With Jeb Bush and Donald Trump arguing over whether George W. Bush failed to stop 9/11, it’s worth going to the videotape (47:28) of the second Presidential debate of 2000. On 10/11/2000, the Texas governor denounced heightened scrutiny of Arab airline passengers by airport security. Bush said on national TV:
Secondly, there is other forms of racial profiling that goes on in America. Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what is called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we have to do something about that. My friend, Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, is pushing a law to make sure that Arab-Americans are treated with respect. So racial profiling isn’t just an issue at local police forces. It’s an issue throughout our society. And as we become a diverse society, we’re going to have to deal with it more and more. I believe, though — I believe, as sure as I’m sitting here, that most Americans really care. They’re tolerant people. They’re good, tolerant people. It’s the very few that create most of the crises, and we just have to find them and deal with them.
Note that when the future President said “we just have to find them and deal with them,” the “them” he was referring to as having to be dealt with were not Arab skyjackers but airline and airport employees worried about stopping Arab skyjackers.
In accordance with this statement, Bush appointed Democrat Norman Mineta Secretary of Transportation and directed him to root out profiling of Arabs at the airport.
In 2005, airport counter clerk Michael Tuohey told Oprah Winfrey of his encounter early on 9/11/2001 with the leader of the terrorists:
“I got an instant chill when I looked at [Atta]. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a political correct slap…I thought, ‘My God, Michael, these are just a couple of Arab businessmen.’”
By the way, on a personal note, this may have been when I started to realize I was the world’s least viral journalist. I’m not sure if the word “viral” had that meaning on 9/11/2001, but if it did, I was sure that the President’s 11-month-old denunciation of anti-terrorism efforts would soon go viral. I vividly recalled watching Bush say this to a huge television audience less than a year before. Back then you couldn’t post video, but it was easy to find a transcript. So I stayed up late that night writing up “Bush had called for laxer airport security” so I wouldn’t get scooped too badly by all the other pundits.
In all the rush, it didn’t get published for about a week. Yet by then, nobody else had brought it up. When my piece didn’t get any attention, well, lots of stuff was happening.
Every few years since then, I’ve brought up Bush’s statement, but it never seems to register on anybody other than my core readers. It’s an interesting example of the Sapir-Whorf effect in action. We are given categories to file facts away in: e.g., Republicans Are Racist; Bush Protected Us from Terrorism, etc. It’s very hard to remember anything that doesn’t fit in the right slots.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* After 9/11 the government kept up its race-blind policy; it just changed directions. So instead of treating no one like a potential terrorist they treat everyone like a potential terrorist. As a very non-Arab, non-Muslim American of overwhelmingly European descent, I dread returning to the US due to the double digit IQ, completely unaccountable bullies that pass for border agents.
* So…a Bush calls for less security on a certain group and that group takes advantage. Sounds like actionable intelligence to not let a Bush into public life.
* This is what passed for ‘conservative’ in our political culture. Bush the wrecker destroyed everything he touched. There’s also this conflating of Arab-American with just any Arab passing through. The former might be just an ordinary citizen going through customs but Atta was not a citizen and certainly no American. There’s a difference.
* Bush made his speech at least five years after the first World Trade Center bombing by Mad Mullah Omar of New Jersey and his crew.
Bush made his harangue when jihadis were already convening airport conventions across the USA (as Steve Emerson reported).
Bush made his warm-n-cuddly speech five years after Emerson released his award-winning documentary, “Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America”.
* Excerpts from an article written by Andrew Kaczynski, published by Buzzfeed.
In 2000, 19 months before Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Trump wrote extensively of the terrorism threat the United States was facing.
Trump, who at the time was considering a presidential bid on the Reform Party ticket, went so far as to say that an attack on a major U.S. city was not just a probability, but an inevitability.
“I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers,” wrote Trump in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. “No sensible analyst rejects this possibility, and plenty of them, like me, are not wondering if but when it will happen.”
Trump even mentions Osama bin Laden by name, in a criticism of an American foreign policy that too quickly jumps from one crisis to the next.
“One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan,” The Donald wrote. “He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”
….
“We can kid ourselves all we want by mocking their references to the Great Satan, but also keep in mind that there is no greater destiny for many people than to deal the Great Satan a major kick in the teeth,” he wrote, adding they despised the U.S. support for Israel.
“Our teenage boys fantasize about Cindy Crawford; young terrorists fantasize about turning an American city (and themselves) into charcoal,” Trump wrote.
Trump predicted a major attack on an American city that would involved weapons of mass destruction, writing, “Yet it’s time to get down to the hard business of preparing for what I believe is the real possibility that somewhere, sometime, a weapon of mass destruction will be carried into a major American city and detonated.”
* George Bush was on an ego trip from getting a large percentage of Hispanic votes whenever he ran for governor of Texas. A high number for a Republican at least. GW and Karl Rove wanted to extend this by having an illegal alien amnesty. They were working for this when 911 happened and ruined their open borders plans.
The Vdare website was around back then and cautioned us on George Bush’s immigration stance before he was elected and after. To repeat. It was only the 911 attack that stopped these schemes. I blame Karl Rove as much as George Bush. Rove had a real grip on Bush’s mind.
Rove is ultra sneaky and nefarious.
* It didn’t go viral because everyone agrees that profiling based on race is wicked. 3000 Americans may have died but if our [or ‘your’ since I’m not American] commitment to race-blindness was weakened that would have been a greater tragedy.
* I guess we’ll find out in a few days whether Trump or anyone in his entourage reads your blog.
* This is the kind of stuff that would make the average GOPer’s head explode. Their ill-thought political loyalty forces them to either ignore his policies or mildly defend Dubya. That it took a Trump to do this speaks volumes about the GOP masses. The Tea Party never went there There might have been a few isolated examples, but the Tea Party as a movement never castigated Bush directly or consistently.
Aside from Trump,who for reasons not readily apparent is changing history on his own, I’ve no real hope that the GOP brigades of the so-called Greatest Generation, Silents or Boomers will ever do the right thing. They’ve had generations to do SOMETHING. They’ve had their prophets, but like the rich man’s brothers they continue in their sinning [against their grandchildren].
At some point blaming political elites, NAMs or political operatives no longer works to excuse the populace’s acquiescence to or complicity in the current sad state of the country. When Dalton made his speech or whenever anything like that happens, why wasn’t there an immediate petition to have the man recalled? Why no public marches or protests? Same for Reagan’s Amnesty? Where were the marches?
There is a powerful lobby for red herrings like GUNS and the “pro-life” movement, people can and do mobilize.
* Viralization does not correlate well with either relevance, cleverness, quality, or import. It also does not just happen automatically. In order for something to go viral, it has to be repeatedly tweeted, facebooked, “dug,” redditized, instagrammed, or otherwise continuously recycled through the various social media. I don’t participate in that sort of thing, and I suspect most iSteve readers do not, either.
* I pointed out a few days ago that Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice received a warning more than a month before 9/11 from the CIA (personally from George Tenet, as I recall) of impending terrorist attacks “possibly involving airplanes.” That brainless, incompetent woman dismissed the warnings as “vague” because they didn’t give her specific flight numbers.
BTW the 9/11 Commission Report, overseen by Philip Zelikow, states (at p. 359 of my version) that “In the summer of 2001, DCI Tenet, the Counterterrorist Center, and the Counterrorism Security Group did their utmost to sound a loud alarm, its basis being intelligence indicating that al Qaeda planned something big.” Curiously omitted from the Commission Report was the specific reference to Rice from Tenet and the warning “possibly involving airplanes.”
Years later, we got this report from NBC News:
“On the 11th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, there is mounting evidence that the Bush administration received more intelligence warnings than previously known prior to the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000.
Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter, wrote in an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s newspaper about a number of previously unknown warnings relayed to the White House by U.S. intelligence in the weeks and months prior to the attacks. Eichenwald wrote of the warnings in his new book, “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars.”
And former US intelligence officials say there were even more warnings, pointing to a little noticed section of George Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm.”
In it, Tenet describes a July 10, 2001, meeting at the White House in the office of Condoleezza Rice, then President George W. Bush’s national security adviser. The meeting was not discussed in the 9-11 Commission’s final report on the attacks, although Tenet wrote that he provided information on it to the commission. . .
Tenet wrote about how after being briefed by his counterterrorism team on July 10 — two months prior to the attacks — “I picked up the big white secure phone on the left side of my desk — the one with a direct line to Condi Rice — and told her that I needed to see her immediately to provide an update on the al-Qaida threat.”
Tenet said he could not recall another time in his seven years as director of the CIA that he sought such an urgent meeting at the White House. Rice agreed to the meeting immediately, and 15 minutes later, he was in Rice’s office.
An analyst handed out the briefing packages Tenet had just seen and began to speak. “His opening line got everyone’s attention,” Tenet wrote, “in part because it left no room for misunderstanding: ‘There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!’””
From a 2004 blog by Fred Kaplan in Slate that was recently reposted on another blog:
“Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their “hair on fire,” warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President’s Daily Brief (by one of Tenet’s underlings), warning that this attack might take place “inside the United States.” For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.”
* Trump could put together a devastating Instagram GIF using this video. It might go viral yet.
* The specific screw-ups of W are mostly history, but the forces that determine which facts are remembered and shared (and which go down the memory hole) remain relevant today.
I think a lot of what drives this is cognitive dissonance (contradictory thoughts are unpleasant to hold in your head) and confirmation bias (things that agree with your starting ideas are easier to remember and recall than things that contradict them).
Once there is a widely accepted public image of some politician, it’s common for facts that contradict that image to bounce off the politician, while facts that re-enforce the image stick to him. A good example of this is McCain’s maverick image, which survived being a consummate insider who voted with his party nearly all the time, as well as his role in the Keating Five scandal.
I suspect that understanding how this works is pretty useful for understanding the (vast) distance between reality and common public understanding of issues.
