licentious radio

Sunday, May 19, 2002
[11:36:42 AM]

Here are the three main September 11 threads Bush and Cheney must answer: 1) Bush blocked investigation of Bin Laden for family/business reasons, 2) Cheney provoked the September 11 attack by threatening to oust the Taliban in order to build a pipeline, 3) Cheney ignored proposals to solve our intelligence analysis problems -- so that the key information which could have prevented the September 11 attacks was not available to the people who could have used it.

This isn't a matter of second-guessing or Monday morning quarterbacking. This is recognizing and acknowledging responsibility for failures. Accountability is essential to democracy.

The Bush-Bin Laden thread.... Bush takes over the government, and forces the FBI to back off of investigations that get close to the Bin Laden family. Multiple generations of Bushes have had close business relations with multiple generations of Bin Ladens. Osama, though, creates September 11. Now the FBI has even more urgent reason to talk to the Bin Ladens, but Bush lets a plane fly around the country (when all other flights are grounded) to pick up Bin Ladens and fly them back to Saudi Arabia. The FBI doesn't get to talk to them.

So it *looks* like family business interests were put above national security, leading up to the deaths of thousands of American citizens, and even after.

The pipeline thread....

When Bush-Cheney took over the government, they worked hard with Unocal to pressure the Taliban to allow them to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. (Not surprisingly, Enron might have benefited, by extending a branch pipeline to its monster powerplant in India. Also not surprisingly, current Afghan leaders are former Unocal lobbyists, and the pipeline has already been approved.)

The story is that when the Taliban balked, the Bush people threatened to remove the Taliban from power. Supposedly, plans were in the works to take out the Taliban, even before September 11. In this story, the September 11 attack was a response to threats of military attack, to enable Unocal to build a pipeline. If the pipeline deal was part of Cheney's energy task force, it's easy to see the motivation to keep the records out of public view.

The intelligence analysis thread....

The Hart-Rudman report said there was a huge problem with the way we analyze intelligence information, and we had better fix this immediately, or something horrible will happen.

Bush-Cheney took over the government, put Cheney in charge of intelligence, and he ignored the Hart-Rudman recommendations. Sure enough, September 11 happens, and sure enough, there was information that could have put us on guard, but it wasn't distributed and analyzed in a way that could have protected us.

If available information had been properly analyzed, the threat of suicide attacks could have been noted, and the general alerts could have included alerts to the FAA and the fighter groups around the country to be ready to intercept hijacked aircraft. Had this happened, the planes might not have been able to hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Of course, the administration might *still* have missed the warning signs for September 11, but they would have at least done their best to solve the known problems.