Do You Really Want to Entrust Your Security to George W. Bush?

In the 2004 election Bush said only Republicans could be trusted on national security. I find that rather odd considering that a Democrat sat in the White House for eight years previous to Bush and never experienced a devastating attack on our shores by foreign terrorists to equal 9/11.

Especially odd is that Bush was in office for almost nine full months when those planes attacked. Think about that for a second. The man who is promising to protect you from further terrorist attacks sat around for nine months as the people he personally appointed to the highest echelons of government agencies charged with overseeing security allowed over a dozen men fitting their profiles of Muslim terrorists to learn how to fly a plane, BUT NOT TO LAND A PLANE.

Now you would think that people so overwhelmingly more intelligent than Democrats and Democratic appointees would have stopped to take a minute to ask themselves this question: Why would a bunch of guys learn to fly a plane, but not to land it? But no. Nobody considered this unusual, apparently. Nobody raised their hand when the President came to ask how are things going? Assuming, of course, that the President took the time to come around asking how things were going. Aside: Does anybody remember anything that President Bush did in the nine months leading up to 9/11? Anything. Anything at all. Was the President of the United States engaged in any memorable policy before he decided to take over the-excuse me for laughing here-mantle of WAR PRESIDENT. What exactly were Bush’s accomplishments before 9/11. (Of course, one might be tempted to ask what his accomplishments have been since 9/11, too, right?)

So, anyway, nobody in the Bush administration took the time to question whether or not it was the least big suspicious that a bunch of guys of the same background-whether it was Middle-Eastern, or midwestern America-were learning to fly, but not land planes. These are the people whom you entrust to protect you against terrorists? These dunderheads can’t even adequately respond to a natural disaster they saw coming over a week in advance. Yet you want to trust them to respond quickly and promptly to an unexpected terrorist attack? Because only they are qualified?

A lot of people like to point to the fact that there hasn’t been another attack on American soil as proof that the Bush team knows what it is doing. Well, perhaps there is a point to that, though I personally think there are so many variables involved in the successful carrying out of a terrorist attack that, frankly, trusting the lack of an attack to Bush policy is something that gives me the willies. I prefer to look at how they responded to a real attack rather than investing my trust in how they responded to an attack that may never have even been planned.

Pres. Bush’s immediate response to being told of the attack was not only woefully inadequate and embarrassing, it was frightening dangerous. For seven minutes the President of the United States remained rigid in his chair inside a classroom full of children and, of course, photographers. (Has any member of the Bush family ever stepped foot inside a public school without a posse of photographers behind them?) The argument for his not immediately leaving and taking action is that he didn’t want to alarm the children. Well, I’m sure that was reassuring to them. I’m less convinced anyone outside that classroom was reassured. It was impotent and frightening. It was the first indication that Pres. Bush cannot be allowed to respond to a crisis without first being handed a script; a scenario that keeps being replayed over and over. Bug never mind that it sent a message to the rest of the world that our President is incapable of handling an emergency until someone else has written a script for him to recite, consider this: The President’s agenda for the day had been published and for all he knew there was a plane or suicide truck headed for that school at that moment. Pres. Bush’s so-called concern over upsetting the children could have, for all he knew at the time, have been putting them in danger. Did that ever occur to him?

Then there is the secondary response. Immediately, it was decided that Iraq was behind the invasion and that is how the President chose to respond. Of course, he had to make allowances for the fact that none of the hijackers were Iraqi by going after Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but the eye was always and already toward invading Iraq.

For years now, we who opposed this war before it even began have known in our hearts that Bush was making up all that WMDs stuff. Many were surprised when no weapons were ever found in Iraq. We weren’t. It was obvious even before he got elected that this was a man who lacked the character and intelligence to be President. And, well, why attack Iraq in response to 9/11 when not one single hijacker was Iraqi?

We knew Bush was lying about the intelligence failure even as he was saying it. We knew that, as usual with this President, the buck no longer stops in Oval Office, but somewhere outside the door. We knew that his lies were not about faulty intelligence, but about his knowledge of the WMDs.

We knew he knew there never were WMDS. And now so does the world. Former CIA official, Tyler Drumheller says that he personally saw intelligence that concluded there were no WMDs in Iraq and that he knows that same intelligence was seen by Bush and Cheney. He says he saw firsthand how the White House ignored evidence that hurt their case for war and tailored evidence that to support it.

Perhaps most damaging of all, Drumheller was part of the operation that turned Iraqi Foreign Minister Sabri into a leak before the war. The White House was terribly excited because Sabri promised to give them high level inside information on Iraq’s WMD program. That excitement turned to disinterest when it Sabri admitted there weren’t any WMDS.

If anyone is left who thinks that this country is safer under the guidance of George W. Bush, I urge you to see the film United 93. And while you are watching this true story of heroism and courage, I want you to keep one thing in mind. I want you to remember that Pres. Bush’s memorial to these people and everyone else who died as a result of those hijackings was to spend billions of dollars going after the wrong suspect.

Meanwhile, the man responsible for their deaths remains free.