----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 5:11 PM
Subject: [unioNews] Fwd: Follow The Leader


Published: Mar 10 2004
<H3>Follow The Leader</H3>
John Prados

The outcry over the first series of political commercials for
President George W. Bush was swift and heartfelt. Using images of
victims of the 9/11 attacks and firefighters responding to the
emergency at the World Trade Center, the ads trumpeted President
Bush's "steady" leadership. Families of the victims and
representatives of the firefighters charged that the White House is
using 9/11 to advance a political agenda. Former New York mayor Rudy
Giuliani tried to deflect this criticism by emphasizing that Bush's
leadership has been steady. But the commercials themselves beg the
question: What did President Bush do on 9/11? Giuliani himself framed
the Bush question this way: "His leadership on that day is central to
his record."

Over the weekend that followed initial broadcast of the Bush campaign
commercials both sides took positions on the appropriateness of their
content. Democrats protested the imagery. President Bush, who in
January 2002, when seeking an extra budget appropriation for his war
on terrorism, had told congressional leaders, "I have no ambition
whatsoever to use this as a political issue," backed away from that
undertaking. From his Crawford, Texas, ranch on March 6 Bush
declared, "I will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our
country and my presidency." Echoing Rudy Giuliani, Bush added, "how
this administration handled that day, as well as the war on terror,
is worthy of discussion."

A leader marches to the sound of the guns. George Washington, Robert
E. Lee or Napoleon would have done that. Rudy Giuliani did do that.
After the first plane struck the Twin Towers, he went immediately to
the World Trade Center and helped supervise emergency efforts there.
But what exactly did George W. Bush do?

On that crystalline day in September, President Bush was at the Emma
Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla. Bush was to participate in
a conference and some reading demonstrations in support of his "No
Child Left Behind" education program. Learning of the terrorist
attacks, President Bush made a brief televised statement in which he
said he had spoken to Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert
Mueller and New York Governor George Pataki. He called the
terrorists "folks" and promised a full investigation. Then he left
for the airport.

Air Force One was wheels up from Sarasota at 9:57 a.m., a little over
20 minutes after Bush's first statement. At that point the president,
the commander-in-chief, had three choices. Bush could have returned
to Washington, where the Pentagon had also been hit by one of the
terrorist planes, and where the president had told the nation he was
headed. Bush could have gone to New York City, which had sustained
the most grievous blows in the 9/11 attacks. What he chose-the third
option-was to flee somewhere else to refuel, then remain in the air.
The president's plane flew to Barksdale Air Force Base outside
Shreveport, La. By choosing to fly to a remote location far away from
the site of the attacks, Bush acquiesced to the demands of his
security people. At the moment of the initial decision there was
still some reason for the moving out of danger, because one of the
terrorist aircrafts, Flight 77, was still airborne, but it crashed in
Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m., only a few minutes into Bush's flight.

Did Bush march to the sound of the guns? Did he go to New York where
his presence would have been the symbol of a nation unbowed? No.
Instead, at about 10:40 a.m., when Air Force One picked up a fighter
escort near Jacksonville, Bush accepted Cheney's advice not to return
immediately to Washington.

Because every aircraft over the United States except official planes
got orders to land, air traffic controllers and military air defense
commanders could verify within a few hours that the airborne
terrorist threat had ended. Certainly the situation had been
clarified by 12:36, when Bush spoke again to the nation from
Barksdale, looking flustered on television but promising the United
States would track down the perpetrators. An hour later Air Force One
was back in the air-the real situation clearer yet-but Bush flew to
Offut Air Force Base at Omaha, headquarters of the Air Combat
Command, not to either Washington or New York. Offut had a secure
command post where Bush could teleconference with his top national
security people, but he could have done that even more easily in
Washington. Only late in the day did the president return to the East
coast. He stepped onto White House grounds at about 7:00 that
evening.

<B>Three days after the attacks President Bush finally went to New
York. This sorry record is not one of steady leadership, nor does it
show a decisive president willing to override poor advice.</B>

The official record of Presidents of the United States, the Weekly
Compilation of Presidential Documents, which would have to have
recorded Bush's statements of the morning and afternoon of 9/11,
never appeared for the week of September 11, 2001. The remarks
appeared only much later on the White House website. President Bush
also went to extraordinary lengths to shield from public scrutiny his
inaction on the terrorist threat before 9/11, including denial of
documents to congressional investigators and a public commission, the
use of secrecy rules to suppress embarrassing information and the
manipulation of the scope of inquiry and its deadline to ensure
investigators had minimal time in which to review the key issue of
Bush's leadership on terrorism.

<B>In contrast to this disturbing performance, George Bush went on to
take every opportunity to harness 9/11 in service of his political
agenda, contrary to his own promises of 2002. A carefully
orchestrated World Trade Center speech on the first anniversary of
the attacks, the use of the Statue of Liberty as backdrop for a 9/11
commemoration a year later, now the Bush political ads. This is
leadership of a different kind.</B>

***
<i>John Prados is an analyst with the National Security Archive in
Washington, DC, and author, most recently, of The White House Tapes;
Eavesdropping on the President.</i>

Copyright © 2004 TomPaine.com










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