1115.org

I’m going to take a leaf out of President Bush’s book, and write a totally non-political post. It will only focus on 9/11 and TWAT and keeping our country safe, nothing about politics will intrude at all. If I had a Press Secretary, I would turn over the keyboard to her for a minute, so that she could reassure everyone that this is indeed a non-political post. But I don’t, so I’ll just have to stick with self-certification.

I’ve never had much patience with crackpot conspiracy theories, but I fear I’m about to propound one now.

That is to say, I’ve finally arrived at the point where I’m prepared to seriously consider the possibility that the Bush administration, consciously and deliberately, chose to ignore the warnings they received before 9/11 that al Qaeda was fixing to launch an attack in the U.S.

I’m not saying they let the attacks happen by being too busy doing other things. I’m afraid I’m saying they consciously chose to let the attacks happen, by deliberate inaction, as part of an explicit plan.

There is no doubt that President Bush personally, and the Bush administration generally, received plentiful warning of al Qaeda’s intention to launch an attack in the U.S.

There was the well-known PDB of August 6, 2001, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

As Ron Suskind reports in The One Percent Doctrine, that same month

CIA officials “flew to Crawford [Texas] to personally brief the President — to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.” At the end of one such briefing, Bush reportedly responded to the CIA briefer, “All right … You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Before the Bush administration took charge, Sandy Berger tried to bring home to Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, the magnitude and urgency of the al-Qaeda terrorist threat:

One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. …he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.

Berger attended only one of the briefings—the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. “I’m coming to this briefing,” he says he told Rice, “to underscore how important I think this subject is.” Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, “I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.”

President Clinton said almost exactly the same thing to President Bush:

Clinton said he discussed security issues with Bush in his “exit interview,” a formal and often candid meeting between a sitting president and the president-elect.

“In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defense,” Clinton said. “I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden.”

After the Bush administration took charge, then counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke made urgent attempts to get the Bush administration to take the al-Qaeda threat seriously. He made repeated attempts to interest the Bush administration in the detailed plan he had prepared for fighting al-Qaeda:

In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to “everything we’ve done since 9/11.”

There is no dispute that the Bush administration failed to act on all these warnings.

So the only question is: Why? There would seem to be just two possibilities. Did the warnings simply slip through the cracks because the Bush administration did not take this terrorism threat seriously, because they were too busy with other things? Or were the warnings deliberately ignored?

Why would they deliberately ignore the warnings? If you look at how the Bush administration used the 9/11 attacks, they twisted the war on terror around and used the 9/11 attacks to drum up support for invading Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. It is abundantly clear that removing Saddam Hussein from power was a major priority for George Bush right from the time he took office in 2001 (I’ll summarize the evidence below in a moment). He was determined to do it, he just needed a good enough pretext, a way to sell it to the American people and to Congress.

Up to now it has been assumed the Bush administration opportunistically seized on the 9/11 attacks to achieve this end. And it’s possible that that’s how it happened. But is it all that far-fetched to imagine that maybe this was not just a crime of opportunity, maybe this was a deliberately crafted plan? Allow al Qaeda to launch an attack on U.S. soil, then exploit the spontaneous emotional response to whip up a nice little patriotic frenzy. Carefully fan these flames, and use them to sell a pseudo-justification for invading Iraq.

I don’t think they ever expected anything on the scale of the actual 9/11 attacks. Going by past al Qaeda attacks, I think they expected some kind of bombing that would take out a few hundred victims. That would be quite enough to whip up a critical mass of emotion. As for the lives lost, if you want to make an omelet, there will have to be some broken eggs. A necessary sacrifice. In the greater good, etc. Saddam has to be taken out. No matter how you take him out, some lives will be lost. Regrettable, certainly, that a few hundred civilian lives have to be sacrificed in order to bring peace and stability to the Middle East forever, but we can’t let that stop us, this is too important. Any of them could have said it, and all of them would have agreed, whether it was Bush putting it in plain-speech or Rice putting it in fancy-Ph.D.-speak or Cheney putting it in vernacular hate-speech.

I think this was the real meaning of Condoleezza Rice’s statement:

I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

She first blurted out this thought in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. I think at that point she was still numb with guilt at what they had wrought. She couldn’t help saying, more to herself than to anyone else, that this wasn’t what they had bargained for, this isn’t what they thought they were permitting. It wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near this bad.

But let me take you back and fill in that blank—the evidence which suggests that removing Saddam Hussein from power was a top priority for Bush from the time he took office, practically an obsession:

But the basic argument that the Bush administration was intent on an Iraq invasion has been made many times before: In Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s book, The Price of Loyalty, it says getting rid of Saddam was at the top of President Bush’s agenda in his very first cabinet meeting back in January 2001; Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke wrote that President Bush pressured him to come up with evidence linking 9/11 to Iraq; Bob Woodward, in his book Plan of Attack, reported the administration was determined to invade Iraq long before the president went to the United Nations in September 2002.

From The One Percent Doctrine again:

As to 9/11, the critics’ case for CIA incompetence was clouded by the repeated warnings from Tenet and top deputies about the al Qaeda threat, starting with their first briefing to the incoming President. Neither Bush nor the more experienced Cheney had reacted with a plan of action. Bin Laden was a problem without a ready solution, a combination that often spells inertia for the vast U.S. government. The primary focus, instead –as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice framed it in January 2001 at the first NSC meeting of the Bush presidency — was on “how Iraq is destabilizing the region,” and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Throughout the spring and summer of 2001, dozens of reports were generated inside the Defense and State Departments about a possible invasion of Iraq, as the CIA increasingly warned about the threat from al Qaeda.

From Daily Kos:

“F*** Saddam. We’re taking him out.”- March 2002, “sticking his head in the door of a White House meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and three senators who had been discussing strategies for dealing with Iraq through the United Nations.”

“Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry motherf***ing ass all over the Mideast?”- May 2002, “told that reporter Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam by force.”

Not much doubt that Bush was determined from the very outset of his presidency to take down Saddam Hussein, and only needed a marketing plan to sell this operation to Congress and to the public. He found that in the 9/11 attacks. Just a lucky coincidence, or a calculated plan?

Let me make it clear that I’m not saying I do believe it was a calculated plan. I’m saying it’s certainly possible that’s how it went down. And when I ask myself: would you put it past these guys, the answer comes back, unhesitatingly, as: “No, I wouldn’t put it past them at all”.

They have repeatedly demonstrated the kind of behavior which allows no objection based on: it’s totally immoral, so they wouldn’t do it. They have repeatedly demonstrated the kind of behavior which allows no objection based on: this is America, we don’t do things this way. They have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the lives of others in pursuit of their grand follies. Think of the cold dark bleak landscapes they seem to call their souls, and ask yourself: would you put it past them?