Hiding in Plain Sight?


Countdown mentioned something interesting last night:

Almost ignored in the coverage of his speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco pleading for telecom immunity, Attorney General Michael Mukasey also said, quote, "Before 9/11, that‘s the call that we didn't know about. We knew there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan, and we knew that it came to the United States, we didn‘t know precisely where it went."

What? The government knew about some call from the safe house in Afghanistan into the U.S. about 9/11, before 9/11, and even though it had the same FISA courts and the same right to act against international targets in 2001 as it has does now, they didn't do anything about it?

Well, this would seem to leave only two options, either the attorney general just admitted that the government for he works is guilty of malfeasance complicity of the 9/11 attacks or he's lying.

I'm betting on lying. If not, somebody in Congress better put that man under oath right quick. You could send them to Gitmo I suppose.

Actually, I think this might well be consistent with Condoleezza Rice's own testimony to the 9/11 Commission, where she said

...Let me read you some of the actual chatter that we picked up that spring and summer: "Unbelievable news coming in weeks," "Big event ... there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar," "There will be attacks in the near future."

Troubling, yes. But they don't tell us when; they don't tell us where; they don't tell us who; and they don't tell us how.

I don't know, but if I was in a position of high office, I think I'd USE tools like FISA to be, you know, a little on the pro-active side, and not just sit around and wait for something to happen...which, as best as I can tell, is what the Bush administration DID. And no, that's not some weirdo conspiracy theory, but the facts as described by Rice...and now Mukasey (although, to be fair, the AG was a judge, not in the Executive Branch, on 9/11).

Under those circumstances, it becomes awfully ugly to use 9/11 as some sort of badge of honor and license to "sweep everything up, related or not" or whatever the hell it was that Don Rumsfeld said. 9/11 is a national tragedy--but it's also a badge of shame...an example of the sort of incompetence that subsequently brought us...Iraq, the response to Katrina and the flood, and so on.