[Mb-civic] An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report Robert Scheer

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer27jul27.story

ROBERT SCHEER

An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report
 Robert Scheer

 July 27, 2004

 Busted! Like a teenager whose beer bash is interrupted by his parents'
early return home, President Bush's nearly three years of bragging about his
"war on terror" credentials has been exposed by the bipartisan 9/11
commission as nothing more than empty posturing.

 Without dissent, five prominent Republicans joined an equal number of their
Democratic Party peers in stating unequivocally that the Bush administration
got it wrong, both in its lethargic response to an unprecedented level of
warnings during what the commission calls the "Summer of Threat," as well as
in its inclusion of Iraq in the war on terror.

 Although the language of the commission's report was carefully couched to
obtain a bipartisan consensus, the indictment of this administration
surfaces on almost every page.

 Bush was not the first U.S. president to play footsie with Muslim
extremists in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, nor was the Clinton
administration without fault in its fitful and ineffective response to the
Al Qaeda threat. But there was simply no excuse for the near-total
indifference of the new president and his top Cabinet officials to strenuous
warnings from the outgoing Clinton administration and the government's
counter-terrorism experts that something terrible was coming, fast and hard,
from Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's gang, they said repeatedly, was planning
"near-term attacks," which Al Qaeda operatives expected "to have dramatic
consequences of catastrophic proportions."

 As early as May 2001, the FBI was receiving tips that Bin Laden supporters
were planning attacks in the U.S., possibly including the hijacking of
planes. On May 29, White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke wrote
national security advisor Condoleezza Rice that "when these attacks [on
Israeli or U.S. facilities] occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what
more we could have done to stop them." At the end of June, the commission
wrote, "the intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming
attacks as occurring on a calamitous level." In early July, Atty. Gen. John
Ashcroft was told "that preparations for multiple attacks [by Al Qaeda] were
in late stages or already complete and that little additional warning could
be expected." By month's end, "the system was blinking red" and could not
"get any worse," then-CIA Director George Tenet told the 9/11 commission.

 It was at this point, of course, that George W. Bush began the longest
presidential vacation in 32 years. On the very first day of his visit to his
Texas ranch, Aug. 6, Bush received the now-infamous two-page intelligence
alert titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States." Yet
instead of returning to the capital to mobilize an energetic defensive
posture, he spent an additional 27 days away as the government languished in
summer mode, in deep denial.

 "In sum," said the 9/11 commission report, "the domestic agencies never
mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have the direction, and
did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened.
Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not
targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not
marshaled to augment the FBI's efforts. The public was not warned."

 In her public testimony to the commission, Rice argued that the Aug. 6
briefing concerned vague "historical information based on old reporting,"
adding that "there was no new threat information." When the commission
forced the White House to release the document, however, this was exposed as
a lie: The document included explicit FBI warnings of "suspicious activity
in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types
of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
Furthermore, this briefing was only one of 40 on the threat of Bin Laden
that the president received between Jan. 20 and Sept. 11, 2001.

 Bush, the commission report also makes clear, compounded U.S. vulnerability
by totally misleading Americans about the need to invade Iraq as a part of
the "war on terror."

 For those, like Vice President Dick Cheney, who continue to insist that the
jury is still out on whether Al Qaeda and Iraq were collaborators, the
commission's report should be the final word, finding after an exhaustive
review that there is no evidence that any of the alleged contacts between
Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein "ever developed into a collaborative
operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq
cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against
the United States."

 So, before 9/11, incompetence and sloth. And after? Much worse: a war
without end on the wrong battlefield.


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