Salon: Conason's "Big Lies" – Who's Tougher on Terror? (Part 5)

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Conservatives blame 9/11 on Clinton. But it was Bush Republicans who made deals with terrorists -- while Clinton's team took concrete steps to protect Americans. Part 5 of "Big Lies"

After terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill eagerly lined up with conservative Republicans to pledge their support for the President's war against al-Qaida and the Taliban. No one mentioned the hesitancy of George W. Bush's initial response to the terror strikes. No one said or did anything that might hint at dissension in a time of national crisis. When Bush showed up at a joint session of Congress nine days after the fall of the World Trade Center to deliver a rousing speech, he won standing applause across the bitter partisan divide left by the 2000 election.

(snip)


Seeking to scuttle any probe before it could begin, the President's aides and his allies on Capitol Hill continued to stall the investigation by appealing to fear (and, rather brazenly, to patriotism). National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice argued that an investigation would endanger the country still further. "In the context of this ongoing war, it is extremely important to protect the sources and the methods and the information so that we can try and disrupt further attacks," she claimed. "The problem is that this is an act that is not finished. It is ongoing. We are still fighting a war on terrorism." Tom DeLay dove into the gutter immediately: "We will not allow our president to be undermined by those who want his job during a time of war." It was quite revealing that DeLay assumed a full investigation would undermine Bush.

(snip)

When terrorists first tried to take down the World Trade Center with a truck bomb in February 1993, there was no organized outcry of recrimination against George Herbert Walker Bush, although he had left the Oval Office a scant six weeks earlier. Neither the incoming Clinton administration nor the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress tried to blame Bush for the intelligence failures that had allowed the perpetrators of that atrocity to conspire undetected for more than three years.

No liberal commentator pronounced the former President guilty of "criminal negligence," as conservatives immediately did in blaming Bill Clinton for the September 11 attacks. Using fabrications, falsehoods and half-truths, the opportunists of the right compiled an indictment of Clinton and the Democrats. Calling for "national unity" in one breath, they angrily assaulted Clinton in the next. To make their case, they had to erase his administration's extensive record of action against terrorism.

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/08/22/conason_five/index.html