Did George W. Bush Play A Role in 9/11

CIA vs. FBI It's true that there was data available on the terrorists, at various levels in the FBI and CIA. And if anyone in those two organizations had gotten together and compared notes, 9/11 might have been prevented. Unfortunately, in those days the only place where those two bureaucracies intersected was at the top -- in the National Security Council. And because the information each organization had didn't amount to much by itself, neither dataset was deemed important enough to send up to the decision makers who might have put two and two together. A tragic error. But it is astonishing that the Left is actually using this to show that Bush did something wrong. Let's suppose that, on his first day in office, George W. Bush had foreseen all the potential problems and had ordered information-sharing at very low levels between the FBI and CIA. Do you know how hard it is to get entrenched bureaucracies to change the way they do business? Anyone who knows about the screaming and hair-pulling that went on right after World War II, when Truman moved to combine the War Department and Navy Department into the Department of Defense will realize that even in that celebrated case, the interservice rivalry continued. The FBI and CIA did not invent noncooperation. Even to get their computers to be able to read each other's files would have been a nightmare. Which of them would have to give up all their old equipment and change to new software? Who would fund that massive change? But all of this is moot. Because the moment President Bush breathed a word about intending to get the FBI and CIA to share information, prior to 9/11, he would have been crucified in the press. Why? Because there is a strict legal separation between the two services. To keep the CIA from spying on American civilians, it is limited to gathering data abroad. The FBI had a monopoly on domestic counter-intelligence. When either service had information they thought the other might need, they passed it along, of course -- they were and are loyal Americans. The trouble is, the FBI was never in a position to know what information the CIA might actually need, and vice-versa. The best they could do was guess. If President Bush had attempted to change this situation, the civil libertarian lobby would have had his head on a plate. It was only after 9/11 proved how devastating the consequences of separation could be that it became possible to break a few chinks in that thick wall between the bureaucracies. In other words, it was always desirable to have information sharing, in order to do a good job; but it was also desirable never to have information sharing, in order to protect the civil liberties of citizens. Without a direct and obvious threat to American security -- a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 -- Americans cared a lot more about the latter than the former problem. Airline Info Gathering And the situation hasn't changed. There was enough data available, prior to 9/11, to intercept all of the terrorists -- if the government were allowed to use the same information about Americans that corporations are using to track us all the time. I have seen a completely convincing demonstration, from a corporate security firm that uses fuzzy data searches to find significant intersections between people using credit cards and driver's licenses to move through America, which revealed the following: If the CIA had plugged the names of the couple of terrorists known to them into that software, all the other terrorists would have been identified before 9/11. And when they all purchased airplane tickets for flights on the same day, even the dumbest guy in government -- heck, even an "anti-war" college professor! -- would have known to detain them and keep them from boarding their planes. But if that had happened, guess what? Even if the government announced, "Major Terrorist Threat Blocked by Quick Action," we would have dozed through the news reports, wouldn't we? And the civil libertarians would have kept the courts tied up for years, because of course the government had no right to spy on the airline ticketing system and so they "shouldn't" have found any information about ticket purchases by anyone. The World Trade Center would still be standing, but the Bush administration would quite possibly have fallen -- as a result of having succeeded in preventing that national disaster. Personally, I couldn't care less if the government knows when I'm flying. Delta already knows, and I don't get to elect anybody who's working there. If by letting the government know who is buying every ticket on every plane, I could have a better chance of getting home alive, I'd let them have that information in a heartbeat. It's not a secret. Everybody sees each other on that plane. Does anybody seriously have an expectation of "privacy"? But even after 9/11, it was impossible to get civil libertarians to allow the government even to study the feasability of such a data-tracking system. If you doubt me, ask Admiral Poindexter, who was shredded in the media for trying. Preemption When George W. Bush and his national security team took office, they immediately began to make preparations to eliminate the threat of terrorism, instead of just slapping bandaids on the wounds. They recognized that Saddam posed a continual threat, to his neighbors and to his own people. Something would have to be done about Iraq -- they were firing on or targeting our planes several times a week, and thanks to greedy "allies" like France and Germany and "friends" like Russia, the so-called sanctions were giving Saddam plenty of money to keep his hideous regime alive. Likewise, they knew that the Taliban in Afghanistan was harboring Al Qaeda; that Pakistan was also helping the Al-Qaeda cause; that Iran and Syria were actively funding and training anti-Western and anti-Israeli terrorists and sheltering them from international police efforts; and that other nations like Sudan, Libya, and Yemen were playing footsie with the terrorists and getting away with everything they thought they could. The trouble was, war is not just a military action, it's a political one as well. There was no way, prior to 9/11, that the Bush administration could have got Congressional support for a preemptive attack on Afghanistan. And Iraq always required exactly the solution that we have been imposing for the past year. This is why President Bush's father did not take out Saddam when he had the chance back in 1991: without Saddam's repressive regime, every would-be dictator in Iraq would have made his play for the top spot then, just as they're doing now. So we couldn't get rid of Saddam until we had the national will to stick with the job until a strong government with popular support could fill the power vacuum. It is not a "failure" of our policy that Iraq is suffering from attempted rebellions -- the best hope for Iraq's future is for these warlords to make their play while our troops are still there to slap them down and clean them out. Likewise, it's not a "failure" of our policy that now, absent the Taliban, opium production in Afghanistan is twenty times higher than it was under the Taliban. That sort of thing always happens in times of uncertainty and transition. The question is never between a choice that is all good and a choice that is all bad. Every good choice has bad consequences, too, and every bad choice was made because it seemed to offer benefits. Even though the Bush administration understood that the only way to eliminate terrorism was to transform the governments that sponsored it, they could not take action until they could marshal the political will. In other words, the only way of preventing something like 9/11 was not possible, politically, until after something like 9/11 had galvanized the public into supporting drastic action. The "Might Have Been" Problem Successful disaster prevention always looks unnecessary, because after all, nothing bad happened. Failure to prevent a disaster always looks inexcusable, because we forget that the will to take drastic action was not present until afterward. The political leaders of the Left are now criticizing the Bush administration for not doing the very things for which, if they had done them, they would have been savagely attacked by the very same people. Franklin Roosevelt saw in the 1930s that war with Germany was necessary and ultimately unavoidable. He also knew that if Britain and Russia fell to Hitler, America's eventual war would be infinitely harder to win. So even though the American people had no will to go to war before Pearl Harbor, FDR persuaded, cajoled, and arm-twisted Congress into providing enough military aid to Britain and Russia that they did not fall; and when we did enter the war, we were far closer to being ready than we had been back in 1917. Yet after Pearl Harbor, there was no shortage of critics eager to charge Roosevelt with not having done enough -- ignoring the fact that he had done all that he could. George W. Bush did all that he could to prepare to rid the world of Islamic terrorism prior to 9/11; and because of 9/11, he finally got the political support to make it possible to begin the real job. Right now, though, the Left is doing everything it can to blame him for everything he did and everything he didn't do. He's being blamed for not taking preemptive action in Afghanistan, and for taking preemptive action in Iraq. In other words, Bush's critics are simply taking hold of every tool they can find to try to block his reelection. It's the lowest form of politics, to throw rocks at the guy who's leading us with amazing success in a war that was forced upon us by our enemies. These are a few of my arguements but I have plenty more