It turns out that there's a connection
between the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks on
the United States and the war in Iraq after
all. But it's not the one President
Junior and his advisors expected to find.
Instead of unearthing Saddam
Hussein's vaunted "weapons of mass destruction"
or producing evidence of
collusion with Osama bin Laden, what the
fall of Baghdad has again exposed
is the Bush administration's stubborn incapacity
to heed "intelligence" that
doesn't fit its pre-existing world-view.
Moving unwelcome information up the chain
of command is difficult in ALL
hierarchical bureaucracies, from the Little
Rock Police Department to the
CIA. Hence, in part, the CIA's failure
to anticipate events as portentous as
the collapse of the Soviet Union or India's
development of nuclear weapons.
Nobody's eager to give the boss the bad
news. But the problem becomes
acute when the people at the top are politically
ruthless, determined ideologues,
like the Bush administration's dominant
figures.
Add extreme dishonesty and the media-enhanced
cult of personality that has
developed to cover Bush's obvious intellectual
shortcomings, and you've got
yourself the makings of a real mess. With
respect to 9/11, the administration
went into cover-up mode almost before the
World Trade Center's twin towers
had fallen--putting out a since-retracted
story that the president high-tailed it
to Nebraska because of a specific, credible
threat to Air Force One.
There's reportedly a made-for-TV movie
in the works in which a jut-jawed
president demands to be taken back to Washington
to face the enemy. I guess
they'll airbrush away all those press briefings
in which Ari Fliescher kept insisting
the U.S. had "no warning" of the al Qaeda
sneak attack. CBS News later
reported that Bush had, in fact, received
an urgent CIA briefing of imminent
al-Qaeda terrorist strikes roughly a month
before 9/11. He continued his vacation.
Stories appeared describing CIA director
George Tenet and National Security
Council counterterrorism head Richard Clarke
as "nearly frantic" with worry.
Having brushed off urgent warnings of the
terrorist threat from the previous
administration, White House advisor Condi
Rice alibied that nobody could have
imagined anything as fiendish as crashing
airliners into buildings. Bush's August
2001 briefing, she claimed, had concerned
only "traditional highjackings."
In fact, intelligence professionals had
predicted exactly what happened.
Bouyed by his decision to create a department
of Homeland Security, which he'd
previously opposed, Bush got away with
it clean. Busting up al-Qaeda's sanctuary
in Afghanistan and rousting the Taliban
didn't hurt either. Questioning critics'
patriotism proved a useful tactic in a
time of fear. Giving Bush the benefit of the
doubt, most citizens bought the bait and
switch campaign to substitute Saddam
Hussein and Iraq for Osama bin Laden and
al Qaeda as threats to American security.
And why? Well, mainly because Bush has
surrounded himself with self-described
"neo-conservative" intellectuals centering
around Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
who have been hollering that the sky was
falling since the 1970s. Many were
members of the infamous "Team B," convened
by then-CIA director George
H.W. Bush. Their great achievement was
portraying the Russian military as ten
feet tall and bulletproof precisely as
the ramshackle Soviet empire was falling apart.
Needless to say, dissenters were accused
of being "soft on communism," lacking
patriotism, etc. Meanwhile, real
traitors like CIA spy Aldrich Ames got away with murder.
Undeterred, the same gang next sought
a super-villain in the Middle East.Allied with
the Israeli Likud party, the "Project for
a New American Century" started urging Bill
Clinton to attack Iraq five years ago,
and devised a utopian scheme to dominate the
world. Here's how one of its prime movers,
Richard Perle, described his first meeting
with President Junior in Vanity Fair recently:
"Two things became clear. One, he didn't
know very much. The other was he had the
confidence to ask questions that revealed
he didn't know very much...you got the
sense that if he believed something he'd
pursue it tenaciously."
The same article describes Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz telling friends
Bush "wanted to be told what needed doing
and how it should be done." So they told
him, and he told the American people. He
told us Saddam had nuclear weapons.
He told us "weapons of mass destruction"
had been deployed. British Prime Minister
Tony Blair claimed they were ready for
use in 45 minutes. Bush warned us that not
attacking Iraq would be tantamount to national
"suicide."
British intelligence now admits that the
45 minutes business was simply invented in
response to political pressure to "sex-up"
their report.
"What this administration has done to military
and intelligence professionals in
government is disgraceful," Former Reagan
assistant defense secretary Lawrence
Korb told Salon. 27-year CIA veteran Ray
McGovern, head of an organization
called Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity, has described the administration's
pressure tactics as "worse than the Gulf
of Tonkin"--the fabricated incident that got
us into Vietnam.
Condi Rice says it's all a big misunderstanding.
The question is whether Americans are too scared and confused to care.