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The Gilmore Report ... Gilmore Report? What Gilmore Report?

Michael Moran, MSNBC News (April 2, 2004):

In May of 2001, one of the very few public figures who genuinely raised a warning about the threat al-Qaida and other terrorist groups pose to America won an audience with the new vice president, Dick Cheney. The public figure was a Republican stalwart, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, head of an obscure commission that had just issued a report six months earlier, “ Toward a National Strategy for Combating Terrorism .”

In its executive summary, released in December 2000, Gilmore wrote: “The potential for terrorist attacks inside the borders of the United States is a serious emerging threat. … Because the stakes are so high, our nation's leaders must take seriously the possibility of an escalation of terrorist violence against the homeland.”

Gilmore's panel studied the problem for two years before the attacks, but he felt the threat was being ignored. “The political and media people had nothing but Chandra and Monica on their minds,” he told me. “Our hearings were open, public events. Not once in two years did a major media outlet cover them.”

Gilmore hoped his meeting with Cheney was a breakthrough. “I had personal ties to the new administration, and the vice president seemed interested. He took notes, and I had a follow-up with one of his aides a few months later,” Gilmore says. “But nothing really happened. In the end, we didn't see any evidence of any interest at all. No one called us to Congress, no one called us to the executive branch.”...