Reply #30: Yeah. Bush the turd failed to do his job and order DEFCON 1. [View All]

[Octafish]

The drunk coward just sat there, knowing what was to come.

Here's how that moment got there -- just the facts, from Jerry Politex:

Bush's Path to 9/11:
How Bush Removed Antiterrorism Protections, Without Providing Replacements, Dire Warnings With Little Response

The Bush administraqtion's focus in the months leading up to 9/11 was upon funding and creating a missile-defense system, on Iraq and its imagined "weapons of mass destruction," and the WMDs of other "rogue nations." This course of action was taken despite the fact that a proliferation of U.S. intelligence reports increasingly warned of something totally different: an attack on the U.S. from cell-based terrorist groups.

SNIP...

Clarke later said, "Prior to September 11th, a lot of people who were working full time on terrorism thought it was no more than a nuisance. They didn't understand that Al Qaeda was enormously powerful and insidious and that it was not going to stop until it really hurt us. John and some other senior officials knew that. The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn't understand" (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020114fa_FACT1).

Clarke could have considered a corollary reading of the Bush administration's inaction: as has been too often the case in these 6 long years, if a program does not fit into the conservative/neocon agenda begun in the Reagan years and expanded since by the same group of men and women and their heirs, it is shunted off to the side and generally ignored. "The central notion that Mr. Bush did not make terrorism as high a priority as hindshight shows it should have been is one that he himself has admitted. Mr. Bush said as much in an interview with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for his book on the response to September 11" (Christian Science Monitor, april 1, 2004).

SNIP...

Michael Tomasky observes: "When the Bush administration started hearing more intelligence noises in June and July of 2001, why didn't it--and Rice, specifically, since this was her baliwick--convene the same kind of daily meetings the Clinton administration had when it heard similar noise? The obvious answer...is that it wasn't a high priority and the facts could not make it so. And a model existed, then not even two years old, for how to avert catastrophe (American Prospect, April 4, 2004).

CONTINUED...

www.BushWatch.com

Thanks for giving a damn, lonestarnot.

¡Estas chevere!