After
watching Dr. Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, I realized what
the anecdote really means to her and others in this administration:
No matter what others think, stay “on point” long enough and
people will eventually come to believe you. Case in point
is the Bush Administration 9/11 talking point/mantra, simultaneously
fed to the press by Dr. Rice and former White House Press Secretary
Ari Fleischer in May, 2002. In response to a question about
the President's apparent inactivity in the face of terrorist
threat intelligence prior to September 11, 2001, Fleischer stated, "The
president did not receive information about the use of airplanes
as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack
that had not been foreseen."
Rice’s
2002 riff on
the mantra: "I don't think anybody could have predicted…that they
would try to use an airplane as a missile. Had this president
known a plane would be used as a missile, he would have acted
on it."
Dr. Rice essentially repeated herself
when she appeared before the 9/11 Commission, two years later.
However, she carefully narrowed the focus. "No one could
have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon,
into the World Trade Center," she said. The President “would
have moved heaven and earth” to avoid such an outcome.
President Bush made
a statement to the same effect on the first day of the televised
hearings, then repeated himself at his April
13 press conference: “[H]ad I had any inkling whatsoever
that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings
we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country,” said
Bush, in his inimitable, slightly annoyed tone.
Silver bullet
defense
The
Bush Administration’s
intent is obvious: to convince the world that the President
had no actionable intelligence that would have allowed
him to hinder or mitigate the 9/11 tragedy.
The
wording of the mantra is critical. Though repeatedly warned, the White House
only found time to approve an unimplemented domestic terrorism
plan on September 4, 
2001, a full 225 days into their administration. It
is also important because it dismisses any and all warnings
the Bush Administration received prior to 9/11 that could have
been acted upon. Intelligence information about an impending
al-Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001 was not only described
as "chatter," it was dismissed as "chatter." The
information did not prompt the National Security Advisor to
call daily meetings on the subject, as the Clinton Administration
had done based on similar information during the millennium
plot crisis. Nor did the information prompt an antiterrorism
task force, eventually led by Vice President Cheney, to hold
a single meeting prior to September 11, 2001.
"We had no indication that terrorists would use airplanes as missiles to
attack the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001," means that the administration
may have known that there was an al-Qaeda plan to hijack planes in the US, but
it didn't know terrorist would use planes to fly into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. This administration may have known
that the World Trade Center towers continued to be prime terrorist targets following
the 1993 Ramzi Yousef-led bombing, and the administration may have known that
terrorists planned to use planes as missiles. The stationing of anti-aircraft
missiles to protect the G8 foreign ministers summit in Genoa in the summer of
2001 indicated such awareness.
Finally, "We
had no indication that terrorists would use airplanes as missiles
to attack the World Trade Center on 
September 11, 2001," means
that no matter what we may discover through the work of the
9/11 Commission, the very inquisitive and effective 9/11 victims
lobby, declassified Presidential Daily Briefs, best selling
books by former Bush Administration officials and so on, we
will never find that the Bush Administration knew the day an
actual attack on the World Trade Center would take place. Therefore,
as Dr. Rice put it, "There was no silver bullet that could
have prevented the 9/11 attacks."
Of course, even this pithy statement – a certain candidate for a new Bush
Administration talking point – doesn't say there was nothing that could have
been done by this administration to prevent the 9/11attacks. Rather, it says
there was no silver bullet that could have done it. This is factual
because, quite literally, a single silver bullet most certainly would not
foil a coordinated effort by a small group of committed, intelligent, and
well-supported opponents who saw themselves as soldiers engaged in a holy
war. Figuratively, no single act may have prevented a terrorist attack,
but possibly the urgent focus of the combined resources of the US government
could have. According to the 9/11 Commission testimony of former Bush
counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, that kind of effort seems to have
prevented the implementation of the planned millennium terrorist plot against
targets in the US.
Who profits?
A fair question in
contrast is simply, "What advantage would be gained by
this administration in not actively countering a threat to
US national security?" A quick look at recent and
distant American history may be illuminating. Back in
January of 2001, President Bush was the minority-elected leader
of a seriously divided populace. His approval ratings
hovered between 45 and 55 percent with potentially negative
publicity on the horizon due to personal and professional connections
with the leaders of the failed Enron Corporation. President
Bush needed an opportunity to redefine himself in order to
be competitive for a second term, keeping in mind that no US
President elected by a minority of the popular vote has ever
been re-elected in US history.
President Bush also needed a way to repay a constituency
of supporters from the business community, of which Enron
was one of his largest contributors,
interested in the largesse only the US Government could provide through
deficit spending. As the documentation brought
to light by former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neil
indicated, a war with Iraq was in the
plan of the Bush Administration from the moment it came to power. Nothing
justifies deficit spending quite as well as a war.
From the economic stimulus of extra battle pay to soldiers, spent
by their families living in and around US military bases located
in the largely Republican
South, to hundreds of thousands of dollars per bomb purchased from defense
contractors, a war with Iraq would not only be a comfortably winnable
major operation, but also good for business. There was only one problem. The
US populace was in no mood for a war with Iraq prior to September 11, 2001. A
failing domestic economy marked by the loss of millions of US jobs was on
the minds of the millions of US workers who lost those jobs and the millions
more who feared they might lose their own. The people of the
US weren't just singing out of key, they were singing a song the Bush
Administration
didn't know.
Remembering the Alamo, the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor,
the Gulf of Tonkin, and the American public’s reaction to many similar events, the Administration
wagered that an attack upon Americans was a sure way to unify public opinion,
turn attention away from domestic problems, and pave the way for war. History
shows that Americans "spoiling for a fight" after a public tragedy
don't need much justification, or truth, for that matter, as a cause for
war – just a direction to point their "righteous indignation." A
jingoistic, pseudo patriotic, "us versus them" mentality is
a perfect tool to silence dissent and to prosecute, legally or socially,
those who
refuse to be muzzled.
Following September 11, President Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed
as he was transformed in an instant from an embattled minority-elected
President
to Commander-In-Chief of a nation suddenly gripped with fear. The historically
predictable, revenge-inspired war cry now had Americans singing the same
song the Bush Administration desired and required only that the “key” be
changed from a shadowy, ill-defined war on terrorism to an unsanctioned,
full scale invasion of the once sovereign nation of Iraq.
Over the past three
years, Dr. Rice and the Bush Administration played in a key
that supported their political futures until the rest of the
US came to them.
James Culver,
Jr. is an African American expatriate writer living in Germany.
