He Kept Us Safe!

With notably rare exceptions:

When Donald Trump impugned the honor of his brother earlier this year, Jeb Bush proudly fell back on the achievement of the Dubya administration that has endured in public memory, despite his other failures: “He kept us safe.” Even in 2008, at the nadir of Bush’s presidency, Americans still gave him a fair measure of credit in this area. But the impression that Bush was successful, or even especially well-focused, on protecting Americans from terrorism is an inversion of reality, and the fact that it can still be asserted with a straight face is the residue of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in American history.

Chris Whipple’s revelations about the CIA’s urgent, ignored pleas to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda before 9/11 flesh out an increasingly consistent portrait drawn by Kurt Eichenwald and other reporters. A broad and consistent body of evidence had persuaded intelligence officials that Al Qaeda was poised to carry out a devastating attack against the United States. It was not just the famous August memo, “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” — the one Bush dismissed at the time as ass-covering — but a much longer and more desperate campaign to wake up Bush’s inner circle. Whipple reports, “Months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.”

But the Bush White House was dominated by neoconservatives, who were ideologically fixated on the threat posed by states and dismissed the threat of non-state actors. The administration’s defenders tend to gloss over the wee problem of Bush’s abject failure before the attack by treating it as a passing transitional problem, a matter of getting one’s feet wet, often speaking of the Bush presidency as if did not really begin until September 12. This willfully erases the administration’s gross negligence before the attacks.

It also ignores the reality that Bush and his closest advisers clung to their state-focused neoconservative dogma even after the attacks.