Archive for September, 2006

I took a trip to Brazil from 9/10 to 9/17 2006. I was there for a business trip.

The photo below is from the Quality Suites Hotel (12th floor) in Natal, Brazil.

From Trip to Brazi…

Unfortunately I did not have too much free time. Only 16 hours of travel (flight time plus waiting at the connecting airport). Denver to Chicago to Sao Paulo. There was bad weather in Chicago so I had to fly stand by on an earlier flight, which left after my original flight, in order to make my connecting flight to Brazil. I arrived Monday afternoon at the office and had to spend the afternoon and evening preparing for the meeting with the client on Wednesday. Tuesday was a day of travel from Sao Paulo to Natal, in the north. Got to go down to the beach and gobble up some seafood. The meeting on went well. Thursday involved travel back to Sao Paulo, a little time spent work working, and alot of time resting. Friday I was in the office doing some work. After a mad dash to the airport during rush hour, it was a 17+ hours of travel. Sao Paulo to Washington, D.C. to Denver. Wow, that was painful to get to the airport - so many cars. Luckily the Taxi drive knew his way around.

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From the October 2, 2006 issue of The Nation magazine (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061002/alterman):

The network initially trumpeted the program in full-page ads as “based
on the 9/11 Commission Report.” But it explicitly contradicts the
findings of almost every part of that report, in order to cast blame on
the Clinton Administration–inventing scenes, characters and dialogue
along the way. To take just one of many examples, as Editor &
Publisher reported, the film “explores the terrorist threat starting
with the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, and there is little
question that President Clinton is dealt with severely, almost
mockingly, with the Lewinsky scandal closely tied to his failure to
cripple al-Qaeda.” The commission concluded exactly the opposite.
Clinton instructed his staff to ignore his domestic troubles and, as the
report explains, “All his aides testified to us that they based their
advice solely on national security considerations. We have found no
reason to question their statements.”

Former National Security Council senior director for
counterterrorism Roger Cressey has added in a Washington Times
op-ed that Clinton “approved every request made of him by the CIA and
the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al Qaeda.”
Recall that most Republicans and many in the media were themselves
obsessed with the President’s penis at the time and accused Clinton of
playing “wag the dog” with every attempt to take action against Al
Qaeda.

And a little more:

ABC execs offered up one Mickey Mouse excuse after another. One day they
defended their depiction as true; the next they claimed it was a
“dramatization, not a documentary.” But as Max Blumenthal reports on the
Huffington Post and TheNation.com, the program is part of a plan hatched
by a group of right-wing extremists dedicated, in the words of the
organization founded by the film’s director, David Cunningham, “to a
Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and
Television industry.” The scriptwriter, a young friend of Rush
Limbaugh’s named Cyrus Nowrasteh, was a featured speaker at the Liberty
Film Festival, an annual event founded to promote right-wing films,
which calls itself “A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom
Center.” ABC also passed along hundreds of advance screeners to
right-wing taste-makers like Limbaugh but refused to allow even the
ex-President to have an early look.

What Liberal Media?

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ABC News is devoting 6 hours of prime-time on September 10 and 11 to a “docudrama” written by a staunch conservative that, according to Rush Limbaugh, “really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration.”

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Of course the problem is that the Clinton administration tried to pass on everything it had regarding bin Laden and his bunch, but the newly installed Bush administration ignore their advice.

From the ThinkProgress website:

“On September 10 and 11, ABC will air a “docudrama” called “The Path to 9/11.” It was written by Cyrus Nowrasteh, who describes himself as “more of a libertarian than a strict conservative,” and is giving interviews to hard-right sites like FrontPageMag to promote the film.

How does it deal with President Bush? Salon has a review:

Condoleezza Rice gets that fated memo about planes flying into buildings, and makes it very clear to anyone who’ll listen just how concerned President Bush is about these terrorist threats — despite the fact that we’re given little concrete evidence of the president’s concern or interest in taking action. Maybe my memory fails me, but the only person I remember talking about Osama bin Laden back in 1998 was President Clinton, while the current anti-terrorist stalwarts worked the country into a frenzy over what? Blow jobs. In the end, “The Path to 9/11″ feels like an excruciatingly long, winding and deceptive path, indeed.

The director of the film, David Cunningham, is already backtracking about its accuracy, saying “this is not a documentary.” OK, fair enough. But the movie is being billed as “based on The 9/11 Commission Report.”

However, here’s a newsflash from the realilty-based universe:

Clinton, 9/11 and the Facts
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 30 August 2006

…Measures taken by the Clinton administration to thwart international terrorism and bin Laden’s network were historic, unprecedented and, sadly, not followed up on. Consider the steps offered by Clinton’s 1996 omnibus anti-terror legislation, the pricetag for which stood at $1.097 billion. The following is a partial list of the initiatives offered by the Clinton anti-terrorism bill:

• Screen Checked Baggage: $91.1 million
• Screen Carry-On Baggage: $37.8 million
• Passenger Profiling: $10 million
• Screener Training: $5.3 million
• Screen Passengers (portals) and Document Scanners: $1 million
• Deploying Existing Technology to Inspect International Air Cargo: $31.4
  million
• Provide Additional Air/Counterterrorism Security: $26.6 million
• Explosives Detection Training: $1.8 million
• Augment FAA Security Research: $20 million
• Customs Service: Explosives and Radiation Detection Equipment at Ports: $2.2 million
• Anti-Terrorism Assistance to Foreign Governments: $2 million
• Capacity to Collect and Assemble Explosives Data: $2.1 million
• Improve Domestic Intelligence: $38.9 million
• Critical Incident Response Teams for Post-Blast Deployment: $7.2 million
• Additional Security for Federal Facilities: $6.7 million
• Firefighter/Emergency Services Financial Assistance: $2.7 million
• Public Building and Museum Security: $7.3 million
• Improve Technology to Prevent Nuclear Smuggling: $8 million
• Critical Incident Response Facility: $2 million
• Counter-Terrorism Fund: $35 million
• Explosives Intelligence and Support Systems: $14.2 million
• Office of Emergency Preparedness: $5.8 million

The Clinton administration poured more than a billion dollars into counterterrorism activities (emphasis added) across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community, into the protection of critical infrastructure, into massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack, into a reorganization of the intelligence community itself. Within the National Security Council, “threat meetings” were held three times a week to assess looming conspiracies. His National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, prepared a voluminous dossier on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, actively tracking them across the planet. Clinton raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave in the last three years of his tenure.

Clinton’s dire public warnings about the threat posed by terrorism, and the actions taken to thwart it, went completely unreported by the media, which was far more concerned with stained dresses and baseless Drudge Report rumors. (emphasis added) When the administration did act militarily against bin Laden and his terrorist network, the actions were dismissed by partisans within the media and Congress as scandalous “wag the dog” tactics. The news networks actually broadcast clips of the movie “Wag the Dog” while reporting on his warnings, to accentuate the idea that everything the administration said was contrived fakery.

In Congress, Clinton was thwarted by the reactionary conservative majority in virtually every attempt he made to pass legislation that would attack al-Qaeda and terrorism. (empahsis added) His 1996 omnibus terror bill, which included many of the anti-terror measures we now take for granted after September 11, was withered almost to the point of uselessness by attacks from the right; Senators Jesse Helms and Trent Lott were openly dismissive of the threats Clinton spoke of. - Source : http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083006J.shtml

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