LET'S PUT THE BLAME WHERE IT BELONGS, ON ALL OF US :

No Hint of Sept. 11 in Report in August, White House Says (DAVID E. SANGER and ELISABETH BUMILLER, May 17, 2002, NY Times)

In fact, the information Mr. Bush received in the Aug. 6 briefing had been public for months. The Federal Aviation Administration published a report called Criminal Acts Against Aviation on its Web site in 2001 before the hijackings that said that although Osama bin Laden "is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so." It added, "Bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation."

Every once in awhile the dynamics of partisan politics plunge us into Cloud Cuckoo Land. Even after we lost thousands of people on September 11th, we've refused or resisted the following : racial profiling of Arab plane passengers; preventive detention of suspected terrorists; banning carry-on baggage; confiscating sharp objects from passengers; national ID cards; arming pilots with hand guns; etc.; etc.; etc...and Tom Ridge's color coded warning system for the terrorist threat level has been greeted with uniform derision, rather than anyone paying it any attention. The notion that on September 10th we would have been prepared to do all these things, which is what it would have required to have a chance of stopping the highjackings, both gives us all credit for the kind of foresight that no one has and assumes that we take our civil liberties so lightly that we're prepared to surrender them whenever the government says we should. Implicit in the criticism from people like Tom Daschle is that, had he been president, on receiving these warnings, he would have warned the American people of an imminent threat and demanded that such extraordinary actions as we've since taken be implemented immediately. Yet, oddly enough, as Majority Leader of the US. Senate, even after receiving these same warnings, he did nothing. Are the responsibilities of his office really so minimal that he can escape the blame he's trying to cast? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 17, 2002 7:28 AM