Posted on 04/12/2004 6:20:21 AM PDT by OESY
President Bush was asked, during a very brief session with reporters yesterday, about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo he received on domestic terrorism. He responded with the familiar White House complaint about lack of specificity in the C.I.A.'s warnings — although the memo mentioned a plot, possibly involving hijacked planes and New York City. The most striking thing about the president's comment, however, was his bottom line: that he did everything he could. Over the last few weeks we have heard lawmakers and officials from two administrations talk about their feelings of responsibility, about how they compulsively re-examine the events leading up to 9/ll, asking themselves whether they could have done anything to avert the terrible disaster that day. It is beginning to seem that the only person free of that kind of self-examination is the man who was chief executive when the attacks occurred.
No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes. Even that sort of prescient response would probably have been too little to head off the disaster. But those what-if questions should haunt the president as they haunt the nation. In all probability, they do and it is only the demands of his re-election campaign that are guiding Mr. Bush's public stance of utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.
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It is time for the president to drop his political posture and reassure the country that his first and foremost concern is not his re-election but the safety of Americans at home and abroad. Instead of passively noting that it is the job of the 9/11 commission to figure out whether anything could or should have been done differently, he must demonstrate that he is asking those questions of himself. Instead of preparing — as the administration seems to be preparing — to blame the C.I.A. and F.B.I. for everything that went wrong, he needs to ask whether the structure of the Bush White House itself is part of the problem.
Perhaps no other administration would have responded differently to the skimpy document Mr. Bush received in August 2001. But most other presidents did not limit critical briefing papers to little more than a page, give political advisers such a prominent place in the White House and so dramatically restrict the number of policy makers who had access to the Oval Office. All of Mr. Bush's recent predecessors had at least one of those flaws, but no one else had them all.
The "fact sheet" the White House released over the weekend along with the August 2001 briefing memo hardly shows any rethinking of the way Mr. Bush operates his government. It is instead an extraordinary exercise in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirection. It says that the notion that Osama bin Laden wanted to mount an attack on the United States was familiar information and "publicly well known." It said the presence of Qaeda agents in the United States was equally old news to the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies. It makes it sound as if everyone knew about Osama bin Laden's danger to America except the inattentive president.
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, gave a bureaucrat's hedged responses in her appearance before the 9/11 commission. The public needs to hear a leader's candid answers from President Bush, who so far has agreed to appear before the commission only in private and in the company of the vice president.
This is not a time for more secrecy and presidential isolation. Mr. Bush is asking Americans to simply take his word for the need to stick to an increasingly bloody and chaotic mission in Iraq that he won't even define clearly. (When asked by NBC's Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi leaders the coalition planned to hand over the government to on the target date of June 30, the American proconsul Paul Bremer III chillingly began his answer with "That's a good question.")
Mr. Bush needs to speak out fully in public, both about 9/11 and about Iraq. He is chief executive of a country that once trusted him to lead in perilous times. The public supported his decision to go to war in the Middle East because most Americans believed his judgment was sound. That kind of faith is not just what he needs to win an election in November. It is what he needs to run the country, and he is in grave danger of losing it. Neither administration officials nor political advisers nor the White House spin team can hold on to the country's ebbing confidence. The president must do this himself, and quickly.
Bush has behaved very responsibly.
The Dems are another story. They have formed a cabal to prevent confirmations of Bush's candidates.
"Mammogate" is just one example of their conniving.
(Definition of Mammogate: "Shameles pandering to pro-abort women's groups, by baby-of-his-family Senate Democrats like Ted Kennedy.")
Should a commission be formed to investigate pre-911 obstruction by Democratic Senators?
No but I honestly thought they were bringing up Mr. Clinton when the paragraph started with
It is time for the president to drop his . . .
Since we are going back to the 1990s to find out why it happened here's a clue. It suggests the attitude our (self) anointed ones (the chattering classes, self-described "intellectuals" and hangers-on) had toward Bin Laden.
From ABC "news" John Miller's 1998 Interview With Osama Bin Laden. Mr. Miller is speaking to Bin Laden.
JOHN MILLER From history, in 1897, Teddy Roosevelt was a wealthy man who grew up in a privileged situation who fought on the frontline, put together his own team not from the army, handpicked his own men and went into battle. You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt.
www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/miller_binladen_980609.html
Clinton wasn't silent. He was just "otherwise occupied" in the Oval Office during the day and on the telephone to Monica at night.
What idiocy. The President probably gets briefings similar to this all the time, and it'd be ridiculous to get all worked up over every one that crossed his desk.
This "factual article" in The New York Times without the brief memo which it purports to discuss show no thought for any consideration other than criticizing the president by standards which it is inconceivable that they would apply to a Democrat.It is instead an extraordinary exercise in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirectionThe argument in this article is simply "it happened on his watch" obscured by a fig leaf of pseudo-logic. Filegate, of course, happened in the White House and was so egregious as to make Rep. Lantos' "Admiral Borda committed suicide over far less" seem almost temperate. President Clinton studiously avoided any assignment of blame to that monumental malfeasance other than the announcement in the passive voice that the low-level perpetrator had been fired. Since no one above the level of flunky even lost his job - and he wasn't prosecuted for the crime he had patently committed - the only conclusion is that the only person who was responsible for Filegate was President Clinton.
The Times can fantasize about a Republican president having "failed" to overreact to a memo which in fact said nothing that the Times itself might have and probably did publish, without expecting an emergency reaction in the White House. But let the discussion turn to even the most obvious culpability on the part of a Democrat and the cat has the tongue of The New York Times.
This article itself "is instead" an all-too-ordinary exercise in journalistic "excuse making and misdirection."
You've got a very good point....I did a Google search and found 2 results in the Janet Jackson context.
I'm surprised there weren't more.
You're right. ..The Democrats blame Bush for tardiness in going after Bin Laden.
But the same Democrats don't want us to notice that they deliberately delayed confirming Bush appointees. The Democratic Senators did all they could to tie the hands of the Bush Administration's Defense Department and Department of Justice.
The Democratic senators put their social agenda ahead of America's national safety.
Is this what they want?
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