Capital Games: Reminder of the coverup chronology.  "A small but significant White House cover-up fell apart this past weekend..

The PDB controversy is not about whether Bush received a specific warning a month before 9/11. It concerns his administration's attitude toward al Qaeda and the possibility of domestic attacks prior to September 11 and whether the White House has truly been willing to see the full 9/11 tale uncovered and told. The evidence is mounting that al Qaeda was not the priority it should have been in the first seven months of Bush's presidency. Yet the White House is unable to acknowledge that it made a misjudgment. Much of the public might even believe that it was a natural mistake for a new administration to underestimate the abilities and reach of a madman hunkered down in faraway Afghanistan. In a way, such a screw-up may be more forgivable than Bush and his lieutenants' efforts to cover up information and prevent the 9/11 commission from completing a thorough examination. ..

The 9/11 commission has not constantly inspired confidence, but thanks to the panel, Rice's PDB cover-up, after two years, caved in. Still, suspicious minds would be right to wonder: Are there other cover-ups, which are not yet publicly known, that will end up more to Bush and Rice's liking? "

  9:41:24 PM    

Battle stations? Hardly: "For at least a decade, the terrorist "kamikaze-ing” of airplanes had been much discussed. In 1994, a deranged man crashed a small plane into the White House, doing little damage. And in 1995, a plot was uncovered to hijack airplanes and crash them into U.S. targets, including the CIA headquarters in Virginia.  Since then, on at least six occasions, according to The Wall Street Journal, the government set up air-defense systems above sensitive events, such as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Indeed, on 9/11, plans were already under way to protect the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. ..

Last week Rice said that .. "The president of the United States had us at battle stations during this period of time.” But a look at the timeline of 9/11 itself shows [otherwise. At] 8:13 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 stopped responding to air traffic control. Within 20 minutes, authorities not only knew that the plane had been hijacked and that a passenger had been killed; they even knew the identity of some of the Arab killers. That plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46.

Mightn't those events alone have triggered some recall of the Aug. 6 briefing, if, in fact, Uncle Sam was at "battle stations”? Instead, at 8:55, the presidential motorcade arrived at an elementary school in Florida; Bush went inside to read a book to the children. Then a second hijacked plane -- known to be off course for 38 minutes -- crashed into the second tower. Bush was told "America is under attack” at 9:07. Yet amazingly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sitting in his regular office a half-hour later when yet another plane struck the Pentagon. Does that sound like "battle stations”? Eighty-four minutes after the first inkling of a hijacked-airplane incident, the defense headquarters of the United States was hit by a lumbering passenger airliner, and the defense chief was caught totally exposed and vulnerable.

Can anybody call that performance a job well done? Bush seems to think so.."

  9:34:21 PM    

Oddpost: Interesting web mail client with news aggregator, Bayesian spam filtering, no advertising, and a DHTML/Javascript interface that resembles a desktop app.  Cheap for end users ($30/year) and can be lisenced (Java version available, Windows version falls from 5 users @$30/user to 1000 users @$2 or unlimited for $5000).  Hilarious weblog, too.   5:22:07 PM