The Bush People Know How To Run And Hide
- From: "Muslim-News" <editor_@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <submit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 16:35:37 +0100
In all the verbiage that has rained down since word leaked that
President George W. Bush was warned that Osama bin Laden's crew might
hijack a plane and strike at the United States, two words count: "No
warnings."
That is what White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters aboard
Air Force One on Sept. 11. He said it as the flames from the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon lit the sky and the office workers and
firefighters and deli-counter men were buried beneath the molten steel.
It was a lie.
We now know, by the administration's own account, that for at least five
months before the terror attack, the intelligence community was in an
anxious tizzy over an impending attack it believed would be "really
spectacular," in the words of one official who briefed the White House.
Since word leaked about the infamous memo Bush received on Aug. 6, the
White House has spun another web of lies. Fleischer and others insisted
last week that no one had ever considered the possibility of anything
other than a "traditional" hijacking. In fact the idea that terrorists
would plow a plane into a symbolic structure had long been discussed.
This precise topic was developed from terrorist prosecutions here and
abroad. You did not need a confidential FBI memo to know this. The
newspaper would have sufficed.
Now there is an unnerving shadow that will follow Bush through his
presidency. It is not, necessarily, that the president could have done
more to thwart the calamitous plot. Who knows what was, or wasn't,
possible? Everyone's failures - at the White House, the FBI, the CIA,
the FAA - will be sorted out soon enough.
But Bush lied to us, and covered up. He tries, still, to keep everything
under wraps, doggedly seeking to prevent even congressional intelligence
committees from seeing the memo. Vice President Dick Cheney, when he
isn't impugning the patriotism of duly elected officials, wants to
hand-pick those committee members worthy enough, in his view, to "have a
conversation" about the memo. But not to read it.
This is their way. Bad news is supposed to result in no news. And no
news is better than the informed consent of the governed.
We had fair notice. During the presidential campaign, when concerns that
Bush might have used drugs during his party-boy days were raised, he did
not come clean, one way or the other. He initiated a bizarre dance with
reporters, two-stepping about whether he could pass a routine background
check for federal employees. Could he pass if the check went back 15
years, or just seven?
When the campaign knew it had to confront Bush's history of excessive
drinking, it spun a tale of decline and redemption, focusing on its
man's forthright decision, after a 40th-birthday bash, to sober up. It
left out the part about a drunk-driving arrest at age 30. That came to
light only when the press dug it up on the eve of the election.
It is impossible to keep an up-to-date count of topics the
administration wants neither Congress nor the people to know about. The
tally grows.
It doesn't want us to know about its meetings with energy-industry
lobbyists who helped write the energy policy. Nor the names of those it
has detained since Sept. 11, or the charges against them. Nor to get
historical papers from the long-departed Reagan administration, despite
a law requiring their release.
The president's men say they want to restore the prestige of the
presidency, eroded after years of congressional pestering. This
high-minded philosophy they apply only to themselves.
The very same officials had no problem releasing to Congress e-mails
from the Clinton White House. They handed over thousands of pages of
documents relating to pardons, though the power to pardon is the
president's alone and not subject to congressional oversight. They
released verbatim transcripts of former President Bill Clinton's phone
conversations with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, waiving the
"state secret" privilege to do so.
But now it is wartime and we must keep secrets and you must trust us,
administration officials keep saying. Trouble is, they've broken the
trust.
Source: Newsday
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