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THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH FOR MURDER

PART THREE

Chapter 5:  BUSH "COULDN'T POSSIBLY" HAVE BEEN ANY WORSE IN HANDLING THE WAR ON TERRORISM

ALTHOUGH THE HEART OF THIS BOOK lies in the two Prosecution of George Bush for Murder chapters, I feel I  cannot possibly leave the subject of George Bush without offering an indictment of his conduct of the war on terrorism. This is an easy transition because the two subjects, after all, are closely linked.  And Bush's conduct in the war on terrorism has been not only completely consistent with that which is set forth in the two prosecution chapters, but it fortifies all the conclusions I have drawn about Bush in these two chapters.

The only American who has even come close to George Bush in profiting from and exploiting 9/11 is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. But Bush exceeds even Giuliani. After all, Bush made 9/11 and his response to it the "centerpiece" of his campaign for reelection in 2004, and most people seem to agree he won reelection because of 9/11 and his supposedly great response to it. (The theme made over and over by Bush and his surrogates during the campaign, one that most Americans accepted, is that Democrats are soft on terrorism and weak on national security, and therefore, it would have been dangerous for America to turn the nation over to a Democratic president.) Indeed, after all that has gone wrong, Bush and his administration to this very day talk as if they are speaking from a position of strength when they talk about fighting the war on terrorism.

As Time magazine said before the 2004 election, Bush's handling of the war against terrorism was a "fortress that so far has protected Bush's presidential advantage in this campaign season." Time pointed out that it was the belief of Americans that "Bush has done everything he could to keep the country safe, and managed the war on terrorism well." Indeed, Time said, "Any fair-minded person" would have to give Bush good grades in foreign policy, i.e., the war on terrorism.  The New York Times said that Bush's "anti-terrorism record" was his "key strength." The Los Angeles Times averred on its front page before the election that although Americans were becoming more unhappy with the economy, "the President's strongest asset in the 2004 campaign has been the unwavering sense among most Americans that he is providing resolute leadership against terrorism." In March 2006, CNN spoke of "President Bush's strong suit," the war on terrorism.  As late as July of 2006, the Los Angeles Times said that Bush and his party's "uncompromising stance against terrorism ... helped the GOP to take control of the Senate in 2002 and Bush to win reelection in 2004." Knowingly not going after Osama Bin Laden at Tora Bora,  thereby allowing him to escape, and instead going to war against Iraq, a nonterrorist nation that had nothing to do with 9/11, is an "uncompromising stance against terrorism"? How could a paper like the Los Angeles Times permit incredibly silly words like these, written by two reporters, to survive editing and appear on page 1 of their July 2, 2006, edition in their main headline story?

The reality -- and I'm confident that no one has quite told you what I'm about to tell you -- is that short of being in cahoots with Bin Laden, Bush could not possibly have been any worse fighting the war against terrorism, from the very beginning of his administration up until now, almost seven years later. That is not an opinion. That is a fact. His conduct has been so extremely bad that if it had never happened and someone told a rational person it had, the latter would be compelled to say, "That can't be. I don't believe it." Giving Bush an F minus would be being generous, since his conduct has been so horrendously bad it goes beyond the grading system. So bad that virtually no sensible American in this vast country would have acted the same way.  John Kerry, who lost the 2004 election for several reasons,one of  which is that Bush was perceived as being much more capable to fight the war on terrorism than he, would have done much, much better than Bush in fighting this war. So would Al Gore and Bill Clinton, which isn't really saying anything. Who wouldn't have done better?

As I cite one monumental failure after another of Bush's in his "war" against terrorism, the thought should enter your mind that even without looking at them in the aggregate, nearly everyone of them, all by themselves, would be enough to cause any prudent person to say, "This is terrible, inexcusable behavior. This man does not deserve to be president." Each one of these failures should lead you, if you are a rational person, to have the most extremely negative impression of Bush imaginable. But the majority of Americans, while most of these things were happening, did not. Why not? In large part it's because most people love to rest their minds, being much more fond of talking than thinking. In fact, the majority of Americans don't even read the daily newspaper, and of those who do, many only read sections like sports, cartoons, and crossword puzzles, not the news pages. Indeed, only one percent of Americans, I am told, read the editorial section of the paper.

Because of this ignorance, as well as general stupidity, instead of provoking a universal denunciation of Bush, his antiterrorism persona remained popular among the American people for several years after 9/11, and as late as August of 2006 a national poll showed the majority of Americans gave Bush a positive rating in his war on terrorism. Indeed, right up to the present, most pundits, including Democrats who deeply dislike Bush and have attacked him on the Iraq war, still declare that the "war on terrorism" and national security are Bush's "strong suit," his "strength." But again, it virtually could not have been possible for him to have been any worse.

As you read on these pages about Bush's colossal malfeasance in his war on terrorism, keep in mind that, unbelievably, in the eyes of the nation and media, 9/11, which happened on Bush's watch, was nevertheless viewed by virtually everyone to be a huge plus for George Bush. I mean, he even used footage of 9/11 in his reelection campaign! Listen to Jonathan Alter, a liberal Democrat who writes a weekly column for Newsweek. Alter is smart and fairly consistently writes anti-Bush articles. I cite Alter to show you that if he can write such lunacy, you know it is downhill from there. As late as February 6, 2006, Alter wrote that 9/11 was Bush's emotional "trump-card." Now, why was Alter calling 9/11 Bush's trump card? Because Alter knows, being a major political writer for Newsweek and at the center of things, that 9/11 is perceived by virtually everyone as Bush's trump card. If it were not, or there was some question about it, Alter would have had no reason to say this. And Alter gave no indication whatsoever that he disagreed.

Before we get into setting forth Bush's incredibly bad blunders and malfeasance bordering on criminal negligence, here is a brief history.  The focus on tracking down and destroying Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists dates back to the CIA under President Clinton. (Very predictably, the right-wing print and radio and TV pundits -- e.g., National Review, Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- blamed Clinton for 9/11 and gave Bush a complete pass on his eight months in office before 9/11.) In late 1995, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 39 that instructed the CIA to capture foreign terrorists "by force," even "without the cooperation of the host government." It was widely accepted that killing Bin Laden in the process of attempting to capture him was not to be discouraged. Pursuant to this directive, in January of 1996 the CIA created a unit (code-named "Alec Station") whose sole function was to capture Bin Laden. In 1998, Clinton created the office of national coordinator for counterterrorism, and Richard Clarke filled the position. Several efforts were launched by the Clinton administration to capture or kill Bin Laden, but most were aborted for various reasons, such as lack of confidence by the CIA in the intelligence it had, or in the ability of those the CIA intended to use to get the job done -- Afghan tribal leaders and their fighters.

But it wasn't because of any hesitation on Clinton's part. In fact, Clarke said that "President Clinton authorized two U.S. cruise missile attack submarines to sit off the Pakistani coast for months on end waiting for word that we might have sighted Bin Laden."

On August 20, 1998, Clinton's CIA did launch sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles on an Afghan camp where Bin Laden was believed to be, but he apparently had left an hour or so earlier.

Throughout the period between 1996 and September 11, 2001, U.S. intelligence agencies picked up signs from many sources, including electronic, of Al Qaeda plans to commit acts of terrorism throughout the world against U.S. interests, but only on foreign soil.  Among the acts of terrorism against the United States believed to be ordered by Bin Laden were car bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, in which 224 people, including 12 Americans, were killed. And suicide bombers who attacked the American destroyer USS Cole at anchor in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000, killing 17 American sailors, were believed to have had links to Al Qaeda.

So Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were on America's national security radar screen. But the summer of 2001 preceding September 11, 2001, with George Bush as president, was different than ever before in terms of the number of Al Qaeda threats to commit terrorist acts against the United States or its interests. Indeed, the stepped-up activity was so pronounced that the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon  he United States (hereinafter the 9/11 Commission), in its 2004 report, captioned its chapter on this period "The System Was Blinking Red." Threat reports from U.S. intelligence agencies "surged in June and July," reaching an unprecedented "peak of urgency," the commission report said. A terrorist threat advisory from the State Department in late June indicated a high probability of "spectacular" terrorist attacks in the near future, one as soon as two weeks hence. On June 25, Bush's counterterrorism expert, Richard Clarke, warned National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that there were six separate U.S. intelligence reports showing that Al Qaeda was preparing for a pending attack.

The 9/11 Commission report said that "the intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil." On June 28, Clarke wrote Rice that Al Qaeda activity suggesting an imminent attack "had reached a crescendo ... A series of new reports continue to convince me and [intelligence] analysts at [the Department of] State, CIA, D.I.A. [Defense Intelligence Agency]  and NSA [National Security Agency] that a major terrorist attack or series of attacks is likely in July." One Al Qaeda intelligence report, he said, warned that something "very, very, very, very" big was about to happen. A CIA report on June 30 was captioned "Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks," and said they were expected in the near term and to have "dramatic consequences of catastrophic proportions."  The CIA director, George Tenet, although a Bush friend and apologist, nevertheless acknowledged to the 9/11 Commission that "the system was blinking red" and could not "get any worse." Also, throughout this whole period, Tenet met daily with Bush in the morning at the Oval Office whenever Bush was in Washington. According to the commission's 9/11 report, the PDB (President's Daily  Brief) turned over by Tenet showed that "there were more than forty" reports "related to Bin Laden" furnished to Bush by Tenet or one of his deputies during these morning briefings from Bush's first day in office, January 20, 2001, to September 10, 2001, the day before 9/11.

Now for the staggering blunders and incompetence of Bush and his people:

***

1. On August 6, 2001, a little over one month before 9/11, Bush, on a five-week-long summer vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, was briefed by a CIA official on a one-and-a-half page top secret memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." The memo referred to U.S. intelligence on Al Qaeda back to 1997, cited evidence of active Al Qaeda cells in the United States, and said with respect to them that the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country  consistent with preparations for hijacking [of planes] or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York ... Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 'bring the fighting to America.' The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full- field investigations throughout the U.S. that  it considers Bin Laden-related."

The significance of the August 6 memo (included in the thirty-sixth of forty PDBs) was that it was the very first one that dealt with a terrorist attack in the United States. Also, what was striking was the memo's specificity -- the reference to Al Qaeda preparing to possibly hijack a plane or planes, their surveillance of federal buildings in New York City, even the reference, in an indirect context, to the World Trade Center.

Obviously there was only one thing for Bush to have done. What any normal president would have done. Cut short his precious five-week vacation, fly back to Washington, and immediately call a meeting of all his intelligence and military advisers to ascertain what specifically was being done by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense on the Al Qaeda threat, discuss the hijacking issue in detail, and map out a stepped-up strategy to meet the threat, including, automatically, the increasing of airport security. And perhaps also call a meeting of his cabinet to get every top official and his department involved at least to the extent of offering immediate advice and suggestions.  The point is not that if Bush had responded immediately the disaster  would have been averted. There is no way to know this. We can only know that he should have made an effort to respond instead of just ignoring these warnings of 9/11.

With the terrorist warnings "blinking red," not just every other president would have done something, you and I would have also. But what if I were to tell you that Bush did absolutely nothing -- he stayed on his vacation, intent on continuing to have as much fun as he could, not returning to Washington until August 30. Did you get what I just said? Should I repeat it? I said Bush did nothing. Nothing at all. How do I know that he did nothing? Not only because there's absolutely no evidence that he did, but because Bush and Condoleezza Rice have never said they did, even when they were trying to defend themselves in 2004 before the 9/11 Commission. All Rice would tell the commission in her testimony on April 8, 2004, was that throughout the summer in question, federal agencies like the CIA and FBI continued to send out "warnings" to their people about a possible terrorist attack by Al Qaeda. But she did not mention a single thing that Bush, or she, at Bush's direction, did to ensure that new additional steps were taken to meet the imminent threat posed in the August 6 memo.

The essence of her testimony (though she never used these precise words) was that the Bush administration left it up to the federal bureaucracy to deal with the escalating threat. In other words, under existing protocol, federal agencies and departments like the FBI, the CIA, and Department of Defense were assigned the job of protecting the country, and she assumed they were doing their jobs. "The president knew that the FBI was pursuing this issue," Rice testified. "The president knew that the Director of Central Intelligence was pursuing the issue." Rice added: "My view ... is that, first of all, the Director of Central Intelligence and the director of the FBI, given the level of threat, were doing what they thought they could do to deal with the threat that we faced." But she never went on to say what she did in her job as national security adviser, and what leadership Bush was providing. The reason she didn't, of course, was that she did nothing, and, more importantly, Bush did not provide any leadership at all that she could point to.

By the way, Rice, although she was Bush's national security adviser, was pathetically ill-informed about what was even going on. For instance, when she was asked in her 9/11 testimony whether she knew that "numerous young Arab males were in flight training" in the United States that summer, she said: "I was not." Question: "Were you told that the U.S. Marshal Program had been changed to drop any U.S. Marshals on domestic flights?" Answer: "I was not told that."  When she was asked if she knew that FAA inspection teams had found "that the U.S. airport security system never got higher than twenty percent effective and was usually down around ten percent for ten straight years," she responded: "To the best of my recollection I was not told that." Bush, everyone knows, knows very little, and has such a mature and advanced case of incuriosity that he will never change. But this is Bush's national security adviser!

Although Ms. Rice spoke very vaguely about the Bush administration having worked prior to 9/11 on a "comprehensive strategy" to destroy the Al Qaeda network, resulting in "a national security principals meeting" on Al Qeada on September 4, just one week before 9/11, and a presidential directive of the same date that made the elimination of Al Qaeda a high priority, she inconsistently acknowledged that while she and other national security officials had thirty-three meetings between the time Bush took office on January 20, 2001, and the meeting on September 4, which was almost eight months later, not one of them dealt with the Al Qaeda threat. Three of the 33 meetings, she said, "dealt at least partially with issues of terrorism not related to Al Qaeda." Despite this, Rice told the 9/11 Commission that she definitely was very aware of the Al Qaeda threat before 9/11 and she and the Bush administration were definitely focused on Al Qaeda, making it a high priority. But she was unable to come up with one single, solitary thing the administration did in response to the August 6 report.

And the 9/11 Commission Report said that between the time of the August 6 memo or report and 9/11, unbelievably, "no ... meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this report." (The September 4 meeting, a week before 9/11, dealt with how to combat Al Qaeda generally, not about the Al Qaeda threat to hijack planes and strike inside the United States as set forth in the August 6 report.) Not only wasn't any meeting called to discuss the threat of an internal attack in the United States by Al Qaeda before 9/11, but the 9/11 Commission Report said it "found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the president and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an Al Qaeda attack in the United States." In other words, not only didn't the Bush administration do anything pursuant to the August 6 memo, they didn't even want to talk about it. It was that bad.

Indeed, it was so bad that although Bush received the August memo near the beginning of the month (August 6), per the testimony of George Tenet, Bush's CIA director, before the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004 (see discussion in notes for Tenet's later version), Bush didn't meet with Tenet, his main intelligence adviser, during the rest of the entire month of August. He didn't even bother to talk to him over the phone. In Tenet's testimony, when he was asked, "When did you see [President Bush] in August?" Tenet answered, "I don't believe I did." When the questioner asked, incredulously, "you didn't see the president of the United States once in the month of August?" Tenet responded, "He's in Texas, and I'm either here [Washington, D.C.] or on leave for some of that time. So I'm not here." "But you never got on the phone or in any kind of conference with him to talk at this [time] of high chatter and huge warnings?" ''In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no."

With respect to the critical August 6 report or memo, which was actually requested by Bush, Rice first told the 9/11 Commission that it "did not warn of attacks inside the United States," despite the fact that the very title of the memo was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." She then tried to explain what she meant by saying that the August 6 memo "was not a threat report" because "there was nothing  in this memo as to the time, place, how or where" of the attack. "No  specifics," she said. In other words, folks, unless the Bush administration knew the exact day and time of day that Al Qaeda was going to attack, and the exact city, and the exact building or buildings in that city, there was nothing the Bush administration could or even should have done. Further translation: "If Al Qaeda didn't announce that they were going to hijack four planes on 9/11, two of which would fly into the north and south World Trade Center towers in New York City at 8:46 and 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, we can't be criticized for doing nothing at all to prevent 9/11."

Bush told reporters on Apri1 11, 2004, essentially the same thing. "Of course we knew that America was hated by Osama Bin Laden. The question was who was going to attack us, when, and where and with what." (Bush would later say, "Had I known there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack."  But other than some nuts on the far left who were loony enough to actually believe that Bush was complicit in 9/11, shouldn't this go without saying?) Bush told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that before 9/11, "I didn't feel that sense of urgency ... I was not on point." Even if we went no further, isn't it hard to see how it can get any worse? [LB-1]

It should be noted that President Clinton warned Bush during the presidential transition period in 2000 that Al Qaeda was the nation's number one security risk, and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, warned her successor, Powell, of the same thing. Likewise, Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, remembers telling his successor, Condoleezza Rice (and she never has denied this), during the transition that "the number one issue you're going to be dealing with is terrorism generally and Al Qaeda specifically."

One of the biggest blows to the incredibly inept Bush administration came when Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief for the Bush administration (who previously served as Clinton's counterterrorism chief and also served in the administration of Bush's father) came out with his book Against All Enemies in 2004. In it, and in his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, as well as in remarks he made to the media, Clarke attested to how the Bush administration was not as focused on Al Qaeda and the terrorist threat as the Clinton administration had been.

Clarke said that on January 25, 2001, in the very first week of the Bush administration, he asked "urgently" for a high-level meeting on the Al Qaeda threat. However, as noted, it wasn't until September 4, nearly eight months later and just one week before September 11, that the Bush administration finally had a meeting on terrorism and approved of a plan to eliminate the Al Qaeda threat. And it wasn't until September 10, the day before 9/11, that the Bush administration forwarded the plan and directive to George Tenet, the CIA director, to start implementing it, a process that was to take two to three years.  Clarke said that Bush "ignored terrorism for months, when maybe he could have done something to stop 9/11." Terrorism, he said, should have been the first item on the Bush administration's agenda. Instead "it was pushed back and back and back for months."

Virtually every charge Clarke made has been substantiated by independent evidence. The White House itself has never denied that Clarke made his request for a meeting on Al Qaeda way back in January 2001, and the meeting didn't take place until September 4. But the Bush administration made a concerted effort to attack Clarke's very serious allegations not by disputing them directly but by attacking him personally, even though on Clarke's retirement the previous year, Bush, in a handwritten letter to him, said that Clarke had served with "distinction and honor." Among other things, Bush's surrogates said, very predictably, that Clarke was making his allegations to sell his book. They also said he was a "disgruntled" former employee who was angry with Bush because, under Clinton, Clarke had briefed cabinet-level officers, but in the hierarchy set up by Rice he was demoted and only briefed deputies on counterterrorism. But, unwittingly, Bush's people were confirming Clarke's central allegation that the Bush administration wasn't focused at all on Al Qaeda and terrorism. If they were, why was Clarke reporting now only to deputies, not cabinet-level officers, on counterterrorism? In a similar vein, Cheney attacked Clarke by saying that he was "out of the loop." But since Clarke headed up the counterterrorism unit in the Bush White  House, if the Bush administration was focused on terrorism, why wouldn't its head counterterrorism guy be in the loop?

Let's look at a few other pieces of evidence supporting Clarke's claim that Bush did a terrible job on counterterrorism. Right at the beginning of the Bush administration, incoming Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided not to relaunch a Predator drone being used by the CIA under Clinton's authorization to track the movements of Bin Laden. And Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz shut down a disinformation program created by the Clinton administration to create dissent within the Taliban, which was giving a sanctuary to Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. These, you might  say, are small points, but small points are snapshot glimpses of larger realities. In a May 10, 2001, letter to his department heads, Attorney General John Ashcroft set forth seven "strategic goals" of his Department of Justice, and fighting terrorism was not one of them. As a member of Bush's cabinet, Ashcroft knew where the emphasis was. It  was not on combating terrorism.

Most tellingly, on September 10, 2001, just one day before 9/11, Ashcroft submitted his first budget. He asked for increased funds for sixty-eight programs in his Department of Justice, not one of which directly involved counterterrorism. Even worse, he rejected a request by the FBI for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents.  He also proposed a $65 million cut (from $109 million to $44 million) in grants to the states and local authorities to increase their counterterrorism preparedness.

On May 9, 2001, Ashcroft testified before Congress that "the Department of Justice has no higher priority" than fighting terrorism.  But if the old injunction "Put your money where your mouth is" means anything, which I believe it does, it is impossible to reconcile these words of Ashcroft's with the budget he submitted. One of my favorite expressions is "Your conduct speaks so loudly I can't hear a word you are saying." Under the Clinton administration, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, increased the counterterrorism budget by 13.6% in fiscal year 1999, 7.1% in 2000, and 22.7% in 2001. Ashcroft's  2002 budget cut counterintelligence spending by $476 million, a whopping 23% drop from the previous year. This fact alone shows that the Clinton administration placed more emphasis on counterterrorism than the Bush administration prior to 9/11.

All of the aforementioned actions of the Bush administration are clearly very revealing ones, showing its intent to de-emphasize the war on terrorism. And note that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft were not only very high up in the Bush administration, but spokes of the same wheel. Though the Bush administration has proven to be incompetent overall, one thing it prizes and demands above all else is loyalty, and everyone is always on the same page. So these points I have mentioned reflect the policy of Bush and his administration to almost look the other way when it came to fighting terrorism. Yet, let's not forget as we read on that Bush's approval rating among Americans shot up to 90 percent as a result of 9/11. 

General Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of 9/11, said that the Bush administration had moved counterterrorism "farther to the back burner" than the preceding administration of President Clinton. Three-star General Don Kerrick spent the final four months of his military career in the White House.  In a memo to Rice's National Security Council on "things you need to pay attention to," he warned (about Al Qaeda), "We are going to be  struck," but he said he never heard back. "I don't think it was above [their] waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen," he later observed. The likes of Clarke, Shelton, and Kerrick were simply voices in the wilderness to a Bush administration that clearly had its mind on other things.

Indeed, Rice's own words (actually, the lack of them) prove this. A search conducted by Peter Bergen) a fellow of the New America Foundation, of all of Rice's public statements and writings from the moment she became national security adviser in January of 2001 to September 11, revealed, astonishingly, that she only mentioned Osama Bin Laden's name one time and "never mentioned Al Qaeda at all as a threat to the United States before 9/11."

So there can be little question that Rice, Bush's obedient national security adviser, lied under oath to the 9/11 Commission when she said the Bush administration "understood that the Al Qaeda network posed a serious threat to the United States ... We worked hard [yes, the CIA and FBI did, but what about you and Bush, Condoleezza?] on multiple fronts to detect, protect against, and disrupt any terrorist plans or operations that might lead to an attack." Do you know what my sense of Rice's fidelity to the truth is? I trust her as far as I could throw the Empire State Building.

Former president Bill Clinton summarized the difference between his administration and that of George Bush well in an interview on the Fox News channel in September of 2006. Referring to the Bush administration he said, "They had eight months to try" to get Bin Laden and put Al Qaeda out of business. "They did not try. I tried and failed. At least I tried."

***

2. Knowing what you now know, in looking back to the moment when Al Qaeda-hijacked planes toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, you should have an extremely low estimation of Bush's competence in the war against terrorism, and you ought to wonder whether, if he and his people had been competent and responsible public officials, 9/11 could have been averted. Immediately following 9/11, Bush deserved the harshest criticism and denunciation there is for his  pre-9/11 conduct. Instead, as indicated, he became more popular than ever, which you have to agree was 100 percent insanity.

In fact, even if Bush and his people had acted properly and responsibly, he'd still have to be condemned for 9/11. Why? Because of something that Americans and the nitwit media have apparently forgotten. Nine-eleven happened on Bush's watch, and in life, when something happens on your watch that is bad, you automatically get the blame for it. We all know that's simply the way it is -- even, as I say, when you've acted responsibly. An army loses a battle. The general is  canned. The grade level at a university goes down. The president of the university is either fired or told he will be if things don't improve.  Joe Paterno, the ageless football coach at Penn State, knocks himself out every year, seven days a week, trying to make Penn State a winner. But when he had some losing seasons a few years ago, everyone and their grandmother wanted to get rid of poor Joe. Because he is so much of an integral part of Penn State, they kept him on against a tide of criticism, and he's had better seasons the last few years. But basketball, football, and baseball coaches are routinely fired when their team doesn't do well, no matter how hard and diligently they work. As Harry Truman said, referring to the Oval Office: "The buck stops here."

But unbelievably, with the draft-dodger from Crawford, no one was blaming him for 9/11. I've saved the newspapers from around that time. Day after day the CIA and FBI took a beating, but the press, which influences public opinion, refused (in stark contrast to its savage treatment of Clinton) to criticize Bush. They gave him a free ride, not even mentioning him in their news articles dealing with the issue of culpability, and totally forgetting the rule of life that the guy in  charge is the one who gets the blame. And that's true, as I indicated, even if he has been working diligently: Here, it wouldn't have been possible for Bush to have been more remiss, negligent, lazy, and irresponsible. Not possible. 

All that the media would say was that 9/11 "was the biggest failure by U.S. intelligence agencies in U.S. history," not adding that both the CIA and FBI are in the executive branch of government -- Bush's branch -- and he, obviously and naturally and automatically, is ultimately responsible for their performance. In fact, as indicated, most of the right-wing and their political hacks and scribes were making a great deal of noise that 9/11 should be blamed on President Clinton for not already having gotten Osama Bin Laden. The fact that 9/11 happened on their guy's watch, and he did absolutely nothing for eight months to combat Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, was ignored by these people who specialize in being obnoxious.

Bush, of course, if he had a molecule of manly leadership in his body -- particularly since he knew very well how culpable he was for doing absolutely nothing before and even after he received his briefing on the August 6 memo -- would not have allowed his CIA (who warned him of the threat) and FBI to take the fall. True, both the CIA and FBI could hardly have been more incompetent in their own right  in their antiterrorism effort, but they were Bush's incompetents, and he alone was responsible for their performance. Bush should have apologized to the nation for the terrible event that happened on his  watch, assuring the public that his administration would do everything in its power to never let them down again. But you see, with Bush the buck stopped below him. Indeed, Bush elevated unaccountability to a fine art.

Other presidents in recent memory, in analogous situations, have done the right thing and accepted blame as a part of leadership. When 241 American servicemen (220 marines, 18 navy personnel, and 3 army soldiers) were killed by a terrorist bomb at their compound in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 23, 1983, the State Department prepared a release severely criticizing the military for its failure in not protecting the troops. The release was sent to President Reagan for his approval. An aide of Reagan's, David Gergen, said that Reagan read the release, and with virtually no discussion went to the White House  pressroom and announced to the media: "If there is to be blame, it  properly rests here in this office, and with this president. And I accept responsibility for the bad as well as the good." When the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961 turned into a disaster, an  invasion that President Kennedy had inherited from the Eisenhower administration, but had signed on to, John F. Kennedy, just three months into his presidency, told the nation that "victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. I'm the responsible officer of the government." His press secretary, Pierre Salinger, said that Kennedy wanted everyone to know that he was solely responsible.

But not the small man from Crawford. Just as he ran away from his generation's war, Vietnam, he ran away from all responsibility for the biggest failure in our national defense ever, only stepping forward to attempt to become, unbelievably, a hero of 9/11. And again, unbelievably, he succeeded.

We've talked about the media giving Bush a free ride. What about the American public? Although everyone knows it's a negative when something bad happens on one's watch, [1] there never was a moment when the American public blamed Bush for his administration's failure to prevent 9/11. And the moment he said that he was going to go after the perpetrators, virtually the whole nation fell hopelessly in love with him. The fact that 9/11 happened on his watch was treated as something completely irrelevant. Worse yet, the public, untouched by common sense, apparently never even considered the issue. It wasn't just the media and the American public that gave Bush a pass on 9/11.  When a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committees later issued its close-to-900-page report on July 24, 2007, it was a damning indictment of the CIA and FBI for their failure to prevent 9/11. But not one negative word about George Bush.

3. How did Bush respond to this moment of great crisis, the first deadly attack by foreigners on American soil in our history? If we didn't know what he did, no one could possibly believe it. It is so incredible that I am certain one would be extremely hard-pressed to find one other person out of a million -- but certainly no public official of any rank, much less another president of the United States -- who would have responded the way he did. At 8:55 on the morning of September 11, 2001, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, informed Bush over the telephone that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He was then told this in person by his chief of staff, Andrew Card, before he walked into the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, at 9:04 a.m. He would have had no way of knowing at this point that it was a terrorist attack, and could have reasonably assumed it had been an accident. Eighteen second-graders rose to their feet as the president entered the classroom, and he proceeded to sit down next to the teacher (Sandra Kay Daniels) at the front of the class and listen to the students as they read aloud a children's story about a girl's pet goat. A small battery of news reporters and camera crews in the back of the room recorded the event.

At 9:07 a.m., Card entered the classroom and whispered into the president's ear: "Mr. President, a second plane has struck the second tower. The nation is under attack." Unbelievably (why can't there be more powerful words in our lexicon to describe special, yes, unique situations like this other than this tired, terribly overused adverb), Bush did not instantly apologize to the students and excuse himself to immediately respond, as the president of the country and the commander-in-chief of our armed forces, to this attack on the nation's soil.  While inside the two towers were scenes of horror and death that Hollywood would not even try to capture on celluloid, Bush, after a momentary show of concern upon hearing the news, "grew cheerful," per the Orlando Sentinel, as the seven-year-olds continued to show off  their reading skills to the beat of Miss Daniels's tapping pen. "Reading more than they watch TV?" the president asked, smiling. 'Anybody do that?" The children's hands shot up. "Really good readers -- whew. This must be the sixth grade," Bush joked, remaining in the classroom.

You, I, or anyone else in Bush's shoes would have instantly excused ourselves from the children's classroom and demanded to be briefed immediately by our national security adviser and secretary of defense on exactly what happened, asking if they had any idea who was behind the attacks. Was there any fear that this was just the opening salvo of a much greater attack on the entire nation? What steps should be taken to protect the nation? What emergency measures were being taken at the Twin Towers site? Have our military forces been placed on national alert -- and a host of other questions. What Bush did before 9/11 was bad enough, by itself, to be thrown out of office. It was grossly irresponsible conduct; conduct that was inexcusable. But that type of behavior was at least "imaginable" and has happened before in different contexts. But I maintain that what Bush did in that classroom could not have been imagined.

Bush continued to sit in the classroom to the very end of the reading session, leaving the room at 9:12 a.m., five minutes after learning the nation was under attack! God knows how long he would have stayed in the classroom if the reading session had been longer. Indeed, he showed no indication at all that he wanted to leave. When that part of the reading session scheduled specifically for him came to an end, and the children closed with the phrase "more to come," Bush asked, "What does that mean, more to come?" The president was told by Miss Daniels that they didn't intend to take up any more of his time, at which point he finally left the classroom.

Bush later told Newsweek that when Card said to him that America was under attack -- "I'm trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to. I'm sitting in the midst of a classroom with little kids, listening to a children's story, and I realize I'm the commander-in-chief and the country has just come under attack." In other words, Bush, a very small man, was in a state of paralysis because he knew he was so far beneath the situation.

In his interview with the 9/11 Commission, Bush tried to improve on what he told Newsweek by not only telling a transparent lie, but a remarkably bad one at that. The 9/11 Commission reported that Bush said he stayed in the classroom because he "felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening." But how could he better understand what had happened by remaining inside the classroom rather than leaving the classroom and being informed by his advisers? And to whom did he want to project strength and calm? The seven-year-old children? Even if that were his  demented goal, how could he project strength and calm to them when they didn't even know the attacks had taken place? Or was he trying to project strength and calm to the American public? But how could he do this when the public couldn't see him inside the classroom?

To call Bush's conduct a dereliction of duty would be to minimize it a thousandfold by employing a term used to routinely describe commonplace, garden variety types of negligence and failure in public office. No. What Bush did here was not only unprecedented, but most assuredly will never happen again, no matter how long this crazed little planet of ours revolves around the sun. When I told a right-wing acquaintance of mine about what the president had done, I already knew he would defend it. You see, you have to understand that because Bush is a conservative Republican, he could be caught sodomizing a goat on the front lawn of the White House and they'd say this only showed his love for animals. My right-wing acquaintance  told me: "The president didn't leave because he probably didn't want to upset the children." Even if his leaving would have left a scar on the  psyches of the children for the rest of their lives (which, of course, is  ridiculous and impossible to believe), Bush still had absolutely no choice but to immediately excuse himself from the classroom to attend to the security of 280 million Americans. (Indeed, even if the two planes that struck the Twin Towers did so as a result of an accident, what happened was still catastrophic enough for Bush to have excused himself.) But the reality is that it wouldn't have hurt the children a bit, since seven-year-olds are old enough to understand emergencies. If they were hurt at all, it was when they heard the president speaking at the school minutes later on television about the attack on the towers. There would be a full-scale investigation, he said, to track down "the folks" who were responsible.

Let me add that in view of Bush's mind-boggling, extremely bizarre, and utterly incredible malfeasance in the way he responded to learning that the nation was under attack, the whole nation should have been terrified down to the marrow of its bones that someone like George Bush was our president. Yet unbelievably, far from being lambasted as he should have been for his severely aberrational behavior, Bush was treated with kid gloves by the nation's press at the time, and the incident was mostly ignored.

The first time Bush started receiving some serious ridicule for what he did was when Michael Moore came out with his movie  Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. Though Bush, of course, came off badly in the movie, I didn't think there was any possible way for anyone to even partially redeem or explain Bush's otherworldly conduct in the Florida classroom until Moore did so. As I have suggested, I believe there was only one true reason for Bush's behavior -- he was in way, way over his head, and no one was immediately nearby to coach and mother him in this moment of crisis. Not so, says Moore, determined to throw out a rope to a fellow human in an unforgiving sea and pull him from the other world aboard our planet earth. Moore, inadvertently moonlighting for Bush, came up with a possible explanation for Bush's behavior, which, though still depicting Bush in a negative light, brought his conduct within the margins of imaginable human behavior. Moore told his audience that Bush may have stayed in the classroom because he was immobilized by the thought that one of his friends (like a Saudi billionaire) might have been behind the attack.  Moore asked, "Was he thinking, 'I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Which one of them screwed me?"'

The sultans of silliness over at the editorial board of the New York Times (the nation's paper of record) went far beyond Moore in defending Bush. They actually wrote (I'm not making this up -- you can't make up stuff like this -- September 2, 2004, edition, page A22) that in "Judging Bush's leadership" abilities, his staying in the classroom after being informed the nation was under attack is "irrelevant." Can you  imagine that?

In any event, Bush's conduct in remaining in that classroom for five minutes after being told the nation was under attack is nothing short of unbelievable. And this is the "war" president who was re-elected because he was perceived as being a strong and effective leader against terrorism.

***

4. Let's continue the litany of Bush's egregious failures, one after another. What else did he do this day of 9/11 that caused Rudy Giuliani to say, "I do think that there was some divine guidance in the president being elected. I remember saying it on the street [on 9/11], 'Thank God he's there.' [Where, Rudy? In the classroom?] President Bush's leadership on that day is central to his record, and his continued leadership is critical for our ultimate success against world terrorism."  I agree, Rudy. If I had been the president and I had been in the classroom, I would have stayed much longer than five minutes. In fact, I might have never come out. And the fact that Bush did after only five minutes stamps him as a great leader. 

We've all heard so many times that the real president is Dick Cheney, not George Bush. My guess, without having any inside  knowledge about the situation, is that Bush gets his way on whatever he wants. But he is smart enough to know he doesn't know anything and Cheney does, and lazy enough to not want to work to acquire this knowledge, so he defers to Cheney's judgment almost out of necessity, making Cheney close to the de facto president. Indeed, jokes have been made about this, and Bush has made no ostensible public effort to disabuse people of this perception. The incident I'm about to relate to you is illuminating as a corollary of the above -- that the members of Bush's inner circle realize he is hopelessly ill-suited for his job, and whenever necessary, they act accordingly.

Following is the finding, from testimony and interviews, of the bipartisan (five Republicans and five Democrats) 9/11 Commission that investigated the 9/11 catastrophe. After Bush emerged from the classroom and spoke briefly to the press, Cheney urged him, understandably, not to return to Washington, while Cheney proceeded to the shelter conference room in the bowels of the White House. Cheney told the 9/11 Commission that he called Bush (now aboard Air Force One flying west away from the East Coast with no particular destination) right after entering the conference room around 10 a.m. to discuss the so-called rules of engagement for American fighter jets in the sky. Cheney recommended that they be allowed to shoot down any plane in the sky that would not follow their orders to divert. He said that Bush signed off on this, meaning that Bush authorized the shooting down of any additional hijacked aircraft with Americans aboard, an order that Cheney knew only the president of the United States was supposed to give. And because he knew this, it may have been the reason why we shall see, it appears he lied to the 9/11 Commission and said he called Bush for authorization when he in fact did not. For Americans, as numb as they are, to hear that within minutes of 9/11 Dick Cheney was deliberately ignoring Bush and running the country would have been very harmful to Bush's image.

Did Cheney in fact call Bush and get authorization? Though not 100 percent conclusive, the weight of the evidence is that he did not.  The only two people who support Cheney's assertion that he called Bush to secure authorization are Bush himself (who had an even greater motive to lie than Cheney, in that if he didn't lie and say Cheney called him, he would be acknowledging his irrelevance) and the old (though young) reliable Condoleezza Rice. With her history of lying before the 9/11 Commission, Rice would certainly not be considered the best of witnesses on this point. (Cheney's military aide said he believed that Cheney called Bush upon entering the conference room, but did not know what they talked about.)

The evidence that Cheney did not call Bush is much more persuasive. Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby was sitting right next to Cheney when Cheney allegedly made the call, and was taking notes. Libby told the commission that he was unaware that Cheney had called Bush upon entering the room to secure shoot-down orders. Mrs. Cheney, also taking notes, was also unaware of any such call. The 9/11 Commission's report reads that at some point between 10:10 and 10:15 a.m., "a military aide told the Vice President ... that [an] aircraft [United 93, which eventually crashed in Pennsylvania] was eighty miles out ... The Vice President authorized fighter aircraft to engage the inbound plane. [Cheney] told us he based this authorization on his earlier conversation with the president." The commission said that Joshua Bolton (the White House deputy chief of staff who was present throughout this whole period) told them he thereafter "suggested that the Vice-President get in touch with the president and confirm the [alleged] engage order ... He said he had not heard any prior discussion on the subject with the president." Pursuant to Bolten's suggestion, "the Vice-President was logged calling the president at 10:18 for a two minute conversation that obtained the confirmation." And on Air Force One, the president's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was taking notes. The commission report said that "Fleischer recorded that at 10:20 the president told him that he had authorized a shoot-down of aircraft if necessary." Fleischer had no record of any previous phone call between Cheney and Bush in which the president gave a shoot-down order.

The above alone strongly suggests that Cheney only called Bush for a shoot-down authorization per Bolten's suggestion, and no such call was made by Cheney to Bush earlier, as Cheney and Bush would later claim. What virtually proves that no such call was made is the fact that, as the 9/11 Commission report said, "There's no documentary evidence for this call" allegedly made around 10 a.m. In other  words, there was no official log (which, as I learned in writing my book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is automatic for all calls to and from the president) confirming this call, as there was a log for the 10:18-10:20 call. Lee H. Hamilton, cochairman of  the 9/11 Commission, told reporters that "the only evidence" that Cheney got earlier approval for the shoot-down orders "is the statement of the president and the vice-president."

I think we can be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt (if not beyond all doubt) that Cheney accustomed to calling the shots, simply ignored Junior and issued a shoot-down order, only calling Bush later upon the suggestion of Bolten.

***

5. There really was only one essential message for Bush to deliver after the 9/11 attacks, and that was that he intended to bring the perpetrators to justice. Instead, he also told the nation he not only was going to go after terrorism wherever it existed on the globe, but he suggested he'd also go after any nation that protected the terrorists, making, he said on the evening of September 11, 2001, "no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them." Not knowing Bush well at this point, nor knowing of his intentions in Iraq, I nonetheless immediately said to myself, you're not going to go after anyone but Bin  Laden and Al Qaeda, so why sound like such a fool to the world? And we now know Bush never went after terrorists anywhere except Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the terrorists he personally created in Iraq, virtually ignoring (except by words) the Israeli-Palestinian terrorists, those in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Sudan, Uganda, Myanmar, Colombia, Liberia, Sri Lanka, or wherever else they may exist in the world. So why did he sound like such a fool to anyone with an ounce of sense? Because he is a fool and has no business leading a nation such as the United States of America.

About Bush's unqualified assertion that he would go after any country that protected terrorists, I said to myself, right. If China or Russia winds up giving Bin Laden asylum, we're going to invade Russia or China. With both sides having nuclear weapons, it would be a golden opportunity to blow up the globe. I just don't see any leader of a European nation making such rash, idiotic remarks. But I don't recall anyone in the media taking Bush to task for them.

Continuing his idiocy, Bush said in his speech to Congress and the nation on the evening of September 20, 2001, that those behind the World Trade Center destruction did what they did because "they hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." Any sensible person would have to know this is preposterous. People don't do what Bin Laden did because they don't like our freedoms and lifestyle, which would be a motivation for an act like this that would not take residence in an adult mind.

Bin Laden eventually spoke up on November 24, 2002, and gave his reasons, none of them dealing with Bush's childlike thoughts.  They had everything to do with our foreign policy. The very first reason he gave for the attack was our support of Israel in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (something that almost the entire Arab world hates us for). Two other reasons were our having American troops stationed in (and hence defiling, in his mind) certain areas of Saudi Arabia considered to be sacred places by Muslims, and our stealing the oil of Muslims at paltry prices because of our international influence and military threats. He also blamed us for what he said was the death of 1.5 million Iraqi children from starvation because of our  sanctions following the Gulf War.

Focusing on "the political roots of the terrorist atrocity of September 11," Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, said, "American involvement in the Middle East [which he said was our "support of Israel and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, as well as the direct injection of American power into the region"] is clearly the main impulse of the hatred that has been directed at America." Yet we had a president who was using a sandlot, playground mentality to address the issue, and no one was criticizing him for it.

I must digress for a moment here to make an observation about a phenomenon that is terribly vapid and irrational, one that is almost solely responsible for the great favor with which the American people viewed Bush, giving him the Oval Office a second time. Bush's approval rating at the time of 9/11 was around 50 percent. Since 9/11 happened on his watch it should have dropped to 10 percent overnight.  That is, if we're talking logic and common sense. After 9/11, Bush and his people, figuratively speaking, should have been hiding behind the curtain, peeking out every now and then to see how much lower he  was dropping on the American stage, at some point whispering to each other about whether they would be able to survive in office.

But a different reality took over that I've seen over and over again. You see, most everyday Americans don't seem to know, the media doesn't know, even the New York Times editorial board doesn't know that credit necessarily implies a choice. You don't give anyone any credit for something he had no choice but to do. But apparently not too many people have enough common sense to realize this. Even though Bush should have been "stoned (for 9/11 as well as his terrible malfeasance leading up to it) by the entire American community" like the man in the Book of Leviticus was for using the Lord's name in vain, all Bush had to say was that he intended to go after those responsible for 9/11, bring them to justice, and get Bin Laden "dead or alive," and almost the entire nation swooned, and his approval rating soared to an astronomical 90 percent almost overnight. (In fact, in the Gallup poll's annual survey of Americans in 2001, 39 percent chose Bush as the man they admired most in the entire world, the highest ranking any man had ever received since Gallup started asking the question over a half-century earlier in 1948.) But what else could he have said -- that he was not going to go after these people? That it was fine with him what they did? Or that he was going to seek justice for 9/11 by going after whale hunters in Alaska? Obviously, he said the only thing he could say; the only thing that you, I, or anyone else would have said. Yet virtually the entire American public, Republicans and Democrats alike, thought  Bush was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Nelson Warfield, a Republican political consultant, said, "I think everyone agrees that an asset for Bush is his performance in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks." Warfield was right. Everyone did seem to agree on this. But why? What had he done to deserve any credit at  all? What other option did he have? It is remarkable that both Republicans and Democrats were singing Bush's praises. Indeed, Republicans were saying to Democrats, referring back to the 2000 national election the Democrats thought Bush stole from Gore: "Aren't you glad now that Bush won?" and remarkably, it appeared the majority of Democrats were agreeing.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter said that Bush's remarks about pursuing those responsible for 9/11 were "a defining moment for his presidency," and he lauded Bush for the "moral clarity" of his words.  Moral clarity? Are you actually suggesting, Jonathan, that there could  have been some moral ambiguity here? That others in Bush's shoes may have wondered whether or not to go after Al Qaeda? Alter went on in another article:  "After September 11, we trusted Bush not to let us down, and he didn't." Jonathan, you actually thought that maybe  Bush, like many people you know, may have decided not to go after the perpetrators of 9/11? Jonathan, you may be a sadist, but I'm not a  masochist, and I'm going to have to wear some heavy armor the next time I'm exposed to your words about Bush's words vis-a-vis 9/11.

The New York Times editorial board, again demonstrating its sweet tooth for silliness, wrote in a lead editorial that Bush's conduct "right after 9/11 ... was the high point of the Bush presidency. We [the nation] hung on every word [not knowing, the Times implies, if Bush might say he intended to let Al Qaeda get by with it] when Mr. Bush denounced Al Qaeda [you see, he might have praised them] and made the emotional ... vow to track down Osama Bin Laden." And this, again, is the editorial board of the New York Times, writing stuff like this, totally unaware that giving credit implies someone had a choice.

Ronald Brownstein, a liberal columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that "many, perhaps most Americans appeared to take a snapshot of Bush in the frenzied, frightening days after the attacks and concluded that he passed as wrenching a test as any president had faced in decades." He passed a wrenching test? Was there any conceivable way for him to fail? If so, how? By going back to the Florida classroom and moving in? Not giving a speech saying he was going to go after the terrorists?

Pollster Frank Luntz, in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, sounded just like Alter, only slightly crazier, if that's possible. He wrote:  "The moral clarity that Bush espoused and acted upon immediately following September 11 was articulated at perfect pitch. Black and white language to a grieving nation was exactly what was called for and why his credibility surged even among those who had cast votes for his opponent just ten months earlier. This was a president," Luntz went on to say, who said, 'I know what I believe and I know what I believe is right.  My job isn't to nuance."' But Frank, are you saying there's reason to believe that others would have had an ambiguous response to 9/11? Who,  Frank? Who? Are you suggesting that there are many people out there who did not feel it was right to bring the perpetrators to justice?

When, in early August of 2006, the British foiled a terrorist plot to put liquid bombs on commercial planes bound for the United States, Greg Valliere, a member of the Stanford Washington Research Group,  told CNN that the British terrorist plot "is Christmas in August for Karl Rove" because this meant "we are still in a war." Translation: If the terrorists are still out there, obviously, only the Republicans can stop them, not the Democrats. And Valliere said this even though the Republican administration of George Bush had already failed miserably in the war on terror. Moreover, the Bush administration didn't  even have anything to do with the foiling of the plot. And Valliere, as I say, is employed by a prominent research group. My God, what level of common sense IQ is good enough to work for these think tanks? Can you imagine that? "Christmas in August for Karl Rove."

And Gary Jacobson, a political scientist from the University of California in San Diego, told USA Today that the British incident "reminded people that terrorists were out there, and this is [George Bush's] strong suit." Can you imagine that? This is in 2006, close to three long years after Bush started his war, when all the evidence, every single piece of it, without exception, clearly showed that Bush couldn't possibly have performed any worse in the war against terrorism. And people in think tanks and political scientists can talk like this.

Al Neuharth is the usually reliable founder of USA Today, a fine paper that is a lot better than many people think who haven't bothered to take a really good look at it. Though not of the quality of some of the major papers of America, it has less silliness in it, indicating that USA Today has a splendid editor. But Al decided to be silly about Bush and added a new twist to the insanity. "Bush," Al said, "bravely took on a necessary fight against terrorists who attacked us." Al, Bush was personally brave to have his military go after Bin Laden? In what possible conceivable way? Since I like your paper, particularly the front-page feature stories, which usually are better than in any other paper in the land, and you usually talk sense, if you want to take that word "brave" back, I'll let you. You couldn't possibly have been thinking clearly when you wrote it.

Al, I'll tell you what I'll do if you don't want to take the word back. If you can tell me how Bush was "brave" to command his military to invade Afghanistan and bring back Bin Laden dead or alive, I'll get up every morning at six (or whenever I have to) to deliver USA Today papers for six months free. Is that a deal? The reason I'm making such a big deal of this, Al, is that you know how words influence people. We have enough idiots in America without a few more who are on the fence voting for people like Bush because of some loose but powerful words some member of the media used. Remember Al, stupidity is not benign. There are over 100,000 people in their graves today from the war in Iraq because of it.

Professor and political scientist Richard Sylves wasn't just observing a fact, but clearly seemed to be embracing it himself when he said that when Bush walked into the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 14 and vowed that the perpetrators of the attack would hear from the United States, it was "a major symbolic statement for the president and created a tremendous confidence" in him by the American people. I don't blame the American people. If I had been president,  I wouldn't have gone to the World Trade Center site. If I had been in town, I would have gone to a Mets game at Shea Stadium. And if the media caught up with me, I would have told them I had no intent to go after the perpetrators, because next time they might come after me.

What was the message of all this extreme praise for Bush, including the popular slogan "Aren't you glad now that Bush won?  There is only one interpretation of this. That if Al Gore had been in the White House at the time of 9/11, he would not have strongly vowed to go after the perpetrators. But a moment's reflection -- not even that -- will tell you that no thought could be more irrational than this. Any president, you, I, or any other rational person would automatically do the same thing Bush did. If he didn't, as incredibly spaced out as the majority of Americans are, they'd be dumbfounded and undoubtedly be screaming for his head. But that would never happen. Ever. It's out of the question. And that is the precise reason why to sing Bush's  praises for doing something he had no choice but to do can only be categorized as a very serious type of stupidity.

Although the lauding of Bush -- with his approval rating rocketing from 50 percent to 90 percent and people everywhere saying, "Aren't you glad now that Bush won?" -- necessarily conveyed the message that Gore would not have vowed to go after, and gone after, those behind the murder of 3,000 Americans, those words were never uttered.  They didn't have to be. It was understood. (Indeed, one could say that the official party line of right-wing Republicans is that if Democrats had been in power at the time of 9/11, they would have hidden in a corner in a fetal position and hoped the terrorists wouldn't strike  again. And if they ever came out of their corner they wouldn't fight the terrorists but instead coddle them.) It also wasn't expressly uttered because if anyone for a moment thought of doing so, they would know how crazy and ridiculous they would sound.

So saying that Gore and the Democrats wouldn't have responded to 9/11 would sound absurd and no public figure or columnist I know of said it, at least publicly, until the debate over the war in Iraq, at which time one prominent person I know of said it. And it was a big surprise since he has demonstrated himself to possess a very fine and facile mind in the area of social satire. I'm referring to Dennis Miller, a previously fairly liberal guy by his own admission, who fell madly in love with the Republican Party; he says, at the time of 9/11. "Nine-eleven changed me," he said. Why? Dennis mentioned the unmentionable, that which people who have far less gray matter than he knew enough not to mention. Listen to this. (And I hate to come down on Dennis.  He invited me to be a guest on his former show several times; publicly called me "brilliant"; invited me and my wife to have dinner with him and his wife; and when he was on Monday Night Football, even worked me into one of his social allusions that he's so famous for -- something on the field caused him to opine: "That's like being cross- examined by Vince Bugliosi." So I don't eagerly relish verbally assaulting Dennis, but just as Bush never had any choice to do what he did, Dennis has given me no choice. I'll be as nice to Dennis as I possibly can be under the circumstances.)

Here is what Dennis told Time magazine for its September 22, 2003, edition: "September 11 was a big thing for me. I was saying to liberal America, 'Well, what are you offering?' And they said, 'Well, we're not going to protect you."' Dennis, please. What in the world happened to you? Should someone be taking your temperature? Anyone, Dennis, anyone holding the office of the presidency would protect you by going after Bin Laden. Not only that -- which is a given and beyond discussion -- but Dennis, since these liberals you said wouldn't protect you also live in America, even if they didn't want to protect you, why wouldn't they want to protect themselves? You see, Dennis, if they're not going to protect you, then necessarily they wouldn't be interested in protecting themselves either. But Dennis, last time I heard, liberals wanted to live just as much as conservative Republicans. [2] Dennis, you know how, when you're in the audience and someone is making a fool out of themselves on stage, you almost reflexively avert your glance because you're embarrassed for them? When I read those words by you, I was embarrassed for you.

Circumstantially, it couldn't be more obvious that in the context of what he was saying, Dennis forgot about Afghanistan. He uttered those words at a time when the majority of Democrats were opposed to going to war in Iraq, and the Republican Party made a lot of yardage arguing that not wanting to go to war in Iraq meant the Democrats didn't want to fight terrorism, a stunning non sequitur if I ever heard one. The hapless and pathetic Democratic leaders are apparently too thick-pated to say, when the Republicans continue to make that charge: "Wait a second. Have you forgotten Afghanistan? No one in our party was against invading Afghanistan, and all the national polls showed that Democrats were in favor of militarily pursuing Bin Laden as much as  Republicans were. [3] Again, have you forgotten that there were no demonstrations out on the streets of America by hundreds of thousands of people urging no invasion of Afghanistan, as there was before the war in Iraq? Democrats are just as much against terrorists as Republicans. But in a war on terrorism, aren't you supposed to go after the  terrorists? That's why so many Democrats were against the war in Iraq.  There were no terrorists in Iraq. They were in Afghanistan. That's where Bin Laden was. You know the guy who murdered 3,000 Americans? Instead, Democrats keep taking it on the chin and virtually never cite the conclusive evidence, Afghanistan, to rebut the Republicans' outrageous charge that they are against, or very weak on, fighting terrorism. 

Dennis Miller, there would seem to be little question, had to be confusing Iraq with Afghanistan. There simply was nothing taking place around 9/11 or when we went to war in Afghanistan in October of 2001 that would have ever been fertile soil for such a deranged thought by him to emerge. Dennis, you're a bright guy, but a word you might not possibly be overly familiar with is the word "conflation." It can be used in more than one way; but colloquially it implies a confusion resulting from combining events that don't match in time. "Yes, you saw Joe yelling his head off a year ago about the Red Sox game, but he didn't do this where you say he did." It happens to all of us, Dennis, and you had to be conflating the Democrats' position at the time of the Iraq war with what was happening around the time of 9/11.

Dennis, not satisfied with saying that the Democrats, if they were in office at the time of 9/11, would have, you know, cried, and begged Bin Laden not to do it again, decided to join Al Neurath, actually (I'm not kidding) calling Bush "ballsy" for going after Bin Laden and the terrorists. Dennis, Bush has balls? Really? Pardon the pun, Dennis, but that's really a low blow. That's really hitting below the belt. Dennis, the wimp from Crawford only has balls with the lives of other people's children. People don't change. The prophet Mohammed said, "Tell me you can move a mountain, but don't tell me people change."  And when it was Bush's time to fight during the Vietnam War, he ran like hell in the opposite direction. Dennis, if Bush has balls for what he did, I live in Sweden, I'm Elvis Presley's brother, I just broke the record in the 100 meters.

Dennis, you don't have a newspaper, so I can't deliver papers for you, but let me put myself on record by saying that if you can tell me how Bush had balls to order the U.S. military to bomb Afghanistan and try to capture Bin Laden, I'll send you a certified check for $10,000. And if you can't do it, you don't have to pay me a dime. Is that a fair deal? For old times' sake, Dennis, I hope you don't hurt yourself more than you already have and try to explain how Bush had balls after 9/11. I hope you come to your senses and return, from your political apostasy, to where you used to be on the political spectrum. Anyone can make a mistake.

In brief summary here, it's hard to see how Bush could possibly have been more negligent and irresponsible in defending this nation against terrorism prior to 9/11. So when 9/11 happened, the nation should have been thoroughly disgusted with him, and the House Judiciary Committee should have been preparing articles of impeachment. Instead, all Bush had to do (not one, single thing more) was vow to get the perpetrators of 9/11, something he had to say, and his approval rating soared to stratospheric heights, Bush miraculously becoming a hero of 9/11. So much of a hero, in fact, that when he ran for reelection, as I indicated earlier, he showed footage of 9/11 as part of his television ads for reelection. Unbelievably, Bush was advertising his biggest failure. This is impossible, right? But it happened. Indeed, the distortion of reality was so severe that Cheney felt confident and comfortable saying (actually, it was the main thrust for Bush's reelection) close to the 2004 election: "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is we'll get hit again" by the terrorists. Cheney was subliminally saying, "Hit again by the terrorists like we were the last time the Democrats were in office. When we were in office you never had to worry about something like this." Right on.

Bush was so successful in using 9/11 to his advantage that former Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, who disapproves of every breath of air Bush breathes, could only criticize Bush for "exploiting 9/11," which necessarily implies that Scheer felt Bush had something to exploit, Scheer not adding words to the effect, "How does Bush have the gall to advertise his biggest failure?"

Indeed, an article in the Los Angeles Times said that "privately, some Democratic strategists agree that Bush should be able to invoke the disaster, as long as he doesn't overplay the theme." Can you imagine that? One Democratic mental paraplegic told the Times that 9/11 "is a big part of their record and they should be allowed to talk about it."  When this candidate for the mental poverty program said that 9/11 "is a big part of their record," he could only have meant that 9/11 was something that Bush and his people had a right to be proud of. Said another Democrat: "If the shoe were on the other foot, there would be 9/11 ads coming out of the Kerry White House." This incredible Democrat was saying that "if 9/11 happened on our watch, we'd be bragging about it in our campaigns, too." Unbelievable. Isn't this logic turned completely on its head, a topsy-turvy world, like the one Alice found on the other side of the looking glass? Or maybe it's like a farce or a cartoon, where one angry combatant says to the other, "If you don't shut up, I'm going to hit your fist with my nose."

So although the Republican Party should have been hiding from 9/11, and the only party that should have been able to exploit it was the Democratic Party since the tragedy happened on Bush's watch (remarkably, I know of no Democratic columnist who made this point), the situation was the exact reverse. In other words, defeat is victory. White is black. Up is down. Night is day. Where can one hide to escape from all this madness?

***

6. If anyone reading what I've written so far is not thoroughly disgusted with Bush, it gets worse, much worse. Obviously, when a failure of U.S. intelligence (for which the president is ultimately responsible), the automatic response is to conduct a congressional investigation, and/or one appointed by Congress, to find out why this catastrophe was able to take place beneath our radar, and to identify what prophylactic measures this nation has to take to ensure it never happens again. And that's precisely what Democrats in Congress, everyday Americans, and survivors of the victims of 9/11 proposed.  But g-d unbelievably, George Bush, the person who should have been spearheading the movement for an investigation, actually resisted the investigation and made a big effort to block Congress's proposal to have an independent commission investigate the 9/11 terrorist attacks. [4] Hey; stupido (Italian-American slang for a stupid person; here I'm talking to any reader to whom what I just said did not sink in), did you hear what I just said? If you didn't, I'll repeat it one more time: 9/11 was the first attack on American soil in American history and 3,000 Americans were murdered. George Bush never wanted (and did  everything he could to stop) any investigation of how and why the tragedy happened, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again!!

On October 11, 2002, two prominent senators from opposite sides of the aisle (Republican senator John McCain and Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman) openly accused the Bush administration of deliberately sabotaging their efforts to create an independent commission appointed by Congress to investigate 9/11, suggesting the administration was afraid the investigation might turn up government failure.  McCain said, "Every bureaucracy in this town is scared to death of an  investigation. [McCain, of course, could only be referring to Bush and his executive branch of the government, since everyone in the Democratic Party supported the creation of the commission.] No one has really been held accountable [by Bush]. No one has lost their job [i.e., Bush hadn't fired anyone], no one has even been reprimanded [by Bush], nothing has happened as a result of September 11. Unless responsibility is assigned, then we can't cure the problem." Lieberman  said, "The question we pose to the White House today is, 'Do you really want to allow this commission to be created? And if you don't, why not?'"

The incredible story that George Bush did not want an independent commission to look into 9/11 should have been a major, front-page headline in all the newspapers of the country, a cover story in all national magazines, and the lead story on all TV and radio shows, with all of the above expressing absolute astonishment and outrage.  Everyone in American should have been talking about it. People should have been calling their friends on the phone, saying, "Did you hear what I just heard? You're not going to believe it but President Bush is trying to block an investigation of 9/11. This is unbelievable.  Why isn't he being thrown out of office?"

Instead, nothing like this took place. The struggle went on in Congress between Democrats who wanted the investigation and Republicans who did not (Republicans obviously knew that an investigation would reveal that the Bush administration had been grossly derelict in trying to prevent 9/11). What seemed to tip the scales toward the appointment of a commission was a group of four widows of the victims coming to Washington and prodding Congress, as well as pleading over radio and television that there be an investigation. "We simply wanted to know why our husbands were killed, why they went to work one day and didn't come back," they said.

Conducting rallies with signs made from wood they bought at Home Depot, entering and cajoling senators in elevators marked  "Senators Only"; and doing whatever else was necessary, including crying, the widows made headway. Although Bush had no interest in knowing why their husbands died, these widows wanted to know why. They kicked up such a storm that a recalcitrant Congress, pressured by Bush and his people to say no, finally yielded and the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan commission chosen by Congress, was created on November 27, 2002. Their mission was, in the concise language they would later use in their report, to answer the questions, "How did this happen, and how can we avoid such tragedy again?"  The chairman of the 9/11 Commission, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, Thomas H. Kean, would later say about the widows: "I doubt very much if we would be in existence without them."

How can it possibly get any worse than for the president of the United States to resist an investigation as to why 3,000 Americans were not protected by the U.S. government and hence had to die? This fact alone should cause any American who loves this country, and has a sense of right and wrong, to have the greatest disgust and contempt for Bush imaginable.

Jumping ahead to the work of the 9/11 Commission, Bush and his people did everything they could to sabotage it. Their main tactic was to deny the commission access to the critical documents the commission sought. It had nothing to do with national security. If it did, the Bush administration would have claimed this and gone to court to resist turning over the documents on that ground, which they did not do. The Bush administration's only purpose in not turning over the documents to the commission, of course, was to prevent the nation's people from learning how much the administration knew about the Al Qaeda threat before 9/11, and how very little it did about it. Remarkably, this stonewalling by the White House itself, as well as Bush's Pentagon, Justice Department, and other federal agencies acting under his direction, was done at the very same time the Bush administration was soaking up and exploiting the credit everyone was giving Bush for his handling of the entire 9/11 crisis. Bush got away with it because other than the editorial pages of the major newspapers, which the vast majority of the public doesn't read, Bush's inexcusable lack of cooperation with the commission was not a major story anywhere in the news.

The obstructionism took different forms, one of which was the Bush administration's insistence that when any member of any federal agency testified before the 9/11 Commission, at least one or more other members of that agency be present. At a July 8, 2003, news conference, 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean openly complained that it was a form of "intimidation" to have "somebody sitting behind you all the time who you either work for or works for your agency. You might get less testimony than you would ... without [these] minders."

The lack of cooperation got so bad that on October 25, 2003, Kean said that if the White House continued to withhold documents the commission requested, he would issue a subpoena for the documents.  "I will not stand for it," Kean said, referring to the Bush administration's deliberate obstructionism. Lieberman said the Bush White House had "resisted this inquiry at every turn. After claiming they wanted to find the truth about September 11, the Bush administration has resorted to secrecy, stonewalling and foot-dragging, President Bush may want to withhold the truth about September 11, but the  American people -- and especially the victims' families -- demand and deserve it." On NBC's Meet the Press, Republican senator Charles Hagel urged Bush to cooperate.

The White House backed down, but only a little. Just enough to avoid a subpoena. Bush's lack of cooperation, supported by most Republicans in Congress, was so pronounced that in February of 2004 the commission said it actually could not complete its work by the May 27, 2004, deadline because it did not have access to many crucial documents the Bush administration was withholding, and requested more time to complete its task. Bush and his people said no, vigorously opposing any extension of time. But eventually, and after much  pressure, Bush reluctantly agreed to a short two-month extension. However, congressional Republicans, implicitly carrying out Bush's obvious wishes, refused to agree to the extension. Once again, the  9/11 widows kicked up a big storm, demanding an extension, and once again, they succeeded, Congress granting a sixty-day extension.  John Feehery, spokesperson for Republican House Speaker representative J. Dennis Hastert, told the media that "public pressure by the 9/11 families" was responsible for Hastert's reversing his position.  "There's no doubt about that," Feehery said.

The failure by Bush to cooperate with the commission created to investigate the tragedy extended to his only grudgingly agreeing to meet with the commission and answer questions after months of resistance on his part. But he had strict conditions that he insisted upon, and there were several. He would meet with the full, ten-member commission (originally he said he'd only meet with the chairman and cochairman), but only in private and not under oath (not unreasonable, and consistent with tradition). Also, the session could not be recorded, nor could there be any transcript. What? Also, his appearance had to be limited to one hour, and he refused to appear alone, demanding that Cheney appear with him at his side, (This merely lends credence to late-night comedy routines that Bush is but a puppet of the ventriloquist Cheney.)

Other than meeting in private and not under oath, Bush's requests were out of line, but the commission caved in to each of them and agreed. Condoleezza Rice, knowing full well how preternaturally lazy her boss, Bush, is (and that he has spent more time at his ranch and away from the White House than any other president in history) had the guts and gall to say on NBC's Meet the Press about Bush's demand for a limitation of one hour: "I would hope that the Commission would recognize that he's President, and people would be judicious in the use of his time." She said this the same week that Bush found enough time to attend a rodeo in Houston, Texas, and with his well-known daily exercise regimen, spending at a very minimum ten hours exercising. But he was only willing to spend one hour, and no more, with the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 tragedy.

One poignant moment during testimony before the 9/11 Commission occurred when Bush's former counterterrorism chief,  Richard A. Clarke, began his testimony by telling families of the 9/11 victims, many of whom were in the spectator section of a hushed Senate hearing room, something that it was Bush's job to have done:  "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you ... I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and your forgiveness." Relatives of the victims  in the room applauded Clarke. It was Bush, of course, who should have apologized to the nation, but if I were to wager, I'd say that the thought never even entered the mind of the terribly arrogant son of  privilege. Actually, why would it, when terminally idiotic Americans were giving Bush high approval ratings and making a hero out of him?

It should be noted that although the 9/11 bipartisan commission consisted of distinguished people, they were all political insiders and seemed reluctant or incapable of asking the necessary, tough questions. As Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, puts it, the 9/11 Commission members were "very much people who are at the heart of the establishment." Describing their questions as "probing" but not "aggressive," he said, "I think there's a very, very strong disposition to avoid finger pointing. It's very clear that they [didn't] want to single out people for incompetence or not being vigilant."

Indeed, when the 9/11 Commission issued its report on July 22, 2004, Chairman Thomas Kean said, "It is not our purpose to assign  blame ... Our goal is to prevent future attacks." That's just polite politics, though the report was specifically hard on the CIA for its failures. In other words, even if the members of the commission were aghast at Bush's gross irresponsibility and behavior, they never would say this publicly.

Nevertheless, and given the above realities, the conduct of the Bush administration prior to 9/11 was so extremely inept and irresponsible that the commission, in its report, felt compelled to say that before 9/11 the U.S. government (i.e., Bush administration) was hobbled by "failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management."

When the 9/11 report was issued in July of 2004, the totally shameless Bush, who had done everything he could to make sure the independent bipartisan commission was never formed, said the commission had "done a really good job of learning about what went wrong prior to September 11" and that it had "identified steps we can take to better defend America [in the future]," both of which, Mr. Bush, you did your best to prevent them from doing.

With respect to the forty-one recommendations made by the commission to improve our nation's security, on December 5, 2005, almost a year and a half later, the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a watchdog group established by the commission when it went out of business to monitor the Bush administration and grade it on its efforts to comply with their recommendations, gave the administration seventeen F's and D's. They gave the administration only one A, an A minus at that, for efforts to stem the financing of terrorist networks.  Commission chairman Thomas Kean said, "Many obvious steps that the American people assume have been completed have not been.  Our leadership is distracted," a euphemistic way of saying that Bush, who did nothing to prevent 9/11, was doing very, very little to ensure that it never happened again. 

Before we move on, it should be reiterated that the 9/11 Commission, after a twenty-month investigation, said they could find no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and no evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11.

***

7. At this point, you should be beyond shock at the terrible performance of Bush, but there is so much more. Let me give you a little background on this next matter. The words used to describe Bush's stance on terrorism by those who love him as well as the simpleton media are "steadfast" and "resolute" and "unflagging." Even most of those who don't like Bush, like Jonathan Alter, use words like this, conceding this point. But it would hardly be humanly possible for him to be less steadfast. Other than going after the terrorists whom he himself gave birth to in his invasion of Iraq, which obviously cannot count since the war in Iraq continues, Bush has only pursued (and then, extremely poorly) one group of terrorists in this whole world -- Bin  Laden and his Al Qaeda. No one else.

And before I enumerate just how "steadfast" he has been in his pursuit of Bin Laden, let me remind you of something you might not be thinking about. How often do you read a fairly long personal interest story in your daily newspaper about a detective in the police department of your city who has very nearly dedicated his life to finding the murderer of someone who was killed many years ago, often, twenty, twenty-five, thirty years ago? Frequently, he continues the pursuit even after he retires. He feels he won't be able to rest in peace until he finds, for instance, the killer of the young woman he found dead, lying in a pool of blood on the floor of her home, her throat slashed, and her baby sitting next to her crying loudly. Usually, at the time you read the story you have long forgotten about the murder, and just as frequently, if you live in a big city, the murder may have only been reported in a small article on an inside, back page of the paper when it happened, or not at all. And nearly always, as you well  know, you read in the paper (maybe in the same article about the detective) that the killer has been apprehended in some far-off state living under an assumed name, and he is returning to the city to be prosecuted for a murder he committed several decades earlier. This happens all the time. Major homicide bureaus in big cities even have what they call "cold case" rues that remain open, and the bureau pursues the killer for years and years, sometimes as many as fifty to sixty years.

That's life, real life in the big city, and with real human beings who care, care about bringing about justice for the victims of terrible murders. Yes, even though they are dead, they are entitled to justice. (Certainly their surviving loved ones are.) Near the end of my final summation in the Charles Manson murder trial in 1971, I gave what the newspapers would come to call my "roll call of the dead," the seven Tate-La Bianca victims. After each name I paused, so the jurors could stop and think, really think about the fact that the name wasn't just a name, but one that belonged to a human being who at one time lived and breathed just as they were now. Too often, in the heat of battle at a trial, and with all the legal procedures, issues, and complexities being wrangled over by lawyers on both sides, people tend to forget about the victims, whose death is the only reason for the trial. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," I quietly began, "Sharon Tate ... Abigail  Folger ... Voytek Frykowski ... Jay Sebring ... Steven Parent ... Leno La Bianca ... Rosemary La Bianca ... are not here with us now in this courtroom, but from their graves," I said in an increasingly loud crescendo, "they cry out for justice. Justice can only be served by coming  back into this courtroom with a verdict of guilty."

So we know how unheralded detectives, quietly and tenaciously and steadfastly pursue, for several decades, the killer of just one human being, and almost desperately want to find him and bring him back to face justice. Let's see now what Bush did with his pursuit of Bin Laden, the murderer of not one, but 3,000 Americans.

In December of 2001, just a few months after 9/11, the American military learned that Bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora, a dense mountain range in southeastern Afghanistan. By the way, not only was Bin Laden there, but for the Bush lovers who say we don't know for sure that he was, that is irrelevant. I personally saw on television Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld say at a TV press conference that they had located Bin Laden in Tora Bora and he was trapped there. So even if he wasn't there (and subsequent evidence has confirmed that he was), the Bush administration cannot use this as an excuse for their  absolutely incredible conduct. That conduct has to be viewed from the state of mind we know they had, which was the belief that Bin Laden was at Tora Bora. And what was that conduct? Instead of sending thousands of American soldiers to go into the mountain range to capture or kill Bin Laden, Bush did not send one single American soldier.  He only dispatched forty American Special Forces soldiers there to coordinate the bombing, by U.S. B-52 bombers, of caves and areas in the mountain where Bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, was believed to be. 

The job of capturing Bin Laden was given to three anti Taliban Afghan warlords and their men. Haji Mohammed Zaman, one of the warlords, in disbelief and frustration told the assembled press who had converged on Tora Bora: "If America wants to capture Osama, why aren't they trying?" A top aide to Zaman said: "I don't think the United States wants to capture Osama. We know where he is, we tell them and they do nothing. So they are not as serious as they say they are." Also, knowing Bin Laden's most likely route of escape (to cross the southeastern border of Afghanistan into Pakistan), instead of massing thousands of American soldiers along that border, the United States decided (I also heard Rumsfeld say this on television) that they were going to rely on the Pakistani military (with no help from us) to prevent Bin Laden from escaping. Unbelievably, then, Bush, that ballsy, steadfast, great fighter of terrorism, decided to rely on Afghan warlords and the Pakistan military to capture the most important terrorist of all, Bin Laden, who was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. To repeat, Bush did not use one American soldier. It almost seemed like Bush was more interested in  Bin Laden and what he had done as a pretext to invade Iraq than he was in capturing him.

This is 2008, seven long years after Bin Laden murdered over 3,000 American citizens, and Bush promised to bring him back "dead or alive." Where is the outrage in America that this mass murderer is still a free man, free to make threatening videotapes and plan further attacks upon us? The lack of outrage in America over the fact that Bin  Laden has not been brought to justice is nothing short of astonishing.

The Bush administration, embarrassed by its having allowed Bin Laden to escape, came up with the preposterous excuse that they didn't pursue Bin Laden at Tora Bora because they wanted to minimize American casualties and they also wanted to prevent the war in Afghanistan from being viewed by the world as an "American war."  But why shouldn't it be an American war? Weren't Americans the only victims of 9/11? So the ballsy, brave Bush didn't feel that going after someone who had murdered 3,000 Americans was really, after all, a good idea (and he got a 90 percent approval rating and was re-elected precisely because he said he would). Instead, we should let the Afghan warlords and Pakistani military (mostly Muslims, who at least religiously and culturally were not antagonistic to Bin Laden), whose people were not murdered by Bin Laden, go after him. Yet the outrageous Bush was willing to send 150,000 American soldiers to risk their lives in Iraq to get Saddam Hussein, who we know was as innocent of complicity in 9/11 as a newborn baby.

Lutfullah Mashal, a senior spokesperson for the Afghanistan Interior Ministry, confirmed in 2005 what everyone already assumed, that Bin Laden had paid for his escape from Tora Bora into Pakistan. But the recipients of the money were not the Pakistani military, as some had assumed, but Afghan commanders loyal to Maulvi Yunus Khalis.  Khalis was a top mujahedin leader during the Afghan-Soviet War whose family compound Bin Laden, with his four wives and many children, moved into for a while. Mashal said, "The help was provided because of monetary aid [provided] by Al Qaeda and also partly because of ideological issues" (among which, naturally, was the fact that everyone on both sides was Muslim).

In 2005, August Hanning, the head of German intelligence, confirmed this, saying his agency had learned that Bin Laden had been able to elude capture at Tora Bora by paying "a lot of money" to the very same militias of the Afghan warlords to whom the United States had delegated (outsourced) the task of capturing him, and they allowed his safe passage into Pakistan.

And listen to this. As reported in USA Today and never denied by the Bush administration: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment, Iraq." So way back in 2002, going after Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11, was more important than going after Bin Laden, who was responsible for the catastrophe. And Bush is the one whom the morons in the media, with graduate degrees in nitwitolgy, continued to praise for his "tough," "steadfast," and "resolute" stand against terrorism. It's enough to make the cat cry.

It has to be added that the incomprehensible and virtually psychotic posture of the Bush administration to let Bin Laden, who was responsible for 9/11, go free, yet engage in a terribly costly and long war against Iraq, which had no connection with 9/11, continues, believe it or not, to this very day. While the Bush administration persists in carrying on the bloody fight in Iraq, it has pledged to Pakistan that it will honor Pakistan's territorial sovereignty and not cross the border  of Afghanistan to pursue Bin Laden into Pakistan, where we know he is presently headquartered. So we wouldn't pursue the mastermind of  9/11 at Tora Bora, nor will we do so in Pakistan, even though no invasion would be involved since Pakistan is our ally. But we were very willing to invade Iraq and fight a monstrous war there. And remember, this was all over 9/11, and not only was Iraq completely innocent of 9/11, but like the United States, it was a sworn enemy of the very group, Al Qaeda, that was responsible for 9/11, which made Iraq a natural ally of ours against Al Qaeda. How can the conduct of Bush make any sense to a rational person?

Before we continue, one very important observation has to be made that I can assure you most Americans have completely forgotten -- if they were ever aware of it. When I was talking earlier about Bush never sending one American soldier after Bin Laden at Tora Bora, relying on Afghan warlord allies to do so, this actually was no shock at all to anyone following the Afghan war. I say this because up until and through December of 2001, when Bin Laden was at Tora  Bora, Bush had decided he did not want America to "fight" anyone in Afghanistan. Yes, you heard me right. When I said previously, in talking about Dennis Miller, that there was no justification for Miller and everyone else heaping praise on Bush for "going after" those who attacked America on 9/11, because "anyone holding the office of the  presidency" would likewise have done so, I was speaking very loosely (to Bush's benefit) because Bush never even did this!!! You see, the evidence is clear that Bush decided that America was not going to go after Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Instead, he was going to have someone else do it for America -- Afghan allies of America called the Northern Alliance, a U.S.-backed resistance movement formally known as the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.

Although eventually U.S. soldiers fought in Afghanistan, from the day of the invasion (commenced by air strikes) in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, through December 7, when the Taliban regime collapsed, not one single American soldier died in combat. [5] Why? Because the real fighting in the Afghan war was being done almost exclusively by the Northern Alliance. Our military was only there in an advisory and support capacity to the Northern Alliance, and our air force, from its  safe position high in the clouds beyond the range of the very limited Taliban antiaircraft artillery, dropped bombs on the almost medieval country. If you want to call this "fighting" a war, then you have a different view than I do of what this word means.

So all Bush did was vow to go after those responsible for 9/11, and those who harbored them (the Taliban). He didn't actually do it, though a mentally anesthetized nation gave him immense credit for doing so.  Even if he had, as I indicated earlier, he would have been entitled to no credit at all, since anyone in his shoes would have done the same thing. But he didn't even do this, deciding to fight a war by proxy, achieving victory on the cheap by having others fight for America.

As Major General Frank L. Hagenbeck told reporters in a briefing in Bagram, Afghanistan, on February 26, 2002: "We want the Afghans to go after these guys. It's their country." (Yes, but it was 3,000 Americans who were killed by Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda on 9/11, not 3,000 Afghans.) You have to know, of course, that General Hagenbeck did not make this decision. He was only carrying out the orders of George Bush and his administration.

A man is seated with his wife at a restaurant table. An armed killer enters the restaurant, shoots and kills the wife, then flees. The man, who everyone would automatically assume would pursue the killer since it was his wife who was killed, and since, it turns out, he was fully armed to do so, decides not to. He tells a stranger at a nearby table that he would appreciate it if he would pursue the killer, which the third party does. That's exactly what Bush did in the Afghanistan war. Three thousand Americans were murdered, Bush vowed to go after the perpetrators, but instead asked the Northern Alliance, which never lost one of its members during 9/11, to in effect "get even" with the 9/11 killers for us. Shocking? Unbelievable? Yes, but 100 percent true. And through all of this, Bush's approval rating remained extremely high (84 percent in a January 2002 Gallup poll), and we learned from the likes of Al Neurath and Dennis Miller how very brave and ballsy Bush was.

With respect to Bush not wanting to use one American soldier to fight the Afghan war, it wasn't until March 4, 2002, five months after the war commenced, that American soldiers started fighting in a normal, military way. This, from the March 5, 2002, edition of the New York Times: "In some of the fiercest fighting of the five-month war in Afghanistan, American  ground forces took the lead in a large-scale combat operation for the first time, American officials said."

And even then, our military involvement in the war was still taking a backseat to the Northern Alliance. A March 10, 2002, headline in the New York Times read: "Afghans' Retreat Forced Americans to Lead a Battle." The article read, in part: "American troops were unexpectedly forced to do the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan this week after an allied Afghan general retreated under withering fire from ... Al Qaeda.  Soldiers from the Army's 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne Division  moved quickly to fill the breach left by their bloodied Afghan allies."

Bottom line: Although 3,000 Americans were murdered by Bin Laden's Al Qaeda on 9/11, and we knew the Taliban was harboring Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda -- and although Bush was receiving towering praise in America from Republicans as well as Democrats for his supposedly tough stance against terrorism and his vow to bring back Bin Laden "dead or alive" and to "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them" -- Bush's original intent was to not send one American soldier to go after Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban, [6] all of whom were responsible for 9/11. But Bush was very, very eager, to the point of lying to the American public to get his way, to put over 150,000 American soldiers in harm's way to go after Saddam Hussein, who he knew had nothing to do with 9/11.

For the next thing I'm going to tell you, which actually is completely consistent with what you have just read, I suggest you strap yourself in your seat because it could affect your physical equilibrium if you are standing. I'm going to tell you something that is going to cause you to say, "Impossible. I don't believe Bush said this." But he said it all right. It's just that if you're like ninety-nine out of a hundred people, you weren't listening.

Recall that many detectives throughout the land frequently pursue relentlessly the killer of just one murder victim for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years. Now let's just look at the state of mind of George Bush on his feelings about the killer of 3,000 American victims just six months after the murders of 9/11. In a March 13, 2002, press conference, a reporter said to Bush: "Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk about or mention Osama Bin Laden. Why is that?"  The man who vowed to get Bin Laden "dead or alive" answered:  "This is a fellow [since Bush is now unscripted, Bin Laden has become  a "fellow," language that is remindful of his use of "folks" outside of the Florida classroom to describe those responsible for 9/11] who is willing to commit youngsters to their death and he, himself, tries to hide." (Bush could well have been describing himself as he committed young American soldiers to their death in fighting his war, yet he himself hid out during the Vietnam War.) Then the "steadfast" and "resolute" fighter of terrorism, George Bush, proceeded to say, unbelievably, the following, which is, again, just six months after 9/11 : "So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on  him, to be honest with you ... I truly am not that concerned about him. I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country [Afghanistan]." So while detectives think about the killer of one person for years and years, Bush had apparently stopped thinking about Bin Laden just six months after Bin Laden murdered 3,000 Americans!! [7] Bin Laden has been routinely described as "the world's most wanted man." But not, apparently, to Bush, who decided that the world's most wanted man was Hussein, someone who had nothing to do with 9/11.

By the way, at the aforementioned press conference Bush said, in an apparent attempt to justify his state of mind about Bin Laden, that "terror is bigger than one person." While terror is bigger than one person, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? So what? To capture or kill the main person who was responsible for 9/11, the founder as well as the active and spiritual leader of the world's main terrorist organization, would have to be a principal objective of any sensible leader, just like we tried to kill Hitler during the Second World War. During my prosecution of Manson and three female members of his "family" for the Tate-La Bianca murders, I told the media that "if I convict Manson's co-defendants, and he walks out of court, it will be an unsuccessful prosecution."

Furthermore, even if we were to assume, just for the sake of argument, a situation we know doesn't exist -- that Bin Laden no longer had any control or influence over Al Qaeda, perhaps that he even retired, and was no longer a threat to the security of this country -- what about this thing called justice? What about the 3,000 murders Bin Laden committed? Don't we absolutely have to capture him, bring him back to this country, and after a trial and conviction, put him to death for what he did? Take the situation we spoke about earlier. A killer gets away, changes his name, and for twenty to thirty years is living elsewhere, never repeating his crime again, and is no longer a threat to any other human, much less a nation. Yet a lone detective,  wanting to bring about justice for a single homicide, pursues the killer to the ends of the earth for years and years. If a lone detective can seek justice for one murder, how is it possible that Bush had already apparently lost interest in seeking justice for 3,000 murders?

Remarkably, in the very same press conference in which Bush said, in effect, that he wasn't thinking about Bin Laden anymore, he said, "The more firm we are and the more determined we are to take care of Al Qaeda," the better chance we have "of solving some difficult problems ... But it's going to require a resolve and firmness from the United States of America. If the United States were to waver, some in the world would take a nap when it comes to the war of terrorism. And we're just not going to let them do that. [This is] why I'm so determined to remain firm in my resolve." That Bush would use these words to describe himself, after just admitting that he had already lost interest in pursuing Bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, and no one blinked an eye, is simply incredible.

One footnote to the above. The July 4, 2006, New York Times reported that "the Central Intelligence Agency has closed the unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama Bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday. The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the CIA to a Counterterrorist Center, the official said. The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama Bin Laden became a household name, and bolstered its ranks after the September 11 attacks when President Bush pledged to bring Bin Laden to justice 'dead or alive."' Isn't that something?

***

8. The most unbelievable thing Bush did in his so-called war on terrorism has already been alluded to in this chapter. Instead of making an all-out effort to capture Bin Laden and destroy his Al Qaeda, Bush all but stopped the pursuit of Bin Laden and hence, the real war against terrorism, and diverted most of the American military's strength to going after Saddam Hussein and invading Iraq, a nation that was not our enemy, had no terrorists, was not involved in any way in 9/11, and represented absolutely no threat to this country, (A report published in January 2004 by the U.S. Army War College strongly criticized the Bush administration for its "war on terrorism" as being "unfocused," pointing out that the war in Iraq was "unnecessary" and  a" detour" that had diverted attention and resources away from the real threat posed by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.) It would be difficult to imagine a more colossal and incomprehensible failure by the leader of any nation.

As indicated previously in this book, to this day we don't know for sure why Bush started his war in far-off Iraq. But going after Hussein in Iraq when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan or Pakistan recalls the vaudevillian skit where a man is on his knees searching for something at night beneath a lamppost. When a passerby asks him what he's looking for, he tells him it's his car keys. "When did you lose them?" the passerby asks. "About five minutes ago when I was walking down the block," he says, pointing some distance away to the darkness. "So why are you looking for them here?" the passerby asks. "Because  there's better lighting here," the man says. So instead of Bush giving Bin Laden a bullet or noose for killing 3,000 Americans, he gave Bin Laden the best birthday present imaginable by invading Iraq, fulfilling Bin Laden's wildest dream that there be an abundant supply of virulently anti-American terrorists for years to come.

As noted, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan fell on December 7, 2001. However, by diverting most of our military forces from Afghanistan to Iraq shortly thereafter, we squandered our opportunity to truly finish off the Taliban. We know this is so because the Taliban has reemerged as a much stronger force than it was during the brief Afghan war, inflicting hundreds of casualties on American forces in an ongoing war, whereas prior to December 7, 2001, as indicated earlier, they had inflicted none. We never, under any of the existing circumstances, should have invaded Iraq. But to do so before we completed our mission in Afghanistan of capturing Bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda and the Taliban makes Bush's conduct all the more incomprehensible and egregiously wrong.

***

If we were living in a normal country, what happened on September 17, 2003, should have been the biggest story of the year, with the entire nation talking about it. Saddam Hussein had as much to do with 9/11 as you or I. But that's not the point. There can be no question that Bush, by his very strong innuendo, led Americans to believe that he did. And the majority of Americans believed it at the time. In fact, as we know, as late as 2006, five years after 9/11, 90 percent of the soldiers in Iraq said they thought Hussein was involved in 9/11. So that's the important point -- what people thought. As indicated earlier, on  September 17, 2003, six months after we invaded Iraq under the belief, by most Americans, that Hussein was involved in 9/11, Bush, only in response to a reporter's question, said, "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th. " (Say what?!?!) This should have been a screaming headline all over America, and everyone, on radio, TV, and on the streets should have been talking about it. One reason they didn't is that the press virtually ignored it. Conservatives always speak of the "liberal press" and believe the New York Times represents the citadel of American liberalism. Do you know where the story in the New York Times about Bush's admission was?  Page 16 of the next day's paper. So either that paper is not liberal (no paper savaged Clinton more during the Monica Lewinsky affair than the New York Times), or liberals simply don't know how to fight. If this had happened to Clinton, the right-wing, who are natural (and mostly dirty) fighters, would have seized on this in an extraordinarily major way.

And when the 9/11 Commission said on June 16, 2004, that they could find no evidence that Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda, the story didn't get anywhere near the attention it should have, although several papers in the country did at least make a headline out of it. However, they used words from which an inference had to be drawn (far too much for most Americans, who have to have a bib put on them and be spoon-fed) that Hussein had no connection with 9/11. For example, the June 17, 2004, New York Times headline read: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie."

When the 9/11 Commission found that Hussein had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or 9 /11, the story should have swept the country like wildfire. Very angry and outraged Americans, feeling Bush had either deliberately misled them into war, or was terribly and dangerously incompetent in taking this nation into an ill-advised war, should have been calling for Bush's scalp. His defeat at the polls should have been automatic, Kerry winning in an overwhelming landslide. But as we  know, no such thing happened.

Everything I've mentioned thus far on the pages of this book about Bush's mind-boggling failures fighting terrorism had already taken place when American voters went to the ballot box in the 2004 presidential election on November 2, 2004. Yet Time magazine reported that of those voters who said terrorism was their leading concern, an astonishing 85 percent voted for Bush. (Only 15 percent had confidence in the genuine war hero, Kerry.) Knowing that stupidity is not benign, if you don't find this scary, what is scary to you?

***

Although the things that follow are well known, they are so important on the issues of Bush's extreme failure in his war against terrorism, and the incalculable damage and harm he has done, that they bear repeating. Everyone knows what a disaster the war in Iraq has become -- that no weapons of mass destruction were found; that apart from Kurdish territory, Bush literally physically destroyed and set aflame an entire nation, one that before the war was a stable nation; that Bush, against the counsel of his own military, never sent anywhere near the number of troops into Iraq that would have been necessary to not only defeat Saddam Hussein's military but to also secure the peace by not allowing the insurgency to even get off the ground;  that, remarkably, Bush and his people engaged in virtually no postwar planning at all, something that is automatic when a nation, intending to win a war, is preparing for that war.

We also all know that Iraq had no terrorists before Bush invaded it. The only one we know of who was in Iraq was Abu Mousab al Zarqawi. But not only were his ties to Bin Laden shaky and tenuous, if they existed at all, more importantly, he had no ties or relationship with Hussein. Moreover, he operated in Kurdish territory, which was outside the control of Hussein.

Bush's war, then, has turned a completely nonterrorist nation into a nation with many terrorists in it, Iraq serving as a magnet for Islamic terrorists from other nations to join the native Iraqi insurgents in a fight against an America they both hate. So Bush created terrorism in Iraq, with thousands upon thousands of innocent, everyday Iraqis targeted by suicide bombers paying the ultimate price by losing their lives in markets, restaurants, mosques, etc. Bush's invasion of Iraq, we all know, thrust Iraq into a bloody, rudderless chaos, a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites where American soldiers, caught in the middle of the carnage and crossfire, are being killed by members of both groups, the very people, ironically, Bush said he wanted to liberate.

We also know that before Bush invaded Iraq, the majority of Iraqi people led safe, productive lives as long as they did not oppose Hussein, were free to pursue any lifestyle or religion they wanted -- Muslim, Christian, gay, etc. -- and walk the streets of Baghdad or any other city at two in the morning without any fear. Since the invasion they are afraid to go anywhere outside their homes, a great many even being murdered there. And children, on their way to school, routinely see dead bodies and decapitated heads out on the street, even bodies hanging from lampposts, a virtual nightmare the likes of which hasn't ever been depicted in any Hollywood horror film.

Before Bush, Baghdad was a relatively modern city with perhaps the finest university in the Mideast. Women had virtually full equality with men. They were free to become doctors, lawyers, etc. and enjoyed personal freedoms, the Los Angeles Times noted, "undreamed of by women in neighboring [Muslim] nations" -- a far cry from what their lives will be like if Iraq becomes a Shiite theocracy.

On March 14, 2003, just days before Bush's invasion, although the people of Iraq were worried about what was going to happen if the invasion actually took place, the New York Times found them to be going on with their regular lifestyles. A featured article in the paper started with a reporter's visit to the Amiriya racetrack and his interviews with jockeys, racetrack employees, and bettors. The reporter observed that life among the Iraqi people -- other than the omnipresent photos and paintings of Hussein and the realization that no Iraqi was free to challenge his rule, those that did being brutally murdered --  mirrored life in the United States. "Perhaps 5,000 people turned up at the track to watch the eight-race card, about average for a Friday meeting. In the city, pool halls and Ottoman-era coffee shops and pinball arcades were busy as usual. The expressways that criss-cross the Dallas [Texas] that Saddam Hussein's bulldozers have made of one of the oldest cities in the Arab world ... were busy carrying families out to stroll in the park, or to linger over kebab lunches in restaurants, or to visit friends."

One pre-invasion image of Iraq that sticks in my mind was on the television news a few nights before the war started: two young Iraqi adults, speaking surprisingly good English, talked on the sidewalk with an American newsman while eating ice cream cones.

We know that before the war, Iraq, although poor because of UN- imposed sanctions following the Persian Gulf War, was a fully functioning country with a very low unemployment rate. Since the war, unemployment has skyrocketed, at one point reaching a staggering 50 percent. And while Baghdad and most of Iraq's cities had regular electricity for lighting, heat, and air conditioning, only a few hours a day are now available to the nation's citizens, and sanitation services are almost nonexistent.

We know that before Bush invaded Iraq, the Shiites and Sunnis lived peacefully with each other, and now members of both sects have viciously killed one another in great numbers. Also, that almost 5 million Iraqis (in a nation of only twenty-four million) have been driven from their homes. Two million have actually fled the country, leaving virtually all of their belongings behind. The remaining 3 million are living with friends or relatives or in makeshift shelters. Of those who fled the country, a disproportionately large percentage are from the nation's professional class of doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and educators, the very people the country needs to rebuild Iraq into a functioning society. A Sunni Iraqi pathologist said, "it will take a decade just to train new physicians," almost half of whom have been part of the exodus. He said the war "has turned the country into an empty vessel, drained of talent." Two Los Angeles Times staff writers, reporting from Baghdad on January 6, 2008, said, "Hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals have left the country. Businesses have closed. Insurgents and thugs have targeted professors, doctors and businesspeople, killing them, abducting them or driving them out of their jobs and out of Iraq." This, from a nation that was almost free of crime before the war.

And it has to be noted that a September 2006 poll showed that about six out of ten Iraqi citizens actually approved of attacks on U.S. forces. Slightly more than that do not even want us in their country, viewing us not as liberators but as invaders and occupiers.

We also know that the invasion of Iraq was opposed and clearly denounced by the overwhelming majority of people throughout the civilized world, even in countries like Britain, Spain, and Italy whose weak leaders went along with Bush's suicidal (and homicidal) mission. [8] We know that Bush and his war have caused our traditional allies and people throughout the world not only to lose substantial respect for us, but for the first time ever, to disrespect the once great United States of  America. Indeed, polls now consistently show that although the United States, before Bush, was the most widely respected nation in the world, the majority of people in the world today now have a negative feeling about the United States. This is particularly true, of course, in the vast Muslim world, where we were never popular, but which now abhors us for invading, without any justification at all, a sovereign and fellow-Muslim nation. Out of the blood and debris of the Iraq war, how many young Bin Ladens will we eventually have to deal with down the line, whom Bush created when their mother, father, brother, sister, wife, or child was killed (and in some instances murdered) by Bush's soldiers fighting for George Bush in George Bush's war?

Indeed, the CIA's 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (to repeat, the consensus view of all sixteen federal agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community), released on September 26, 2006, confirmed that Bush's crazy war against terrorism (going after nonterrorist Iraq) has not only been unsuccessful but counterproductive, making America less safe than before. The report said that although the U.S. effort had seriously damaged the leadership of Al Qaeda and disrupted its operations, "a large body of all-source reporting [from around the world] indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists ... are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks." The CIA's 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, released on July 17, 2007, was no more reassuring. The report said, "We judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment."

We also know, of course, that over 100,000 people have died horrible, violent deaths in the war, including 4,000 young American soldiers and thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies. And untold thousands of Americans and Iraqis have suffered devastating psychic damage and disabling physical injuries. Also, the war has been a prodigious drain on the American economy, costing us $250 million per day and more than $1 trillion thus far, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Remarkably, with the worst track record in the war on terrorism conceivable, in the past year or two Bush and his people have come up with new disparaging terms to describe the Democratic Party's position on Iraq, calling Democrats "quitters" and people who want to "cut and run" because they want to end our disastrous war in Iraq by bringing our young soldiers home as soon as possible.

***

When you see Bush and Cheney (and their right-wing supporters) still, after seven years, with all we have seen and all that we know happened, shamelessly continuing to use their 9/11 failure and their insane and disastrous war against Iraq not only as assets and weapons for political victory, but to depict innocent Democrats as dangerously weak traitors to America, the thought that comes into one's mind, even a civilized and timid one, is that only a figurative stake through the heart could ever stop these diabolically monstrous charlatans.

***

I cannot leave this section without at least a brief reference to a very predictable but nauseating phenomenon that was under way at the time this book went to press in mid-March of 2008. I'm talking about some of the painfully brainless members of the media buying into the Bush administration's propaganda that we finally are "winning" the war in Iraq. And when you have the stupid (media) influencing the ignorant (masses), well, that's a toxic combination. Let's look at this dynamic at play. In a front-page New York Times story on November 25, 2007, the reporter said that since violence was declining in Iraq, [9]  Democrats would have to acknowledge "that success." He then went on with his self-fulfilling prophecy for the masses to live up to by saying that "the changing situation suggests for the first time that the politics of the war could shift in the general election next year (in other words, favor the Republican Party whose president gave us the horrible war), particularly if the gains continue."

This terrible nonsense -- that the only thing that is important is what is happening at the moment -- has been echoed many times in the past several months, despite the fact that the situation in Iraq remains terrible, with thousands of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of American soldiers continuing to die violent deaths. The horrors and monstrous crimes of the past not only are forgiven and forgotten, they never even happened. You know, 100,000 people haven't already died in the Iraq war. No, really. They're still alive, leading normal, regular lives with their families. You didn't know that? And the country of Iraq was never decimated. Look around and see. It looks just like it did before the war. And people of the world don't look down on America. Really. Just ask them. And the more than $1 trillion that people claim have been spent by America on the Iraq war was never spent. It's still in the U.S. Treasury.

Just like the expression "What have you done recently?" the past doesn't count. All that counts is now, and violence is down, which means that we should not only celebrate, but declare that we're on the road to victory.  "Victory is within our grasp," conservative columnist Max Boot exclaimed on January 28, 2008. But what victory? That Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of our country and we eliminated him and destroyed his weapons of mass destruction?  That there is real democracy in Iraq, and this democracy is spreading throughout the Middle East? That Bin Laden has been captured and  executed and his Al Qaeda destroyed and they are no longer a threat to this nation?

With no end in sight for the war, and the worst atrocities imaginable still being routinely perpetrated, and the once bustling, safe and open metropolis of Baghdad being reduced to a city of high concrete walls and military checkpoints to help keep the Sunni and Shiite death squads out and the murders down, America is not only starting to show signs, with the help of the mindless media, of settling for fewer dead bodies, but of pronouncing the whole disastrous adventure a success. In other words, instead of the absolutely horrible and intolerable situation in today's Iraq being viewed as terrible but better than it once was, it is viewed as good because it's not as bad as it once was.

Terrible is good, black is white, up is down. The insanity continues, and the bodies keep being buried, and Bush keeps smiling.

_______________

[1] All humans, even the duke of duplicity, Vice President Dick Cheney, knows this is so. Stung by accusations by Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that the Bush administration had essentially ignored the Al Qaeda threat before  9/11, Cheney, in an interview with his favorite radio host, Rush Limbaugh, countered that terrorist attacks on the USS Cole and U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had taken place "on Mr. Clarke's watch."

[2] Rudy Giuliani said what Miller said, in a slightly different way, almost four years later. In April of 2007, Giuliani actually said that any Democrat who became president would endanger the nation because he would "go on defense" in the war on  terrorism and "wave the white flag" Can you imagine that? 

[3] A January 7-9, 2002, national Gallup poll showed that only 6 percent of Americans were opposed to our going to war with Afghanistan. [LB-2] Ninety-four percent approved, with virtually equal support among Republicans and Democrats. And the support  was worldwide. For instance, eighty-nine nations joined the United States in the Afghanistan conflict by providing troops, including those from every major European country. Only thirty-two countries joined the United States in Bush's war in Iraq,  among which was only one major power, Britain. 

[4] Right after Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and President Lyndon B. Johnson, respectively, pushed for a federal, nonpartisan investigation of the tragedies, which were thereafter conducted. What other conceivable position could they have taken? Only a George Bush would have tried to sabotage an investigation of 9/11. 

[5] The first American combat casualty in Afghanistan was Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Ross Chapman, who was killed on January 4, 2002, three months after the war commenced.

[6] One might say it's wonderful that we could bring about the collapse of the Taliban without the loss of one American life by having someone else fight our war for us,  And I would agree. But just because it's wonderful doesn't mean it's anything to be  proud of, which it certainly is not. Also, probably because of this approach, we never did capture Bin Laden and bring him to justice.

[7] The above is in keeping with what former U.S. senator Bob Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2002, wrote in an op-ed  piece in the Washington Post on November 20, 2005: "In February 2002 [one month before Bush's remarks about Bin Laden at the press conference], after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, General Tommy  Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away."

[8] It is estimated that an incredible 36 million people took to the streets in six hundred cities throughout the world to demonstrate against Bush's threat to invade Iraq. In Rome, 3 million people participated in the largest antiwar protest ever. In Barcelona, 1.3 million protested; in London,1 million, and in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, 500,000.

[9] Wouldn't it have to be after five years? I mean, there are only so many adversaries to kill. As columnist Rosa Brooks observed: "The process of 'sectarian cleansing' is nearing completion: Sunnis have been driven out of Shiite neighborhoods [by mass murders], and Shiites out of Sunni neighborhoods."

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Librarian's Comments:

[LB-1] Let's add it up, Vincent:  (1)  Why didn't Bush do anything BEFORE 9/11, when the warnings were dire?  (2)  Why didn't he do anything ON 9/11, before and after reading "My Pet Goat"? (3)  Why didn't he want an investigation, or do anything (meaningful) AFTER 9/11?  If Bush really believed that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, why didn't he find out that they were responsible, and then pursue them with all the forces at his command?  Why did he let Bin Laden go?  Why did he get "sidetracked" into war in Iraq?  He obviously does NOT believe that Al Qaeda is a threat to us (no one has ever proved Al Qaeda was behind 9/11, and Osama Bin Laden denied that he did it), or else it's a threat he wants us to have, or else doesn't care about (he basically says as much when he said, "Terror is bigger than one person. And [Osama bin Laden’s] a person who's now been marginalized. So I don't know where he is. Nor [do I care]. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you."  The fact is, George Bush is a traitor to our country.  It appears that Al Qaeda works FOR the CIA under Bush, just like they did in the War in Afghanistan against the Russians, that nothing has changed and the connection is unbroken.  "Al Qaeda," "Northern Alliance," "Taliban," -- all these are Bush's agents for terrorism, and include members from the original Afghan Mujahideen, with movement of members between them, and are supported either directly by the United States, or by our allies, Britain and Pakistan.  Bush doesn't want to go after them because they are doing what he wants them to do:  bring terror to the world to facilitate the Neo-Cons' world expansion plans as outlined by The Project for the New American Century.  Instead of killing the bad guys who kill innocent civilians, Bush joins in to kill more innocent civilians. You think Michael Moore is the dupe?  Look at yourself in the mirror, Vincent.  Not once in this book have you examined evidence pointing to Al Qaeda being responsible for 9/11.  And you refuse to see that all of this is exactly why Bush went to war in Iraq. 

In addition, the World Trade Center buildings and Building 7 were NOT destroyed by fire, but instead were brought down by controlled demolition.  Can all these lies be chalked up to laziness, to eliteness, to wanting to take his vacation, to being a spoiled rich kid, and stupid?  No!  He's not stupid.  He knows what he does.  He's guiltier by far than you say.  The problem is, all our so-called "leaders" HAVE to hide Bush's complicity, lest our society fall into splinters from the disillusionment of it all. 

[LB-2]  I opposed going to war in Afghanistan, because (1), no one has yet proved that Al Qaeda was behind 9/11, (2) when and if they do prove it, then members of Al Qaeda who are responsible should be arrested and brought to justice before a court of law, instead of invading entire countries of innocent people, and (3) If we're going to start invading countries that harbor terrorists, we'll have to start FIRST with our own (Yeah, bomb ourselves!) (See "Welcome to Terrorland, Mohamed Atta & the 9/11 Cover-Up in Florida," by Daniel Hopsicker), and also invade our twin brother Britain, which is the biggest training camp for terrorists in the world (See "Al Qaeda and Londonistan," in 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism, Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley) and also invade Pakistan, who funds the Taliban.  Is it the Afghani people's fault that terrorists funded by our ally Pakistan took over parts of their country?  No!  They weren't "harboring" terrorists.  They were "invaded" by terrorists.

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