National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice, a classically trained pianist and devout Christian, has been a popular spokesperson for the Bush Administration.  When speaking at the 51st National Prayer Breakfast last year, she shared an anecdote about her experience as a pianist for a Black Baptist church in California:

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.