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"The fact of the matter is the administration focused on this before 9/11." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

February 2002 Five months after 9/11, VP Cheney addresses a Council of Foreign Relations gathering:

Throughout the time that I've been a member of the council, most of our debates were defined by the Cold War. When America's great enemy [Soviet Union] suddenly disappeared, many wondered what new direction our foreign policy would take. We spoke, as always, of long-term problems and regional crises throughout the world, but there was no single immediate, global threat that any roomful of experts could agree upon.

All of that changed five months ago. [9/11] The threat is known and our role is clear now. ~ Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to a Council of Foreign Relations benefit in February 2002. Source: CFR transcript

Golly "Big Time", that sounds an awful lot like this below, but without the room full of experts.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism task force, which was created in May, never convened one single meeting. The President himself admitted that "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11. [Washington Post, 1/20/02; Bob Woodward's "Bush at War"]

...and this from Herr Rumsfeld who apparently related to the 9/11 commission that he:

"did not recall any particular terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11 other than the development of the Predator unmanned aircraft system for possible use against bin Laden." [source: Denver Post]

Or something like that. Anyway....enter Colin Powell, who remembers things differently even though he can't always remember things.

[Following transcript excerpts: Face the Nation - Sunday, March 28, 2004 / Sec. of State Colin Powell speaking with Bob Schieffer]

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me go back to what you said, that first briefing you had. Did he [Richard Clarke] express a sense of urgency about this growing threat at that point? Because now he says he did and nobody was listening.

POWELL: What does he mean, nobody was listening? I was sitting there listening to him. The CIA, Mr. Cofer Black, who is now a counterterrorism expert at the State Department -- I even brought the fellow who did it from the CIA over to the State Department to now do it for me.

We were listening. We did respond.

SCHIEFFER: But did he say it was an urgent threat that had to be dealt with...

POWELL: I can't remember.

SCHIEFFER: ... immediately?

POWELL: It was a threat. We all knew it was a threat. We didn't need just Dick Clarke to tell us that terrorism was a threat. The Cole had been blown up three months earlier. I became secretary of state knowing that two of our embassies had been blown up in 1998.

[...]

SCHIEFFER: What would you say, Mr. Secretary, is the most serious inconsistency that you have found?

POWELL: In my judgment, it is the charge that somehow the administration that was leaving office, which focused on law enforcement and diplomatic activities, was dealing with this problem with greater energy and urgency and immediacy than the new administration coming in. WaPo/Face the Nation

Jeepers Mr. Powell, I wonder what could possibly move anyone to such a charge?

The Cult of the 'W' has entangled itself in a Gordian knot of its own designs and doesn't know who to summon forth to undo the entire twisted mess. Meanwhile the usual predator pundit drones in the nooze-o-musement TV-media will manage to fiddle and fumble and slobber all over the whole hodgepodge like so many servile cringlings groveling at the kinked bootstrings of an oaf King who's lashed his own shoes together. This will go on until some impavid avenger heaves the bootlickers aside or delivers them a swift kick in the haunches and they go loping off squealing, chasing after the next tantara. For the oaf King needs to be restored to former glory - rescued from its own muddle - and no noisy flock of blind sycophants are gonna pull off the great escape this time. That leaves two possibilities.

One - Some arbusto chevalier tufthunter shows up and frees the fool from its own binds and whisks it away to a secret undisclosed spa where it can gnaw on chitterlings and await Lady Karen of the Bluebonnets, flower of the Lupines, who arrives in a dervish to nurse the boo-boos.

Two - Deliverance comes in the person of the unknown patriot, better angels of our nature, who doffs from the sheath a deadly filagree sword and hacks the entire drooling loutish tangle into a hundred bloody chunks.

Now I don't pretend to not favor one scenario over another. I'm clearly in the doffing and hacking and bloody chunks camp - metaphorically speaking of course - but I will say this: when hacking and stabbing and smoting it's always best to bring along an archangel or three. I suggest Michael and Raphael and ultimately Gabriel. ..."lead forth to battle these my sons - Invincible; lead forth my armed Saints -By thousands and by millions ranged for fight."

Unleash the wild geese.
And, as always; beware the mist in the garden. :-)

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