'Bush blew it — the inescapable 9/11 conclusion'
July 26
By Bruce S. Ticker
'I think everyone knows what happened could have been prevented. Of course, they'd never admit that' - Melodie Homer, Marlton, N.J.
'It was very upsetting that the president on Aug. 6, 2001, at the daily briefing ignored the notice about al-Qaeda. It was a very strong warning and it was ignored. That's one that we know about. How many more warnings that we don't about?' - Judy Reiss, Lower Makefield, Pa.
These women, whose husband and son, respectively, were killed in the 9-11 attacks, have only to finish their thoughts…Bush blew it.
It happened on George W. Bush's watch. He was in charge, he was warned that a disaster was in the offing, he refused to put forth his best efforts to avoid any attacks and nearly 3,000 Americans died.
The 9-11 commission was too timid to say it and even made some stupid comments to cover their cowardice. Headline writers for the major newspapers stated that the commission blamed unnamed people in many posts in the current and previous administrations.
Homer and Reiss, who were quoted in Friday's Philadelphia Inquirer, came as close as anyone to telling the truth: The immediate blame must be laid on Bush.
Certainly, the Bush administration is not alone in setting the stage for the 9/11 attacks, but Bush put out a welcome mat for terrorists. One might even wonder if this amounts to criminal negligence.
Deep in the middle of its lead story on the 9-11 report, on an inside page, Friday's New York Times caught the essence of the situation when it reported that the Clinton administration responded to a scare by mobilizing domestic agencies while the Bush administration did not bother to do same after they received warnings.
The Times story reports: "Different sections give contrasting accounts of responses by national security advisers under Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush. It describes how Mr. (Sandy) Berger, (then national security adviser) under Mr. Clinton, took the lead in December 1999 in mobilizing the F.B.I. and other domestic agencies to address the so-called millennium plot, in which attacks planned in Jordan and Los Angeles were disrupted. By contrast, the report describes (current National Security Advisser) Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, as not having regarded the coordination of domestic agencies as part of their responsibility after they took office in 2001, even as warnings of a possible attack continued to grow."
Then, according to the Times, the report proclaimed these words of the pre-9-11 Bush administration: "The domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction, and did not have a plan to institute."
Notice the indirect phrasing? Here's another way the commission could have worded it: "The Bush administration never mobilized in response to the threat. It did not give the agencies direction, and it did not provide them with a plan to institute."
The cowardly phrasing is very relevant because the commission was downplaying as much as possible Bush's most serious blunder. Sticking to the context of the commission's findings, we do not know if the attacks would have been prevented if Bush had done more, but the commission lays it out starkly enough: Bush did not do what he could.
Isn't this enough? The commission wrote, "Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them."
We'll never know, and that's because Bush was not "flexible and resourceful" enough to even attempt "any single step or series of steps."
To put this into perspective, let's say you're on the board of directors of a company and your CEO is called on the carpet: "Mr. Bush, you received warnings of a potential attack on our headquarters building and you refused to mobilize all the company's divisions to prevent it, and 3,000 of our employees died as a result."
Bush: "Well, mobilizing these divisions does not guarantee that this would have prevented anything."
Perhaps Manhattan's District Attorney would have said to Bush: "We're talking about the murder of 3,000 people, which of course is a capital crime. No, you did not do this yourself, but you had warnings that something like this might happen and you did not follow through.
"This means that you knowingly facilitated the murder of 3,000 human beings on my judicial turf. At the least, that's reckless endangerment. We could also call that criminal negligence."
Some people would be fired and maybe prosecuted for a disaster of these proportions.
smirkingchimp.com |
