Truth - Al Franken [16]
The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.
The Bush administration has never allowed the full text of that speech to become public, even though it would have been public if she had been able to deliver it. My guess is that it’s being withheld on national security grounds. After all, America’s enemies might be emboldened if they knew just how far the Bush team’s heads were up their asses during that critical period.
Many of us would look back at the events leading up to that horrible day and draw many lessons. The first of those lessons is to pay attention to your Presidential Daily Briefs. Another good one: If the Director of Central Intelligence tells you “the system is blinking red,” ask him what he’d like you to do about it. Also, if you insist on appointing Dick Cheney head of your Counterterrorism Task Force, make sure Cheney actually calls a meeting. Many, including me, have argued that Bush’s failure to do these things during his first eight months in office might have made the difference between preventing and not preventing the attacks.
But while you and I were sifting through old intelligence reports to understand what had gone wrong, he was looking at his poll numbers.
Bush took away a very different lesson: Take advantage of 9/11. 9/11 is good to you. If you want to invade Iraq, if you want an excuse for a rotten economy, if you want to get reelected—don’t forget: 9/11 is the gift that keeps on giving.
As I documented in the previous chapter, Bush used 9/11 to scare people. But that’s not all. He used it for pretty much everything. As the wife of blogger Dwight Meredith observed, 9/11 became Bush’s “little black dress.” Meaning he could slip it on for almost any occasion. Bush put on his little black dress to accuse Senate Democrats of not being sufficiently patriotic, to unravel Americans’ civil liberties, to make the case for drilling in ANWR, and even as an excuse not to allow prescription drugs to be reimported from Canada. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, he went a step further and accessorized his little black dress with a strand of Richard Perles.
He also wore his little black dress with pumps—when he was pumping his economic record. And, boy, did it need pumping. As late as January 2005, Bush was still the first president since Herbert Hoover not to have created one single new net job. I think this might have had something to do with his policy of borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars in order to provide tax cuts to the rich, who then invested the money in a particularly non-economically-stimulating fashion, by buying the bonds issued to pay for their tax cuts. But Bush had a more fashionable explanation for the job loss. As he said on October 6, 2004: “Because of the attacks of September 11 nearly a million jobs were lost in three months.”
Now, according to something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which provides statistics related to labor, the number of jobs reported lost either directly or indirectly because of 9/11 was 125,637. Sixty-two percent of those jobs were in either the air transportation or hospitality industries.
The 9/11 excuse for the prescription drug reimportation ban, for which the little black dress was borrowed by one of Bush’s henchmen, was just as nakedly false. In fact, it was debunked as soon as it was reported. Witness this AP report from August 12, 2004:
FDA WARNS OF TERRORIST PRESCRIPTION DRUG TAMPERING
WASHINGTON (AP)—“Cues from chatter” gathered around the world are raising concerns that terrorists might try to attack the domestic food and drug supply, particularly illegally imported prescription drugs, acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford says.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Crawford said Wednesday that he