You and Mr. Goldberg may want to review this new article carefully...pay close attention to the last few paragraphs...
Message 19246054
<<...But the campaign undertaken by Hannity, Sullivan, Horowitz, and other conservatives to arraign Clinton for September 11 has a more sinister, explicitly political aim. Their rhetoric is redolent of the old stab-in-the-back theories once used to discredit FDR and JFK. And of course they are attempting to deflect blame from Bush (whose vow to get bin Laden, "dead or alive," has been consigned to the same White House memory hole as the balanced budget).
Does George W. Bush deserve responsibility for the failures that led to September 11? The independent commission that the President so reluctantly approved in late 2002 is likely to provide complex and nuanced answers to that question. Perhaps the commission will explain why members of the bin Laden family were spirited out of the United States on orders from the White House before they could be questioned by the FBI. Perhaps the commission will explore why FBI terror expert John O'Neill, who died in the World Trade Center conflagration, believed that the Bush administration was soft on Saudi cooperation with al-Qaida.
What is clear already from the public record is that the Bush administration received ample warning from Clinton's national security officials -- and from CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover -- that al-Qaida posed the most significant, immediate threat to American security.
Departing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and the National Security Council's counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, who was held over by Bush, gave Condoleezza Rice a series of urgent briefings on terrorism during the presidential transition in January 2001. "You're going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and al-Qaida specifically than any issue," Berger told his successor. Clarke delivered similar emphatic briefings to Vice President Cheney and to Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy. But the supposedly competent national security managers in the new administration, including Rice, Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were too preoccupied with other matters (such as national missile defense) to pay heed to the most serious threat since the end of the Cold War.
The failure of Bush's national security team to recognize the threat of al-Qaida, even after they were clearly warned, will rank among the most serious mistakes ever made by U.S. government officials. They had billed themselves as "the grown-ups," condescending to the Democrats they replaced and asserting that their experience would return steady guidance to American policy. Instead, these veterans of previous Republican administrations fumbled and fooled around with ancillary issues while an elusive new enemy prepared to strike. They weren't prepared. They had no plan. They hadn't seen what was coming. They had ignored the warnings. Their judgment was as deluded as their self-image...>> |
