"Must have been a bad pilot"

[nyhuskyfan]

I still think that President Bush should be hammered on that statement he made about his initial reaction on September 11.

Think about it:

Terorrists had attacked the World Trade Center once before
Terrorists have always had an infatuation with airplanes
Terorrists had plots in the past to fly planes into the Eiffel Tower, CIA Headquarters and the Genoa Convention
He had been warned when taking office about the dangers of Al Qaeda
He had been warned by the CIA Director that the "system was blinking red" during the summer of 2001
He had been warned by Egyptian intelligence that same summer that suicide terrorists were in the United States looking into flight lessons
He had been warned that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States with the August 6 PDB

So you have a plane, which terrorists love, flown into the World Trade Center, a terrorist target, at a time when there were repeated warnings of a looming threat of an attack on the United States, one month after a PDB that made the threat crystal clear, and what does this man think? Must have been a bad pilot. And then he walks into the classroom for his photo opportunity with second graders, as scheduled.

I bet in that roomful of second graders, he could have found someone to help him play "Connect The Dots"

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Someone was going to use AIRPLANES

to kill his dad.... well duh dubya..... I mean come on... we deserved better... and we got chopped liver.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

2. Funny, the Genoa G8 summit musta' been expecting a lot of "bad pilots"

Bush is lying.

[nyhuskyfan]

3. But about what?

If that wasn't really his first reaction, then why would we go into the classroom? Remember, he was told at 8:50-8:55 about the plane flying into the WTC, then went into the classroom at 9:00. It was only after the second plane hit that we see Andrew Card whispering in his ear, and then the seven minutes of projecting calm so as not to scare some eight-year olds.

So either he really did think it was a bad pilot, or worse yet, he thought it might be a terrorist attack, but didn't think that he didn't need to do anything about it and thought that the photo op was more important.

Michael Moore speculated on what was going through Bush's mind after the whisper in the ear. I want to know what the hell he was thinking going into the classroom in the first place. If he really did think, "Must have been a bad pilot" he's a moron incapable of processing information, no matter how serious it is (plane - WTC - system blinking red - uh oh). If his thoughts were closer to reality, then this was either an egregious dereliction of duty or a pretty big arrow in the quiver of the LIHOP/MIHOP people.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

7. actually Condi was the liar

who said they couldn't imagine planes would be used as weapons.
Meanhwile, the Genoa airport was surrounded by AA guns based on that specific threat intelligence.

[nyhuskyfan]

9. Bush also said...

"If we had known that terrorists were thinking of attacking us, we would have moved heaven and earth to stop it."

Yet when he was told just that on August 6, he didn't once discuss it with anyone on his staff until September 11 (9/11 Commission Report, p. 260-262).

But when Bush said that his reaction when told of the first plane hitting was that it was a bad pilot, I don't know what is worse. That he might have told the truth (and is incapable of retaining and processing information), or that he might have been lying (and didn't care enough to look into it further). Either way, it speaks to his incompetence (or worse).

[lapfog_1]

8. Kerry should buy 8 minutes of air time

in the battleground states, run the film of Bush in the classroom
without commentary (other than specific stmts whispered) and
just let it run all the way. Don't shorten it by a second.

[Ravy]

4. Even forgeting terrorism in the incident... to say such a thing about

a burning skyscraper in NYC where people were bound to have died in the incident is callous beyond belief.

[George W. Dunce]

5. GWB on 9/11

"I bet that pilot missed his flight physical"

[karlrschneider]

6. Oooooo, now THAT was EVIL. I love it.

:evilgrin:

[Catfight]

10. Yes, I agree, he can't even do a Paint By Numbers Bin Laden Set.

President Dumbass, even a child could have connected those dots. 3000 Americans burned, jumped and suffocated because Bush decided fishing was more important than reading. You decide America, four more years of Oops?

[KoKo]

11. According to theads here in DU ...he was thinking of himself when he said

that. After almost crashing a Cessna the first thing comes into his clueless idiot savant's mind is: a bad pilot.. Projection...

[nyhuskyfan]

12. And even if it was a smaller Cessna...

Wouldn't you want to make sure that the Cessna didn't have something else on it -- something that might make a really loud "Ka-Boom"? Or a few of those little vials that Colin Powell held up before the UN?

Given what we know about the pre-9/11 intelligence, there should have been no circumstance where any flying object larger than a paper airplane should have hit the World Trade Center without alarm bells instantly echoing through the vast emptiness between the President's ears.

[The_Casual_Observer]

13. The thing happened because a merit-less nitwit is running our country

why anybody would defend him or his actions after that is beyond logic and reason. I will never understand the motivation of freepers who continue to pretend that this was the fault of somebody else, and still worship the bastard.

[bobbyboucher]

14. Don't forget, "I saw the first plane hit the tower,

the television must have been on, and I thought, that was one bad pilot." To paraphrase.

Remember, he led off that stupid statement with something that couldn't possibly have happened unless........

[uhhuh]

15. Even more to the point

The fact that he continued on with the photo op after what could have been just an "accident", is telling in itself.

Let's assume the the chimp thought it was just an accident.

This would certainly rank up there with the all time aviation "accidents" in history.

He would have to know that at least hundreds, if not thousands were killed in this "accident."

The idea that a president would not immediately get on the phone with someone and find out the extent of the damage, and start to make his way to NYC to support a grieving city is unimaginable to me.

If this would have been the only event, and if niether tower had fallen, and if this had been "just an accident", I still can't see any justification for him to continue with the planned event.

It makes no sense.

[baldguy]

16. Truthfully, I thought the same thing that morning.

But then, I wasn't a President who had been getting warnings about attacks from al Qeada from half a dozen different sources for eight months.

[nyhuskyfan]

17. Exactly

There are numerous things that you or I could have thought at the time (accident, terrorism, one crazy person commiting suicide to go out in a blaze of glory). But we didn't know the system was blinking red, we weren't given a PDB on August 6, and we didn't know about the plots to fly planes in the Genoa Convention or the Eiffel Tower. Richard Clarke, Gary Hart, et al, didn't lay out the threat to any of us.

I actually didn't hear about it until after the second plane hit, so I can't say for sure what my reaction would have been after the first one. But I'm pretty sure the 1993 WTC attack would have popped into my head almost immediately, and I would have been hoping that it wasn't terrorism until I learned more.

If my job was to protect people, I sure as hell would have gone to full alert right away. If you prepare for the worst and it turns out to be nothing, what's the problem? Some wasted jet fuel? At the very least you have just performed a very revealing drill in which you could study internally what else could be done.