Kurt Eichenwald's article

 

September 14, 2012

Last Monday I read a short article in the New York Times by Kurt Eichwald, author of "500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars." In it he says that President Bush was amply warned of the attack of September 11th. The administration, cynically I think, only released one briefing paper, that of August 6, 2001, which stated the Bin Laden was determined to strike the United States. This was the only presidential briefing that was declassified and released. The Bush administration later claimed that it had no other information about the attack except this vague warning on August 6th, no date, no time, no place. However, that is the nature of surprise attacks: they come at a time and place no one suspected.

Eichenwald, however, cites information drawn from classified briefs and other documents: the CIA began warning the president about a surprise attack by Bin Laden in the spring of 2001. These warnings continued and continued to be ignored, despite increasing evidence that an attack was planned.. But neocons withing the administration (is he talking about Cheney?) claimed that the CIA had been fooled, that the reports were a canard planted to distract attention from Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Let it be noted that in the spring of 2001 Iraq was already on the neocon radar.

On July 24, 2001, the CIA warned that the attack had been postponed but was still on.

As we know, all these warnings were ignored.

Now it can be argued, and has been argued, that the administration was new to office and as such was deluged with plans, projections, projects, all the bureaucratic chatter that exists in large organizations. This can be overwhelming. President Bush himself was not a particulary skilled politician; his previous experience had been as governor of Texas, not a singularly difficult job. Then too, the administration was absolutely determined to "do things differently", to show the American people that great change had occurred in Washington, the hated and ineffectual Clinton years were over. The new administration was determined to go in new directions.

All of the above, in my opinion, are excuses.

Our elected leaders were put there to protect us from harm, that is their job, that is what they were elected to do. All other considerations, political or otherwise, are secondary. Bush was put there to deal with just this sort of problem.

He failed, and failed spectacularly.