So now it seems the Bush Clan is scrambling hard to make it sound like 9/11 was all on Clinton’s lap and Bush could never have anticipated it. Such as this comment that, during his campaign, no one ever asked about al Qaeda!

“I thought every question imaginable had been asked of him during the 18 months on the presidential campaign,” she said. “No one ever asked him, that I remember, about al-Qaida. No one.”

The entire purpose of the article is the little tagline there: For a new administration, Sept. 11 presented an unanticipated challenge

Right. See, because no one ever asked Bush about al Qaeda, it’s not his fault! It was THEIR fault for not asking him about ‘em. See, Bush is not expected to know anything that he isn’t asked about, and it’s not like bin Laden was a fairly well-known name. And hell, that August 6th memo doesn’t exist or anything, right?

This is turning absurd.

[tags]terrorism, 9/11, al qaeda, bush[/tags]

Okay, I am about to lose my goddamn mind. Now, criticism that Bush wasn’t REALLY interested in capturing bin Laden is old news. He let the guy go at Tora Bora, etc. But that was just a mistake, right?

Enter a new report that Bush let Osama go in Afghanistan to focus on the upcoming Iraq War. Pay close attention.

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. “We were there last night,” bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

Now, let’s think…

The most obvious problem is that nary five months after September 11, Bush called off the search for Osama bin Laden when he was close enough fo the battle-ground to see the explosions. He was THERE, we were THERE, and yet… the hunt was called off. As a result, bin Laden got away.

However, that’s the secondary point. According to this, in February of 2002 Bush pulled the troops and operatives out of Afghanistan in order to focus on the Iraq War. The problem? The Iraq invasion wasn’t until March of 2003. We are looking at preparations for the Iraq war a full thirteen months before the war itself happened.

Five months after 9/11 and thirteen months before the Iraq invasion, Bush was already scrapping the war against al Qaeda to start moving his way into Iraq. And before you ask, the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq wasn’t until October of 2002. A full 8 months before he was given the authorization to invade Iraq, he was already gathering up the forces.

Make no mistake, Bush had no interest in doing anything to bin Laden. And its effect on the War on Terror?

“I was appalled when I learned about it,” [Leverett] said. “I don’t know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It’s very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn’t done that.”

And there you have it. Because Bush wanted to invade Iraq, because he decided only five months after 9/11 that bin Laden wasn’t important enough and he needed to get ready for Iraq, the man responsible for killing 3,000 innocent American civilians is alive and well in Pakistan. That is our timeline.

1. August 2001: Bush gets a memo that bin Laden wants to strike in the US
2. September 2001: bin Laden strikes in the US
3. October 2001: Invasion of Afghanistan
4. February 2002: Resources pulled away from getting bin Laden to get ready for Iraq
5. October 2002: Bill is passed to allow the Iraq War
6. March 2003: Invasion of Iraq

Bush’s Iraq War has done nothing but damage the war on Terrorism. He has done nothing to capture bin Laden. He was single-mindedly focused on invading Iraq from the beginning. If this isn’t enough to get him burned at the stake, I’m not sure what else we’re waiting for.

[tags]terrorism, war, iraq, afghanistan, bush, bin laden, cia, politics[/tags]

It took a while, but it looks like The Penguin is finally coming around to reality. He’s actually willing to admit that he was wrong about… some of the things he said prior to the war. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t change anything.

President Bush would have ordered an invasion of Iraq even if the CIA had told him that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.

…

The U.S. invasion “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it again, we would do exactly the same thing,” he said.

He admits there were no WMDs, they were wrong about being greeted as liberators, the Senate has shown no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the war has cost far more than we were told. On every single aspect of the war, the administration and its supporters were irrefutably and completely wrong. Someone explain why we should trust them on anything?

[tags]war, iraq, cheney, bush[/tags]

Bit of a random thought here, but bear with me. I actually think Bush’s incompetence is what got him re-elected.

Zip back to 2003. Imagine that the Afghanistan War was all that happened. We went in there, rooted out the Taliban and blew up Al Qaeda. No Iraq war because he actually looked at the intelligence. That leaves almost two years before the presidential elections and means we all have to sit around and look at Bush’s disastrous domestic policy.

Back further to 2001. He stops 9/11 from happening. Now the event Bush has ridden like a mechanical bull for his entire presidency isn’t there. Every law he’s tried to pass every ridiculous action he’s taken has been with 9/11 as the screaming backdrop. Without it, he would be the same president he was before 9/11: an idiot who can’t fix America and didn’t win the election legitimately. And he’d never get his war to change his image from bumbling moron to American Hero.

Bush’s presidency is like the episode of The Simpsons with Mr Burns’s diseases all offsetting each other and thus keeping them from killing him. His massive incompetence has prevented people from looking at it, because we’re too focused on how he gets himself out of the messes he’s created and are rewarding him based on that, like paying a kid to fix a car he wrecked.

[tags]bush, war, iraq, afghanistan, terrorism[/tags]