The Dark Side

“I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”

— John Ashcroft on the presence of Al Qaeda operatives (soon to be 9/11 hijackers) in the United States, 2001.

Is anyone still wondering why the Bush Administration didn’t want a 9/11 Commission or why their cooperation was so poor once the Commission was inevitable?

(See Frank Rich on Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side)

excerpt from Rich:

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s
descent into the dark side was to cover up for the
Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda
threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for
the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002,
told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all
preventable.”

from Random House:

In the days immediately following September 11th,
the most powerful people in the country were
panic-stricken. The radical decisions about how to
combat terrorists and strengthen national security
were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but
the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and
his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington,
used the crisis to further a long held agenda to
enhance Presidential powers to a degree never
known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional
protections that define the very essence of the
American experiment.