Sunday, April 11, 2004 3:03 p.m. EDT
How Bush Could Have Prevented the 9/11 Attacks
A handful of Sept. 11 widows are outraged that President Bush didn't act on the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing he got from the CIA.
"Everything is in [the President's Daily Brief, or PDB] but the date 9/11," complained Lori Van Auken, whose husband died in the Twin Towers, in comments to the New York Daily News. "You have the who, what, where, why and how. The only thing you don't have is the when."
Actually, as far as the "who" goes, none of the hijackers' names appear in the Bush CIA briefing memo.
And the "what"? Nowhere does the memo warn that hijackers would use airplanes as kamikaze missiles.
"Where"? The memo mentions "federal buildings in New York." But Bush could have closed every one of them and the World Trade Center, which is not a federal building, would have still been packed with 50,000 workers on the morning of 9/11.
How about the "why" cited by Mrs. Van Auken? The CIA briefing says that "after US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington." But those attacks were launched by President Clinton, not Bush.
And the "how"? The memo makes no mention of hijackers overtaking U.S. flight crews with small knives.
Of course, if President Bush had treated the Aug. 6 PDB as actionable intelligence, there are indeed several measures he could have taken that would have guaranteed that a Sept. 11-style attack on America would never have happened.
* Because the CIA memo mentions only Osama bin Laden by name, Bush would have had to round up any and all of bin Laden's potential followers inside the U.S., i.e., every Muslim in America, and throw them into internment camps - just as FDR did with Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.
* Since reporters have been able to sneak any number of weapons past airport screeners even with post-9/11 security measures in place, President Bush would have had to close all of America's airports to completely eliminate the possibility of hijackings.
* In order to protect against another Millennium Plot bombing attack - which the memo explicitly refers to - Bush would have had to order that all shopping malls, schools, museums, movie theaters, train stations, large office buildings and other potential high-value targets be closed till further notice.
* Because Millennium Plot potential bomber Ahmed Ressam tried to sneak across the Canadian border, Bush would have had to seal both the Canadian and Mexican borders until the war on terrorism was won.
* In order to assure the elimination of the bin Laden threat, Bush would have had to launch a pre-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. If the master terrorist ran to Pakistan, the U.S. would have needed to invade that country as well.
Had Bush taken the above steps, the economy would have been in shambles, the airline industry destroyed, most of the nation unemployed, the U.S. at war, and 6 million Muslims - nearly all of them innocent - would be behind bars.
But the Sept. 11 attacks would have been prevented - at least for the few months that it would have taken for the Congress to impeach and remove President Bush from office for massive abuses of power.
