…It hasn’t received much recognition in previous years, but today, Aug. 6, is a noteworthy anniversary as well — six years ago today, the president, on vacation in Crawford, was handed an intelligence briefing document. It was titled, Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.
In 2004, Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, explained that a Presidential Daily Briefing like that one should have sent Bush back to the Oval Office. Johnson, who’d written dozens of PDBs during Bush 41’s presidency, said the documents are usually brief and dispassionate. The one on Aug. 6, 2001, was a page and a half, with a title meant to capture the president’s attention. “That’s the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace,” Johnson said.
Johnson added that when he read the declassified document, “I said, ‘Holy smoke!’ This is such a dead-on ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to do something!’ ”
[A]n unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US. Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
Top intelligence officials — George Tenet, Richard Clarke, and others — were running around with their “hair on fire,” warning that al Qaeda was about to unleash a major attack. Bush, tragically, treated his intelligence briefings about Osama bin Laden as perfunctory chores that he had to endure. Based on the “covered your ass” comment, it was almost as if the president was humoring the CIA briefer…
Thirteen months before President Bush was reelected, chief strategist Karl Rove summoned political appointees from around the government to the Old Executive Office Building. The subject of the Oct. 1, 2003, meeting was "asset deployment," and the message was clear: The staging of official announcements, high-visibility trips and declarations of federal grants had to be carefully coordinated with the White House political affairs office to ensure the maximum promotion of Bush’s reelection agenda and the Republicans in Congress who supported him, according to documents and some of those involved in the effort. "The White House determines which members need visits," said an internal e-mail about the previously undisclosed Rove "deployment" team, "and where we need to be strategically placing our assets."…But Rove, who announced last week that he is resigning from the White House at the end of August, pursued the goal far more systematically than his predecessors, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Washington Post, enlisting political appointees at every level of government in a permanent campaign that was an integral part of his strategy to establish Republican electoral dominance. Under Rove’s direction, this highly coordinated effort to leverage the government for political marketing started as soon as Bush took office in 2001 and continued through last year’s congressional elections, when it played out in its most quintessential form in the coastal Connecticut district of Rep. Christopher Shays, an endangered Republican incumbent. Seven times, senior administration officials visited Shays’s district in the six months before the election — once for an announcement as minor as a single $23 government weather alert radio presented to an elementary school. On Election Day, Shays was the only Republican House member in New England to survive the Democratic victory.
While Bush is just an incompetent wise guy, his colleagues are something else – something much darker. Here, Karl Rove is blatantly using the governmental agencies and resources for partisan political gain. To me, these three people [Bush, Cheney, and Rove] have made a mockery of our country by ignoring our laws, our legal system. And, in a way, they’ve pointed out a genuine fundamental flaw in our system. Our judiciary can be dominated by the Executive Branch. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is an Administration Puppet. Thus, there is no check on what the three kings can get away with. Right now, Congress is having a real try at filling in for our absent justice system, but that shouldn’t have to be. Our system allows an incompetent President and his unscrupulous cronies to run free because they’ve been able to paralyze the legal system by appointing a weak and totally controlled Attorney General. That’s a hole in our system – a big one…
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