JVLV: JEB, YOUR BROTHER DID NOT KEEP US SAFE! HE IGNORED PUTIN'S WARNING! By Jiri & Leni Friedman Valenta, 10-17-2015

Jeb, Donald Trump is unfortunately, correct. Your brother did not "keep us safe." Like your friend and former Florida campaign treasurer, Felicano Foyo, we deeply admire you. We also admire your brother’s response to 9/11 and respect your loyalty to him. However, our first loyalty as Americans, is to our republic. You are killing your presidential chances by continuing to defend the indefensible.

Not just ”W,” but also Dr. Condi Rice, your brother’s NSA and close confidant- turned your advisor, disregarded Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning. He told them at a June 16 summit in Slovenia of a coming Islamist attack on our homeland. Rice herself wrote, “Putin… was right. The Taliban and al Qaeda were time bombs that would explode on September 11, 2001…I was taken aback by Putin’s alarm and vehemence.”

But not by Putin’s alone! Two holdovers from the Bill Clinton administration, who also worked for your brother, Dr. Richard Clarke, head of counter-terrorism in the Bush NSC, and CIA Director George Tenet, repeatedly warned Rice of a coming attack.  Condi did not let Clarke get close to the president and even demoted him from his senior position at the NSC. Tenet called Rice on July 10th to sound the alarm once again about the impending attack. Clearly the NSA did not pay high level attention to the Islamic terrorism threat in June and July 2001.

Only on August 6th did the CIA finally get to brief the president with the now famous memo entitled, “Bin Laden determined to Strike in U.S. “ A few weeks after this Presidential Briefing, Tenet went to Bush’s Crawford Ranch in Texas for the first time to make sure “W” understood its meaning. Finally, we also learned from Senator Gary Hart, former co-chair of a bipartisan commission on national security, that he personally warned Condi too. He knew her well as she had worked on his 1984 presidential campaign.  On September 6, 2001, five days before 9/11, Hart met with Rice and urged, "You must move more quickly on homeland security. An attack is going to happen.”  He, like Clarke, later accused Bush and Rice of ignoring his warnings. We will be discussing all this in more detail in a forthcoming book.

We admired “W”. He responded brilliantly to 9/11 by going to war in Afghanistan. However, he and his principle NSA failed to anticipate and defend us from the 9/11 attack. As both Clarke and Donald Rumsfeld noted, Condi monopolized “W”. Rumsfeld noted she made herself the channel for information from various staff he should have directly consulted to make his own decisions. If “W’s” security people had enjoyed direct access to him, there is likelihood the attack could have been prevented and 2,753 lives could have been saved. Finally, as we criticized President Putin for his Ukrainian intervention, we must say, as objective authors, we must still give him kudo for his warning and desire to help America in her struggle against Islamic terrorism at that time.

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