Lieberman, in fact, submitted the bill in the Senate. There’s plenty more, and a lot more about Republican attempts to deny DHS employees the collective-bargaining rights that other federal employees have, as well as a bunch of the usual irrelevant riders. That stuff was fought against successfully, and won, by the Democrats in the final bill.
As a matter of fact, yes. Cite, please - despite that transparent use of “some Democrats” to imply “*the * or *most * or *mainstream * Democrats”.
Thanks for the assist, ElvisL1ves - I was off doing some IRL things (such things do exist, folks. Honest.)
I’d still like to see a quote from any Congressional Democrat stating that Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance and allowed them to happen in order to advance his plans to create the DHS, and thereby to create a police state, Razorsharp. I’m not stating categorically that such a quote doesn’t exist. I just find it highly unlikely.
Look, Bucko… when I say “some Democrats”, I mean some Democrats. It is a intellectually shallow tactic, to take someone’s written words and overtly spin them to mean something that is clearly not said.
As for your Leahy quote, surely you notice that Senators Leiberman and Spector, a Democrat and a Republican, introduced the legislation in the Senate.
Here’s another “cite”.
The introduction of legislation is the step that follows the proposal.
Maxine Waters went on NPR and made claims that Bush had prior knowledge of the 9-11 attack.
Cynthia McKinney called for an investigation into what Bush knew of the planned attacks prior to 9-11.
Howard Dean’s campaign insinuated that Bush had prior knowledge.
If you notice, I said
Such as the “Patriot Act” and “TIPS”, which has been maligned by Democrats, and some Republicans as well, (and rightly so) for trampling on certain Constitutional protections.
Patriot Act, TIPS, and police-state have most certainly been used in the same sentence.
Razorsharp,
Your cite does not back up your assertion. You said that Democrats had accused GWB of deliberately allowing 9/11 to happen. Your cite says that Tom Daschle accused Bush of ignoring warnings and “sitting on” evidence that could have perhaps prevented 9/11. That’s not the same thing. Daschle was not accusing Bush of being complicit in 9/11, he was accusing him of being asleep at the switch and not making terrorism a priority before 9/11. Charging Bush with negligence and indifference about terrorism pre 9/11 is not the same as actually accusing him “allowing” the attacks to happen in any sort of deliberate, cognizant or complicit sense of the word.
personally, I don’t know if 9/11 could have been prevented or not, but I do know that Bush ignored warnings from Clinton that he needed to make ObL and al Qaeda a priority.
A dollar says that razor will now try to come back with that canard about how Clinton could have arrested ObL and chose to let him go instead
First, on the question of the creation of the DHS, the administration initially tried to handle the need for coordination of security efforts by appointing Ridge to be the point man, without creating an entire new bureaucracy. That’s perfectly consistent with the administration’s professed preference for less government, not more. The administration maintained that a whole new department wasn’t necessary. In the face of calls from people from both sides of the aisle, the administration finally relented, and proposed the creation of the DHS. Creating a new cabinet-level agency was not an idea that sprang from the administration. They only proposed it when there was a clamor for them to do so.
So, a cite that says that “President Bush’s proposal to create the DHS…” doesn’t really tell us much. Sure, he proposed it, but only because his first solution to the problem was looking like a non-starter, and was provoking lots of criticism.
On the other question, the classic “What did he know and when did he know it,” I believe I see where the difficulty lies. As I read it, those public officials who claim that Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11 were saying that there was intelligence that indicated that an attack was coming (admittedly rather non-specific), but that Bush failed to act on it, either because he wasn’t paying sufficient attention, or because he didn’t give enough credence to the intelligence, or because he was suspicious of the source of the intelligence (Clinton administration holdovers who had been pushing the “watch out for Al Qaeda” line).
That’s not quite the same as charging that Bush knew that the attacks were coming, but decided that letting the attacks take place would be a good thing, because it would allow him to advance a particular agenda. That, I think you’d agree, would be an impeachable offense. A President who did that would be a candidate for the firing squad.
I believe Bush’s critics were charging him with incompetence, rather than a traitorous conspiracy. (For purposes of this discussion, of course, we have to ignore the lunatic fringe - I’m talking instead about members of Congress, the mainstream media, etc.)
By the way, here’s Cynthia McKinney’s statement on the subject. I think it’s fairly clear that she’s not making the charge that Bush knew about the attacks, but decided to let them happen. She’s saying that we had a major intelligence screw-up, and we’d better find out what happened. Which is precisely the belief that led to the creation of the 9/11 Commission.
Oh, and what Diogenes said. (That’ll teach me to preview!)
No more intellectually shallow than bringing up a position held by the fringe and offering it as something significant to the discussion, friend. It’s a common tactic best nipped in the bud, which is what I was doing. “Some Republicans” may have wanted to nuke Iraq after 9/11, but what would it serve to try to debate that?
I had indeed mentioned Lieberman.
You demanded cites and were given some. You offered cites for your own assertion, but have not presented any that mean what you said they mean. The rest of your argument has already been addressed above. Early Out’s account is accurate - the charges against Bush are of complacency before the fact and bungling after it, not complicity.
Well, just what is being insinuated when Hillary Clinton parades around the Senate floor, holding up a newspaper headline that proclaimed, “BUSH KNEW”?
If Bush did know, and allowed it to happen, then it goes a little bit further than, as Early Out and Elvis1ives describe as, “complacency” or “of being asleep at the switch”.
The popular phrase, “Bush Knew”, that has even become a bumper-sticker, implies that Bush allowed the attacks to occur. If he allowed them to happen, there had to be a reason. Why? To further an agenda to curtail certain inconvenient Constitutional protections? To create a justification to invade Iraq?
Hardly any indication of any degree of clairvoyance, just a little CYA.
Well, what do you expect me to do after you have given me the perfect set-up. Speaking of canards, you again try to put the onus on Bush by saying that Bush ignored warnings from Clinton, this, after I have previously provided a “cite” that Clinton’s National Security Advisor was approached on four different occasions with opportunities to hit Bin Laden, but did not take action. And like I said, the terrorists responsible for the first bombing of the WTC had every intention of bringing the towers to the ground and killing as many innocent Americans as possible. They did not achieve their ends, so they had to make a second attempt. Clinton isevery bit as, if not more complicit than Bush in allowing the terrorists a second opportunity.
You’d have preferred to see Hillary parading around the senate floor, holding up a newspaper headline that proclaimed, “BUSH CLUELESS”? As you know, there were all sorts of bits of information floating around, that if strung together might have allowed the administration to prevent the attack. That’s an important observation. It DESERVES attention.
Parading around the senate floor waving a copy of a 500 page report does not have the same impact as parading around the senate floor waving a headline, and no one on the right side of the aisle seemed to be willing to bring up our intelligence failures. Hillary gave the issue the attention it deserves.
Wrong. Remember the cruise-missile strikes? Oh yeah, that was just dog-wagging. Read Clarke’s book for the most succinct account - the other occasions involved excessive risk of deaths of innocents, something that hasn’t seemed to bother Bush.
He failed, but not for lack of doing his damnedest. The criticism of Clinton laid on him by the Reps before 9/11 was that Clinton was *obsessed * with getting Bin Laden. Bush has made it clear, since just a few months after the attacks, that he doesn’t even think it *matters * that we get Bin Laden. The results have been equivalent, sure, but do not equate that with intentions - the odds of an obsessed leader succeeding in a goal are always better than the odds of an apathetic one.
“Bush Knew” what, you ask? That Al Qaeda was a serious threat to US security, and that he’d been warned by the people with direct experience to be proactive about the problem. What motive did he have for not doing that? There are plenty of “conspiracy theories”, but a combination of mental laziness and ideologuism, heavily flavored with personal hatred of Clinton, is sufficient to explain it.
Are you referring to the strike on the asprin factory? Yeah, I remember. Our finest hour.
No, you’re wrong. Clinton wasn’t concerned with the deaths of innocents while bombing Yugoslavia into submission to the dictates of Globalism. In fact, when confronted with the civilian body-count, Secretary of State Albright replied that it was worth the price.
No, that’s not what the phrase means, and you know it. “Bush knew” insinuates that Bush knew of the impending attacks, and allowed them to happen for political purposes.
Oh, now I see the light. Bush did know, but allowed it to happen. THE BASTARD!!
You’re being a trifle oversensitive.
Is there some reason you;re omitting the simultaneous attack on the training camp in Afghanistan, where there was good intelligence that Osama himself and his entire leadership were?
Time for a cite on that last. As to the former, do you really think Clinton was trying to establish a new American empire in the Balkans? Is that how it worked out? The military work there was to *stop * the ethnic killings and at least *reduce * the body count, and that is exactly what happened. Anything further I could say to you about Clinton’s bloodlust is Pit material. Do you also believe in the Clinton Death List?
If you want to know what the phrase means to those using it, why not just ask them what they mean? Or listen to them when they tell you?
It had to have been “dog wagging”, cause Clinton and Berger did ignore other opportunities to hit Bin Laden, thus allowing for a second attempt to bring down the WTC.
I was mistaken, Secretary of State, Albright made that statement in regards to the half-million men, women and children that died as a result of the embargo on Iraq, not regarding the civilian deaths in the bombing of Yugoslavia. But what was it you said?
And it bothered Clinton?
When Clinton soothed America’s apprehension over sending troops to Bosnia, he said that the troops would be home in a year. What’s it been now, a decade, and with no end in sight? See, Clinton didn’t just lie about sex.
Those were the “opportunities” where intelligence was unclear on whether bin Laden was actually where we thought he was, right?
Ah, I miss the days when Presidents tried not to act on iffy intelligence…
Besides the fact that your statement here is remarkably cite-free, it also has total f-d up logic. There may have been some possible opportunities to hit Bin Laden but there were also various risks associated with these opportunities and decisions had to be made in a very limited time frame. You pretend to know how the decision was arrived at even though you have absolutely no basis for doing so.
Well, noone is going to predict the future perfectly. But, since you bring this up…Let’s compare to Iraq. How many U.S. troops are therein the Balkans? How many have been killed? Are they there in simply a peacekeeping capacity or is it a much more difficult and dangerous situation like in Iraq? Has this put a strain on our resources to the extent that we had to extend troops’ tours of duty and turn reservists into essentially full time soldiers? Did we have major scandals there like U.S. troops humiliating and torturing prisoners that have immeasurably hurt our standing in the world and exposed our troops to reprisals in kind in the future?
How wrong was Clinton in regards to how the Balkans situation worked out in comparison to how wrong the Bush Administration was in regards to Iraq?
Anyone else get the impression that if Clinton was a Republican, Razorsharp wouldn’t give a flip about all this?
“Ignore”, you say? “Cite”, I say. jshore handled the rest already.
Eye-rack, Yugowhateverthehell, shit, they’s all jist funny-talkin’ furriners anyway, raght? A good ass-kickin’ do 'em all some good, huh? And, for the second time on this point, cite?
As the examples of passing up a couple of opportunities to bomb Bin Laden due to the risk of innocent deaths (again, read Clarke’s book - he was there) shows, yes, of course.
He made no such commitment, despite the urging to do so by the same faction that now *protests * about Congressional “interference” with wars. Unless you got a cite for that either, bro.
There *has * been an end to the widespread ethnic killings, and an end to the Milosevic regime that sponsored it. The Tudjman regime too, if we’re being honest about the Croats’ role. I thought you cared about such things.