Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [11]
With all that was happening in the days after September 11, how did you find the time to even begin thinking about protecting people named bin Laden? I’m amazed at your ability to multi-task.
As if bin Ladens Over America (“Air Laden?”) wasn’t enough, The Tampa Tribune reported that the authorities also found the time to help even more Saudis. Apparently, another Saudi jet, this one a private Lear jet (arranged by a private hangar owned by defense contractor Raytheon, which also happens to be a hefty GOP donor), was allowed to fly from Tampa on September 13 (during the air-travel lockdown) to Lexington, Kentucky, to drop off some members of the Saudi royal family to be with other Saudi royals who had been in Kentucky looking at horses. Two bodyguards for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were hired to travel along on the flight and they told their story to the Tribune about how the pilot revealed to them upon returning to Tampa that he had still another run to make to Louisiana.51
Why, Mr. Bush, was this allowed to happen?
A frightened nation struggled to get through those days after September 11. Yet, in the sky above us, the bin Ladens and Saudi royals jetted home.
I think we deserve an explanation.
Question #5: Why are you protecting the “Second Amendment rights” of potential terrorists?
Mr. Bush, in the days after September 11, the FBI began running a check to see if any of the 186 “suspects” the feds had rounded up in the first five days after the attack had purchased any guns in the months leading up to September 11. Using the instant background check files for gun purchases created under the Brady Bill, the FBI immediately found two of the suspects had indeed purchased weapons.52
When your attorney general, John Ashcroft, heard about this, he immediately shut the search down. He told the FBI that the background check files could not be used for such a search and these files were only to be used at the time of a purchase of a gun, not to find out information on law-abiding gun-toting citizens.53
So, the FBI was prohibited by Ashcroft from doing any further investigation as to whether those detained—because they were possible associates of the hijackers—had procured any weapons in the ninety days leading up to that fateful day. Why? Because even though all their other rights had been thrown out the window, your administration insisted that they still had one constitutional right that you were willing to protect: their sacred Second Amendment rights to bear arms and for the government not to know about it.
Mr. Bush, you can’t be serious! Is your administration so gun nutty and in the pocket of the National Rifle Association that, even though you have not given a nanosecond of thought to protecting the rights of any of the Arab-Americans you have arrested, detained, and harassed in the past two years, when it comes to their GUN rights, then all of a sudden you are the biggest defender of constitutional rights and civil liberties that the nation has ever seen?
Do you realize that when most Americans figure out you have protected potential terrorists by stymying a legitimate police investigation, they are going to run you and Dick and Reverend John out of Dodge with their own six-shooters of ballot boxes a-blazing?
I guess none of this should come as a surprise, considering what Mr. Ashcroft was up to in the summer of 2001. Instead of protecting the country from events like the one that was about to take place, the attorney general was busy trying to dismantle the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. He said that the government should not be keeping a database on gun owners and wanted the law changed so that the files were kept for only twenty-four hours!54
The Senate (and the public) did