In a Huffington Post blog entry titled "J'Accuse", Gary Hart says just what the Democrats should all be saying about 9/11 and the Bush Administration. This is about as direct and no holds barred a critique of the myth Bush has constructed about Republicans and the War on Terror as I have ever read.
This is the link to the story here. I tried searching to see if anyone else has mentioned this but I couldn't see anything (maybe I don't know how to use the search function though, so if this diary is a duplicate let me know and I'll delete it).
Hart starts off with three paragraphs that should be the frame for all Democratic discussions of Bush's phony wars:
Six years ago three thousand Americans lost their lives. They need not have. Their deaths could have been prevented. Their lives could have been saved.
The Bush administration was warned months before 9/11 that terrorists were going to attack America. They did nothing. They have yet to be held accountable for the preventable loss of American lives. Yet the administration blames its critics for not understanding the terrorist threat.
The perpetrator of those American deaths is still at large and the war to eliminate those who harbored him threatens to drag on inconclusively for many years. Instead, administration operatives, with the approval of their masters, find it convenient to use him to create fear, and therefore justify their positions of power.
These are the facts. Bush and company had ample warning of an impending terrorist attack. His G-8 meeting in Genoa had anti-aircraft guns on guard just to prevent the use of hijacked airplanes as suicide missiles against the assembled dignitaries, the very threat that Rice after 9/11 asked "Who could have imagined...?" about. He sat around like a wax dummy listening to children read "My Pet Goat" while the nation was under attack. In Washington, DC, Dick Cheney was in the driver's seat of the national security state, and his response was so inadequate that a plane got through and hit the Pentagon for crying out loud! When Bush finally got off his duff he went hopping around the country on Airforce-1 like a scared rabbit, finally ending up in Omaha while the country was looking around dazedly for some leadership.
Then the war planners began trying to drag Iraq into the crisis, when they had no reason to believe it was connected in any way. Rumsfeld wanted to "Go big" and sweep in as many unrelated war plans as possible. We attacked Afghanistan (which I realize some people claim may have been in the works anyway for reasons unrelated to Bin Laden, though related to the Taliban). But then we conveniently lost Bin Laden in the mountains and Bush declared he wasn't wasting time thinking about him anymore...because the war drums were starting to beat much louder for Iraq. Because we had to get the new "New Hitler", Saddam Hussein. With a combination of lies and media propagandizing and glitz, our military forces were sent into that quagmire with no thought of how to get them back out and no concern for the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians who would be murdered and maimed. As Hart states:
Those who claim to understand terrorism and the use of force, meanwhile, have so exhausted our combat forces that our true national security is greatly at risk and our nation is weakened.
This administration stands indicted for incompetence and mendacity. That it still commands the loyalty of even a quarter of our fellow citizens is testament to the persistence of willful ignorance. Against all the facts assembled in this indictment, that the administration's operatives can still make claims on strength, security, and determination is chutzpah on stilts.
Having failed to protect us from the terrorists on 9/11, Bush and Cheney are now destroying our military while planning even more wars using even deadlier weapons. Most of their Homeland Security efforts involve showy tactics of dubious effectiveness while whole categories of vulnerabilities (that were pointed out by Hart and Warren Rudman before 9/11) like container ships, tankers and nuclear plants go unprotected still.
Gary Hart has produced a very short but stunning indictment of the fakery that allows Bush, Cheney and the Republicans to say that they're "strong on national security". Instead they have failed us spectacularly, and they should be given no more credence on any of these issues. They should not be trusted to take any major new national security or military actions on their own say-so, and none at all without rigorous questioning, ironclad justifications, reasoned public deliberations by Congress, and strict predefined limits on both timelines and funding.