I read Alterman's piece at CAP yesterday, and with my reacclimating myself with television, I somehow missed posting it. I did mean to. Honest, I did.

Alterman's got the 9/11 issue pretty much framed in this piece. I have to wonder, with his excellent Altercation Weblog, his column at The Nation, and his work for CAP, does this guy sleep? Oh, in addition he's an adjunct professor of Journalism at Columbia.

Without further ado, an excerpt:

..........But anyone who studies the record with any care will know that there were any number of moments when it would have been possible for a more alert administration to intervene in such a fashion as to interfere and quite possibly thwart the hijackers' purposes. Here are just a few:

• What if Bush's National Security Agency had translated on Sept. 10, 2001 - instead of Sept. 12 - disturbing Arabic intercepts that referred to phrases "tomorrow is the zero hour" and "the match is about to begin"?



• What if the FBI had acted on the Phoenix memo and aggressively investigated, and arrested potential terrorists and illegal aliens who were taking flight lessons for the purpose of hijacking?



• What if the CIA had received and acted upon the Minneapolis memo, and combined with the FBI to apply its vast knowledge of al Qaeda operations to break up the U.S.-based network of fliers?



• What if the FBI and CIA had not mysteriously decided to drop their investigations of the whereabouts of hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar who, following their return from an al Qaeda planning meeting, continued live and work under their own names in San Diego?



• What if Bush and Cheney had seized upon the recommendations of the Hart/Rudman Commission rather ignoring - and pretending to review - them?



• What if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had agreed to the Senate and House Armed Services committee?s request to reprogram $800 million from missile defense to terrorism protection?



• What if Bush?s National Security Council had carefully studied the evolution of terrorist threats: to hide bombs on 12 U.S.-bound airliners and crash an explosive-laden airline into the CIA; to crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, CIA or the White House; and crash a plane into the Eiffel Tower or to the Genoan castle where Western leaders met in spring 2001?



• What if the same NSC had taken seriously the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard C. Clarke to institute an aggressive program in order to: attack the financial network that supported the terrorists, freezing its assets and exposing its phony charities, and arrest their personnel; offer help to such disparate nations as Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Yemen to combat al Qaeda forces; increase U.S. support for the Northern Alliance in their fight to overthrow the Taliban's repressive regime; and institute special operations inside Afghanistan and bombing strikes against terrorist training camps?



• What if the Bush Treasury Department had taken a less indulgent view of the kind of money-laundering operations that support terrorist networks and worked with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to try to curb it?



• What if Secretary Rumsfeld had green-lighted the use of the CIA's Predator surveillance plane over Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan, armed with Hellfire missiles?



• What if Attorney General John Ashcroft had taken the initiative in speeding up the FBI request to add 149 field agents, 200 analysts and 54 translators to its counterterrorism effort, instead of vetoing it entirely to focus on his higher priorities?



• What if Attorney General Ashcroft, instead of simply deciding not to fly commercial like the rest of us, persuaded the administration to institute an emergency program to improve airport security to prevent hijackers from reaching their targeted weapons?

The administration and its allies rule all such questions out of order, going to extraordinary lengths to ensure they don't enjoy any political traction. When the issue was first raised, back in 2002, Vice President Cheney termed all suggestions "incendiary," and "thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war," Even the usually apolitical Laura Bush got into the act by calling the questions about what the administration might have done as an attempt to "prey upon the emotions of people." But Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Senate intelligence panel and co-chairman of the inquiry, had a different answer. "The attacks of Sept. 11 could have been prevented if the right combination of skill, cooperation, creativity and some good luck had been brought to task." Much more at link

Valid questions all, and we need to ensure that the 9/11 commission has the time and resources to fully investigate why none of the above were done.

pure bs addition to yesterday's Kay testimony: CNN has now posted the transcript.

Another thing. Last night, on Ted Koppel's show Nightline, he stated twice that, Saddam Hussein kicked the inspectors out of Iraq. I'd put quotation marks around that, but I was dozing off as he blathered this demonstrably false divel. We know that the inspectors were pulled by the UN on both occassions. In 1998, and again in 2003. Koppel is guilty of either not knowing the facts, and repeating a scripted RNC line, or he simply lied. We're here to set the record straight.