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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
First the White House ignored warnings about al-Qaida. Then it tried to stop Congress from getting the truth. Now we know why.
May 16, 2002 | Incompetence, rather than conspiracy, remains the most plausible explanation for the Bush administration's failure to prevent the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. But "conspiracy" is beginning to look like a plausible description of the administration's effort to conceal its tragic errors.
For the first time in eight months, angry citizens are asking why they have suddenly learned what George W. Bush knew all along: That weeks before the event, the CIA had warned the president and other top officials of an active plot by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida operatives to seize civilian aircraft. That during the same period, FBI special agents in Phoenix and Minnesota had warned their own agency of activity by suspected al-Qaida operatives at U.S. flight schools. That somehow nobody at the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Council or any other government intelligence agency managed to connect those dots until after the disaster.
Evidently Bush and his associates wanted to ensure that nobody else connected the dots, because they point directly to the White House. So determined were they to prevent the emergence of such embarrassing facts that, with the Democrats in control of the Senate, Vice President Dick Cheney tried to intimidate Majority Leader Tom Daschle from undertaking a serious investigation of the Sept. 11 catastrophe. Both Newsweek and the Washington Post reported last January that Cheney called Daschle to warn against the investigation.
According to those reports, Cheney was particularly disturbed by the prospect of public hearings and suggested that such an inquiry would be cast as partisan interference with the "war on terrorism." The president later echoed Cheney's bluster, in milder terms, at a breakfast with congressional leaders.
If the military campaign in Afghanistan ever provided a pretext for such obnoxious and self-serving conduct, it no longer does. In the months since those pleas and threats were issued, the White House and its political surrogates have repeatedly sought to exploit the campaign against terrorism for cheap gain. They can't sell pictures of the commander in chief on Air Force One and then demand immunity from public scrutiny. Besides, the bipartisan consensus has suddenly turned sour, with conservative Republicans as bemused and troubled as Democrats over the latest revelations.
No one should be surprised that the Bush White House tried to hide important facts about what the president knew before Sept. 11. The first impulse of the president's "communications" apparatus was to mislead the media and the public about the reasons behind Bush's flight from Washington on that terrible day.
For weeks, high officials -- including Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, political chief Karl Rove and press secretary Ari Fleischer -- repeatedly insisted that the Secret Service believed there was a "credible threat," involving "code-word confirmation," that al-Qaida's hijacked jets would hit Air Force One and the White House. They leaked and promoted that false tale to gullible journalists (notably William Safire) until it was disproved by CBS News and the Associated Press.
The credibility of the White House on these matters was poor then and is poorer now. That is why many of the events of last year will be re-examined for further evidence of what the Bush administration knew or should have known.
