Blaming the president for 9/11

• Revisionist history?

Revisionist history?

By Joseph Perkins

George W. Bush ought to be impeached.

Everybody and their grandpa warned the president that Al Qaeda was going to hijack airplanes on Tuesday morning Sept. 11, 2001, to destroy the World Trade Center and gouge a hole in the Pentagon.

Yet the Republican did nothing to prevent the attacks, to spare the lives of nearly 3,000 innocents.

That’s the impression one gets from news accounts of hearings this week by the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. It’s as if Osama bin Laden dropped Bush an e-mail detailing his plan to remake the Manhattan skyline, and the commander-in-chief just shrugged it off.

There clearly is an effort afoot by those who would like to see Bush turned out of office — including, one suspects, most of the reporters covering the 9/11 commission hearings — to raise doubts in the minds of the American people about the president’s prosecution of the war on terror.

The Bush haters fear that if the presidential election is won or lost on the issue of terror, the Republican will prevail.

They are worried by surveys showing that Americans believe that Bush would do a better job fighting terrorism than John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee (by a landslide 56 percent to 33 percent margin, according to the latest Newsweek poll).

So the president’s detractors are trying to turn Sept. 11 around on him. They are disinforming the public that Bush somehow had advanced knowledge of the terror attacks, but did little to nothing to stop them.

Of course, that’s an absurd notion. The Sept. 11 terror attacks almost certainly would have occurred whether Bush was in the White House or Al Gore. That’s because Al Qaeda was girding for holy war against America long before Bush was sworn into office.

And if Osama’s terror network was to be thwarted before it could execute its attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the pre-emptive measures should have been taken during the eight years that Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office.

Indeed, in 1993, a terror attack on the World Trade Center killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Had Clinton responded to that first attack upon the World Trade Center the way Bush responded to the second, maybe the second never would have occurred.

In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked. Intelligence agencies attributed the attacks to bin Laden. Clinton limply responded by lobbing a few cruise missiles at a reputed terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in the Sudan.

In 2000, suicide bombers linked to Al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole, the Navy destroyer anchored in Yemen. Clinton failed to retaliate at all to that terror attack.

So it was little wonder that Osama and his mass-murdering jihadis felt emboldened to carry out the Sept. 11 terror attacks. They had little fear of strong American reprisal.

That is why it is so outrageous, so unfair to blame the Bush administration for the worst-ever terror attack on U.S. soil.

And no one’s attacks have been more outrageous, more unfair than Richard Clarke’s, the former Bush administration counter-terrorism adviser who served in a similar capacity in the Clinton administration.

During his appearance this week before the 9/11 commission, Clarke, the born-again Clintonite, claimed that the Democratic president had “no higher priority” than fighting terror.

Conversely, terror was “an important issue but not an urgent issue” to Bush, charged Clarke, who is pimping a new book (previewed on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which shares the same parent company as the book’s publisher) that skewers the Republican president.

Clarke’s politically (not to mention financially) motivated deconstruction of Bush administration counter-terrorism policy was reported without qualification by much of the Bush-hating media.

So what many Americans may not know is that in 2002, before Clarke was passed over for deputy secretary of Homeland Security, he told reporters “there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.”

So the Bush administration was left to devise its own counter-terrorism policy, which included, among other measures, the laudable plan “to increase CIA resources … for covert action five-fold to go after Al Qaeda,” according to Clarke.

During the days, weeks and months following the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Americans were united in grief, united in the resolve expressed by Bush to “bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to out enemies.” Too bad that national unity has given way to ugly election-year politics.

Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at Joseph.Perkins@UnionTrib.com.

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