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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (256869)	5/19/2002 7:21:48 PM
From: Mr. Palau	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Ish, this is my general response to your post. Given what we know now about the generalized information Bush apparently had at the time, I think that is Monday-morning quarterbacking to say he, as an individual, should have taken some dramatic action. I do, however, believe that there was a breakdown in getting the relevant information to the appropriate levels of government: the Arizona memo, the arrest in Minnesota, etc. What is not obvious to me is where the problem lies. Is a failing at the agency level, or should Bush's top national security advisers have been more proactive in asking more questions, in light of the information they did have? It seems to me that perhaps they should have. And the FBI does seem to have fallen down, altho I think that Director Mueller may be able to straighten out that organization. And in the end, even if Bush had been told that it was possible that someone might try to crash a plane into a building somewhere in the United States, I am still unclear on what specific action would have been appropriate. You could have warned the public, of course, altho I am not sure what that accomplishes. The current green-orange-red warning system demonstrates that point. I think that responsibly-conducted hearings might be of some use in answering these questions so that things can be fixed in the future, including Congress allocating the appropriate resources where they are needed. Finally, I have to add that I know to a moral certainty that if exactly the same thing had happened on Clinton's watch, with Clinton having the same information available to him that Bush had, the majority of posters on this thread, not to mention Rush, the Washington Times, Newsmax, etc. would have been unrelenting in saying that Clinton was personally responsible for those thousands of persons killed. The impeachment hearings would already have started, and books would be coming off the press shortly. Any honest poster on this thread knows that this is true. And I think that has a lot to do with with the visceral reaction of many Dems to the information that has come out this week.