(the below is cross-posted from my blog)
As the 9/11 commission does its work and prepares to hear from Condi Rice on Thursday (while inexplicably failing to even contact the man whose commission warned her of all of this on top of Richard Clarke, former Sen. Gary Hart), President Bush has finally seen it fit to speak out on this topic publicly (much in the way that Rice, who has been silent since it was decided that she'd testify, was yammerring about when she thought her testimony would only be private and not under oath like Bush's). Of course, he's not saying much of depth, and what he is saying is pretty slippery:
"Let me just be very clear about this," he said. "Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack. ... If we'd have known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we would have done everything in our power to stop it."
Note that not once there or in the past has he bothered to add, "And I'm sorry that I didn't have that information at the time, and that the processes weren't in place to get that information synthesized at the lower levels and made a priority on my national agenda." No, that would require some actual self-reflection, and remember, Dubya doesn't do that well-- just all self-assuredness, because we need steady leadership, even if its wrong and unwilling to be flexible.
Please. If you want a good summing up of just how morally reprehensible this utter inability to admit responsibility for letting bad things happen is, take a look at the
latest masterpiece by my second-favorite hometown columnist, Paul Vitello, which draws an eerie parallel between the line being taken by the administration and the current position of the former football coaches at my district's own Mepham High School (who refuse to say that there is anything they could have done to prevent the animalistic hazings that happenned on their watch):
The assaults were as unforeseeable as 9/11, said former assistant coach Art Canestro, apparently innocent of the doubt cast on that 9/11 certainty during recent weeks of Washington hearings.
They were as unforeseeable as Columbine, said former head coach Kevin McElroy, also apparently innocent of the many unheeded warnings of the rampage to come at Columbine High.
No event is truly foreseeable. Condoleezza Rice will tell you that, as will the Suffolk County cops who failed to arrest the man who would allegedly kill Jean Ferdinando in Coram last month. She had an order of protection against the man; she had called for police help just hours before she died, but the cops had declined to arrest him, seeing no cause for alarm.
Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, calls this sort of thing a failure of imagination. In all these cases, there is undoubtedly that. But there is something else, too, and that is a failure of empathy -- an inability to see the world through the eyes of a weaker party. In the case of the U.S. government, bulked to the max with military might, it was obliviousness to the extreme vulnerability of its civilian population. In Mepham, it was the coaches' inability to see the vulnerability of its youngest, smallest boys.