Sitting Duck Bush

From The Memory Hole comes this: 5 minute video of George W. Bush on the Morning of 9/11. That's right. Bush is told that America is under attack, and does nothing - NOTHING! - for at least five minutes. This is after the second plane hit the towers. As The Memory Hole analyzes it, he was a sitting duck. Under a terror attack, anyone following the President's public itinerary would have known where his photo op du jour was taking place. Yet the Secret Service, Chief of Staff, etc, do nothing to get the President out of there.

As analyzed by Bob Harris (co-writer at the This Modern World weblog this morning:

The White House admits that Bush fully understood what was happening. So keep this in mind while watching: in New York, as these long, precious minutes slowly tick by, people are burning horribly, people are jumping 100 stories to their deaths, and more planes are very likely headed for other targets (the Pentagon, for example, as it turned out).

Bush sits complacently, doing nothing.

This is the president who's being hailed as this great commander-in-chief, a rally-round-the-troops guy. Yet he doesn't even leap into action when America is facing the gravest attack on its soil since Pearl Harbor. (This is also the man who is cutting funds to the Veterans Administration and their hospitals so that our underpaid troops won't even have decent medical coverage anymore).

Perhaps, as a human, he was stunned and processing the events. But as a commander in chief, and surrounded by secret service and other high ranking individuals who had been trained in doing more than pumping oil and managing ball teams, you would think someone would end the photo op saying "something has come up that needs our attention." It's no wonder that a public disclosure of his actions that day are still being suppressed.

But some have made valiant efforts to compile the events of that day and the days leading up to it. Allan Wood and Paul Thompson have put together the article An Interesting Day: Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11 (link found via The Memory Hole's video description). Among the interesting tidbits of the September 10th night and September 11th pre-attack morning are these: there were surface-to-air missiles and an "Airborne Warning" plane circling overhead (the essay states that it's unclear if this is standard operation or if there was knowledge of an increased threat); and there was apparently an assassination attempt made that morning using a similar tactic to the assassination of AhmedShas Massoud (leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). From the BBC on September 10th:

But the loss of Ahmed Shah Masood would push the balance, perhaps decisively, in the Taleban's favour.

It's an eerie reminder of the unbalanced world that few Americans took notice of in those days. I knew of some of it as a reader of The Economist at that time, but (of course) had no idea how such things could ever impact us. And, of course, we're still not thinking of our place in the world except that we are the world, not just a cog (albeit a big cog) in a connected machine where world wide politics, actions, inactions, can all come crashing back on us. Lewis Lapham wrote in one of the essays published in Theater of War (an essay written after the immediate aftermath of the attacks) that he had hoped that a real dialog about our place in the world would have opened up. That we would realize the perception of some of our global actions as imperial and evil, no matter how good we may intend them to be (or pretend them to be). Of course, it didn't happen. The rhetoric fell sway to wishes of payback and resolution - a knife in the throat of anybody, as long as it proved how all powerful the United States was. It's too bad that "all knowing" doesn't come along with that "all powerful".

One Minute No Silence; One Minute Suspended Detonation. This track was done as a brief and noisy outlet of my frustrations over the increasingly inexcusable Iraq war and the fucking warmongers who took us there. You should hear the hour of new noise works that I'm sending out to potential labels or distributors this week. It looks like I'm being given yet more fuel to glorify and burn.