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Expecting by Dan Vojir
Another
Reason For Mitt To Treat Bush Like Poison
Washington, D.C., June
19, 2012 -- The National
Security Archive today is posting over 100 recently released CIA documents
relating to September 11, Osama bin Laden, and U.S. counterterrorism operations. The newly-declassified
records, which the Archive obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, are
referred to in footnotes to the 9/11 Commission Report and present an unprecedented public
resource for information about September 11.
Hammering
nails into the coffin of the Bush administration's involvement in 9/11 hasn't
been easy: Republicans have avoided the topic for a decade. They'll certainly
be spinning everything they can with this latest revelation: pointing to
Clinton, distancing themselves from Bush, painting the CIA as dunderheads,
maybe even saying that al Qaida didn't really exist before 9/11.
Whatever the spin, however, the fact remains: Bush knew about imminent attacks
from the very beginning of his Presidency and even hampered efforts to
catch/kill Bin Laden.
Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 -- but didn't get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al - Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. "I don't think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn't get the institutional support they needed," says Barbara Elias- Sanborn , the NSA fellow who edited the materials.
From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior
Intelligence Briefs detailed
that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one
intelligence agency.
Documents
also show that the CIA gave warnings to the out-going Clinton administration,
indicating that Bush knew about them from the very onset of his
Presidency.
Big
News?
To many
people, the new evidence is not surprising, but what is the most damning about the
situation is that the Bush administration defunded the CIA operation monitoring al-Qaida and bin-Ladin just as it was gathering
this critical intelligence. Even the associated security meetings were downgraded to mere deputy
level. Conspiracy theories have always centered around "intentional
neglect" of some sort, and now that part of the theories seems more
plausible than ever.
But can
Bush be held accountable IN TIME?
And
will Democrats make the revelation a stance against any of Romney's foreign
policies? As de -regulator
in national economic affairs, Romney has struggled to distance himself from the
disastrous effects of the Bush administration while trying to convince the
American public that Bush had set the stage for bin Laden's death.
"I think the tools that President Bush put
into place -- GITMO ,
rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this
information -- obviously served his successor quite well," Rove
said on Fox News.
The newly
revealed documents now catapult statements like this into the highest category of
BS in U.S. history.
Accusations
of war crimes have hung over the Bush administration for years with nations
such as Malaysia creating tribunals, but with these entities having little affect on
the former President's image of himself as defender of democracy. The latest
evidence of prior knowledge of imminent attacks, however, may be approached
from a different angle: treasonous neglect. Failure to act sufficiently in
defense of the country, combined with the acts of downgrading and defunding intelligence efforts regarding a known threat, certainly calls
for action of some sort.
The
timing of the declassification of the documents couldn't be more ironic: with
President Obama declaring Executive Privilege in the matter of "Fast and
Furious" and in defense of Attorney General Holder, Republican congressmen
will have a hard time maintaining focus.
Spin.
Cover-ups. Focus. Distractions. If the CIA documents gain any traction
in the coming weeks, our political scene is going to get a lot dirtier ...and
definitely more entertaining.
