You want precident? Sure. Jimmy Carter announced the secret B-1 bomber program because Reagan was accusing him of being soft on the military. Reagan leaked a program himself, as I recall.
In October, the Bush administration had to scramble and beg the publisher of the Washington post to withhold sensitive information that had been leaked to him by someone who attended a national security briefing. I’m sure you remember this - Bush publically castigated the members of Congress who attended (without naming names), and threatened to keep them out of the loop on future briefings because of it. We don’t know what that information was, because they were successful in containing it.
Speaking of Clinton, when he left office he pardoned two government officials who were actually convicted for leaking sensitive information to the media.
Oh, and you can cut out the nonsense about people having to ‘clean up after me’. I have always provided cites for my assertions when asked, as I just did. And if I couldn’t find cites when requested, I’ve retracted statements. This rarely happens. I’ll hold up my record for accuracy with anyone’s, thank you.
But since you just made a flat-out claim that turned out to be wrong (that congress has NEVER leaked), I don’t suppose I could ask for a cite or a retraction from you, hmn?
Speaking of which… Here’s one more cite for you, from CNN:
So, George Bush, Tom Daschle, AND Dick Gephardt agree that Congress has leaked sensitive information.
I’ve been out of the country for a while, but I seriously doubt that this is the case. Labeled as such by whom? Idiot party-liners? People like that have been throwing labels like that around for years and no one really listens to them. This thread is full of people criticizing Bush’s administration, and no one has labeled anyone Anti-American yet.
Regarding the OP, I think the situation is very simple: the president and his administration are busy enough as it is. Aside from doing their actual jobs, I’m sure they are already answering tons of questions from both of the committees presently investigating the case. Maybe having three committees working on it would be better. Maybe having five or twenty-three of them would be even more efficient. But you can only answer the same questions so many times while still trying to fulfill your duties as president.
If Bush is hiding something about pre-9/11 warnings (and I personally don’t think he is), I say leave it to the present committees to find out. Why waste more time when there’s a country to be run?
You say he is busy running the war, but that turns out not to be the case. If he has time to campaign for other peoples elections, then he certainly has time to answer for his lack of any real progress in the “war” on terror.
The airplanes were hijacked etc. by a bunch of deluded, pathetic losers from the Middle East, not white fatcats from Texas. As I know you are well aware. Kindly not to put words in my mouth.
The general idea here is that Big Oil’s worldview had (I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise) seeped pretty far into the Executive Branch, by way of campaign contributions and the old-fashioned buddy system etc. Part of that worldview being that “everyone” i.e. Big Oil would be better off if the Taliban were out, seeing as how they didn’t want to play ball re the pipeline. But you can’t just go in and trade blood for oil, you need a thinly veiled reason.
That reason turned out to be Osama bin Laden (or as W would say, “is he related to the bin Ladens that gave me all that money?”). ObL = known to be hanging out with impunity in Afghanistan. ObL = known to have declared a fatwa on the USA. ObL = whose al-Qaeda network was known to be planning an attack in the USA. If al-Qaeda were to let off a little truck bomb or something in the US somewhere, it would give plenty of reason to go in and get a friendlier regime installed in Kabul. Plus the way a crisis makes any President look good, and gets Americans thinking about God & the flag & our boys in uniform & all those supposedly nonpartisan things that the GOP likes to play up for better ratings.
Naturally nobody but the most demented barbarian could have imagined a coordinated series of suicide hijackings with 3000 deaths across 3 states, and I have taken pains to say that this is obviously NOT the foreknowledge that the White House is hiding. But there are those who wish to put these words in my mouth.
So, in other words, you’re saying that the adminsitration- as influenced by Big Oil- was being lax on actually preventing a terrorist attack because it would make a good excuse for war. Am I understanding that correctly?
ha ha ha, I’ve been DYING for somebody else to come up with this very same thought. They hunted Clinton down for a personal problem, but when something that could turn out to be a real issue needs to be investigated, God forbid, “You’re unamerican.” Now I’m not saying that it will turn out to be true about Bush, it does bear looking into, but three commitees sound like too much to me. It always ends up as a big media circus, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s not all a little of “look at what this hand is doing…”
I didn’t say he was busy running the war, I said that he and his administration (not only he) are busy running the country. I am willing to be realistic and grant that a sitting president is going to devote a certain amount of his time to campaigning. Although a less cynical view might be that in the process of campaigning, he is also acting as the face of the administrative branch and keeping it in contact with the American people, which I believe also falls under his list of duties as president.
I agree that too much money and perhaps too much time is spent campaigning, but there are more sides to it than just getting the man back into the White House for another term.
If there are already two comittees working on the case, and he is answering their questions, why waste time and money answering the same questions from another comittee? How many comittees is enough? I think George W. Bush is a total goober, but I don’t see any wrongdoing here.
And regardless of how shamelessly the Republicans acted toward Bill Clinton in the past, turnabout is not fair play.
It’s, “Let the little scamps take their best shot, and then we come down on them like a ton of bricks.” Which still means that the actual attack that transpired came as a great surprise.
Stoid: Are you saying there is no war effort? That America’s interests in that area can’t be damaged?
I thnk you’re trying to set up a straw man here. So what if the war effort is unfocused and has poorly-defined goals for ‘winning’? Does that mean that intelligence leaks are okay?
For the record, I agree that the Bush administration is going wobbly on the war effort. They are contradictory, homeland defense is a joke, and the focus Bush had early on seems to have faded. I’m not a happy camper in that regard. But that’s really beside the point - intelligence leaks can do damage to an already creaky effort.
According to The Guardian, before the 9/11 attacks, John Ashcroft was sufficiently worried about terrorist threats that he began to travel around using a private charter jet (instead of commercial airliners), yet didn’t consider counter-terrorism to be a high priority worthy of support or budget increases.
As others have pointed out, wouldn’t this just encourage the Republicans to use more Clinton-style witchhunt tactics in the future?
“Wow, Bush is really up a creek, isn’t he?”
“But the Democrats aren’t taking advantage of it – I thought they would have tore him a new one, just like the way we did with Clinton.”
“You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Yeah – the Democrats are wimps!”
“Right! If they ever get the White House again, we can dump even more slime on 'em, and they won’t dare stand up to us!”
Somehow, the idea of one political party being allowed to do dirt to the other with no fear of reprisal strikes me as much worse than the (admittedly flawed) setup we have now.
[old man’s voice] Back in my day, before we accused anyone of treason, conspiracy to commit treason, negligent homicide, and dereliction of duty, we had at least some evidence. Dang whippersnappers. [/old man’s voice]
W is contacted by his shadowy friends in Big Oil. They want a pipeline going through Afghanistan, and they want it right away, as in over a year-and-a-half after Bush’s inauguration. Big Oil, of course, stands to make boatloads of money off of this pipeline, though in fact only a single company will actually own it, and it may not be an American company- it may end up being British or Russian- and adding supplies of Oil to the marketplace will only cause prices to go down, meaning 99% of Shadowy Big Oil will lose money, but one company will make money, but they’re still all aligned because they’re eeeeevil.
In any case. Big Oil tells Bush to go to war with the Taliban. Bush agrees, and decides to initiate the following plan- there’s rumor that al Qaida might strike again. If it does- and assuming it does, and assuming it does soon, and assuming the attack is something that garners actual attention- then Bush will declare war on Afghanistan. The fact that liberals across the country- commentators like Richard Cohen and E.J. Dionne, for example- are practically begging Bush to do something about the repressive regime in Afghanistan, the fact that Taliban destruction of ancient artifacts is gathering national attention and outrage, is not nearly enough incentive, since it certainly wasn’t the incentive necessary to take action in Bosnia or Kosovo. No, wait, it was. But still, we need to wait for an attack. And no pointing to old attacks- such as on the USS Cole- that killed servicemen in order to start an attack; no, we have to have new servicemen killed in order to get the war machine running.
Am I correct in the further fleshing out of your scenario? Or are you starting to understand exactly how mindbogglingly McKinney-Stonesque your accusation is? In order to benefit a group- which actually competes with each other- and actually there won’t be any known benefits while there are known flaws- W decides to let an attack happen that will certainly kill people rather than use the incredible amount of cassus belli already piled on his desk. The combinations of “absolutely amazingly competent to pull off such a conspiracy and have no one notice” with “for all the stupidest reasons in the world” are just stunning.
The Joint Cheifs of staff, pondering the possibilities of cooking up a brisk little war with Cuba? What nonsense!
A sitting President, selling arms to our sworn enemies and slipping the money off to foment civil war in a sovereign nation? Liberal bushwa!
A Presidential candidate sabotaging a peace conference, prolonging an agonizing and futile war for political gain? Febrile leftist fantasy!
A cabal of Republican in suits, conspiring to rip off an enitre state for millions of dollars, in a desperate attempt to cover up thier own inept cupidity? Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
As it happens, I find the Big Oil/Taliban theory kind of weak. But I’m a long way from saying it couldn’t have happened. So lets just have a good hard look anyway, whaddayasay?
The idea that Bush was told to go to war in Afghanistan by Big Oil from the moment he took office is off the mark. There had been negotiations with the Taliban (I think) starting during the Clinton administration, and they continued into 2001. In the summer of 2001 there was a delegation of Taliban governmental types who met with some oil companies in Texas to discuss the pipeline plans, but that conference led to nothing and ended in June or July. Then there was the supposed offer to the Taliban that they could be “carpeted in dollars or carpeted in bombs.” I don’t know if that carpeting quote is verified or not, but I think this is the genesis of the accusation against the current administration of willfull negligence.
But the thing you have to understand is that with Bush & Cheney having as close a bond to the energy industry a rumor like this will never go away. It’s not to say that Bush knew planes would be flown into the WTC, but that he/they knew something was up.
Do I believe it? Stranger things have happened, but the question of why Bush chose to ignore counterintelligence/counterterrorism pops up big time. I doubt it true, but the credibility of the administration in my eyes is lower than that of the Reagan administration.
Actually, I’m expressing that I believe the term "war effort’ to be a misnomer at best and propaganda at worst.
We are not at war. What we have on our hands, and have had since day one, is crime. Terrorism is a crime. Afghanistan’s government was facilitating the crime by sheltering the criminals, giving us something that looked sort of warrish, but that’s over now. Now it’s just crazy motherfuckers committing horrible crimes.
I think the administration is milking the idea of “war” for all it’s worth and a little extra besides, for reasons that should be obvious to any Doper, no matter what your political bent. And I think it’s grossly manipulative and dishonest.
And the fact that there are “poorly-defined goals for winning” is damned convenient. So long as there is no real goal, they can be striving towards it forever, now can’t they? Effectively making everything they desire into a matter of national security in the service of the big, bad, completely meaningless “war effort”.
Stoid: ‘War’ is a lot closer to a description of what is going on than ‘crime’. There are millions of hostile people out there who want to harm us. They have organized into pseudi-military organizations, and are launching attacks. In many cases, they are aided and abetted by hostile governments like Iran and Iraq. The response is not being carried out by the police, but by the armed forces. The government of one country has been toppled, and several more will come down before this is all over.
That’s a war. A new kind of war to be sure, but war nonetheless.
John Corrado: “Big Oil” is the nutbar left’s big conspiracy. It’s the equivalent of the nutbar right’s “One-World Government” or Jewish Banking Conspiracy. It’s a nebulous, impossible-to-disprove scapegoat.
Anyone with half a brain and an understanding of how the economy works understands that “Big Oil” as a coordinated conspiracy is a ridiculous concept, for the reasons you mentioned.
