Let us recap
Quote of not:
"Let's be as generous as possible," said one Republican strategist, who said he did not want to be quoted by name in criticizing the White House. "If voters believe Clarke, than Bush's greatest strength — his response to terrorism — is significantly eroded. This Clarke stuff is significantly bad for Bush."
9/11 Panel Provokes a Discussion the White House Hoped to Avoid
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON, March 27 — In the summer of 2001, according to witnesses interviewed by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 hijackings, President Bush was told repeatedly of terror warnings pouring into American intelligence agencies, mostly about threats overseas.
The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who briefed Mr. Bush on threats almost daily, "was around town literally pounding on desks saying that something is happening, this is an unprecedented level of threat information," said Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, who was quoted in a Congressional report last year.
But even as the warnings spiked in June and July that year, there appeared to be little sense of alarm at the White House, officials of the Central Intelligence Agency told the commission. It was not until Sept. 4 that Mr. Bush's national security team approved a plan intended to eradicate Al Qaeda and not until Sept. 10 that Mr. Tenet was told to put the plan into effect.
Now, nearly two and half years later, the issue of whether Mr. Bush and his advisers failed to respond adequately to the threat of terror before Sept. 11, 2001, has become the focus of intense scrutiny and debate in Washington.
The White House had long hoped to avoid just such a discussion of Mr. Bush's actions before the hijackings, fearing it would draw attention to the first months of his presidency rather than the period after Sept. 11 when he took military action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The White House had opposed the creation of the independent commission and for many months cooperated reluctantly with the panel.
White House fears were realized this week when Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, depicted the first months of the Bush presidency as a time of indecision and inaction on terrorism. Many of the preliminary findings of the commission supported the picture Mr. Clarke outlined in his new book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," published by Free Press.
Policy issues aside, the Bushistas made some serious blunders here, first of all by stonewalling the investigation and secondly by holding onto Clarke's book for three months. The combination indicates to me they knew Clarke would be trouble so they tried to hold the book off until the commission's time expired. The smart play would have been to get the inevitable investigation over with while your approval ratings were strong enough that challenging your spin would be difficult. And let's face it…American politics is the original Short Attention Span Theater. If all this had come out this time last year it would be over with already.
