Truth - Al Franken [13]
But by September 14, Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, had pulled himself together enough to put another survey in the field. His findings stunned an already stunned nation. Bush’s approval rating had shot up to 86 percent. A week later it reached 90 percent, the highest ever recorded since the Gallup Poll first asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt is handling his job as President?” And that was way back during the Roosevelt administration!
What had Bush done in those critical days to become so spectacularly popular? Well, he had stood on a pile of rubble and delivered a rallying cry via bullhorn that I thought was genuinely stirring. Also, he had made me and two hundred million-plus other Americans cry with his speech at the National Cathedral. And then he had declared a war on terror. (Although it turned out he meant “Iraq.”) Then, he called the war on terror a “crusade,” which to many listeners, sounded like “Crusade”—which is probably why he didn’t get all the way up to 100 percent.
But something else had happened in the period between September 10 and September 14 that was more important than all those other things combined. George W. Bush had failed to prevent the most deadly terrorist attack in American history.
In my last book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, in the chapter “Operation Ignore,” I laid out in great detail how the Bush administration had ignored the terrorist threat until it was too late. The 9/11 Commission did an even better job than I did. Of course, they had more time, a bigger staff, and subpoena power. As an official, bipartisan body, the 9/11 Commission couldn’t come right out and say, as I did, that Bush had dropped the ball on terrorism over and over again from the minute he came into office. But anyone who reads the report can’t come to any other conclusion.
To me, the most infuriating passage deals with Bush’s nonreaction to the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief, memorably titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S.” The brief warned, among other things, that “al Qaeda members—including some who are U.S. citizens—have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.” Even worse, “FBI information . . . indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
The 9/11 Commission reported:
[The President] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether [then National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice had done so. He said that if his advisers had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That never happened.
If advisers had told him there was a cell? Can someone please tell me what else “al Qaeda members have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years,” maintaining “a support structure that could aid attacks,” could possibly mean?
Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission found that following the August 6 PDB,
We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11th between the president and his advisers about the possibility of a threat of al Qaeda attack in the United States.
It is my firm belief that President Bush never read the August 6 PDB. Or if he did, he did not have the reading-retention skills to pass the sixth-grade No Child Left Behind high-stakes exam. And it’s hard to imagine any higher stakes.
Not convinced? Answer this question: If he had read the PDB, why did Bush go into the classroom at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School just after Condoleezza Rice had told him that a commercial plane had struck the World Trade Center?
I know what you’re thinking. “Nobody thought it was terrorism at that point! I certainly didn’t.” Yeah, but, like the President,