During the transition meeting that takes place between incoming and outgoing presidents, Bill Clinton, strongly urged 'Dubya' to take the terrorist group seriously, emphasizing it could prove to be a major security threat. As history reminds us, with Bush & Co., the warning fell on deaf ears. Moreover, in mid-2001, Richard Clarke -- Clinton's terrorism 'tsar' and a 'carryover' from his administration -- wrote to Condoleezza Rice -- Bush's National Security Advisor, urging her to pay more attention to the threat warnings coming in from all quarters that he said had "reached a crescendo".
And if that wasn't enough, just over two months before 9/11, the CIA prepped a briefing paper for Bush himself that was worded along the following lines: 'We believe [bin Laden] will launch a significant attack against US interests in the coming weeks...attack preparations have been made...and will occur with little or no warning.'
There can only be three (or if one likes to really push the speculative envelope, four) possible explanations.
1. those folk responsible for America's security were either asleep at the wheel and/or working at cross purposes to each other; [or]2. were so arrogant and insular they dutifully ignored such warnings and were covering each other's ass for fear of being actually held responsible for one of the country's darkest, most tragic -- and preventable -- events; [or]
3. these folks knew about the impending attacks and yet it served their purpose to allow them to take place and/or when it became obvious the US was under attack stalled, shut down, or otherwise hampered first response efforts.
Of course a 'popular' conspiracy theory is that the US power elites actually perpetrated the attacks themselves. But let's not go there for the present. Either way, events like 9/11 -- much like the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack -- do not occur in some historical vacuum, as some folk would have us believe. Nor do they come as a complete surprise, certainly not for those who are getting paid to predict then prevent said surprises.
The Forward March of Freedom (One Step Forward, Two Steps Back)
The difference then between George Bush's vision impaired reality of the 'here and now' back then and JFK's more clear eyed vision of the future four decades earlier could not have been more stark. Whereas Kennedy at least openly pondered a path to presidential greatness via a Grand Peace, Bush like many before him saw the only path to a glorious presidential legacy [was] through war, one he "knew" the American people would support him in.
As impaired as Bush's vision may have been, one is tempted to suggest that his was the more pragmatic and realistic, and the one most in sync with America's true 'manifest destiny'. Jack's didn't stand a 'snowball's'! For a nation then whose 'business model' was seemingly based on the military, industrial and financial infrastructure and the accrued and collective power that is at once the rationale and foundation for it, it made perfect 'economic' sense! What was there not to like?
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