Leo
08-28-2004, 04:14 AM
A few moments before 9 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the president was told that an aircraft had struck the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. He didn’t see video of the event at this point despite a White House claim that he did and later retracted.
It could have been just a terrible air disaster. However, given what the president had been told in Richard Clarke’s memo of Aug. 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,” he might reasonably have had suspicions that something more sinister might be going on. That PDB, fewer than five weeks earlier, had specifically warned of aircraft being highjacked and used as missiles.
Despite this, President Bush made the decision to keep the photo op appointment to promote his education program in Mrs. Daniels’ class at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla. He took his place among the second graders and was given a copy of Reading Mastery 2, storybook No. 1. Then he and the rest of the class followed Mrs. Daniels’ instruction to: “Open your book up to lesson 60 on page 153 and get ready to read the title.”
No sooner had the title been read - “The Pet Goat,” not “My Pet Goat” as often reported - than Chief of Staff Andrew Card appeared in the room and whispered to the president that a second plane had hit the WTC. “America is under attack,” Card reported telling the president in his sworn testimony before the commission. It was now 9:05 a.m.
For more than six minutes the president remained in the classroom and on camera as the second graders and the president too read along with: “A girl got a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her goat in her house. She played with her goat in her yard...”
It’s a riveting tale but some may think the president had more pressing matters. The world knew at that moment that the United States was the victim of a vicious and unprovoked assault. What nobody knew for sure was the scope. Was it conventional or nuclear? Who were the aggressors? Was there more on the way?
The responsibility to react to such a crisis is in the hands of one man, the President of the United States. That is why an individual follows him at all times with the “football” containing the launch codes for nuclear retaliation.
But for nearly seven minutes the president did nothing except read along with the children. In the meantime two other aircraft were on course to destroy the Pentagon and either the White House or the Capitol. The decision to shoot down civilian aircraft is also in the hands of the Commander in Chief.
The official White House line, repeated by the president in his unsworn testimony before the commission and faithfully parroted by Mr. Watson, Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and GOP.com, is that the president didn’t want to scare the children. How about saving their lives? Has this been an attack by the much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction then seconds, let alone minutes, could have made the difference between life and death for perhaps millions of Americans.
Scare the children...that’s the worst excuse for presidential behavior since Bill Clinton tried to redefine sexual contact. And you know the kids would have understood about leaving the room. All the president had to do was tell them he had to go potty.
http://www.ledger-dispatch.com/opinion/opinionview.asp?c=120849
It could have been just a terrible air disaster. However, given what the president had been told in Richard Clarke’s memo of Aug. 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,” he might reasonably have had suspicions that something more sinister might be going on. That PDB, fewer than five weeks earlier, had specifically warned of aircraft being highjacked and used as missiles.
Despite this, President Bush made the decision to keep the photo op appointment to promote his education program in Mrs. Daniels’ class at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla. He took his place among the second graders and was given a copy of Reading Mastery 2, storybook No. 1. Then he and the rest of the class followed Mrs. Daniels’ instruction to: “Open your book up to lesson 60 on page 153 and get ready to read the title.”
No sooner had the title been read - “The Pet Goat,” not “My Pet Goat” as often reported - than Chief of Staff Andrew Card appeared in the room and whispered to the president that a second plane had hit the WTC. “America is under attack,” Card reported telling the president in his sworn testimony before the commission. It was now 9:05 a.m.
For more than six minutes the president remained in the classroom and on camera as the second graders and the president too read along with: “A girl got a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her goat in her house. She played with her goat in her yard...”
It’s a riveting tale but some may think the president had more pressing matters. The world knew at that moment that the United States was the victim of a vicious and unprovoked assault. What nobody knew for sure was the scope. Was it conventional or nuclear? Who were the aggressors? Was there more on the way?
The responsibility to react to such a crisis is in the hands of one man, the President of the United States. That is why an individual follows him at all times with the “football” containing the launch codes for nuclear retaliation.
But for nearly seven minutes the president did nothing except read along with the children. In the meantime two other aircraft were on course to destroy the Pentagon and either the White House or the Capitol. The decision to shoot down civilian aircraft is also in the hands of the Commander in Chief.
The official White House line, repeated by the president in his unsworn testimony before the commission and faithfully parroted by Mr. Watson, Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and GOP.com, is that the president didn’t want to scare the children. How about saving their lives? Has this been an attack by the much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction then seconds, let alone minutes, could have made the difference between life and death for perhaps millions of Americans.
Scare the children...that’s the worst excuse for presidential behavior since Bill Clinton tried to redefine sexual contact. And you know the kids would have understood about leaving the room. All the president had to do was tell them he had to go potty.
http://www.ledger-dispatch.com/opinion/opinionview.asp?c=120849