People like Michael Moore or the Daily Show often use the title of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US to show that the Bush administration was ignoring warning signs before September 11th. And, if done right, it can be amusing, especially if it's in response to someone claiming there was no warning whatsoever. But generally, I find it disingenuous and annoying.
On August 6, 2001, I didn't get to read a Presidential Daily Briefing, but I could have told you that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the US. Anyone who was paying attention to non-blowjob-related news in the summer of 1998 could have. That summer, I read ABC's interview with bin Laden, which contains this piece of happy news:
If the present injustice continues with the wave of national consciousness, it will inevitably move the battle to American soil, just as Ramzi Yousef and others have done.So there was good reason to worry about al-Qaeda attacks before September 11th, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with the August 6th PDB. There are two disingenuous sides to this debate - one side, loyal to Bush, that says the US was taken totally by surprise on September 11th, which "changed everything"; and the other side, opposed to the administration, that says the August 6th PDB, which contained no new information, should have sparked a response.
What both sides have in common is a dependence on public ignorance. If, in 2001, you couldn't remember things that happened three years before, you were probably shocked that al Qaeda would attack the US, and the PDB might seem like new information to you. All's fair in love and war, and using this ignorance to political advantage might be a smart thing to do, but don't ask me to like it.
Posted by digamma at September 4, 2004 01:14 PM | TrackBackWell DiGuy, you are right, but the Daily Show invoked "the memo" in the context of an equally disingenous attack on the Clinton Administration and the Democrats. George Pataki, easily the least effective attack dog in the history of the GOP, lamented on Thursday night that he wished the Clinton Administration had acted on terror warnings in the 1990's. John Stewart was merely pointing out (via a low blow) that the Bushies had warnings too.
So yeah, it's cheap, but if the Kerry people won't (or can't) respond in kind to the lies and distortions of the Bush campaign, I'm glad at least one media outlet is trying to level the playing field.
Posted by: bleepingidiot at September 4, 2004 09:20 PMI like how my two most intelligent commenters are named "RETARDO" and "bleepingidiot".
Posted by: digamma at September 5, 2004 02:43 AMWell, DG, you seem to be presenting a third perspective here (after saying there are two). Of course, it's the same thing I've been saying since roughly noon on September 11th of 2001, but it doesn't make you less wrong. But you need to look from even further outside the box, IMO: for a variety of reasons, terrorism has become the only military option for fighting westernization or globalization or capitalization or imperialism or however you break down the world. The only way to fight a nation whose military costs as much as the rest of the world combined (or at least so I've read) is by attacking non-military targets. It's logical to presume that in the face of such overwhelming force, what is now deemed "terrorism" becomes the only possibly response. It is a failure of at least the last several administrations to recognize what large swaths of military history had told us -- in a nutshell, that when the odds are stacked enough against the underdog, breaking the rules of war is inevitable. This is about more than the failure of any one administration or even the collective of elected officials and bureaucrats to take any partiuclar warnings seriously, it's a failure of vision and foresight at the highest levels. And furthermore, it's a failure of the American people to elect officials who are capable of abstract thought.
Posted by: lacking a cool name at September 13, 2004 04:57 PMUh, I fail to see what any of that has to do with what I wrote. I was pointing out the disingenuousness of two particular arguments about who could have predicted what and when. You say "this is about more than the failure of any one administration...." but I'm not sure what "this" is. (I guess this ambiguity is the reason teachers have always discouraged me from using demonstratives as standalone pronons.)
If "this" is the four paragraph post I wrote last week about the August 6th PDB, then I have a pretty good idea of what "this" is about. If "this" is something as broad as "what matters in international relations", then I can't disagree, but that doesn't make my original point any less right.
Posted by: digamma at September 13, 2004 07:09 PM