Another One

April 5, 2004

Gary Hart was interviewed in Salon on Friday regarding the warnings he gave to the Bush Administration in early 2001. Hart was the co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security, which studied the history of American national security and made recommendations about how the country should approach its security the future. The most urgent warning they made was for a greater effort to prevent a terrorist strike in the US, which they said was imminent unless actions were immediately taken.

To view the interview you need a Salon membership, but you can get a free day pass by clicking through some advertisements. Well worth it - a brief excerpt:

And in the spring of 2001, some members of Congress introduced legislation to create a homeland security agency...

And then as Congress started to move on this, and the heat was turned up, George Bush -- and this is often overlooked -- held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he was turning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney....

We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.

Lots more juicy stuff. How many more people who were on the inside, or close to it, have to come out saying that the administration at best neglected, and at worst willfully ignored terrorism pre-9/11, before people will get mad? I'd say "before Bush apologizes or someone gets fired," but that will never happen. I hope it's just a matter of evidence building. I'm looking forward to Rice's appearance on Thursday.

William Safire has a rather ridiculous column today essentially saying that we should stop looking at the past, trying the blame someone for what happened on September 11th, and should address future threats. Aside from the fact that he clearly wouldn't say the same thing if this were Clinton, whose past was a constant source of fascination for the Right, and besides the fact that the whole point of the 9/11 commission to assess what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future, and discounting the fact that it's possible to plan for the future and look at the past at the same time, what Safire is pretty much saying is that we shouldn't hold our leaders accountable for anything. After all, all they've done is now in the past! Why examine if they made mistakes or even lied, we should just ask what they have planned next!

I also enjoyed how he attempts to group those who opposed the war in Iraq with the small group of people (and I can't say I know or have even seen any) who opposed the war in Afghanistan. It's the usual tactic of not directly lying, but being deceitful by grouping things together to suggest untruths.

Safire's obviously a right-wing nut, but the column's worth reading just to see how far their arguments have gone to try and defend this president.