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November 10, 2004

9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey talks to CNN's Paula Zahn.
Kerrey: "[T]here'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 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.

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 ..."
If the information was in the Commission's published report -- and it was -- why did the Commission members need to take an oath, vowing to not talk about it during the campaign? Was it simply to avoid pointing out the truth about the Bush administration's negligence? Since Kerrey is not revealing any previously unknown information to Zahn, that's the impression I'm left with.

Wasn't fighting terrorism one of the big issues this time around? Shouldn't every American have as much information as possible when making their decision who to vote for? And these fucking hacks on the Commission were supposed to be non-partisan?!?

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