April 7, 2004 by lonbud

Holding Back The Flood

Scanning the news these past few weeks, I’ve been thinking of the story of the little Dutch boy, who tried ever so valiantly to save his town by sticking his finger in the hole in the dike that stood between his townsfolk and their certain ruin. Except, George W. Bush, who plays the role of the little Dutch boy in my imagination, knows no valor, and the only thing he’s trying to save from ruin is the awful hegemony of his mendacious administration.

It seems he may be running out of fingers.

Two and a half years ago, the Bush Administration would have us believe, “everything changed.” But, despite two generations of the dumbing down of America, the result of gutting our commitment to education and smothering our children in sugar and fat, there remain enough inquiring minds who want simply to know, “why?”

The President resisted the creation of an independent commission to study the whys of September 11, 2001. But the demand for answers overwhelmed the supply of obfuscation, and a commission was finally named.

The President tried to limit the scope of its inquiry, and refused to produce documents and testimony the commission requested in pursuit of its mandate. He cited “national security” concerns and the open-ended “war on terror” into which the country was dragged by the villains of 9/11. But the administration was unable to satiate demand for answers to basic questions like, “what the hell was the FBI and the CIA doing with all of the hard evidence America risked imminent attack by Islamic radicals,” even as the President was taking his fraudulent oath of office in January 2001.

Paul O’Neill, the administration’s first Secretary of the Treasury, was forced out when his understanding of the dire straits in which the country’s economy is mired did not fit with the President’s plan to enrich its least-needy members. He then had the temerity to suggest in a public forum the White House’s priorities were, from the beginning, skewed in a direction that portends no glad tidings for the nation. He was pilloried by the administration, whose spokespeople said, basically, O’Neill was “out of the loop” on security matters and his statements were not to be trusted.

There was also Joseph Wilson, who’d been dispatched by the President to confirm Saddam Hussein’s trafficking in yellowcake uranium with Niger. Except Wilson’s investigation revealed such accusations were more likely than not bogus. But that didn’t stop our nation’s chief executive from asserting that very bogosity in his State of the Union address prior to his launching our adventure in Iraq. When Wilson used a public forum to clarify the results of his investigation, someone at the White House saw fit to make public the fact that Wilson’s wife happened to be a deep-cover agent for the CIA, working the ­surprise!- anti-terrorism detail.

Now, THAT’S a good way to thwart the bad guys, eh?

Meanwhile, amidst all kinds of stonewalling and delay of its work by the White House, The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States finally began to meet and to start asking the uncomfortable questions about who in the administration knew what prior to 9/11, and why, on that fateful day, a rag-tag band of Islamic fanatics was able to crash commercial jetliners into some of the world’s most famous buildings.

The timing of all this could not have been worse, from the administration’s perspective, it being an election year, and with the economy finally showing signs of picking itself up off the mat.

Spotlight, then, on Richard Clarke, a career public servant with a distinguished record for helping keep the terrorist threat, such as it is, at bay. This man, who worked tirelessly under three administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, eventually resigned his post to write a book detailing the vast ineptitude of the Bush administration, and the dangerous course on which it has set the nation in its fight against terror. Again, the administration countered with claims Clarke had been “out of the loop,” attacking him personally as a disgruntled former employee looking to make a fortune off of his security clearance.

Clarke’s accusations hit close to the bone, however. He’d been working on this stuff long before the Bush junta took over the government, and it didn’t help when several people in the national security apparatus stood up to vouch for his honor and his credibility. Clarke told the public and the 9/11 Commission that he had briefed the President’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on the imminent nature of the terrorist threat during the earliest days of the Bush administration. He revealed his warnings did not impress the administration as serious matters, and he told the nation that, immediately after 9/11, the President charged him specifically with searching for a connection between the terrorists and Saddam Hussein, as if the President had already decided to act against Iraq and was looking for a justification to do so.

Into the frying pan now hops the aforementioned National Security Advisor, who deigned to give the 9/11 Commission a bit of “secret” testimony back in January, but whose clarifications become all-of-a-sudden worth reviewing in the light of Mr. Clarke’s testimony, and in the face of new revelations from former senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart, who chaired a non-partisan panel charged with ascertaining the nature of the terrorist threat during the Clinton administration, and who claims to have also briefed administration officials as to its imminence long before the terrible carnage unfolded on that bright Autumn morning in 2001.

I began to sense the little Dutch boy running out of fingers when the White House feebly tried to block the National Security Advisor from testifying in public. “We’d like to, but it’s unprecedented,” they lied, uh, cried!

Turns out, it’s not unprecedented (which, in point of fact, is beside the point). And it turns out the good Dr. Condoleezza Rice will take questions in public on Thursday from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States.

Dr. Rice isn’t by chance the same kind of doctor as Henry Kissinger, is she?

She won’t likely be asked anything so straightforward as: why was a country that spends ten billion dollars a year on a space-based missile defense system to protect its good and innocent citizens, unable, on 45 minutes notice, to scramble a few fighter jets several dozen miles to shoot down commercial aircraft it knew to have been hijacked?

One doubts she will be asked to explain: why, in the days ­even weeks and months- after the terrible events of 9/11, the administration sought to assure the nation, “if we’d only known; no one ever imagined such a thing;” when, in fact, they did know, and had imagined the very tableau onto which history’s script has now been written.

Slim chance we’ll get to see klieg lights show tiny beads of perspiration glistening at her hairline as she fumbles to name someone, anyone who lost his or her job in the wake of the colossal failures that had to have occurred for the events of 9/11 to have been possible.

The 9/11 Commission is due to make its final report in July and it feels very unlikely anything like indictments will come out of it, though the Chairman has indicated it will conclude the attacks could have been prevented.

It seems clear, too, President Bush is every bit the “War President” he’d have us vote for in November. The June 30 target date for handing sovereignty back to the Iraqis is fast approaching, and American soldiers are beginning to die in clumps instead of just one or two here and there. Secretary Rumsfeld indicated yesterday he is “open” to the idea of sending more troops to Iraq should the need arise.

What to do?

Give thanks if you or your children are not coming into draft age any time soon. Perhaps I’ll go help the economy out instead of just sitting here bitching about things. Maybe buy some music online, something like Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.”