George Bush Did Not Make Us Safer After 9/11Tim McCown
Philadelphia Progressive Examiner
March 16, 2009
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Dick Chaney has come back from retirement to state that because Obama is planning to do some things like close Guantanamo Bay and start withdrawing from Iraq that he is making America more likely to be attacked in the future. The problem without even getting into the politics of things as I will wholeheartedly, is that using FBI statistics from a Brookings Institution report entitled Total Acts of Terrorism in the U.S. from 1980 to 1998 there are more acts of terror under GOP regimes. That of course stops before Bush, but Bush's possible violation of international law by his use of water boarding hasn't made us safer because people being tortured will say anything to avoid further torture as even former CIA field operatives have recently said, not to mention that Guantanamo has acted like a recruiting poster for Al Quaida.
To believe the fractured fairy tale being put forth to rewrite Bush's place in history you must suppress your knowledge of the absolute incompetence of the last eight years to accept that somehow George Bush kept us safe after 9-11. To believe this you must forget Hurricane Katrina.
You must also forget that you would need to use the same intelligence that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It is the same intelligence that told us that Iraq was trying to buy yellow cake uranium in Niger. This is the same administration that had no plan for what to do after declaring mission accomplished.
This is the administration that privatized some functions at Walter Reed and then to America's horror we found the squalid conditions that this had created in caring for wounded vets back from Iraq. This is the administration that depended upon intelligence to keep us safe that has not been able to find Bin Laden. Or the intelligence that told us that Iraq would welcome us as liberators. It is the same administration that allowed the Taliban to make a comeback in Afghanistan.
This is the administration whose treasury department had no idea that the second coming of The Great Depression was coming. Bush's SEC couldn't detect Bernie Madoff taking 65 billion dollars without making a single trade, and was even made the head of NASDAQ as a financial genius. This administrations FDA was unable to keep us safe from toxic toys, tainted food, and medicine that was a hazard to our health because they relied on companies self testing and voluntary compliance .
The Bush administration can't tell you whether 12 or 20 million illegal aliens have crossed the border so they have no way to know who has come in. As a friend of mine said while discussing the illegal alien issue," Maybe the reason we can't find Bin Laden is because we are looking in Afghanistan and he has come across the border disguised as an illegal alien and is working at a Quik Trip in Crawford, Texas.
I would not engage in blame for how 9-11 happened. That is the most horrendous event during my life time. But just as I won't place blame for 9-11 I'm sure not buying that an administration that had no concept of how to govern because of a political philosophy of hostility to government, and that because of this was absolutely incompetent, could have possibly managed to keep us safe when they could do nothing else right.
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Link:
http://www.examiner.com/x-3629-Philadelphia-Progressive-Examiner~y2009m3d16-George-Bush-did-not-make-us-safer-after-911Exactly!!!
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