If Jeb says his brother kept us safe after 9/11 . . . then it's fair to ask if he did enough BEFORE 9/11?

Noted journalist Elizabeth Drew lays out the case that, although President George W. Bush might not have been able to prevent the 9/11 attack, he ignored the warnings and didn't even try.  There is nothing new here, but that's just the point.   There are powerful political forces that have steered us away from holding Bush accountable for what happened before 9/11.  And we've known it all along . . . and let him get away with it.

Enter Donald Trump in the second debate.  He deftly punctured Jeb Bush's proud assertion that "My brother kept us safe."   All Trump said was:  "When you talk about George Bush--I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time."  So Elizabeth Drew's article has put it all out there for us to look at . . . again.  Here are some excerpts from her article (New York Review Daily, Oct 15, 2015).

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"The heretofore hushed-up public policy question that Trump stumbled into is: Did George W. Bush do what he could have to try to disrupt the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001? It's not simply a question of whether he could have stopped the devastation--that's unknowable. But did he do all he could given the various warnings that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack somewhere on US territory . . . ?  [The] almost unbearable conclusion . . . is that in the face of numerous warnings of an impending attack, Bush did nothing. . . .

"Osama bin Laden was . . . . the prime suspect in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa. . . . [R]epeated and more specific warnings by Richard Clarke, . . . the chief terrorism adviser, were ignored.   In a White House meeting on July 5, 2001, Clarke said, "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon." . . . 

"On July 10, CIA Director George Tenet and aides laid out for Condolessa] Rice what they described as irrefutable evidence that . . . ''There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months' and that the attack would be 'spectacular.'  Tenet believed that the US was going to get hit, and soon. But the intelligence authorities, including covert action, that the CIA officials told Rice they needed, and had been asking for since March, weren't granted until September 17.
 
"Then came the now-famous August 6 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) intelligence memorandum to the president, headlined, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US." Bush was at his ranch in Crawford, Texas . . .  none of his senior aides was present for the briefing . . . . [The brief included the warning that] 'FBI information . . . indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.'  Having received this alarming warning the president did nothing. 

"As August went on, Tenet was so agitated by the chatter he was picking up and Bush's lack of attention to the matter that he arranged for another CIA briefing of the president later in August, with Bush still at his ranch, to try to get his attention to what Tenet believed was an impending danger. According to Ron Suskind, in the introduction to his book The One Percent Doctrine, when the CIA agents finished their briefing of the president in Crawford, the president said, 'All right. You've covered your ass now.'  And that was the end of it. 

"What might a president do upon receiving notice that the world's number one terrorist was 'determined to strike in US'?  The most obvious thing was to direct Rice or Vice President Cheney to convene a special meeting of the heads of any agencies that might have information about possible terror threats . . . .  As it happened they had quite a bit: the administration had already been notified about some Arabs seeking flying lessons at a flight school in Arizona; [they paid with] large amounts of cash for the lessons, which they limited to just wanting to know how to fly the plane in cruise mode, not learn how to take off and land.   In July, an FBI agent stationed in Phoenix wrote to headquarters warning of the 'possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama bin Laden' to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools. .

"Zacarias Moussaoui . . . aroused suspicion by paying cash for lessons at a flight school in Minnesota, also just wanting to know how to fly a 747 at cruising altitude, not how to take off or land. . . . [and he asked suspicious questions about flight patterns around New York].   In August 2001, a manager from the flight school called the FBI. Moussaoui was arrested . . . but . . . an FBI agent in Minneapolis couldn't persuade headquarters in Washington to take the matter seriously and allow a search of Moussaoui's laptop. . . . 

"Had the president ordered a root and branch search of information government agencies had on potential strikes by al-Qaeda in the US, what was known about Moussaoui and the Arizona flight school would have been of great interest.  Perhaps they'd have also unearthed an intelligence memo written in 1998 that said, 'we also learned that the agencies had uncovered a message between al Qaeda operatives in the United States . . .  that read, 'Plans to hijack U.S. aircraft proceeding well. Two individuals have successfully evaded checkpoints in dry run at NY airport.''. . .

"When the [9/11] commission finally succeeded in its demand that Bush testify . . . the arrangement was that only two commission members could be present at a White House meeting where the president was to be questioned for only one hour, without being put under oath and with no notes taken, and with Vice President Cheney present. In fact, the administration fought the commission at nearly every turn.  [Co-chairs] Hamilton and Kean later wrote that they felt that the commission had been 'set up to fail' . . . .

"On the surface, the commission report's dramatic narrative appeared to hold no high-level officials accountable for not doing more to ward off the attacks. Read closely, it was a damning indictment of Bush and Cheney . . .  The commission avoided assigning individual blame in order to get a unanimous report . . .  But the report, amassing all the evidence and warnings the administration had received, made it clear that there was a strong possibility that the attacks might have been prevented. The commissioners who believed this thought the facts would speak for themselves. It presented a picture of an administration not much engaged with the subject of terrorism and unresponsive to clear warnings.

"Reading the report closely and talking to commission members made it clear to me that the report was intended to stop just short of blaming Bush for his inaction . . . The commissioners didn't want to provide the nation a divided opinion. They also didn't want to upset the public too much. Thus for what might have been considered admirable motives, the devastating conclusions that should have been drawn from the available facts have remained buried and the country had essentially moved on--until Trump reopened the question.

"What is arguable about the events of 9/11 is whether they could have been stopped; what isn't arguable is that George W. Bush didn't try. . . "
 

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 If Jeb stays in the race, and especially if he brings his brother in to campaign for him, there is going to be more and more focus on this.   To my thinking, that would be a good thing for the country.   But it could be devastating for a failed candidate who can't have anything else go wrong.

Ralph