“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.
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