(Guest post by clashbeat.)
FRONT:
Hardball Ain’t the Only Game in Brooklyn Anymore
As newly arrived immigrants play the games of their native lands,
baseball in Brooklyn has been eclipsed by other sports like soccer and
cricket. Consequently, fewer major league prospects now come from the
borough that produced Yankees and Mets managers Joe Torre and Willie
Randolph, legendary hurler Sandy Koufax and other hometown heroes. For
some aging Brooklyn boomers, this may be a crisis of nostalgic
proportions, but it hardly warrants front-page real estate.
Excerpt:
“In the 1950’s, when Brooklyn could lay claim to being recognized as the stickball capital of the world, it produced 26 major league players, according to data obtained from baseballreference.com. This decade, it has produced only six.”
BACK (Page A14):
Sept. 11 Panel Wasn’t Told of Meeting, Members Say
An explosive revelation from Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial,
is the July 10, 2001 White House meeting between then CIA Director
George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, of which
neither bothered to tell the 9/11 Commission. During the meeting, Tenet
tried to instill in Rice some sense of urgency about al Qaeda because
he believed this nation was about to be attacked. Now some Commission
members are fuming that Rice and Tenet, both questioned under oath,
failed to disclose the meeting.
That Tenet and Rice covered their own asses by not volunteering
information unflattering to them is hardly a surprise. Both lied under
oath and should be held accountable. But the idea that Commission
members think they did such a comprehensive job that it would preclude
any new revelations is simply laughable. After all, this is an
investigative body that ignored survivors' pleas to ask former NYC
Mayor Rudy Giuliani the tough questions (like why the police and fire
department radios weren’t designed to communicate with each other)
because they thought he was too beloved by the country to be pressed
for answers. Or to demand that both Bush and Cheney be put under oath
and questioned separately. The Commission, which seemed more concerned
about appearing bi-partisan than finding the truth, threw softball
questions when the country desperately needed to know what their
leaders did to prevent the worst attack on our nation's soil.
Intro:
Members of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a July 2001 White House meeting at which George J. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, about an imminent attack by Al Qaeda and failed to persuade her to take action.
Excerpts:
There has also been no comment on the book from J. Cofer Black, who was Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, and who, the book says, attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings. Mr. Black is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”
The book says Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting, calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House, because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings about a possible terrorist strike. Mr. Woodward writes that Mr. Tenet left the meeting frustrated because “they were not getting through to Rice.”
...
“None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,” said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former congressman from Indiana. “I’m deeply disturbed by this. I’m furious.”
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