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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
And it left Bush to pick up the pieces after 9-11. CIA and FBI are to blame for maintaining separate fiefdoms. Then bin Laden became able to hide and is now concocting mayhem for Obama.
The right-wingers, who go around trumpeting the fact that George W. Bush kept the homeland safe (despite the fact he AND his National Security Advisor managed NOT TO FULLY READ a daily briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United State") after 9/11 by preventing any attacks INSIDE the United States go nuts and say it doesn't count when you point out that American citizens HAVE died in a number of terror attacks across the world, NOW want to blame Bill Clinton for attacks that occured outside of the homeland.
What's the standard? When it comes to Bush and Cheney it's just protecting the "homeland." When it comes to Bill Clinton, any terror attack that ever affected any American citizen, is somehow Bubba's fault.
Here's another hint. Our Marine barracks got bombed in Lebanon. It was horrible. It was terrible. It was an affront to America. Good young Americans died. It was embarassing.
And Ronald Reagan had the sense to PULL THE HELL OUT. He understood proportionality, called it a day, and wasn't willing to risk unnecssary American lives in a war we couldn't win with no definable strategic or even tactical goals. America and Israel today could learn a lot from that. And I don't even like Reagan.
But blaming Clinton for an attack that killed American citizens in Tanzania in 1998 while simultaenously exonerating Reagan for an attack on an ARMED MARINE BARRACKS that killed Ameicans, and ignoring the number of Americans that have been taken hostage or killed in terror attacks overseas under Bush is downright ingenuous.
In otherwords: it makes you a current-day Republican. Dishonest.
And yet.....everything that follows that statement is true. All the facts and figures that are presented are true. Health care, military strength, the infrastructure, the economy....are all on life support. Maybe Bush II didn't inherit a peaceful and prosperous nation. The world was dangerous (as it always has been and always will be) and the economy was heading for a mild recession. The point is, the nation George inherited isn't nearly as bad, not by a long shot, as the nation Obama is inheriting.
You want to quibble over one line in this damning article to discredit it. Just one line....well, you are just going to have to do better than that.
"9/11 not his fault? Well no. But any criminal court would CERTAINLY charge Condolezza Rice if not George W. Bush for criminal negligence in an instant for ignoring a memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" and then use, as a series of reasons it was: a) at the bottom of the stack of memos, b) not the MOST important memo then-National Security Advisor Rice received and c) simply didn't seem that urgent."
The memo was not ignored. In fact, if you bothered to read the last paragraph of that PDB, you'll notice that action was being taken concerning al Qaeda.
Having said that, the August 6, 2001 PDB was largely a rehash of a December 4, 1998 PDB. Action on that PDB was ended before February 1999.
How important was the August 6, 2001 PDB. Here is how Richard Clarke characterized it:
"I really can’t recall it. I think its importance has been overblown. What happens in the presidential daily briefing is that the president asks questions of the briefer, which is usually Tenet on Monday through Friday. And the briefer then takes notes of the questions and goes back to CIA to get papers written to respond to the questions.
"In response to the drumbeat day after day of intelligence that there was going to be an al-Qaida attack, the president apparently said, 'Tell me what al-Qaida could do.' And in response to that the CIA went off and wrote a paper that listed everything possible that al-Qaida could do. It didn’t say we have intelligence that tells us the attack will be here or there, the attack method will be this or that. It was rather a laundry list of possible things they could do."
Those comments were first published right here at Salon.com.
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/03/24/clarke/index2.html
And, as I mentioned above, Clarke wrote in his book that there was no "proof or specificity" conncerning an imminent al Qaeda attack. Richard Ben-Veniste also acknowledged this when he questioned Rice before the 9/11 Commission:
RICE: Certainly not. There was nothing reassuring. But I can also tell you that there was nothing in this memo that suggested that an attack was coming on New York or Washington, D.C. There was nothing in this memo as to time, place, how or where. This was not a threat report to the president or a threat report to me.
BEN-VENISTE: We agree that there were no specifics. Let me move on, if I may.
There is nothing that happened during W's presidency that wasn't completely screwed up beforehand. The housing bubble was being inflated by social engineers, the islamic crazies were planning to attack us, and half the country believed (as they still do) that rich people somehow have an obligation to hand over their money to poor people because of some childish idea about fairness. The guy is clearly not a great man but his legacy will become much more favorable if there is a terrorist attack on Obama's watch after he put Elmer Fudd in charge of the CIA.
Um, all y'all were spouting the same intellectually dishonest, half-baked bullshit during the entire '08 presidential campaign. In case you didn't notice, the GOP had their collective ass handed to them on Nov 6, despite your lofty and persuasive oratory.
Why on earth would you expect anyone to buy the same horshit now? Repeating it ad nauseum doesn't make it any more true.
Your Big Lie has been forcefully repudiated. Nobody is listening anymore. You're done.
You'll all eventually get through the First Stage: Denial.
Maybe.
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219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
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Salon headlines in your mailbox
