6.09.2004

Remember Cheney's Secret Bunker?

Consider the undisclosed location disclosed.

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney hid out at "Site R," an underground bunker seven miles from Camp David, deep beneath Raven Rock Mountain on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, says intelligence expert James Bamford in a new book due out tomorrow.

In "A Pretext for War," Bamford describes Cheney's secure location as "a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer-filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir," according to a review in the June 14 issue of Time magazine.

In his 432-page book, Bamford slams the CIA for failing to detect the growing threat from hard-line Islamic fundamentalists in the late 1990s.

Bamford lambastes the agency's slapdash efforts against Osama bin Laden in particular, claiming that the CIA "never once tried to infiltrate" the Saudi terrorist's operation.

He also suggests that senior CIA officials suspected the Bush administration's evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was shaky.