Does George W. Bush Own Our Country? Part I
I
A New Presidency
Who could have believed, in those early months of the presidency of George W. Bush, that anyone could so seethe with hatred of the United States, so burn with passion for martyrdom, as to smash commercial airliners into buildings symbolic of American power?
Earlier in the year 2001 controversial tax, environmental, and labor legislation had moved through Congress. The President succeeded in repealing estate or inheritance tax on exceptionally high incomes. That tax was a legacy in large part of the progressive Republican Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, who had wished to curb the power of great wealth passed down from generation to privileged generation. President Herbert Hoover, a wealthy man himself, wholeheartedly approved of the tax, as do the present-day financiers Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and his father, and Lee Iococca. George W. Bush also dedicated himself to the enactment of a $1.7 trillion tax cut. It lowered taxes on middle-class Americans by about two percent (and average of $850); but the bulk of the tax cut went to the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Vice President Richard Cheney, for instance, saved over $80,000 on his taxes in 2003. As the billionaire Warren Buffet points out, “If class warfare is being waged in American, my class is clearly winning.” An economics professor calls it “Robin Hood in reverse.” Bush managed to ram these bills through the Congress well before the summer recess. They, not proliferation of threats of domestic terrorism that same year, were the priorities on the new administration’s agenda.
Then came the Washington summer, which customarily invites languor and a sense that time has stopped. President Bush, clearly enough, would never have felt the need to bestir himself to deal with anything so outlandishly alien to the White House culture of oil wealth and consumerism as a band of fanatics who might choose death above buying things. So off he went to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for a five-week vacation.
Yet even before Bush took office, government officials had known of the possibility of attacks targeted at civilian casualties on American soil, specifically including suicide flights into domestic targets. In 1996 Abdul Hakim Murad, having trained in American flight schools, confessed to a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters or some other federal building. Just before the election that put the younger Bush in office, a unit within the Department of Defense responsible for protecting the nation’s airspace conducted a mock exercise involving a commercial plane that terrorists might hurtle into the Pentagon. George J. Tenet, appointed by President Clinton as director of the CIA, showed great foresight about terrorism, warning every year from 1998 to 2001 that the terrorist organization al Qaeda posed the chief danger-an “imminent threat” to the United States, he said early in 2001 at the White House.
In the first year of Bush’s presidency, warnings came more swiftly and more credibly, yet made no apparent effect on the White House. A commission on national security chaired by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart issued its final report on February 25, 2001 asserting that “mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland was of serious growing concern.” The document said that the country was “woefully unprepared” for the increasing threat of a serious domestic attack and urged the establishment of a national Homeland Security Agency. Among others alert to the danger was Dale Watson, then head of counterterrorism in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On May 10, 2001, John Ashcroft, the new Attourney General, issued a memorandum listing the Justice Department’s priorities. When Watson saw that terrorism was entirely omitted from the list, he said he “almost fell out of my chair.” A short time before Richard Clarke, the White House head of counterterrorist operation for several months into Bush’s presidency, had proposed meetings of high administration officials to discuss the issue. On July 5, 2001, Clarke warned that “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.” And Thomas Pickard, interim director of the FBI for most of the summer of 2001, has testified that he tried to talk with Ashcroft about suspicious activities on the part of al Qaeda. Ashcroft, Pickard declares, responded that he didn’t want to hear any more about it, and although Ashcroft denies making the remark two other FBI agents have corroborated Pickard. Finally, at the thirtieth meeting, held on September 4, of the “principals”-as Watson and other term them-of the Bush administration including the President, Vice President, and Secretaries of Defense and State, terrorism was for the first time on the agenda. But at Vice President Cheney’s insistence, the day was devoted instead to the question of a ballistic missile child in outer space. September 11 was now only a week away.
Foreign intelligence officers and even one head of state in another nation showed an alertness superior to that of the highest echelons in the United States. In June 2001 German intelligence reported that terrorists from the Middle East were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American culture.” On June 13 Egypt cautioned that a plane filled with explosives could be a terrorist weapon. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, ordered his intelligence agents to warn Bush “in the strongest possible terms” of a possible attack connected with airports. Israel’s intelligence arm, the Mossad, resported that two hundred or so al Qaeda members were slipping into the United Stated and planning “a major assault”.
The FBI under the direction of Attourney General Ashcroft took its time becoming serious about internal terrorism. Numerous failures occurred. Agent Kenneth Williams of the FBI’s Phoenix office issued the now notorious Phoenix Memo of July 18 warning of “coordinated efforts by Osama bin Laden to send students to United States flight schools.” He had discovered an “inordinate number of Muslim extremists training at Arizona flight schools” and urged the FBI to check flight schools in other states to see whether they had noticed anything similar afoot. The Minneapolis office of the FBI recognized something bizarre when it came upon Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan background seeking to extend the flight training he had already taken in Oklahoma. Lacking the skill to pilot even a small plane, he wanted to learn how to fly a jumbo jet and furthermore wished to know only how to maneuver it in the air, not to take off or land. In mid-August FBI agents of the Minneapolis office joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service in arresting Moussaoui, technically on grounds of his immigration status. But the efforts of the Minneapolis office, notably Special Agent Collen Rowley, to convince the Bureau’s highest officials in Washington of the urgent necessity for further investigation were fruitless. Under the title “Suspected airline suicide attacker planning to fly a commercial airliner in the United States of America,” Ms. Rowley speculated that a plane might be fully loaded with explosive fuel. She was specifically “trying to make sure Moussaoui did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.” And even the CIA, to whom the Minneapolis agents thereupon reported their suspicions of Moussaoui, did not notify the President. Still, a month earlier CIA director Tenet had told President Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, of the danger of a terrorist assault inside the United States. Eventually the FBI became sufficiently alarmed by evidence of terrorist activity to request of Ashcroft additional funding for antiterrorist efforts. Ashcroft’s rejection bears the chilling date of September 10, 2001.
A New Presidency
Who could have believed, in those early months of the presidency of George W. Bush, that anyone could so seethe with hatred of the United States, so burn with passion for martyrdom, as to smash commercial airliners into buildings symbolic of American power?
Earlier in the year 2001 controversial tax, environmental, and labor legislation had moved through Congress. The President succeeded in repealing estate or inheritance tax on exceptionally high incomes. That tax was a legacy in large part of the progressive Republican Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, who had wished to curb the power of great wealth passed down from generation to privileged generation. President Herbert Hoover, a wealthy man himself, wholeheartedly approved of the tax, as do the present-day financiers Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and his father, and Lee Iococca. George W. Bush also dedicated himself to the enactment of a $1.7 trillion tax cut. It lowered taxes on middle-class Americans by about two percent (and average of $850); but the bulk of the tax cut went to the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Vice President Richard Cheney, for instance, saved over $80,000 on his taxes in 2003. As the billionaire Warren Buffet points out, “If class warfare is being waged in American, my class is clearly winning.” An economics professor calls it “Robin Hood in reverse.” Bush managed to ram these bills through the Congress well before the summer recess. They, not proliferation of threats of domestic terrorism that same year, were the priorities on the new administration’s agenda.
Then came the Washington summer, which customarily invites languor and a sense that time has stopped. President Bush, clearly enough, would never have felt the need to bestir himself to deal with anything so outlandishly alien to the White House culture of oil wealth and consumerism as a band of fanatics who might choose death above buying things. So off he went to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for a five-week vacation.
Yet even before Bush took office, government officials had known of the possibility of attacks targeted at civilian casualties on American soil, specifically including suicide flights into domestic targets. In 1996 Abdul Hakim Murad, having trained in American flight schools, confessed to a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters or some other federal building. Just before the election that put the younger Bush in office, a unit within the Department of Defense responsible for protecting the nation’s airspace conducted a mock exercise involving a commercial plane that terrorists might hurtle into the Pentagon. George J. Tenet, appointed by President Clinton as director of the CIA, showed great foresight about terrorism, warning every year from 1998 to 2001 that the terrorist organization al Qaeda posed the chief danger-an “imminent threat” to the United States, he said early in 2001 at the White House.
In the first year of Bush’s presidency, warnings came more swiftly and more credibly, yet made no apparent effect on the White House. A commission on national security chaired by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart issued its final report on February 25, 2001 asserting that “mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland was of serious growing concern.” The document said that the country was “woefully unprepared” for the increasing threat of a serious domestic attack and urged the establishment of a national Homeland Security Agency. Among others alert to the danger was Dale Watson, then head of counterterrorism in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On May 10, 2001, John Ashcroft, the new Attourney General, issued a memorandum listing the Justice Department’s priorities. When Watson saw that terrorism was entirely omitted from the list, he said he “almost fell out of my chair.” A short time before Richard Clarke, the White House head of counterterrorist operation for several months into Bush’s presidency, had proposed meetings of high administration officials to discuss the issue. On July 5, 2001, Clarke warned that “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.” And Thomas Pickard, interim director of the FBI for most of the summer of 2001, has testified that he tried to talk with Ashcroft about suspicious activities on the part of al Qaeda. Ashcroft, Pickard declares, responded that he didn’t want to hear any more about it, and although Ashcroft denies making the remark two other FBI agents have corroborated Pickard. Finally, at the thirtieth meeting, held on September 4, of the “principals”-as Watson and other term them-of the Bush administration including the President, Vice President, and Secretaries of Defense and State, terrorism was for the first time on the agenda. But at Vice President Cheney’s insistence, the day was devoted instead to the question of a ballistic missile child in outer space. September 11 was now only a week away.
Foreign intelligence officers and even one head of state in another nation showed an alertness superior to that of the highest echelons in the United States. In June 2001 German intelligence reported that terrorists from the Middle East were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American culture.” On June 13 Egypt cautioned that a plane filled with explosives could be a terrorist weapon. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, ordered his intelligence agents to warn Bush “in the strongest possible terms” of a possible attack connected with airports. Israel’s intelligence arm, the Mossad, resported that two hundred or so al Qaeda members were slipping into the United Stated and planning “a major assault”.
The FBI under the direction of Attourney General Ashcroft took its time becoming serious about internal terrorism. Numerous failures occurred. Agent Kenneth Williams of the FBI’s Phoenix office issued the now notorious Phoenix Memo of July 18 warning of “coordinated efforts by Osama bin Laden to send students to United States flight schools.” He had discovered an “inordinate number of Muslim extremists training at Arizona flight schools” and urged the FBI to check flight schools in other states to see whether they had noticed anything similar afoot. The Minneapolis office of the FBI recognized something bizarre when it came upon Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan background seeking to extend the flight training he had already taken in Oklahoma. Lacking the skill to pilot even a small plane, he wanted to learn how to fly a jumbo jet and furthermore wished to know only how to maneuver it in the air, not to take off or land. In mid-August FBI agents of the Minneapolis office joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service in arresting Moussaoui, technically on grounds of his immigration status. But the efforts of the Minneapolis office, notably Special Agent Collen Rowley, to convince the Bureau’s highest officials in Washington of the urgent necessity for further investigation were fruitless. Under the title “Suspected airline suicide attacker planning to fly a commercial airliner in the United States of America,” Ms. Rowley speculated that a plane might be fully loaded with explosive fuel. She was specifically “trying to make sure Moussaoui did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.” And even the CIA, to whom the Minneapolis agents thereupon reported their suspicions of Moussaoui, did not notify the President. Still, a month earlier CIA director Tenet had told President Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, of the danger of a terrorist assault inside the United States. Eventually the FBI became sufficiently alarmed by evidence of terrorist activity to request of Ashcroft additional funding for antiterrorist efforts. Ashcroft’s rejection bears the chilling date of September 10, 2001.