The Bush administration wanted to potspone the 9/11 hearings until after the election, presumably because they didn't want the Democrats to put a partisan spin on what should really be a learning (and not blaming) process.
From what I can tell, Kerry et al are being pretty quiet about the hearings. But just to be safe, the Bushies are on the defensive.
This defensive maneuvering is turning into a rather tedious series of non sequiteurs. Bush is saying that there wasn't any specific and credible information that Al Qaeda was going to hijack airplanes and use them as missiles on September 11th. Condi Rice claims that a PDB paragraph was "historic," as if these it's common for these briefings to be history lessons.
I don't think that even the most craven Bush critic would accuse Bush of ignoring a warning that actually gave the date and method of the attack. Critics have to use some kind of reasonable man test, such as "given the increasing probability of a terrorist attack in US homeland targets in the fall of 2001, did the government do enough to investigate possible attacks and take countermeasures?"
The Bushies are saying that they took Al Qaeda seriously, as if the USS Cole, embassy bombings, etc., gave them (or any administration) any choice. But that doesn't mean AQ got much more than a passing nof before the morning of 9/11.
On the other hand, it seems kind of silly to argue about a foregone conclusion - the federal government failed to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In hindsight it's always easy to find evidence that pointed to the attack.
The truth is that at any given time, there must have been - and still are - hundreds of thousands of pieces of informnation, of which a specific assembly of a very specific few would have shown what was going to happen. The Bushies should point that out as the core problem, openly regret that things weren't done better, and make much out of all that's been done to improve afterwards.
The political focus should be on the fact that the Bush administration were dismissive of the Clinton administration's warnings about Al Qaeda simply because they hated Bill Clinton. That's probably not the purpose of the 9/11 commission's work, though.
Sent from my Blackberry
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