future plans. Even if the memo’s stale information had been recast in the form of urgent warnings—rather than as factual data from a boring book report—the PDB did not predict one single fact about the 9/11 attack. There is nothing in the memo that could possibly have prevented 9/11.
The four statements in the PDB hinting at al Qaeda’s future operations were these:
“CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the U.S. planning attack with explosives.”
The 9/11 attack did not involve explosives.
“We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of `Blind Shaykh’ Ùmar àdb at-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.”
The 9/11 attack was not an attempt to ransom the Blind Sheik or any other Muslim terrorists, which would have required taking live hostages, not just killing a lot of people by crashing the planes.
“FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
The 9/11 attack did not target any federal buildings in New York.
“A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.”
None of the nineteen hijackers were youths recruited from a bin Laden cell in New York.
If the entire federal government had gone on Red Alert in response to the August 6 PDB, FBI agents would have been rousting suspected terrorists in Queens and looking for swarthy men in U-Haul trucks outside the federal courthouse in New York. In theory, they might also have instituted racial profiling at airport security, which would have prevented both the hostage-taking mentioned in the August PDB and the actual 9/11 attack. Liberals won’t let us do this after 9/11; they certainly wouldn’t have let us do it before 9/11.
So besides a general historical review of al Qaeda (noun, Arabic for “the base,” terrorist group formed in 1980s that seeks to attack the U.S.) based on information known since at least 1999, the few bits of information about future attacks contained nothing of relevance to the actual attack.
Why didn’t the media ever see fit to reveal the full text of the August 6 PDB? It’s not as if this memo wasn’t being used to bash the administration. The media deliberately prevented Americans from seeing the memo in order to attack Condoleezza Rice for saying the document contained only “historical information”—which it did.
Of course, there were clues about what the famous PDB contained. When Richard Ben-Veniste interrogated Condoleezza Rice about the PDB during the 9/11 Commission hearings—wasting the time of the president’s national security adviser in wartime—he nearly had to pull out a bullhorn to prevent Rice from revealing its contents:
BEN-VENISTE: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB.
RICE: I believe the title was “Bin Laden Determined to Attack In-side the United States.” Now, the…
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste, you…
BEN-VENISTE: I will get into the…
RICE: I would like to finish my point here.
BEN-VENISTE: I didn’t know there was a point. I asked you what the title was.
RICE: You asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.
BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.
RICE: You said did it not warn of attacks? It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information, based on old reporting. There was no new threat information, and it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.
This enraged the Jersey Girls. How dare Rice deny that the 9/11 plot had been laid out plainly in a document that issued such clarion warnings as “Bin Laden associates surveilled our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombing were arrested and deported in 1997.” Obviously, this meant nineteen Muslim men were going to wrest control of four commercial aircraft flying out of Boston’s Logan Airport, Washington’s Dulles Airport, and New Jersey’s Newark Airport on the morning of September 11 and fly the planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Why wouldn’t Rice admit she could have stopped the 9/11 attack and saved Kristen Breitweiser’s husband?
Mostly the Witches of East Brunswick wanted George Bush to apologize for not being Bill Clinton. Like Monica Lewinsky before her, Breitweiser found impeached president Clinton “very forthcoming.” She also found the flamboyant Bush-basher Richard Clarke “very forthcoming.” Miss Va-Va Voom of 1968 seemed to think the 9/11 Commission was her nationally televised personal therapy session and as long as government officials issued fake apologies, she could have “closure.” (One shudders to imagine how Clinton ministers to four widows.) The rest of the nation was more interested in knowing why the FBI was prevented from being given intelligence about 9/11 terrorists here in the United States more than a year before the attack and would have liked to have top government officials back on the job preventing the next terrorist attack rather than participating in a charade intended to exonerate the Clinton administration.
Needless to say, the Democrat ratpack gals endorsed John Kerry for president. Most audaciously, they complained about the Bush campaign using images from the 9/11 attack in campaign ads, calling it “political propaganda”—which was completely different from the “Just Four Moms from New Jersey” cutting campaign commercials for Kerry. And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they’d better hurry up and appear in Playboy.
Other weeping widows began issuing rules about what could be done at Ground Zero in New
York City. This is among the contributing factors to the fact that it’s been five years since the 9/11 attack and Ground Zero is still just a big empty plot of ground in the most dynamic city in the world. Five years after Pearl Harbor, we had won WWII, fielded armies on two continents, and developed the atom bomb. Construction workers cleaned up the entire World Trade Center site—1.8 million tons of rubble, 16 acres wide, seven stories high, and 70 feet below ground—months ahead of schedule. But since then, the site has remained unchanged, while family members squabble about what may be built on the “sacred” ground. You have to shut down the No. 1 train because it reminds me of my husband! If FDR had had to put up with this, no planes would ever have been allowed to fly over Hawaii again. Surely, there can be a proper memorial without leaving the footprints empty. The British burned the Capitol and the White House in the War of 1812. If we’d been smart, those are the places we would have left empty.
A lot of widows support Bush—a lot support Pat Buchanan. But they were not trying to convert their personal tragedy into a weapon to dictate national policy or redesign lower Manhattan. None of the weeping widows issuing demands, I note, were firemen’s wives. And how about we hear from some wives of proud fighting Marines? While these professional 9/11 victims turned themselves into the arbiters of what anyone could say about 9/11, some poor woman in Astoria, Queens, was being told her husband died in a car accident. She won’t be paid millions of dollars, feted in Vanity Fair, or granted federal commissions to investigate why her husband died.
It’s especially odd having the angry 9/11 widows fawned over by the same political party that objects to crime victims’ delivering victim impact statements. From now on, when someone’s loved one is killed by a criminal and given a reduced sentence by a liberal judge, can that judge be hauled before a committee of the family?
* * *
ANOTHER Democrat who used a tragedy that befell a mate to end an argument was the biggest drama queen of them all: Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson is the ne’er-do-well, unemployed WASP who claimed to be a Bush insider accusing the president of lying about prewar intelligence on Iraq. Wilson’s prior work experience consisted of drifting through some low-level positions at U.S. embassies over the years until reaching the pinnacle of his career: Ambassador to Gabon. Wilson insists on being called “Ambassador.”
Wilson thrust himself on the nation in July 2003. He wrote an op-ed for the New York Times claiming Bush had lied in his State of the Union address when he said the famous “16 words”: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
The British believed it then and believe it now. A bipartisan Senate Committee that conducted a painstaking investigation believes it. Why, even the French believe it! After Coalition forces conquered Iraq in seventeen days flat with amazingly few casualties, forcing liberals to carp about something other than the execution of the war, they became hysterical about the case for war. Consequently, the British government convened the Butler Commission to evaluate their government’s prewar intelligence. Among the commission’s conclusions, released in 2004, was this: “It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999” and that “the British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.”
But that’s not how Wilson saw it. In 2002, he had been sent on an unpaid government make-work job to Niger to “investigate” whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger. Wilson’s method of investigating consisted of sitting around cafes, asking African potentates questions like Did you commit a horrible crime, which, if so, would ruin your country’s relationship with the United States? I have no independent means of corroborating this, so be honest! It seems not to have occurred to Wilson that his method of investigation might not be watertight. But on the basis of the answers he got, Wilson concluded that Saddam had not sought uranium ore from Niger.
The Senate Intelligence Committee later learned that Wilson’s trip had unwittingly bolstered the case that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger. ( Joe Wilson seems to go through life doing things unwittingly.) Almost as an afterthought, Wilson had informed CIA employees that the former prime minister of Niger told him an Iraqi delegation had proposed “expanding commercial relations” with Niger. Since Niger’s only major export is uranium, anyone who discusses “expanding commercial relations” with Niger is talking about buying uranium.
But Wilson was floored when he heard Bush’s State of the Union address. Listening to Bush’s speech, Wilson interpreted “Africa” to mean “Niger” and “British intelligence” to mean “Joseph Wilson,” and realized in horror that Bush must have been referring to Wilson’s very own report!
Or at least that’s what he realized soon after he started working for the Kerry campaign in May 2003. This was a fact the media seemed studiously uninterested in pursuing: Wilson’s inadvertent admission that he had begun advising the Kerry campaign one month before he started making his outlandish claims against the Bush administration. In October 2003, the Associated Press reported that Wilson said he had been “advising Kerry on foreign policy for about five months.” That means he started working for Kerry in May 2003—a month before he wrote his New York Times op-ed titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
Out of love for his country and an insatiable desire to have someone notice his worthless existence, Wilson wrote a column for the Times that called Bush a liar. His story was nutty enough to be believed by the entire New York Times editorial board.
Though Wilson’s defenders later indignantly denied it, he had clearly implied in his op-ed that he had been sent to Niger at the be-hest of Vice President Dick Cheney and had reported back to him—which was certainly news to Cheney.
Among Wilson’s other references to the high-level nature of his trip in his j’accuse column in the Times, he said:
• “I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report.”
• “[A]gency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.” (Curiously, one “agency official” also asked him to take out the trash and be home early for junior’s T-ball game that night.)
• “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” (He neglected to mention that his “experience” with the Bush administration was limited to what he read in the Washington Post from his living room couch.)
True, Wilson never unequivocally stated that Cheney sent him to Niger or that he reported back to Cheney. But he sure as hell didn’t say his wife had recommended him for the trip. With Wilson’s encouragement, soon the entire press corps was reporting that Cheney had sent him to Niger and that Wilson’s nonexistent “files” were sitting on Cheney’s desk.
In short order, the White House was being forced to deny that the vice president had sent Wilson to Niger. CNN’s White House correspondent Dana Bash querulously remarked that the White House “at this time” was “continuing to deny” that Cheney had “ordered” Wilson to make the trip: “Now, with regard to ambassador Wilson’s charge that it was actually the vice president’s office that ordered him to go and that they did know about his conclusion … administration officials are, at this time, flatly denying that. One official is telling CNN, quote, that they were, quote, ùnaware of the mission and unaware of the results or conclusion of his mission.’ So this is something that the White House is continuing to deny.”
ABC News reported, in a program objectively titled “Bush Administration Deceives America: President Used Known Falsehood to Lead Americans to War,” that “Ambassador Joe Wilson says, at the request of Vice President C
heney’s office, the CIA sent him to Niger in February 2002.
Wilson not only failed to correct the media’s mammoth misunderstanding about the genesis of his trip to Niger, but began claiming that the vice president was aware of his conclusions. On Meet the Press, Wilson said, “The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there.”’ Unless he was referring to the vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, this was preposterous. But Wilson assured the Washington Post—based on his insider knowledge, no doubt—”When you task a serious organization like the CIA to answer a question, it doesn’t go into a black hole.” It might go into a black hole, however, if you were sent by your wife.
The Washington Post reported that the Bush administration and British government had “ignored [Wilson’s] findings” that “helped debunk claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium” from Niger. (This was about the same time the Bush administration “ignored” my report that I was running low on dishwasher detergent.)
The Union Leader (Manchester, N.H.) reported that Wilson went to Niger “at the request of Vice President Richard Cheney’s office” and that Wilson said “he had files with the State Department, CIA and the vice president’s office” saying there were no uranium sales to Iraq. Wilson had filed no written report, but suddenly his “files” were sitting on the vice president’s desk.