Word: pre-sept
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...Washington was a different city, where turf issues prevailed and concern about CIA and FBI "overreaching" trumped concern for security. In retrospect, clues were almost certainly missed, and, as is Washington's way, blame will be attributed. However, for the future, a thoughtful, balanced congressional inquiry can identify the pre-Sept. 11 structural and bureaucratic impediments to information sharing and better coordination across the government, and can recommend changes that improve our defenses against terrorism. But using fragments of information as ammunition against the President, the CIA, the FBI and others--absent context--will only delay tackling the real problems...
...wait a minute. Are things really that bad? And if so, why are we only hearing about it now? Stung by criticism of its handling of pre-Sept. 11 counter-terrorism intelligence, the Bush administration's instinct to share vague terror threats with the public is understandable. But although this is designed to calm the public, it may well have the opposite effect - and that would be bad news for the administration and good news for al-Qaeda...
...Still, nobody can envy the Bush administration having to preside over national security in a time of terror. The second-guessing of the White House's pre-Sept. 11 performance reflects a need, on the part of a substantial part of the American public, to believe that their government can protect them from all threats. Congress bought into National Missile Defense, for example, precisely because of the allure, however misleading, of the idea of an umbrella under which Americans can live unmolested by foreign threats. But as appealing as the idea may be to the public, absolute security...
...government takes the actions they take," Bush said. "Their country is under attack." Given the U.N. vote that very morning, the message was incoherent. And the imagery and atmospherics were all wrong: wearing an open-collar shirt and rocking back and forth in his chair, Bush looked like his pre-Sept. 11 self, a little bit scared and a little bit scary. A top official said later, "It was a mistake...
...attack, then held back by his publisher because of worries that his snippy tone--"Idiot in Chief" is one of the milder things he calls George W.--would not play well in wartime. Now we have his book pretty much as he wrote it, a bit of unadulterated pre-Sept. 11 wrath and a handy compilation of everything Moore's fans hate about the contested 2000 election ("Gore won!"), corporate greed and the buccaneering free-market culture that gave us Enron. Some of it is very funny. A lot of it is old-time left-wing boilerplate...