Sept. 11: Was Bush Asleep at the Switch?

WASHINGTON, 15 April 2004 — The question looms large over the White House: How much did President George W. Bush and his administration know about threats to the US before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001?

With a key memo and other information being declassified, and testimony by former and current officials before a federal panel investigating the attacks, the American public grows more curious, and possibly more suspicious by the day.

Bush, already under fire because of an increasing insurgency in Iraq and the mounting loss of American lives there, has become vulnerable on his handling of the threat posed by Al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama Bin Laden, in the eight months he was in office before the attacks on New York and Washington.

Just days after the White House released the memo from an Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing with the explosive title “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”, the 9/11 Commission released more previously classified reports put out by the US intelligence community in April and May 2001.

Their headlines — “Bin Laden planning multiple operations”, “Bin Laden network’s plans advancing”, “Bin Laden threats are real” — raised more questions about whether the new president was asleep at the switch.

The release of the reports as part of a commission staff report followed much-quoted testimony from National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who read the text of warnings before a national television audience in March.

“Unbelievable news in coming weeks,” Rice said. “Big event ... there will be a very, very, very big uproar.”

With elections coming in November, his presumptive Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, has made the war on terror one of the central issues in the campaign. Kerry has repeatedly charged that Bush, by deciding to invade Iraq, took away resources necessary to effectively fight the war on terrorism.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has largely been exercising damage control.

While many of the threats and intelligence reports date back to the White House of President Bill Clinton, it is the current president who has to ward off the potential political fallout, despite having enjoyed high approval ratings for his response to terrorism.

Bush, as well as other administration officials and leading Democrats in Congress, have said warnings received before 9/11 were not specific enough to thwart the attacks, which killed some 3,000 people. “I can assure the American people that had we had any inkling that this was going to happen to happen, we would have done everything in our power to stop the attack,” Bush said this week in a rare evening press conference.

Rice, who gave public sworn testimony to the commission last week after the White House resisted for months, said there was no “silver bullet”. She and Bush have explained that the United States was not on a war footing before the 9/11 attacks and other officials have added that there was a lack of political will to fight a full-out war against Bin Laden before the terror strikes.

Yet, the panel’s highly publicized work — Rice’s testimony and that of other officials has been carried live on news cable channels and at times on major networks — continues to churn out allegations, saying there were reports that terrorists may opt to hijack a plane or storm a US Embassy and demand the release of prisoners. While the reports did not indicate that attacks were imminent on US soil, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George Tenet, told the commission that in his world, “The system was blinking red” and by late July it could not have been worse, the staff report said.

Bush’s former counterterrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, has charged in a bestselling book and during testimony that terrorism was “not an urgent issue” for Bush, which further damaged the president’s reputation.

The vast majority of Americans are highly unlikely to subscribe to conspiracy theories that there may have been a plot Bush knew about. They may disagree with their president on a number of policy issues, but they will stop short of believing he was in on the attacks. That, however, may be enough in an election year when every move is scrutinized. With Iraq, a still struggling job market, and now his handling of the terror threat, Bush’s spinmeisters have their hands full to stay on message in the campaign.