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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The president's recent evasiveness calls to mind his dodgy behavior in the hours after the terror attacks. It's time for the White House to come clean on how much it knew before Sept. 11.
May 18, 2002 | There are few exercises as forlorn and masturbatory as liberals whining that "if Clinton did what Bush has done"... fill in the blanks. It's OK; we all do it, in the privacy of our own homes. But that kind of indulgent self-pity normally shouldn't seep out into public discourse. Cry into your beer, friend. Suck it up.
But the news that President Bush was warned of an al-Qaida hijacking plot before Sept. 11, after eight months of his boosters blaming the tragedy on Clinton, makes it hard not to smart at the double standard that the right wing, and much of the media, has used to judge this president and his predecessor.
The administration's handling of the August threat is personal to me. I flew from San Francisco to Boston Aug. 6, the very day Bush, on a monthlong vacation at his Texas ranch, got "generalized warnings" about an al-Qaida hijacking plot. Barely five weeks later, three planes either leaving from or headed to those two cities exploded into buildings, killing everyone on board and thousands on the ground.
I actually flew cross-country three times that month, but of course, I wouldn't have flown even once had I known what Bush did. And I'm the reason, according to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, that the president couldn't reveal "all of the chatter," as she put it, about al-Qaida hijacking threats pre-Sept. 11.
"You would have risked shutting down the American civil aviation system with such generalized information," a nervous, harried Rice told reporters Thursday. "You would have to think five, six, seven times about that, very, very hard."
Indeed. I certainly hope Bush thought "five, six, seven times" about what he learned Aug. 6. I hope he thought "very, very hard."
In the days after Sept. 11, liberal critics of the president stepped lightly, striving quite rightly to place patriotism before partisanship. Even after these latest 9/11 revelations, it's important for Bush opponents to put the good of the country ahead of political posturing. We need answers that only an impartial investigation can unearth.
Yet posturing is exactly what we've been getting from the White House and its conservative defenders since CBS News broke the 9/11 warning story on Wednesday. Certainly, we shouldn't jump to conclusions, or simplistically insist the recent news means Bush could have prevented those 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11. But it's the White House, not its critics, that is trying hardest to spin the latest revelations, rather than explain them -- while, at the same time, blaming Democrats for playing politics. It's dizzying, but it isn't working so far.
Clearly the president's defenders want to minimize the seriousness of the August warning Bush received. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told his friend Rush Limbaugh Thursday that "through the spring and summer there was a great deal of threat reporting indicating a variety of different things all over the world, but without any specificity as to what might happen."
What is Rummy saying here: That al-Qaida didn't send dates, times and photos? In fact, evidence is mounting that the government had plenty of specificity about al-Qaida threats from the FBI alerts in Phoenix and Minneapolis, to the alarms sounded in Europe before the G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's dire warnings about an impending al-Qaida strike last summer. On Friday, yet another story broke that thoroughly undermined the Bush team spin that no one could have imagined an airplane-as-missile attack on a building. AP reported that in 1999, a federal intelligence study warned specifically that al-Qaida might crash explosives-filled airplanes into the Pentagon.
Maybe most chilling, we learned Friday from the Washington Post that the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard C. Clarke, gathered high-level leaders of the Federal Aviation Administration, Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service at a meeting July 5 and told them flatly: "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon." All counterterrorism agencies were told to cancel vacations and nonessential travel. "For six weeks last summer, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness -- and anxiety -- against imminent terrorist attack," the Post revealed. But the American public was told nothing, and it's still not clear if Clarke's dire warning was shared with the president. By the time Bush received his CIA briefing on Aug. 6, the government had begun to stand down from the alert.
How much did Bush know and when did he know it? This is obviously what Congress needs to get to the bottom of. But the Bush administration has been resisting inquiry into that very question for eight months. The president himself went to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle at the end of January and asked him to limit Congress' probe, insisting it would divert needed resources from the war on terror -- a rather suspicious request in light of the latest news. On Thursday, faced with bipartisan calls for an investigation, the administration resorted to its favorite tactic: intimidating the opposition by questioning its patriotism. An angry Vice President Dick Cheney, who's opposed congressional investigations into Sept. 11 all along, suggested that asking how much Bush knew in advance of the terror attacks was "incendiary," adding, "Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in time of war."
That's a breathtakingly arrogant statement, even from our imperial vice president. Cheney has spent too long in his bunker: This is America, and authoritarian bullying can't overpower democracy, even during wartime. Or unlimited anti-terror time, or however this period of ill-defined conflict might be described.
