This is what I warned about in my January 2004 article, What Was George W. Bush Thinking on 9/11 (.pdf).
A poll conducted last week by the New York Times and CBS news found that just 16% of Americans believe the Bush Administration is telling the truth about what they knew prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Poll participants were asked, “do you think members of the Bush Administration are telling the truth, are mostly telling the truth but hiding something, or are they mostly lying?”
53% of respondents indicated they believe the Bush Administration was hiding something, and another 28% reported that they think the administration is mostly lying “when it comes to what they knew prior to September 11th, 2001, about possible terrorist attacks against the United States.”
Back in January 2004, the 9/11 Commission was still doing their work and the White House was still stonewalling. The report, when it finally came out in August 2004, was a whitewash. It didn’t even address dozens of questions that the 9/11 widows had requested be addressed. This is how I summarized the problem of stonewalling the 9/11 Commission.
If we give the President the benefit of the doubt that he is not a mass murderer, it
appears that the White House has tried to gloss over this failure, as well as the extent of specific warnings to our civil aviation, in the interest of calming a jittery nation and
protecting the image of the President. In the process, they have made inconsistent and incompatible and sometimes misleading statements, while consistently resisting all formal investigations. But as international unease and distrust of Bush’s handling of the War on Terrorism grows, it is more important than ever that the administration come clean about the mistakes that were made. If they initially obfuscated in the wake of a devastating attack to buck up American confidence in the President, that
can be forgiven. But if they don’t explain the President’s actions on the morning of 9/11, the failure of our air defenses, and cooperate with investigators they will inadvertently promote theories that America perpetrated the attacks on ourselves.The risk, that Dean so sloppily tried to explain, is that Bush will cause damage in our international relations that could extend well beyond the current administration.
