- By terrorism standards the attacks of 9/11 were spectacularly
successful, not only in the extent of death and destruction they produced,
but in instilling a deep sense of horror in the American public. But the
attacks were carried out with the crudest of instruments: commercial airliners
hijacked by a dozen men armed only with boxcutters who then played out
their roles as suicide bombers. In spite of the incredible boldness of
the attacks, it was just another variation on an old theme. Nevertheless,
there were those who claimed that terrorism had entered a new era, and
that "9/11 changed everything." This argument as we now know
was largely self serving.
-
- Stephen Gale, a terrorism specialist at the University
of Pennsylvania, could hardly have been surprised by the nature of the
attacks. "Gale was part of a three-man group that presented a terrorism
analysis to FAA security officialsin the spring of 1998," writes Steve
Fainaru in a Washington Post article in May 2002. "The analysis described
two scenarios: one in which terrorists crashed planes into nuclear power
plants along the East Coast; another in which they commandeered Federal
Express cargo planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon, the White House, the Capitol, the Sears Tower and the Golden
Gate Bridge." [my italics]
-
- Adds Fainaru:
-
- "A broad array of signals -- from foiled plots to
FBI field interviews -- suggested for years that al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist
groups had considered employing airplanes as missiles and U.S. flight schools
as pilot training grounds.
-
- "The clues included a 1995 plot to blow up 11 American
jetliners over the Pacific Ocean, then crash a light plane into CIA headquarters
-- a suicide mission to have been carried out by a Pakistani pilot who
had trained at flight schools in North Carolina, Texas and New York."
-
- With this background to draw on, plus the intelligence
briefing to George Bush one month prior to 9/11 -- the title of which was
"Bin Laden Determined to Attack inside the United States" --
Condoleezza Rice nevertheless admitted to being genuinely surprised by
the nature of the attacks. Proclaimed Rice in her testimony before the
9/11 Commission, "I don't think anybody [my italics] could have predicted
that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade
Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would
try to use an airplane as a missile."
-
- Rice's clueless response is just one reason why she is
widely regarded as the most incompetent national security adviser in memory.
-
- Post-9/11
-
- This horrific failure by the Bush administration to protect
the country from terrorist attack was followed by a series of events that
were almost surreal. There was a short-lived attempt to go after the perpetrators,
Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But this quickly gave way
to boredom and the "need for a new script," as Neil Gabler once
described it. Bush had to come out of this looking like a warrior, an American
hero, rather than the bumbling goat of 9/11 that he was.
-
- We know now that the Bush administration in a matter
of only days or weeks after 9/11 turned its attention away from these crude
but effective forms of terrorism to focus on the threat of Weapons of Mass
Destruction and in Iraq of all places. The logical disconnect was
stunning. We had suddenly gone from terrorists wielding boxcutters and
flying planes into buildings to worrying about the most sophisticated weapons,
those requiring some understanding and advancement in the fields of chemistry,
biology and nuclear physics. Such weapons had been around a long time but
had never been used in any major terrorist attack anywhere in the world.
Yes, there was the use of Sarin gas in a Tokyo subway, and some post 9/11
anthrax letters in the U.S., but these were trivial incidents by any intelligent
measure.
-
- It was also true that Saddam Hussein had used chemical
weapons in the war with Iran in the 1980's with U.S. assistance and
blessing and later against his own people in 1988. But Iraq had since
been decimated, by the first Gulf War and seven years of U.N. weapons confiscation
and destruction. None other than Colin Powell, in February 2001, seven
months before 9/11, stated, "Saddam Hussein has not developed any
significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He
is unable to project conventional power [even] against his neighbors."
-
- Powell would of course go to the United Nations in February
2003 and explain how he was just a little confused two years earlier, and
that, in the interim, those two pillars of rational thought, George Bush
and Dick Cheney, had convinced the always skeptical Army general that Iraq
did have a formidable arsenal of WMD after all, including and above all,
the most lethal in mankind's history, nuclear weapons.
-
- The two issues of Iraq and WMD were quickly fused together
by the administration as one, and we were asked to believe that a belligerent
Iraq was stalking the U.S. eager to attack with ready-to-launch WMD
(Tony Blair said Saddam could launch his WMD "in 45 minutes.")
One could say it was at this point that George Bush took his first POWs
of the war -- the U.S. Congress and the media, both of which surrendered
to the Bush administration's public relations assault.
-
- Weapons Inspectors Return to Iraq
-
- As war fever in the U.S. built, Saddam Hussein played
a clever hand. He admitted U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq in November
2002 as Bush and his gang were hyping the war and preparing for invasion.
Now, if you're the president of the United States and you're really interested
in a possible threat from WMD in Iraq, you see this as at least a minor
victory. Saddam Hussein, after four years of banning the weapons inspectors,
has finally given in under threat of U.S. military action, and it may not
be necessary now to wage a costly and deadly war in Iraq. As president
and commander in chief, it would appear you have done a commendable job.
-
- As the weapons inspections continued through early 2003
and consistently failed to find any evidence of chemical, biological or
nuclear weapons (We now know there were none to be found!), the U.N. team
came under increasing criticism, much of it from Dick Cheney, who consistently
tried to discredit chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. There was also evidence
of deliberate interference and harassment from Washington. According to
a CBS News report in February 2003 by correspondent Mark Phillips:
-
- "U.N. arms inspectors are privately complaining
about the quality of U.S. intelligence and accusing the United States of
sending them on wild-goose chases [and] American tips that lead to one
dead end after another So frustrated have the inspectors become that one
source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as 'garbage
after garbage after garbage.'"
-
- As the weapons inspections advanced, the Bush administration
was losing the public relations momentum -- call it hysteria it had
worked so hard to build for more than a year. Moreover, the administration
certainly had to suspect that there were no WMD to be found since they
had "cooked the intelligence," as the Downing Street memo described
it. Bush was caught in a corner. The pretext for invasion was slowly disappearing,
yet Bush had worked too long and hard for this war to let it slip from
his grasp at the last minute. A force of over 200,000 troops was amassed
in the Persian Gulf region waiting for orders. Bush continued his sleight
of hand. He proceeded to claim that Saddam Hussein was making fools of
Hans Blix and his team. After all, the U.S. had sound intelligence that
Hussein had WMD, and if Blix couldn't find them that was his failing. The
U.S couldn't wait. On March 18 the U.N. inspection team was forced to leave
Iraq, and the following day Bush's invasion began, without U.N. approval,
but with a "coalition of the willing."
-
- How Did Bush Get Away With It?
-
- How can we look back on the Bush administration's argument
for war with Iraq and see it as anything but total horseshit? To add to
the shamefulness of it all, the Bush administration's sleight of hand wasn't
even clever or deft. Even through the fog of fear and patriotism, the simple
truth is, you really had to be stupid to buy the argument for invasion.
Presidents have lied before, but there has never been anything like this
in American history.
-
- And what a war this has been. It was meant to be quick
and decisive and we were to be greeted as liberators. Now, almost three
years later, Iraq is in ruin, teetering on civil war, more than 2,200 U.S.
service men and women are dead, all at unfathomable cost to the country
of $250 billion currently, and rapidly approaching half a trillion dollars.
But the Iraq debacle should surprise no one. It can be viewed fittingly
as part of a mix of failures -- a president of extremely limited abilities,
combined with a misguided Neocon ideology, and the president's sense of
some Divine calling.
-
- One need only look at the other egregious failures of
this administration to see how it all fits together -- $1.3 trillion in
tax cuts that were nothing more than a boon for the rich and a "looting
of the U.S. Treasury," as Nobel Laureate in economics, George Akerloff
put it; the shameful Medicare drug plan, nothing but a giveaway to the
pharmaceutical industry; and of course the Hurricane Katrina disaster,
the victims of which have no powerful lobbyists to represent them in Washington.
The list goes on.
-
- There was a time -- not that long ago really -- when
America had real leadership, men and women of integrity in both parties
who understood America's responsibility to its people and its role in world
affairs. Now the rest of the world looks on in disbelief as the once mighty
and proud United States, twisting and turning in frustration and embarrassment,
attempts to navigate through and around a president who is very much in
charge, but who is utterly incompetent, and perhaps even mad.
-
- We are victims of the old Chinese curse: We live in truly
interesting times.
-
- Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in aerospace industry
for 22 years. He now teaches in the California Community College system.
-
- http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2006/02/fro
m-box-cutters-to-nukes-george-bushs.html
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