Anthony York has already taken apart the current Bush and Co. spin in response to "Terrorgate." According to York, White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer didn't have a very good day.
 Fleischer's first troublesome assertion was his bizarre defense, repeated later by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, that neither law enforcement nor intelligence agencies could have possibly guessed that a "traditional hijacking" might lead to what ultimately happened on Sept. 11.
"The possibility of a traditional hijacking, in the pre-September 11th sense, has long been a concern of the government, dating back decades," Fleischer said. "The president did not -- not -- receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen."
But while the president may not have been able to foresee such a scenario, intelligence experts surely could. The idea of using "airplanes as missiles" was not unprecedented. Before the attacks, in just one concurrent example, an FBI agent in Minneapolis warned that Zacarias Moussaoui -- the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested after telling instructors at a Minnesota flight school that he wanted to learn how to fly, but not land, a 747 -- could decide to "fly something into the World Trade Center." 
For the record, Salon has been running some terrific coverage of all of these events. It's all in the "premium" section, but I'm linking to it for my own records as well as to encourage everyone to throw Salon a few dimes -- they provide an unmatched information service that's well worth the small annual fee. Recent Salon coverage includes:
- See no evil: The revelation that the White House was warned in August about a bin Laden hijacking plot -- and that Bush failed to disclose the warning -- shows an administration both incompetent and dishonest.
There are many vexing questions about this stunning news, but one of the biggest is why it took eight months for the White House to admit it had received early warnings about the day of infamy. Immediately after 9/11, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the press that Bush officials had "no warnings" of the al-Qaida offensive. Now it turns out they were awash in clues, from the CIA briefing given to Bush, to the flare sent up by an FBI agent in Phoenix about the suspicious number of Middle Eastern men in flight training schools, to the silent scream from a Minneapolis FBI agent, who flat-out warned that suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was the type who "could fly something into the World Trade Center." With Moussaoui now facing trial as the so-called 20th hijacker, it's clear the Minneapolis agent pretty much nailed the plot on the head. And yet no one "connected the dots," in the words of Sen. Bob Graham, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.
- The 9/11 coverup: First the White House ignored warnings about al-Qaida. Then it tried to stop Congress from getting the truth. Now we know why.
Incompetence, rather than conspiracy, remains the most plausible explanation for the Bush administration's failure to prevent the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. But "conspiracy" is beginning to look like a plausible description of the administration's effort to conceal its tragic errors.
- The Bush 9/11 spin machine: What did they lie about, and when did they lie about it? Michelle Goldberg notes that Bush and Co. have used 9-11 as a reason for giving the intelligence community a wide range of expanded powers -- many of which have frightening implications for civil rights. All this new evidence about what the intelligence community knew, when, and when it was communicated to Bush (before the attacks), shows that the problem was perhaps not that there were too many restrictions on intelligence agencies. The problem, more likely, lies elsewhere; however:
As Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek last January, "No one has much of an appetite for an investigation. The reason for this might well be that Sept. 11 happened not because of intelligence failures but, even worse, because of policy failures. The former can easily be blamed on others. The latter requires that everyone -- both parties, both branches of government -- take a long, hard look in the mirror."
Meanwhile, Ari Fleischer may have to look in the mirror and take back his nasty slur against Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who suggested the Bush administration had known of impending terrorist plans before Sept. 11. "All I can tell you is the congresswoman must be running for the hall of fame of the Grassy Knoll Society," Fleischer said April 13. The shoot-from-the-lip McKinney probably exaggerated what Bush had known -- there's no evidence he was warned about the specific plots against the World Trade Center and Pentagon and let them happen. But in light of what's come out in the past 24 hours, Fleischer might have been advised to use a little more restraint when denying that the president had any foreknowledge of 9/11.
5:05:50 PM 
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