Check out this Huffpo post by Robert Scheer. He is right to warn that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted with sex scandals when there are much more important issues deserving of our attention:
The news about the Foley coverup, while important as yet another example of extreme hypocrisy on the part of the Republican virtues police, should not be allowed to obscure the latest evidence of administration deceit as to its egregious ineptness in protecting the nation.
On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an Al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, “State of Denial.”
Gee, I don’t remember Rice talking about that meeting during her testimony before the 9/11 Commission . . . Must have been an oversight. Too bad the media is not focusing on this critical story.
I'm not entirely in agreement with huffpo on this one. I've heard Rice (and others) discuss the intelligence reports that were floating around the Whitehouse in the months before 9/11. Rice has stated that those reports, although clearly warning of a likely al Qaeda attack in the near future, contained too few specifics to enable the Administration to take pre-emptive action. Given that probably only a few people inside al Qaeda knew the details of the 9/11 plot, and none was sharing them; and given that, on any given day, there are thousands of scheduled airline flights, and tens of thousands of airline passengers, I don't think it's entirely fair to blame the Bush Administration for the 9/11 disaster. Yes, Bush was (and still is) a lazy, incompetent, bozo who seemed far more interested in cutting brush on his Crawford ranch than in attending to his job in Washington (at the time, he seemed to think his job consisted of little more than rubber-stamping whatever legislation came out of the Republican Congress), but I'm not convinced that more vigilence by the Bushies would have made much difference. Given how much Americans have complained about the new "security" screenings at airports, it seems doubtful that the nation would have supported such screenings before 9/11. Moreover, even if the intelligence community could have suspected an airline hijacking sometime in the fall of 2001, could anyone have suspected *four* hijackings and, most importantly, could anyone have suspected multiple hijackings that would be followed by multiple suicide crashes? Perhaps so, given that the terrorists had only wanted to learn about flying jetliners, not landing them, but perhaps not, given that no previous airline hijacking has resulted in such action.
In any case, there are enough gaps and grey zones in the pre-9/11 intelligence that I'm unwilling to engage in the sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking that is shown in the huffpo article. Where I come down hard against the Bush Administration is how they responded after the 9/11 attack: they have used the event, together with an ocean of lies and deceit, to rape the U.S. Constitution for their own political gain, to destroy the U.S. budget for the benefit of their own political supporters, to destroy American good will around the globe for the sake of their own swaggering egos, and to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people (including American troops) for the sake of their own political propaganda campaign. Bush and his cronies should be impeached and thrown in prison for crimes against humanity.