Elizabeth Drew: How much is George W. Bush responsible for 9/11?

[flpoljunkie]

How Much Is George W. Bush Responsible for 9/11?
Elizabeth Drew
Posted: 11/02/2015

Poor Jeb. Or I should say, Poor Jeb! (I'm not given to exclamation points, but Jeb! is so magnetic.) It's unfathomable how he thought that he could run for the Republican nomination without having to wrestle with his brother's record as president.

Soon enough, he was so entangled in the question of whether he would have gone into Iraq, knowing what we know now, that it took him four tries to come up with the currently politically acceptable answer: No. But while the war in Iraq is widely accepted to have been a disastrous mistake, another crucial event during the George W. Bush administration has long been considered unfit for political discussion: President Bush's conduct, in the face of numerous warnings of a major terrorist plot, in the months leading up to September 11, 2001.

The general consensus seems to have been that the 9/11 attacks were so horrible, so tragic, that to even suggest that the president at the time might bear any responsibility for not taking enough action to try to prevent them is to play "politics," and to upset the public. And so we had a bipartisan commission examine the event and write a report; we built memorials at the spots where the Twin Towers had come down and the Pentagon was attacked; and that was to be that. And then along came Donald Trump, to whom "political correctness" is a relic of an antiquated, stuffy, political system he's determined to overwhelm. In an interview on October 16, he violated the longstanding taboo by saying, "When you talk about George Bush--I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time."

Trump's comments set up a back and forth between him and Jeb Bush--who, as Trump undoubtedly anticipated, can't let a blow against him by the frontrunner go by without response--but the real point is that with a simple declaration by Trump, there it was: the subject of George W. Bush's handling of the warnings about the 9/11 attacks was out there.

much more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-drew/the-big-bush-question_b_8454434.html

[Human101948]

1. About 90%...

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief —
and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission,
which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration
officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jawdropping
headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a
warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim
absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some
validity.
That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding
Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those
documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along
with other recently declassified records, and come come to an inescapable
conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the
weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence
than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the
controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came
before it.
The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack
began in the spring of 2001. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html

[bamademo]

2. On 9/11 I knew instintively that Bush was responsible.

My ex is my ex because I told him that day it was Bush's fault. He threatened me with a split up and wouldn't hear a word against Shrub. I could not find anyone else who felt the way I did and then I found DU.

It was sickening to me how no one even questioned the administration and the resulting dismantling of our civil rights. I'll always think 9/11 was a gift to Cheney so he could go to war with Iraq.

[smirkymonkey]

4. Funny, so did I.

I even got into an argument w/ some people in a writing class I was taking. Not that he was actually directly responsible, but I knew it was just too convenient for him/his administration. I wasn't buying the official story.

[Gothmog]

3. W did not keep the US safe