About that disrupted attack…

February 9, 2006

Before we get into the big news story of the day — Bush’s comments today about a thwarted terrorist attack in Los Angeles in 2002 — let’s consider a brief step back to last October.

About four months ago, the president claimed, for the first time, that his administration had disrupted “at least ten serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th [2001], including three al Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States.” As it turned out, some of the “serious plots” were actually half-baked plans that were never going to happen. Regardless, in an Oct. 6 speech, Bush specifically pointed to a thwarted attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fast forward to today. In one of the infamous “major speeches” on the war on terror, Bush pointed to a thwarted attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. To be fair, Bush included a couple of new details — shoe-bombs were apparently part of the plot — but the president essentially made major headlines today for repeating a four-month-old claim.

Does this have something to do with the warrantless-search program? Apparently not.

So, why is this a major story today? The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin thinks the White House has pulled another fast one on the press corps. I think he’s right.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan whipped up the press corps early this morning with word that Bush would offer hitherto secret information about the plot to crash a plane into Los Angeles’s tallest building.

Reporters were abuzz, and CNN even pulled away from its live coverage of a news conference announcing murder charges for a British man whose American wife and baby were shot to death last month in Massachusetts.

But now we’re all left scratching our heads a bit. Why is the White House suddenly offering all these details, even though they are unrelated to the central issue preoccupying official Washington, namely whether Bush’s secret surveillance plan is illegal? Could it just be an attempt to change the subject?

I hope that last question was rhetorical because the answer seems so painfully obvious.

That White House “Press” Corps is the biggest bunch of doofuses outside a Three Stooges movie. Why anybody gives them the time of day is beyond me. Jerks. It’s a social club for a bunch of snot-nosed ivy-league graduates who’ve never put themselves in harm’s way to get a real news story. And you can just bet their C-average major was in journalism – not history, or poli sci, or renaissance literature or anything involving facts and reasoning and proof. I’ll bet Helen Thomas is the only one among them who knows what real journalism is.

  • The Washington Post also had an article today about the FISA chief judges instructing the Justice Department not to submit any FISA applications that derived from the Hayden wiretapping program.

    That seems to suggest just what they thought about the legality and constitutionality of the warrantless wiretapping.

    And now we have Bush telling us that the three biggest terrorist plots against US soil twarted by them were not found out by the warrantless wiretapping. (Jose Padilla doesn’t really qualify IMHO).

    And the FBI telling us that the hit rate for useful tips from the program is less than 1 percent.

    George W keeps telling us that Osama and Al Quaida attack us because they hate our freedoms.

    Do Bush and Cheney hate them too? Doesn’t undermining Americans’ freedoms mean that the Administration is helping the Terrorists win 😉

  • Lance, the terrrrists hate us for our freedum. That’s why we have to give away some of them freedums so they don’t hate us so much. If we give away just enough, the bad man will not come and scare us agin. And if we give away some freedums no real Murican uses anyways, we be smarter then them terrrrists. We gets somethin for nuttin! It’s Murican en-gi-nuuu-ety, baby!

  • Another distraction to take air time on Tweety’s “Hardball” and the Fox news “programs”.
    Olberman will mention it and hopefully have a joke about it.

  • Great piece. This is why the blogosphere serves an important role in American journalism.

    I equate the blogosphere is to the mainstream media as what a good woman is to a man – corrects them, reminds them and makes them better.

  • just wondering what the color of the terror alert was during the time of the supposed LA attack

  • Does this have something to do with the warrantless-search program?

    Of course it does!! Not only did the terrorists have shoe-bombs, but they were talking on their shoe-phones!!! Which the prez was wiretapping!!!!

    Secret NSA tape–

    Khalid Sheik Mohammed (to shoe-bomb terrorist): Did you bomb the Library tower?
    (static)
    Shoe-bomb terrorist: Sorry, chief. Missed it by thatmuch.

  • Plunging polls + poor SOTU + the appearance of Congress actually realizing they have an oversight responsibility + Alberto talking out his butt + Abrahamoff loves GWB = attack on Senate office building and news of a tharted terrorist attack. It is a simple equation.

    They have been arguing we are safe but under a serious threat for years now. The best way to prove it is to fill the news with near-miss stories and scare every mullet-head in every Wal-Mart gun aisle.

    They are shameless. I wonder if O’Reilly will even mention this? I mean L.A., S.F. what is the difference really? They are both pretty much disposable. I wonder if God told Pat Robertson why he spared L.A.?

  • Flying a commercial airliner into a building ceased to be a serious threat the morning of 9/11/2001. The only reason they worked in the first place is that our “terrorism experts” have assured us that the best thing to do in a hijacking is to be meek, docile, and cooperative.

    By the time the people on Flight 93 heard what had happened to the other three flights, they (without being terrorism experts) figured out what the proper response was. If they had known of this before the hijackers had control of the plane, there is every reason to believe the flight would not have crashed.

    I flew shortly after 9/11/2001. I knew what Flight 93 had figured out and, from the looks of my fellow passengers, they knew too. HIjackers are a threat to the plane they are own, but they are no longer a credible threat to buildings and people on the ground (except by accident).

  • Call me cynical, but I have serious doubts about the truthfulness of this claim. If Bush would lie about the reasons to take us to war, then it probably wouldn’t bother him to pass on another fabricated story.

  • you know, something about this story bothers me. Why is it that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is all of a sudden the mastermind behind 9/11???

    Weren’t we told that it was Osama bin Laden who was the mastermind and that’s why we put out the “Dead or Alive” posters? I don’t remember Khalid being on a poster? Anyone? Anyone?

  • Of course the Chimp managed to call the LA building the “Liberty Tower” instead of “Library Tower”. As I said before, IDIOT.

  • Hey Gridlock…liked the “Get Smart” reference.

    And yes…Khalid was the mastermind. I remember him from the 9/11 Commission report.

  • Careful Ed, some of us Ivy Leaguers are pretty
    down to earth and on the right side. 🙂

    They wore out the orange alert scam, so now
    it’s the retroactive how-we-actually-saved-you
    ruse, which I need a lot of proof to convince
    me of. And it absolutely begs the question of
    why we’re being kept from all these heroic
    acts of salvation in the first place. I am really
    getting fed up with this secrecy crap in the
    Bush administration. Seems we’re not allowed
    to know anything at all for national security
    reasons. Bullshit!

  • I wish the press remembered how to make screaming headlines like, “McCLELLAN STONEWALLS PRESS” and splatter them over every front page in Ameria. Remember those old movies where stacks of newspapers flowed down print racks causing swarms of motorcycle cops to roar out of police garages like angry bees, sirens wailing?

    We just don’t seem to have that kind of fire in the belly any more and I really miss it a lot.

  • Gridlock, Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a star in the 9/11 Commisiion Report. Read Chapter 7. Zawahiri did not even know about the 9/11 plot unitil midsummer 2001. Some deputy.

    The 9/11 Commission was not permitted to interview Khalid’s interviewer, let alone Khalid. The problem is that so much of the information in the report about the 9/11 plan was attributed to Khalid. I don’t know about anyone else but third hand information about the worst terrorist attack in US history does not do it for me.

    Take Osama bin Laden’s important visitors in the summer of 2001. He supposedly was shooting his big mouth off about a pending US attack. Gee, did anyone on the commission think that we might be interested in the names of the visitors?

    The report is maddening. We learn that Mohammed Atta went to Cairo U. and spoke fluent German. Great, but where did he learn fluent English?

    Khalid’s past is rather vague considering that he coughed up so many of the details of the 9/11 attack. I’m not sure if the report mentions it but I read that Khalid worked for a prince in Qatar in the ’90s. Qatar is an ally.

    BTW, on the domestic terroist front, when was the last time that anyone in DC in government or media mentioned the anthrax case? 5 murders and $6 billion later, some American(s) terrorized the country equipped only with a handful of anthrax. Do you think anyone ever gets murdered for money?

    Bunch of bullshit, if you ask me. Go ahead and ridicule conspiracy theorists if you want to but have you heard anything the last four years to indicate that the government wouldn’t lie about 9/11?

  • “We just don’t seem to have that kind of fire in the belly any more and I really miss it a lot.”

    I’m with you! I once saw a front page of the Las Vegas Sun. All it had above the fold were two lines of very bold, black capital letters:
    HUGE LV SMUT
    CRACKDOWN

    Below the fold was just a photo – I think of some dance hall girls.

    I don’t think print journalists work very hard for their stories anymore. No point to it: everything’s all over cables and blogs as soon as it’s out. All TV newsies care about is their coif and their Botox, certainly not the news (except traffic, fires, and muders). And they’re paid bazillions of times more than those who sit around print shops.

    And the charm of newspapers is gone. The city-room, the “rim”, linotype machines, Ludlow machines (headline setters, if I remember), reading racks of type upside down and backwards, giving your favorite alcoholic printer a bottle of Roma wine to let you get in one last edit, delivering bundles of those “hot off the presses” to the newsstands, seeing your byline in print.

  • It’s like the fable of someone who cries “Wolf!” too often: When actually a wolf appears, no one believes it!! George W. Bush lies too often, when he states the truth–not that he really is doing it now; nobody knows for sure–no one would believe it. It seems to be an effort to change the subject of why he authorized wiretapping without getting warrants.

  • Hey, marcus alrealius alrightus, you aren’t a cynic. I am. I don’t believe a word Bush says. He’s a serial liar. He would rather lie than tell the truth. If his administration had actually thwarted a terrorist attack, he would of pounded John Kerry with that fact every day of the 2004 campaign. He would still be crowing about it.
    SERIAL LIARS – Bush, Cheney, and the whole damn team of incompetents.

  • Remember Rove’s revealed strategy. They have to scare us to win the 2006 elections. So we have the second roll-out of a failed plot – which will work because NOBODY will remember that it is old news. And we have a scare at the capitol.

    Expect more Orange alerts. More trumped us scares. It worked in 2004, they are going to use it again in 2006.

  • Hey. Go to Eschaton. Atrios has a nice reproduction of the press gaggle with Scotty McNumbnutt, where an astute reporter quizzes him on the practicality of how someone can hijack a plane, with the intent to fly it into a building, with shoe bombs–the reporter states the obvious that if the hijhacker uses the shoe bombs, he will either blow off his feet, or blow up the cockpit, which in either case would not result in the plane flying into a building. Classic.

  • Can’t we just say it? Terrorism can be effectively fought and the NSA program can be an unnecessary, abuse of power.

    These are not mutually exclusive, and Bush isn’t even coming near to showing us why we should think that they are. Let’s hold them to a proper standard. Let’s not allow them to mislead us, not a bit.

  • And BTW, the Washington Post article on this mentions Bin Laden; also it turns out that another country captured the terrorist who was plotting the LA attack, and the US’ connection to that, if any, isn’t made clear. Which is interesting given that the headlines make it sound like Bush is crowing about himself.

  • CBS evening news is taking it in the direction of torture and rendition being the effective action on the part of homeland security in getting this plot foiled. Bob Schieffer even used the word “torture?” to confirm what his correspondent was saying, who replied “call it what you will, Bob.”

  • I think this smacks of desperation, because they can see that this issue is tipping towards a debate over the balance of constitutional powers. I hope to hell it keeps heading in this direction.

  • I am Bush the great and powerful.
    Only the mighty wizard can hold off terrorists, freedom haters and evil doers.
    ( roaring blast of special effects fire followed by details of thwarted attacks)

    Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.

    Haven’t we seen this movie before?

  • It doesn’t even matter anymore. This WH has burned all credibilty. I don’t believe a word they say anymore.

    When you yourself, uncover time after time, falsehoods, mistruths, lies, medacity, mean-spirited rumor mongering, falshoods, misleading statements, omission of truth, time after time after time….

    How you gonna believe anything from them? I mean, not even self-serving stuff…(though 99.9% of all they say publicly is self-serving) I wouldn’t believe this WH about what they had for breakfast, or what’s on Bushs’ Ipod, or which books on his night table.

    None of it. Not one bit…

    Fool me 999 times…shame on both of us.

  • Lets face it, it is an election year and even though Bush is lame duck president, he still needs the republicans to controll congress or else you will see impeachment hearings if the Dems seize controll of both the Senate and the House.

    I think, you will see more hyped up claims of attacks that were thwarted till the elections, however that is not the sad fact, the real sad fact is the people will be fooled and will believe this load of BS, because the Republicans will step up their verbal assualt on the Democratic party!

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