- In all the verbiage that has rained down since word leaked
that President George W. Bush was warned that Osama bin Laden's crew might
hijack a plane and strike at the United States, two words count: "No
warnings."
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- That is what White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told
reporters aboard Air Force One on Sept. 11. He said it as the flames from
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon lit the sky and the office workers
and firefighters and deli-counter men were buried beneath the molten steel.
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- It was a lie.
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- We now know, by the administration's own account, that
for at least five months before the terror attack, the intelligence community
was in an anxious tizzy over an impending attack it believed would be "really
spectacular," in the words of one official who briefed the White House.
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- Since word leaked about the infamous memo Bush received
on Aug. 6, the White House has spun another web of lies. Fleischer and
others insisted last week that no one had ever considered the possibility
of anything other than a "traditional" hijacking. In fact the
idea that terrorists would plow a plane into a symbolic structure had long
been discussed. This precise topic was developed from terrorist prosecutions
here and abroad. You did not need a confidential FBI memo to know this.
The newspaper would have sufficed.
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- Now there is an unnerving shadow that will follow Bush
through his presidency. It is not, necessarily, that the president could
have done more to thwart the calamitous plot. Who knows what was, or wasn't,
possible? Everyone's failures - at the White House, the FBI, the CIA, the
FAA - will be sorted out soon enough.
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- But Bush lied to us, and covered up. He tries, still,
to keep everything under wraps, doggedly seeking to prevent even congressional
intelligence committees from seeing the memo. Vice President Dick Cheney,
when he isn't impugning the patriotism of duly elected officials, wants
to hand-pick those committee members worthy enough, in his view, to "have
a conversation" about the memo. But not to read it.
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- This is their way. Bad news is supposed to result in
no news. And no news is better than the informed consent of the governed.
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- We had fair notice. During the presidential campaign,
when concerns that Bush might have used drugs during his party-boy days
were raised, he did not come clean, one way or the other. He initiated
a bizarre dance with reporters, two-stepping about whether he could pass
a routine background check for federal employees. Could he pass if the
check went back 15 years, or just seven?
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- When the campaign knew it had to confront Bush's history
of excessive drinking, it spun a tale of decline and redemption, focusing
on its man's forthright decision, after a 40th-birthday bash, to sober
up. It left out the part about a drunk-driving arrest at age 30. That came
to light only when the press dug it up on the eve of the election.
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- It is impossible to keep an up-to-date count of topics
the administration wants neither Congress nor the people to know about.
The tally grows.
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- It doesn't want us to know about its meetings with energy-industry
lobbyists who helped write the energy policy. Nor the names of those it
has detained since Sept. 11, or the charges against them. Nor to get historical
papers from the long-departed Reagan administration, despite a law requiring
their release.
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- The president's men say they want to restore the prestige
of the presidency, eroded after years of congressional pestering. This
high-minded philosophy they apply only to themselves.
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- The very same officials had no problem releasing to Congress
e-mails from the Clinton White House. They handed over thousands of pages
of documents relating to pardons, though the power to pardon is the president's
alone and not subject to congressional oversight. They released verbatim
transcripts of former President Bill Clinton's phone conversations with
former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, waiving the "state secret"
privilege to do so.
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- But now it is wartime and we must keep secrets and you
must trust us, administration officials keep saying. Trouble is, they've
broken the trust. Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.
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- http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpcoc212714629may21.column
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