Bush's First 8 Months in 2001,... Okay?

[Parisle]

---- George Bush came into office in January, 2001 on a mission that did not address national security or foreign policy, per se. He came into office in a breathless rush to carry out the uppermost items on a corporate agenda which had financed his campaign. What was his first official act? Quashing the Kyoto Accords, eh? Then he ranged into a general preoccupation with corporate deregulation, taxcuts for corporations and the wealthy, and various legal maneuvers to provide added safeguards to Big Business in the event of lawsuits. Throw in the assault on company overtime hours worked,... tightening of bankruptcy laws to the disadvantage of ordinary citizens,....... and the crowning touch, the intended heist of social security contributions for Wall Street financiers,...... and you have Bush's starting shopping list handed to him by his corporate patrons. This list did not leave much time for such things as paying attention to the Clinton transition team's warnings about al-queda, or following up on developing intelligence about bin-Laden. Corporate America was not immediately concerned with those things, and so neither was Bush. The attack on Iraq was in the plan, too,... but first of all, that was Cheney's assignment,.. and secondly, they had planned to engineer their own "trigger" for the war.

---- My guess is that if the administration had gotten signals and tip-offs about an impending 9-11 terrorist event,... either from the Israelis or from their own Intel "chatter,".... then they figured they were only looking at a possible airline hijacking and some ransom demands,.. or possibly another "Cole-like" attack,.... but nothing of the scope of the WTC attacks. And they chose not to intercede,.... but that is speculative. We can easily see what Bush was concerned with during his first 8 months, and that was doing his corporate bidding, plain and simple.

[Warpy]

1. Incompetence and indifference are usually the prime suspects

when disasters like this one go off without a hitch.

However, I think they did know. Asscroft stopped taking commercial flights some weeks before, remember.

Consider how unsurprised Stupid was at his meaningless photo op. Consider that he spent the next 25 minutes with the kiddies as though nothing of importance was happening. Consider that he hadn't left the room to go looking for a TV or even a radio. You'd think basic curiosity would have caused him to seek more information, but he didn't.

He knew.

[Parisle]

3. I hear ya, Warpy,...

----Some days, I lean in that direction, too. It's just hard to imagine Americans doing that to their own country,..... not to mention the fact that, if discovered, they go to the gallows.

[bif]

2. Actually, wasn't his first move...

to cut funding of any organization worldwide that supported birth control? Just like Reagan did before him.

[calimary]

5. And he'd set up his Justice Department to go after a Number One

priority: pornography. Remember that ridiculously embarrassing episode with john ashcroft and the bare-breasted statue? THAT was what the Justice Department was going to be focussing on in this new era. And yes, cheney was put in charge of a terrorism task force - straight off. AND IT DID NOT - repeat - NOT MEET FOR EIGHT MONTHS. NOTHING. NADA. Pushed off the back burner, even. As with the call to serve his country when he was a young man with hair - he had "other priorities."

And by the way...

I can recall reading something back then quoting cheney as saying another of his priorities coming in to the new regime was to restore the power of the executive branch. That, in recent years, it had been rendered no longer powerful enough. Damn! Wish I could remember where I saw that.

[liberalmuse]

4. That's what I remember, but it seems we are in another reality.

This is why we should not completely trust history. The Bushies are arrogantly trying to rewrite what happened 5 years ago. Luckily they have zero credibility with most of the earth's population.

[Old and In the Way]

6. I totally concur - great post - welcome aboard.

The Chris Wallace interrogation and attempted character assassination of Bill Clinton's legacy was a wake-up call to us all. The Syndicate is desparately trying to erase our history from the mid-90's through 9/11. They need a new history that absolves them of all responsibility for 9/11. Because 3000 innocent Americans (and visitors) died thatt day. They breached their oath of Office and are liable for their deriliction of duty. Impeachment and a criminal trial for the negligent manslaughter of the 9/11 victims is totally justified.

They had no interest in fighting terror....they were planning their hostile takeover of Iraqi National Petroleum. They did everything possible to lower the focus on AQ terror. I have no doubt that they downplayed the warnings...they may even have let the event happen - consider that invasion plans of Afhghanistan were already on Dimson's desk awaiting his return to DC....wouldn't they need a trigger event to justify? I have no doubt that this was the opening of the PNAC plan. Once on the ground in the ME, they would immediately pivot East to Iraq.

Condi must be really sweating it now. She's been thrown into the ring to defend her role and her husb..,pResident on 9/11. But how can there be? There is nothng tangible in the record that supports their defense. Guilty as charged. Take everyone connected with this administration and rid us all of them at once.

[Old and In the Way]

9. A very detailed timeline on the Bush-Cheney War on Terror, pre-9/11,

is quite warranted. I'd love to see a Wiki created that includes all relevant acts this administration took to deal with terror, pre-9/11. And a 2nd page that details what they didn't do (or did do to reduce the US fight against OBL/AQ).


The former ought to fill-up 1 paragraph.....the latter would be most enlightening.

[acmavm]

7. The guy came in on a stolen election so nothing he ever did

at anything that he's been squatting in our White House is okay.

Are you saying that he's not to be blamed for not looking at the terrorist reports in the PDBs because he was so damn busy with his cronies trying to figure out how to screw us domestically and rob us blind with corporate give aways? The destruction of the environment? The energy meetings that Unca Dick was chairing?

Fuck that!

[kentuck]

8. Yep...

The key to the truth is in those first eight months.

[Parisle]

10. Heartily Agreed, Kentuck

---- That was when the PNAC was setting up shop and preparing for the dirty work that was yet to come. All the pro-corporate moves were a given,.... the Energy Panel's secret meetings were a darkening of the terrain,... but in those first 8 months lay the underlying DNA of the entire Bush-PNAC junta,...

[kentuck]

11. In ABC's, The Path to 9/11, they completely skipped the first 8 months

They went straight from the Clinton years to the buildings falling down. They could have found the "path to 9/11" if they had only looked in those first 8 months, in my opinion.

[dback]

12. Wasn't there a "Bush scorecard of Evil" for his first couple years?

Somewhere out there on the web--it was incredibly comprehensive, and detailed day-by-day every piece of legislature Bush rammed through, every office he closed or defunded, etc.

It would be a damning eight-month "priority" list indeed, if John and Jane Public ever got a look at it.

[godai]

13. Bush's "Excessive" Vacation

"Couric highlighted for Howard Fineman of Newsweek how according to the Washington Post, by the end of this vacation, Bush will have spent 42 percent of his presidency "either at vacation spots or en route. Does that sound excessive compared to other Presidents in the past or not?" Fineman declared: "Well when you add it all up it sure does." Fineman stressed how "most Americans don't get a month of vacation straight. And if George Bush has one potential political weakness it's that people think he's not in touch with the reality of most American's lives. That he spends too much time about the concerns of rich people and so forth." But, Fineman, conceded, "this is a guy who is completely proud not to be seen as a workaholic. Not only is he trying to avoid his father's mistakes. He's in many ways trying to be the anti-Bill Clinton who many people felt spent entirely too much time in the office.""

http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2001/cyb20010809.asp

This is from August 9, 2001. A month later, his lack of attention to the important issue of terrorism would come back to haunt him, basically causing a nervous breakdown of guilt, the consequences of which we still suffer today. Nearly half of his presidency before Sept 11 was vacation. Clinton tried, * did not try.