🚀 go-pugleaf

It wasn't Bush who failed to protect Americans!

Is there evidence, or even strong indications that Bush was aware of
the strength of the terrorist threat to the U.S. prior to 9/11?  No!
It is completely illogical to jump to any such conclusion.  Go back
and reconstruct from evidence and reports, just what G.W. Bush was
being told by his advisors.  There is every reason to believe that
those who surround the president hold his intellectual abilities in
the same esteem as his detractors.  He is simply not very bright.
Given that assumption, it is perfectly logical to assume that his
advisors, some of whom are acknowledgeably bright people, would not
waste time briefing Bush on details beyond his abilities to
assimilate.  Being also, as is common with such people in those
positions, they are egoists and jealously guard their turf: they did
not share and compare information with each other.

So where does that leave the question, what or who failed?  Who failed
were the usual suspects.  The FBI, the CIA and several other
governmental agencies involved in national security, intelligence and
enforcement.  It would be easy, and not altogether incorrect, to lay
some of the blame on previous administrations, all the way back to the
Kennedy era when the CIA completely blew the Cuban operation based
primarily on their own 'intelligence' which claimed that if an
invading force of 'Freedom' fighters should gain a beach head, that
the general population would rise up and smite the communist usurper
in their midst.  The CIA never grasped the Viet Nam problem, and they
absolutely failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union.  As for
the FBI, it has fewer than a handful of cases which they have solved
without first getting absolute information from stool pigeons and
'walk-in' witnesses and informers.  Crimes solved by classic methods
of hard work are almost always the result of local police departments.
No, the use of the word 'intelligence' is historically a misnomer when
describing this nations intelligence agencies.  Were it not
intelligence given us by Israeli, British and other nations
information gathering organizations we would be declared legally blind
in regards to world 'intelligence'.  The list of obvious failures by
U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis would fill a book, and if you
included all the unpublicized and classified errors it would probably
fill a rather large number of rather thick volumes.

So what can be done?  The most obviously effective, and least likely
to occur action, would be to completely dismantle the top four or five
levels of administrators in all the failing agencies.  Lacking that, a
thorough and in depth investigation followed by a detailed and
publicly released report detailing and itemizing the problem would
probably put some pressure on the self complacent, self absorbed
incompetents who are running these things.  Much closer and critical
oversight would also help.

It should now be obvious, even to the most rabid Bush antagonist, that
blame cannot be laid at the feet of the president!  All blame, and
resulting punitive actions should be aimed squarely at those who are
guiding him, Condoleeza Rice, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft,
and Donald Rumsfeld.   It was those people who failed to grasp the
situation, it was those people, and the directors of the agencies over
which they manage, who had the necessary information to know that
something to do with airplanes was going to happen soon to the U.S.
and it was going to be from the actions of Osama bin Laden and his
organization.  It was those people who failed to protect Americans.

Monte
"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books,
 and there is some evidence that they can't read them either." ---Gore Vidal