Several of you have written me asking why I haven’t jumped on the story that president Bush was told of threats of al Qaeda hijackings before September 11. The reason is simple: it’s not a story. So far as I can tell, there were no specific threats, no suggestion of commandeering planes to use as missiles, nothng that could be differentiated from any number of such warnings before or since. John Ellis is right about this. The real story here is the press’s (and the Democrats’) need for a story about the war to change the climate of support for the president. But I defer to Rummy on Rush yesterday:
Limbaugh: You’ve got a limited amount of time. Let me just get into a couple of things real quick. Could you first give us your take on the controversy that erupted last night with this leak to CBS over the lack of information, or the information that came in, the supposedly lack of action following it concerning the terrorist attack September 11th?
Rumsfeld: Well I guess I’d begin by saying it’s really much ado about nothing. To my knowledge there was no warning, no alert as to suicide attackers in airplanes. There’s always been concerns about hijacking. That’s been true for months and years as a possibility.
Apparently the intelligence community, our intelligence community, the country’s, did not have sufficient granularity to issue any specific warning. But I should say that through the spring and summer there was a great deal of threat reporting indicating on a variety of different things all over the world, but without any specificity as to what might happen.
In my view all appropriate actions were taken according to the threat situation as far as it was known. There were times when the Department of State would send out cautions and warnings to their embassies. The Department of Defense had different threat levels for our various areas of responsibility around the world and took a whole series of steps at different times as we always do, but I think it’s just grossly inaccurate to suggest that the President had any kind of a warning about September 11th.
Ah, they say, but if this had been president Clinton, you would have jumped on it. Nu-huh. My point about Clinton was his record of eight years of not taking al Qaeda seriously as a real threat to this country and the world. Bush deserves criticism on this score as well, except that he ordered a real review of our efforts and was on the verge of transforming our policies against terror on the eve of September 11. What exactly should Bush have done with this vague information at the time? Shut down the airports? Even then, the use of mere box-cutters to use as hijacking weapons was not anticipated. This is a non-story. It’s being used by some to try and get some leverage against the massive support this president rightly has for his conduct of the war so far. It’s pathetic.
THE CRISIS IN A NUTSHELL: From yesterday’s Chicago Tribune:
Joliet Bishop Joseph Imesch seemed unfazed as a lawyer questioned him in 1995 about bringing in a priest who had been convicted of molesting an altar boy in Michigan.
“If you had a child,” the lawyer recalled asking the bishop during the deposition for a civil suit, “wouldn’t you be concerned that the priest they were saying mass with had been convicted of sexually molesting children?”
Replied Imesch, “I don’t have any children.”
ALL THE NEWS THAT’S REALLY ABOUT US:Here’s a piece from the new Forward. Recently, as you may know, several Jewish groups in New York have boycotted the New York Times after some of its more egregious bias in covering the Middle East. Threatened with this boycott, the Times ran a rare editorial apology for their choice of photos about a recent pro-Israel march (the photos showed as many Palestinian protestors as jewish marchers). The ever-loyal Frank Rich was then deputed to defend the Times’ Middle East coverage on the op-ed page last weekend. And then this story comes out – puffing, in a bizarre way, one of the leaders of the boycott, Haskell Lookstein. Weirder and weirder.
THE CASE AGAINST LOMBORG: On global warming, that is. Bjorn should be responding next week to your emails so far – and your questions. If you have a specific question for him, please send it in. Details on the Book Club page.
LEGO HEAVEN: Wait, there’s more. Here’s a Lego site for narcissists. And here’s one for sadists. And here’s one for heterosexual sodomites. I think that covers most of my readers.
MUCH ADO: Back to performing last night. An odd thing has happened. Despite some of the negative reviews of the concept of the production, the houses remain big and even growing. Word of mouth seems strong – and we’ve now been extended one week through Memorial Day weekend. It’s also been great to meet a few of the email addresses I’ve gotten to know over the past couple of years. Judy and Ladislaw and, especially, students and twentysomethings who are fans of the site have stayed behind after to say hi. I realize again how personal this blog is, how you almost feel you know people by interacting through emails and so on for months on end. Anyway, four more shows by Sunday. Oy.
The Dish 