I’m far from being the biggest Bush fan in America. I’ve criticized him quite a bit, and I’ve not yet decided who I’m going to vote for in the November election. Still, I’m getting sick and tired of the big hullabaloo about whether or not Bush did enough to protect the country before 9/11.
Bush definitely has his own agenda, but there’s not a person on this earth who doesn’t. He exaggerated claims of evidence that Iraq had WMDs, but finding a politician who hasn’t exaggerated or lied to get his or her way is like trying to find a talking horse.
Is it likely that evidence existed which, if followed up on, could’ve prevented the tragic attacks? With the benefit of hindsight, it seems like it must’ve, but Bush didn’t have that benefit during the time we’re talking about. I understand the drive to determine whether or not the man was negligent, but considering that, as president, he has a lot of things to deal with, I would really rather he show us how he’s going to prevent future attacks rather than wasting all his time facing accusations that he should’ve known about the previous one before it happened.
From the New York Times: “Still, after two years in which the White House sought to prevent the disclosure of the document, Mr. Bush’s critics are bound to seize on those details as evidence that the president had something to hide.”
Or, maybe, the White House knew releasing that document would cause the political equivalent of Monday morning quarterbacks to criticize his every move.
If we want to criticize Bush for not making this briefing public, let’s look at the real issue: If it doesn’t involve a.) The locations of our undercover secret agents, b.) battlefield tactics in time of war, or c.) other things that we don’t want “the enemy” to know, it should be public. We call our elected officials our “leaders,” but it’s not really that way at all. They work for us, and as much as we can without endangering the defense of this country, we have a right to know what’s going on.
The text does say a few things that could, potentially be used to keep this briefing private until some point after 9/11, but really, it seems to me that it destroys Bush’s attacker’s points. From the briefing in question (link at the Times, again, though I am sure it can be found elsewhere and you’ll have to log in to see the full text of this one):
<Lots of historical data about threats bin Laden had made 3 or more years prior> …
“Nevertheless, F.B.I. information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
“The F.B.I. is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are investigating a call to our embassy in the U.A.E. in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.”
So, basically, the briefing says: “There’s this bad man who’s threatened us in the past. We have reason to believe that his people have an operation going on that could be very, very bad. We have people looking into it.” What was Bush supposed to do in response? How many briefings does he get that have this same kind of gravity to them (given that he didn’t know what the exact operation was)? How many other things were the F. B. I. and the C. I. A. working on? Would there have been enough manpower to devote more people to this investigation?
The briefing itself doesn’t provide enough information for us to judge Bush (though, I realize that, if I took more of an interest, I could probably answer some, if not all, of the above questions) one way or the other. Shouldn’t we be more focused on the future gameplan, rather than criticizing people for making decisions that we can only criticize thanks to the benefit of hindsight?
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