« Government dependency is growing | Home | Stopping the next attack »
May 21, 2002
Blame game, big distraction
The politicians spent last week playing the blame game, as the Democrats seized their first opportunity in 9 months to challenge the Bush Administration's competence in the war on terror. As George Melloan points out, they've paraded out the infamous lines from Watergate ("What did the President know and when did he know it?") to wonder whether Bush knew more than he told and could have done more to stop 9/11.
Cheney countered that the Democrats should be very careful not to seek political advantage by making incendiary remarks and that they were acting in ways unbecoming to their positions.
What on earth are these people thinking?
Do they really think they can gain political advantage playing this blame game instead of focusing on the core issue here: stopping the next attack?
Of course Bush knew more than he told us and of course more should have been done to stop the attacks. There is a massive amount of intelligence that it is not practical or advisable to share with the American public on a real-time basis. There are thousands of security precautions that the US could have taken before Sept. 11 that could have foiled the attack that would not have been tolerated on Sept. 10th. But the focus on the Bush administration suggests this is something new. Ridiculous.
We've known about terror in general and Bin Laden in particular for years and NO ONE did anything about it -- least of all the Clinton administration who was the executive branch when the Bin Laden attacks started. Dick Morris wrote a pretty damming editorial in the Wall Street Journal in February of this year, saying that Clinton was "curiously uninvolved in the battle against terror" but it seems to have been largely ignored. And this latest controversy will die down too--because we all understand that the politicians misjudged this one and no one doubts that Bush administration "gets it" now.
Former CIA director James Woolsey writes today that "The intelligence warning given the president by the CIA last Aug. 6 about possible al Qaeda hijackings was, as is often the case, vague and general; it did not deal with suicide pilots at all. As long as the White House was relying on the foreign intelligence it was given, it is hard to see how the president could reasonably have done more than he did--alert law enforcement agencies and the airlines." Isn't that obvious? If Bush had specific knowledge, surely he would have done something--and no one is suggesting he had more than vague knowledge.
I view this blame game as a real distraction from the job at hand. But if you want to wallow in it, read this piece fron Salon.
The controversy about what the Administration did or did not know before September 11 is not mere "politics"--as the president and most Republicans have suggested. The issues raised go to the heart of how our intelligence agencies operate, and how this administration manages dissent.
It is increasingly clear that Condi Rice lied at her recent briefing where she claimed that our intelligence agencies knew only of a "general" threat, and that no one could have "conceived" that terrorists would fly airliners into civilian and military targets. On the contrary, through June and July the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, was nearly frantic at what an upcoming coming Al-Qaida operation. We knew that it would involve hijacking airplanes. The FBI, in particular, knew of terrorists training to fly airplanes. And since at least 1994, counter terrorist experts knew that Al Qaida wanted to fly planes into buildings.
That the administration has tried to deny this, and has then angrily responded with a charge of politics, is depressingly in character: this White House prefers to be secretive where that is possible, obfuscate when forced to--and when every other avenue has been exhausted, they will lie.
Could the attacks of September 11 been prevented? With better, more integrated intelligence the answer is almost certainly Yes.
The attempt to stifle dissent by claiming that disagreeing with the Administration is unpatriotic, or politically motivated should be greeted with scorn and derision. We badly mismanaged our intelligence agencies before 9-11. The White House didn't care enough about terrorism. Let's fix things so that alarmists like Warren Buffet or Donald Rumsfeld (both of whom have suggested that a terrorist attack using a weapon of mass destruction is a "near certainty") can be proved wrong.