Fighting stem cells, not terror cells

Weeks before 9/11, the president was "consumed" by a pressing policy matter -- but it wasn't al-Qaida.

By Eric Boehlert

Apr 8, 2004 | On the night of Aug. 9, 2001, speaking from his vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush delivered his first prime-time address to the nation. It was just three days after he had read the startling President's Daily Brief titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," which warned of airline hijackings planned by al-Qaida. It was one month after the administration's counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, informed senior law enforcement officials he had gathered inside the White House's Situation Room: "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon." And it was three months after intelligence analysts had begun tracking unprecedented "chatter" about a possible terrorist attack.

So now, Bush looked into the camera and spoke solemnly: "Good evening. I appreciate you giving me a few minutes of your time tonight so I can discuss with you a complex and difficult issue, an issue that is one of the most profound of our time."

That issue was stem cell research.

Two-and-a-half years later, as Bush's national security advisor Condoleezza Rice appears before the 9/11 commission, she is being questioned about whether the White House could have acted on the terrorist threat more decisively. But perhaps the most intriguing and least discussed what-if is this: What if, during the first eight months of the Bush administration, the president had showered terrorism with as much personal time and attention as he did stem cell research?

"In hindsight knowing now what we should've known then, the importance of terrorism and national security certainly should have bypassed any huge focus on stem cell research," says Monica Gabrielle, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. "The contrast is astounding," she says.

In the wake of 9/11 and the war in Iraq it's hard to remember that the summer of 2001 for the White House was the summer of stem cell research. It was a time when this relatively obscure issue dear to the hearts of Bush's Christian conservative political base rose to dominate the administration's agenda and, according to his aides, certainly the president's time and attention. In fact, aides went out of their way to portray the president as "obsessed" and "consumed" about the issue, soaking up any scrap of information he could. According to Bush's own Aug. 9 address, he had consulted "scientists, scholars, bioethicists, religious leaders, doctors, researchers, members of Congress, my Cabinet, and my friends."

That White House talking point was distributed everywhere. USA Today reported, "Bush agonized in public, surprised guests at social gatherings by soliciting their views, debated the issue with advisers, listened to passionate advocates on all sides, read everything that landed on his desk on the topic. And he prayed." Bush's senior political advisor, Karl Rove, told members of Congress that the president believed his stem cell research decision was "no less important than a decision to commit troops to war."

During the summer of 2001 the press's portrayal of Bush "agonizing" over the intricacies of scientific research served the White House's purpose of establishing the new president as intellectually curious, thoughtful about policy and in control. In retrospect, the idyllic picture of a president "consumed" with stem cell research, of buttonholing all sorts of experts to draw out their opinions, while showing little or no curiosity about al-Qaida, is not a White House talking point.

"Is it too bold to suggest the Bush administration was distracted by domestic politics during the summer of 2001?" asks Matthew Nisbet, an assistant communications professor at Ohio State University who studies the stem cell debate. "What the Bush White House did was to take a minor issue, administratively, and make it into a major political one that captured a lot of time and attention during the summer of 2001. And it didn't necessarily have to be that way. Nobody could have predicted that Bush's first nationally televised address to the country would be about stem cell research."

For months prior to 9/11, Bush's counterterrorism chief could not get a meeting scheduled to brief the president about the mounting al-Qaida threat, despite the fact that, according to the one 9/11 commissioner who's had full access to the library of 2001 intelligence briefings, the growing terrorism warnings "would set your hair on fire." According to a 9/11 commission staff report, during those very same three months in 2001, the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications around the world, reported 33 messages suggesting "a possibly imminent terrorist attack."

Yet during the summer of 2001, Bush's aides painted an image of an Oval Office bursting with outside experts queued up to discuss stem cells face-to-face with Bush in a process that seemed to stretch for weeks at a time.

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