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Observations on the world today.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Give Me a Ticket on a Non-Commercial Aeroplane 

John Ashcroft is in the hotseat today. This article, Salon.com | 10 questions for John Ashcroft, has two questions which I personally would really, really, REALLY like to hear the answers to:
5) Beginning in the summer of 2001, Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines and traveled exclusively by private jet because of an FBI "threat assessment." What, exactly, did the threat assessment say? Why is the threat assessment still being withheld from the public?

8) Why, in the days after 9/11, did Ashcroft, along with White House and State Department officials, allow two dozen members of the bin Laden and Saudi royal families to circumvent FAA restrictions forbidding flights and leave the country without full FBI questioning?
The second one, I want to hear the answer simply to feed the conspiracy-theorist curiosity in me. The first question, though, is extremely significant.

The clear implication is that there were specific indications that terrorists were targeting commercial airlines. Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish/American former FBI translator, said as much in the interviews she has given about her testimony before the commissions. If that was the basis for Ashcroft's threat assessment decision, it demonstrates incredible ineptitude on the part of this administration. It means that one of the following scenarios occurred:
• Bush had been specifically warned about hijacking threats and ignored them.
• Condaleezza Rice knew of the threat but did not share it with the president, which makes her sworn testimony to the commission a lie.
• Ashcroft kept the information to himself, but considered it significant enough to take his own security precautions. Screw the rest of us.
Whichever one it was - even if it was the third - the buck stops with Bush. Had he "shaken the trees" after seeing the August 6 PDB, Ashcroft would have had to tell him about the chatter which inspired him to stop flying commercially.

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