Politics

Interesting article in the Washington Post:

A conservative group is suing the Bush administration for access to documents about last fall’s anthrax attacks, asserting that top officials might have known the bioterrorist attack was coming.

…

Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, said administration officials said last fall that some White House staff members had begun taking the antibiotic Cipro on Sept. 11, weeks before the anthrax attacks were made public.

“We believe that the White House knew or had reason to know that an anthrax attack was imminent or underway,” Klayman said. “We want to know what the government knew and when they knew it.”

Good column in the SF Chronicle, courtesy of Sam:

Is It OK To Hate Bush? In which the president’s carefully orchestrated dumb-guy shtick proves hollow and dubious

Can someone explain to me why I should even consider voting for one of the 2 major parties at this point? The people in charge are too stupid to figure out how to make the world safer. They’re doing everything they can to destroy what good will we had from the rest of the world after 9/11.

Gephardt Backs War on Terror

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said yesterday he supports military action “to terminate the threat” from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but said he is “deeply concerned” that the administration has moved too slowly to improve homeland defenses.

Gephardt, a prospective 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, offered broad support for President Bush’s war on terrorism. He endorsed views outlined in the president’s commencement speech at West Point on Saturday, saying that, with the new threat of global terrorism, the United States must be “ready to strike, not just deter.”

The latest “Get Your War On” episode was published on May 22 and I hadn’t even noticed until today.

Tom Tomorrow’s blog has a story on Bush’s visit with Brazil’s President, in which he asked, “Do you have blacks too?”

The original story is in Der Spiegel. I’m not surprised this one didn’t make it into the U.S. papers.

I suppose this could be an urban legend, but the point of the story is that with Bush we’re not sure. I don’t think we could imagine Clinton or Carter or even G. Bush I asking such a thing. With Bush II, it seems possible.

I’ve been reading this essay: The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies, by Bernard Weiner, on the always useful Common Dreams web site. While I don’t subscribe to the full conspiracy theory aspect of this, I think there are some things worth considering.

My take on this is that the Bush administration knew that something was likely to happen, and decided to take a calculated risk that it wouldn’t be too bad. Their other alternative was to panic the U.S. and possibly bring our already shaky economy into a deep recession. Perhaps they feared that if they had warned us and nothing happened, they would have been roundly criticized for “crying wolf”.

The problematic aspect of this: Apparently administration officials thought the risk was high enough that they changed their behavior over the summer to avoid the risk to themselves of commercial airline-based terrorism:

• Ashcroft stopped using commercial flights in July
• Bush, despite criticism over the amount of time he had spent on vacation (42% of his presidency), spent all of August in Crawford, Texas
• Newsweek reported that on September 10, “a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns”

It seems they weren’t the only people with advance warning:

• San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned by “an airport security man” on September 10 to rethink his flight to New York for the next day
• Many members of a Bronx mosque were warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on September 11

It would be easier to brush the author off as just another “conspiracy theorist” if the Bush administration hadn’t refused to allow any serious investigation of the intelligence failings that led to September 11. If administration officials felt that the warnings they had were enough to warrant changes in travel plans for the President and members of the cabinet, and failed to warn the American people, I think it’s fair to say their behavior was treasonous.