The Beginning of the End for George W. Bush

               NEW YORK-It only lasted a few seconds, but on May 17 George W. Bush had a Bill Clinton
               moment, and it was magical. "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on
               that fateful morning," George W. Bush reassured us, "I would have done everything in my power
               to protect the American people." Did he realize how much he sounded like his prevaricating
               predecessor? Were the subject something other than the murder of 3,000 innocent people, such
               desperate dissembling would be absolutely hilarious.

               In the circus of insolent hypocrites which is the Bush Administration, the best lines are reserved
               for the ringmaster. On that same day the creepy Dick Cheney warned Democrats not to "seek
               political advantage by making incendiary suggestions...that the White House had advance
               information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9-11. Such commentary," Cheney
               emphasized, "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war."

               First: what war? And when it comes to "political advantage," it's the Bushies, not the Democrats,
               who have taken advantage of 9-11 to further a partisan political agenda. They used the dead of
               New York, Pennsylvania and Washington to push such Republican platform planks as "fast track"
               signing authority on free trade agreements, Internet censorship, tax cuts for the super rich and
               drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To be sure, there's a war going on: a PR war.
               And now that Democrats are finally scoring a few points of their own, the Bushies who have been
               slamdunking for months are screaming foul.

               "Bush Knew," the New York Post screamed last week. Did he? Hell if I know. Here's a man who
               subverted constitutional law in order to seize the White House in a judicial coup d'état, who
               claimed while campaigning to be a "compassionate conservative" but turned into a Genghis Khan
               right-winger as soon as he took office, and who told us upfront after 9-11 that his administration
               would routinely lie for the sake of the "war on terror." No one can deny that the Bushies and their
               corporate sponsors benefited enormously from 9-11; the post-Taliban Afghan pipeline deal
               (closed March 7 in Islamabad) alone is worth billions of dollars. Under normal circumstances,
               even the suggestion that a president would deliberately stand idly by as his citizens were slaughtered
               en masse would be appalling. George W. Bush, however, tells Congress to go to hell whenever it
               requests documents or summons his staff to testify. Such a man is capable of anything.

               There's no smoking gun-evidence that Bush was told about the exact specifics of 9-11-so far.
               But it's hard to escape an inevitable, disturbing conclusion that itself bears consideration: We are
               in the hands of liars, morons or both.

               When Terrormemogate first hit the airwaves, the administration trotted out National Security
               Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who serves as chief of Bush's Counterterrorism Security Group, to face
               the media. Rice repeatedly asserted that pre-9-11 threats of airplane hijackings had been so
               vague as to be useless. This is somewhat believable: any firefighter can tell you that false
               alarms outnumber real fires.

               Now, let's say you're the President. You're told that someone (you don't know who) may hijack
               passenger jets (you don't know when, how or how many). You assume, as Rice says the Bushies
               did, that those hijackings will assume a traditional historical model: demands for money and/or
               release of prisoners in exchange for the release of hostages. What do you do?

               Given such a generalized threat, you'd order your Air Force to a state of high alert. "Traditional"
               hijackings, after all, tend to end badly. You'd keep planes in the air and many more on the
               ground, ready to scramble at a second's notice. Then, if and when the predicted hijackings
               materialized, you could track the planes and order them shot down if necessary. If months went
               by without any hijackings, you might decide to lower the nation's state of readiness.

               On the morning of September 11th, though, just eight fighters were assigned to defend The
               United States of America's 3,618,770-square-mile air space. And they were piloted by weekend
               warriors, members of the Air National Guard. The jets weren't even in the air-they were sitting on
               the ground at the time of the attacks. Our state of readiness, despite the huge military defense
               budget that sucks millions away from starving children, compared unfavorably to Thailand's.

               By Rice's own admission, the Bush Administration ignored the vague, imprecise threats of which
               Bush was informed during his month-long August vacation, simply because they didn't specify
               exact times and dates. To hear her tell it, our government-our safety-is in the hands of idiots.

               "Administration officials insisted all last week that turning a plane into a suicide bomb was
               something that nobody had contemplated," Time magazine reports in its May 27th issue. "But
               that just isn't so. In 1995, authorities in the Philippines scuppered a plan-masterminded by
               Razmi Yousef, who had also plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing-for mass hijackings
               of American planes over the Pacific. Evidence developed during the investigation of Yousef and
               his partner, Abdul Hakim Murad, uncovered a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters in
               Langley, Va. And as long ago as 1994, in an incident that is well known among terrorism
               experts, French authorities foiled a plot by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group to fly an airliner
               into the Eiffel Tower."

               So Rice was either clueless or lying: everybody knew that Islamist jihadis had plotted suicide
               hijackings well before 9-11. Nevertheless, the Bushies did nothing to improve airline security.
               They did nothing to prepare for the possibility of hijackings, whether suicide or traditional. They
               didn't even tell the airlines what they knew. Then, after 9-11, they covered up the fact that they
               had received numerous warnings.

               Moron Bush or Liar Bush-would one of you please resign?

              (Ted Rall's new book, a graphic travelogue about his recent coverage of the Afghan war titled
              "To Afghanistan and Back," is out now. Ordering and review-copy information are available at
               nbmpub.com.)

               COPYRIGHT 2002 TED RALL

               RALL 5/21/02