On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 13:17:13 -0500, Matt Whiting
wrote:

Yes, I think Bush's much more aggressive approach to terrorism has
helped. Yes, I am considering the lag time, but I'm also considering
that four years is plenty of time given that this is about how long the
planning for 9/11 apparently took.

Too bad Bush didn't get aggressive with Al Qaida prior to the attacks,
when being aggressive might have stopped them. Richard Clarke, former
adviser to the Bush White House reported that he could not get the
White House to listen to him or even discuss Al Qaida prior to
September 11, 2001.

The day after the attacks he reported that Rumsfeld demanded that he
find a link connecting Iraq to the attacks despite the common
knowledge that Al Qaida was operating in Afghanistan, not Iraq.
Clarke has said that this demand was so strange that he actually
thought Rumsfeld was joking, at first. Here are his exact words:

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection [to Iraq],
but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was
sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years
we've looked and there's just no connection."

So not only did Bush not listen to warnings about the possibility of
an attack on the US using airliners as weapons (the week prior to
9/11/01 Condoleeza Rice gave a speech in which she claimed that our
main security concern is to counter intercontinental ballistic
missiles), he eventually attacked a country that was not harboring Al
Qaida operatives, a country who's dictator the leader of Al Qaida
hated almost as much as America.

Corky Scott