In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess that the night of the attacks, when Larry Kudlow was on CNBC grinning from ear to ear and gleefully crowing about how this meant an end to any talk of a Social Security "lockbox", I did turn to Mr. Brilliant and say, "Oh my God, they did it" -- "they" meaning the Bush Administration. However, after I regained my faculties, it occurred to me that given the ineptitude of the Bush Administration up to that point, "they" weren't really capable of pulling something like this off.
As we found out more about what happened, and what the history, was, and how the stories got fishier and fishier, I became less willing to accept the "Nineteen guys with boxcutters did this, financed by Osama Bin Laden, and there was no way anyone could have foreseen this or prevented it" story. There was just too much that if you looked at what people who weren't getting the media coverage were saying, and too much that the media kept pushing under the rug and saying it wasn't significant, that just didn't fit with that explanation. As people like Richard Clarke and Coleen Rowley came forward, and as later on we heard about the infamous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing, I came around to the conclusion that the Bush Administration knew that something was going to happen, that it would happen soon, and that they decided to let it play out to their advantage. I don't think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney banked on almost 3000 deaths and the spectacle of the nation's pre-eminent skyscrapers toppling on national television, though that didn't hurt the agenda. But it became clear in the aftermath of the attacks, as the march towards war with Iraq became ever more relentless, that an attack on this country played to something that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld wanted very badly, and that was to go into Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.
During the last week, as I left the house every day at 6 AM to get to work for 7 AM conference calls, the idea for a post detailing a timeline that goes directly from the 2000 campaign, to the 2000 election theft, to 9/11, to Iraq, to the torture timeline that's now seeing the light of day, began forming in my head. The difficulty was going to be in finding the time to put together a coherent case that the Iraq fix was in very early on, and that the 9/11 attacks were the perfect excuse. Of course the other problem is how to do this without tinfoil, though the idea that an American executive branch is capable of forming policy based on outright lies and fabrications and committing atrocities for political or personal gain seems less crazy in the wake of the news we've had this week about how the Bush Administration used torture in an attempt to fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
Such a post would be a daunting task, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it. But I'm fortunate in that Dan K. over at the Great Orange Satan has done most of the post-9/11 work for me in the form of a "torture timeline", and I recommend that if you decide to read the rest of this post, you'll go over there and read what he has to say after you finish.
I'm not going to get into things like the connections between the Bush and Bin Laden family and other material covered in places like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. There are many places out there to find these things, they are out there, and while such things are certainly smoking guns, that's not where I'm headed, because they lead into the Alex Jones territory of "inside job", and that's not where I'm going here. I'm just looking to see how far back the obsession with Iraq goes, and whether it points not to an active inside job, but more a question of "Something's going to happen; let's just let it play out because it might be just what we need."
We already know of the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document from the neocon Project for the New American Century. The mythology surrounding this document is that it "calls for" a "second Pearl Harbor". But while the word "transformation" appears in this document even more often than the lunatic would-be ninja Benjamin "Coach" Wade uses the words "dragon" and "warrior" on Survivor: Tocantins this season, the document regards such a cataclysmic incident as not something to be deliberately implemented, but as a catalyst, were it to happen, for the transformation of this country into this big, paranoid, militarily badass, unpredictable bully that is the group's wet dream.
But let's go even further back, shall we?
Author Mickey Herskowitz, who ghost-wrote George W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep, has said that Bush was talking about invading Iraq as far back as 1999:
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
The entire Bush Presidency played out as a cautionary tale about what can happen if you don't resolve your issues with your parents. It's clear that Bush Jr.'s desire for the presidency was a twofold desire to please his father by bringing him the head of Saddam Hussein, and to outdo his father by "succeeding" where the father had "failed." It's unusual that a man gets to play out his daddy issues on an international stage, to such devastating effect, but once the 9/11 attacks occurred, at least where Bush fils was concerned, there was his opportunity.
So then we get to Dick Cheney being selected to vet Vice-Presidential candidates, and then choosing hismelf as the best candidate. It's difficult to imagine someone like Dick Cheney agreeing to be #2 to such a lightweight without getting something sizable in return, like a great deal of power. It's quite plausible that being very well familiar with the burden of daddy issues carried by the young wastrel who had chosen him to choose a running mate, Cheney, being no fool, and with Iraq being one of the states with which he'd become obsessed after the fall of the Soviet Union, saw his opportunity to direct policy the way he wanted.
The early months of the Bush Administration were hardly auspicious. There was the incident in which a Japanese fishing boat was sunk by a Navy sub being piloted by big Republican money donors, and the one in which a U.S. Navy spy plane landed in China after flying into Chinese airspace and colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The president who would later be known for never admitting a mistake ended up in an apology situation with the Chinese.
In July 2001, George W. Bush was already on the path that would lead to the economic collapse of 2007. Editorial, New York Times, July 7, 2001:
No sooner had George W. Bush become president than he began warning of an impending recession and campaigning for a huge tax cut. But he forgot -- or perhaps did not know -- that a slowing economy, with lower corporate profits and personal earnings, would automatically result in lower tax collections and throw his knife-edged fiscal plan into imbalance. So instead of residing peacefully in ''lockboxes'' for the next decade, the trust funds collected to cover baby boomers' Social Security and Medicare benefits may be tapped as early as this year. Mr. Bush gave up long-term fiscal discipline for short-term political gain, and the salad days of surpluses have transmogrified into the bad old days of budget bickering.
It all began in January. With a decade of budget surpluses ahead, Mr. Bush swore he could deliver a trillion-dollar tax cut while erasing the national debt and leaving the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare untouched for 10 years. But after Congress set its spending levels and passed Mr. Bush's tax cut, less than $10 billion worth of leeway was left in this year's budget before the government would have to pry open the lockboxes. Now, thanks to shrinking income tax revenues, that narrow margin of error is about to disappear.
By August, 2001, George W. Bush had decided that preznitin' was hard work, and that he needed a vacation. So off he went to his stage "ranch" in Crawford for the month of August. On August 7, 2001, one day after Bush received the now-infamous Presidential Daily Briefing that stated unequivocally that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S., the New York Times presciently opined:
Visitors to Mr. Bush's spread may see a brown, flat prairie relieved by a patch of canyons and woods off a creek, but to the president it is paradise. However, he would prefer that we think of him not so much as being on vacation as on retreat, refreshing his soul ''away from Washington, in the heartland of America.'' No doubt most Americans also are planning outings to ''celebrate some of the values that strengthen America,'' as the presidential counselor Karen Hughes said Mr. Bush would be doing.
[snip]
George W. Bush's aides say he plans a more leisurely pace at the ranch, in Crawford, than his father set -- jogging, bass fishing in a pond created by his own engineers, working out in his gym and getting national security briefings each day. It will be interesting to see which guests show up, with or without the ranchwear that Trent Lott, the Senate G.O.P. leader, gamely put on last year, picking up where Mr. Humphrey left off.
Not since Jimmy Carter vacationed in Plains, Ga., has a president chosen such a remote place for his holiday. Besides covering the announcements that Mr. Bush is working very hard, the media will have extensive opportunities to research feature stories on Crawford's $3 haircuts and its one gas station, and no stoplights.
Beware of presidents who expect uninterrupted holidays, however. Mr. Carter had to cut short a vacation in Hawaii to rush home and deal with gas lines during an energy crisis. Mr. Reagan flew back to Washington early because of the shooting down of a South Korean jetliner by Soviet fighters. Mr. Bush's father had his vacations spoiled by hurricanes, Saddam Hussein and an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.
We wish no crises on Mr. Bush, who takes his vacation after a string of victories or semi-victories with Congress on tax cuts, the patients' bill of rights, education and faith-based programs. But more may happen than sedate outings to celebrate American values in the heartland.
Indeed.
After Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, in which she insisted that the Administration had been front and center in terms of vigilance, Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post offered a different account from their sources:
President Bush was in an expansive mood on Aug. 7, 2001, when he ran into reporters while playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, Tex.
The day before, the president had received an intelligence briefing -- the contents of which were declassified by the White House Saturday night -- warning "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday.
"No mulligans, except on the first tee," he said to laughter. "That's just to loosen up. You see, most people get to hit practice balls, but as you know, I'm walking out here, I'm fixing to go hit. Tight back, older guy -- I hit the speed limit on July 6th."
[snip]
But if top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface. Bush spent most of August 2001 on his ranch here. His staff said at the time that by far the biggest issue on his agenda was his decision on federal funding of stem cell research, followed by education, immigration and the Social Security "lockbox."
Of course, many of the efforts to thwart an attack would not have been visible on the outside. But some officials on the inside -- notably former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke -- say the administration was not acting with sufficient urgency to the spike in intelligence indicating a threat. And there is nothing in Bush's public actions or words from August 2001 to refute Clarke.
During that month, Bush's top aides were concentrating on the president's political standing: His approval rating had slipped, his relations with Congress were tense, and Democrats had regained control of the Senate. The only time Bush mentioned terrorism publicly that month was in the context of violence in Israel.
Now think about what we now know: We know from the August 6 PDB that there was warning that something may very well be in the works, and nothing was done. We know that Coleen Rowley was prevented by the FBI from following up on Zacarias Moussaoui. We know via Ron Suskind that George Bush's response to the August 6 PDB was "All right. You've covered your ass, now" -- an odd thing for a president to say when handed a briefing that a strike against the U.S. may well be imminent. We know that George W. Bush had wanted to do something about Saddam Hussein long before he even took office. We know that 16 members of the Project for the New American Century were in the Bush Administration. We know that George W. Bush sat in a classroom for seven minutes after the planes hit the World Trade Center, despite having received the briefing that Osama Bin Laden was planning attacks against the U.S. We know that Dick Cheney urged George Bush to stay out of Washington the day of the attacks.
So now that I'm heading precariously close to the kind of tinfoil stuff that's been spewed all around the Web for nearly eight years, where am I going with all this? Well, Ron Suskind was on Rachel Maddow's show the other night, and paved the way for where I'm going:
MADDOW: You‘ve done a lot of reporting on the Bush administration‘s efforts to try to create, try to find some sort of link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda—for all the obvious political reasons in 2002 and 2003. How big of a development is it that these interrogation tactics were being used, in some cases, according to the Armed Services Committee report, these techniques were being used specifically to try to find that Iraq link?
SUSKIND: Well, it‘s fascinating. I heard some of that back when I was reporting the book, but I really couldn‘t confirm it and you need, you know, several sources confirming to put it in the book.
And what‘s fascinating here, if you run the timeline side by side, you see, really, for the first time from that report that the key thing being sent down in terms of the request by the policymakers, by the White House, is find a link between Saddam and al Qaeda so that we essentially can link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks and then march into Iraq with the anger of 9/11 behind us. That was the goal and that was being passed down as the directive.
It‘s, you know, it‘s often called the requirement inside the CIA for both agents with their sources and interrogators with their captives. “Here‘s what we‘re interested in, here‘s what we, the duly elected leaders, want to hear about. Tell us what you can find.”
What‘s fascinating, in the Senate report, is finally clear confirmation that that specific thing was driving many of the activities, and mind you, the frustration inside of the White House that was actually driving action. The quote, in fact, inside of the Senate report from a major said that as frustration built inside of the White House, that there was no link that was established—because the CIA told the White House from the very start there is no Saddam/al Qaeda link. We checked it out. We did every which way. Sorry.
The White House simply wouldn‘t take no for an answer and it went with another method. Torture was the method. “Get me a confession, I don‘t care how you do it.” And that bled all the way through the government, both on the CIA side and the Army side. It‘s extraordinary.
Mind you, Rachel, this is important. This is not about an impetus to foil an upcoming potential al Qaeda attacks. The impetus here is largely political diplomatic. The White House had a political diplomatic problem. It wanted it solved in the run-up to the war.
And mind you, and I think the data will show this—after the invasion, when it becomes clear in the summer, just a few months after in 2003, that there are no WMD in Iraq. That‘s the summer of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame—my goodness, there are no WMD. Now, the White House is being hit with a charge that they took us to war under false pretenses. That‘s when the frustration is acute.
My question, the question for investigators now: Is how many of these interrogations were driven specifically by a desire to come up with the Saddam/al Qaeda link? It‘s essentially rivers coming together.
We had in this country an Executive branch that was capable of torturing detainees not to save American lives, or to prevent another terrorist attack, or even because of some kind of delusion that what they watched on 24 every week was reality, not fiction. They tortured people because they wanted badly to connect Iraq with Al Qaeda in order to justify attacking Iraq. So, given that we now know just to what extent the Bush Administration would go to gin up a case for war -- a war that would kill over 4000 American troops and many multiples of thousands of Iraqis who did nothing to us, it becomes more difficult to dismiss out of hand the idea that some kind of cost/benefit analysis was done as intelligence came in during August 2001 and a decision made to let whatever it was play out.
I don't think even Dick Cheney bargained on the Twin Towers collapsing on national television, though I don't think it bothered him that much, given the benefit he stood to gain from America's horror at what happened. I think he figured on a couple hundred casualties at most. And what's a few hundred souls weighed against the chance to fulfill the neocon dream of taking out Saddam Hussein while the front man for the Administration would go along because it meant he could be the War Preznit he so desperately wanted to be, and to one-up his dad in the bargain?
The point of this post is not to rehash everything that's come out about the 9/11 attacks in the last eight years. But once the door has opened to the reality -- no longer allegations by liberal bloggers, but the reality -- that the Bush Administration endorsed torture, ordered torture, advocated torture, and ordered it to try to generate "fact-esque" information about an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, can we still say that there is a limit to what they would have done in pursuit of Saddam Hussein?
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