Kurt Eichenwald: Bush Admin Repeatedly Ignored Warnings Prior To 9/11 Of Imminent Attacks

This is not new news. But it is high time it gets the attention it deserves. According to Vanity Fair contributing editor and former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, classified documentation exists (parts of which he has personally read) that shows that warnings of an imminent al Qaeda attack were repeatedly provided to several of the highest officials in the Bush administration... and repeatedly ignored. In short: 9/11 could have been prevented, but the neocon's were too self-confident that al Qaeda was bluffing. Unfortunately, Bush & Co. supplied only the infamous Aug. 6 presidential daily briefing to the 9/11 Commission, withholding all other memos to the president and other high officials containing evidence of an imminent attack.

In other words, the overconfident bastards fucked up, subjecting our nation to an attack that would eventually, with a lot of help from Bush & Co., have the very effect al Qaeda intended: the gradual but relentless undermining of the basics of American philosophy of government and hence of the American nation.

Short version: 9/11 is wholly the Bush administration's fault. End of story.

(H/T Adgita Diaries for quotes from Paul Craig Roberts and Kurt Eichenwald of the NYT.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: years ago, long before 9/11/2001, I had a colleague who happened to be a Democrat. He offered genuine insight into the Republican notion that government should be run like a business. He said that Republicans' business plan was simple: they planned to increase their market share by destroying public confidence in the product marketed. When Saint Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem," he was invoking a slogan, not offering a plan. Reagan set the pattern for all subsequent Republican presidents.

Government is, for better and worse, essential to human survival. Why in the world would anyone vote into government office a candidate who believes that government is the problem? Is not such a belief guaranteed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy?

And so it was. From Saint Ronald forward to George W. Bush... especially GeeDubya... Republicans expressed their distaste for government by doing it badly. And gawd a'mighty, did they ever do it badly, in the approach to 9/11, the immediate response to 9/11, and the aftermath of 9/11. (That sentence sounded like Rudy Giuliani, didn't it.) Here we sit, eleven years later, still stunned by how badly our government approaches the balance between security and liberty... and how liberty is losing ground. One morning we'll wake up to a disaster far worse than 9/11: an utter undoing of the basic processes of representative democracy in a free society, whether by revolution or sheer incompetence, I can't say. Either way, we could have avoided it by "dancing with them as brung us," sending people to Washington who believe in the power of government to do good things.

Here ends the sermon for the day.