Yeah....I'm real scared of the clowns who listen....NOT
Ted Rall
LIARS, MORONS, OR BOTH?
Tue May 21, 9:02 PM ET
By Ted Rall
The Beginning of the End for George W. Bush
NEW YORK-It only lasted a few seconds, but on May 17 George W. Bush had a Bill Clinton
moment, and it was magical. "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that
fateful morning," George W. Bush reassured us, "I would have done everything in my power to protect
the American people." Did he realize how much he sounded like his prevaricating predecessor? Were
the subject something other than the murder of 3,000 innocent people, such desperate dissembling
would be absolutely hilarious.
In the circus of insolent hypocrites which is the Bush Administration, the best lines are reserved for the
ringmaster. On that same day the creepy Dick Cheney (news - web sites) warned Democrats not to
"seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions...that the White House had advance
information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9-11. Such commentary," Cheney
emphasized, "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war."
First: what war? And when it comes to "political advantage," it's the Bushies, not the Democrats, who
have taken advantage of 9-11 to further a partisan political agenda. They used the dead of New York,
Pennsylvania and Washington to push such Republican platform planks as "fast track" signing authority
on free trade agreements, Internet censorship, tax cuts for the super rich and drilling for oil in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. To be sure, there's a war going on: a PR war. And now that Democrats are
finally scoring a few points of their own, the Bushies who have been slamdunking for months are
screaming foul.
"Bush Knew," the New York Post screamed last week. Did he? Hell if I know. Here's a man who
subverted constitutional law in order to seize the White House in a judicial coup d'état, who claimed
while campaigning to be a "compassionate conservative" but turned into a Genghis Khan right-winger
as soon as he took office, and who told us upfront after 9-11 that his administration would routinely lie
for the sake of the "war on terror." No one can deny that the Bushies and their corporate sponsors
benefited enormously from 9-11; the post-Taliban Afghan pipeline deal (closed March 7 in Islamabad)
alone is worth billions of dollars. Under normal circumstances, even the suggestion that a president
would deliberately stand idly by as his citizens were slaughtered en masse would be appalling. George
W. Bush, however, tells Congress to go to hell whenever it requests documents or summons his staff to
testify. Such a man is capable of anything.
There's no smoking gun-evidence that Bush was told about the exact specifics of 9-11-so far. But it's
hard to escape an inevitable, disturbing conclusion that itself bears consideration: We are in the hands
of liars, morons or both.
When Terrormemogate first hit the airwaves, the administration trotted out National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), who serves as chief of Bush's Counterterrorism Security Group,
to face the media. Rice repeatedly asserted that pre-9-11 threats of airplane hijackings had been so
vague as to be useless. This is somewhat believable: any firefighter can tell you that false alarms
outnumber real fires.
Given such a generalized threat, you'd order your Air Force to a state of high alert. "Traditional"
hijackings, after all, tend to end badly. You'd keep planes in the air and many more on the ground,
ready to scramble at a second's notice. Then, if and when the predicted hijackings materialized, you
could track the planes and order them shot down if necessary. If months went by without any
hijackings, you might decide to lower the nation's state of readiness.
On the morning of September 11th, though, just eight fighters were assigned to defend The United
States of America's 3,618,770-square-mile air space. And they were piloted by weekend warriors,
members of the Air National Guard. The jets weren't even in the air-they were sitting on the ground at
the time of the attacks. Our state of readiness, despite the huge military defense budget that sucks
millions away from starving children, compared unfavorably to Thailand's.
By Rice's own admission, the Bush Administration ignored the vague, imprecise threats of which Bush
was informed during his month-long August vacation, simply because they didn't specify exact times
and dates. To hear her tell it, our government-our safety-is in the hands of idiots.
"Administration officials insisted all last week that turning a plane into a suicide bomb was something
that nobody had contemplated," Time magazine reports in its May 27th issue. "But that just isn't so. In
1995, authorities in the Philippines scuppered a plan-masterminded by Razmi Yousef, who had also
plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing-for mass hijackings of American planes over the
Pacific. Evidence developed during the investigation of Yousef and his partner, Abdul Hakim Murad,
uncovered a plan to crash a plane into CIA (news - web sites) headquarters in Langley, Va. And as
long ago as 1994, in an incident that is well known among terrorism experts, French authorities foiled a
plot by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower."
So Rice was either clueless or lying: everybody knew that Islamist jihadis had plotted suicide hijackings
well before 9-11. Nevertheless, the Bushies did nothing to improve airline security. They did nothing to
prepare for the possibility of hijackings, whether suicide or traditional. They didn't even tell the airlines
what they knew. Then, after 9-11, they covered up the fact that they had received numerous warnings.
Moron Bush or Liar Bush-would one of you please resign?
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