IX / XI

photo courtesy of www.natashamaria.blogspot.com

IX / XI, Part I: Bush's Conduct

Michael Moore has never been accused of being objective (not by any remotely objective person, at least). Anyone who would tell you that Moore is not just as ideological as the president has a severe deficiency in the faculty that differentiates documentary from propaganda. Mr. Moore did us a service, however, in stressing the president's conduct on that horrible day in that Florida school in the otherwise boorish and insipid Fahrenheit 9/11.

It matters that Bush sat and continued reading to those children. It matters alot. It matters not strictly in the public relations sense, but in regards to the much more substantive issues of competence and leadership. There was more than the unnerving skunk-in-the-headlights look on the president's face; there was what it implied.

The people who take pains to defend the president's immediate non-response use a very effective (if allowed to pass unnoticed) sleight of hand to do so; they lump the president in with the rest of us. We were all in shock that day, they say. We all thought the first plane was an accident.

Well, yes, but we weren't all receiving explicit warnings from a number of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies about impending terrorist attacks involving airplanes. We weren't all warned by the outgoing Clinton administration that al-Qaeda was the primary immediate threat to the physical security of the United States. So while, to the rest of us, the shock and disorientation of that morning was to be expected, it was unforgivable in Bush.

He should have known. When someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center, of which he was notified before he entered that school, he should have known it was not an accident. Why? Because he had been specifically warned about attacks using airplanes. If you were specifically warned about attacks using airplanes and then a month later an airplane flew into the tallest building in New York City on a cloudless morning, would you instantly assume, with everyone else, that it must have been a freak accident?

Not only should he have known, he should have acted. Even if it were an accident, the crash would have caused, no, did cause, hundreds of deaths. Perhaps he could have gotten on the horn? Hey, Giuliani, need any help with that crash? Need any resources? Got any info on what might have happened? Hey, FAA, anything odd you may have noticed about that flight? Any need to shut down the airspace around New York? Hey U.S. military, you folks want to send over some helicopters to New York and start plucking folks off the roof of that building? Nothing.

While he was in the classroom, his chief of staff broke ranks to inform him that a second plane had crashed into the second tower and that "America is under attack". Okay. If you're George W. Bush, you've been getting warnings about such attacks. The first attack seems like an accident to you, for some bizarre reason. The second attack makes it clear: this is a multi-pronged, highly coordinated terrorist attack the likes of which the world has never seen. Hundreds of people are dead already, tens of thousands are at risk, and there is no way of knowing whether the attack is over or whether ten more planes will fall from the sky.

Indeed, there is no way of knowing if airplanes are the only weapons in the terrorists' arsenal; "America is under attack" is a rather open-ended prognosis, after all. Maybe the crashes were simply intended to lure a mass of people to the site, where a dozen truck bombs were waiting. Maybe men with machine guns waited outside the Capitol for the second branch of government to be evacuated from their offices. Maybe the president should have gotten off his fucking ass.

Nothing. The man did nothing. He acted as if: a)the attack was over and b) he wasn't the president. "He didn't want to scare the children", his doppelgangers intone, drawing on the president's legendary empathy for the small and weak. I love children. I was a child once. I still am in many ways. I hope to have children of my own one day. But in this case, forget the children and their lil' feelings. There were other people that were scared that morning. Some of them were so scared that they jumped from 110-story buildings. In fact, the president was endangering those children by remaining amongst them, but more about that later.

This was, at this early point that horrible morning, the worst terrorist attack in history. Hundreds of people were dead and dying on live television. It was clear that airplanes were being used as weapons, which raised the obvious possibility that, if there were more, they would have to be shot down. Where was the president? This commander-in-chief who perfected his swagger once the danger was over? Who became far more brave when ordering bombings than he was when called upon to react to them? Sitting. Reading a book.

In a soon-to-be-familiar theme, Dick Cheney made the calls that day, giving the too-late authorization to shoot down civilian airliners that had been hijacked. When Bush did leave the school, he got on Air Force One and flew aimlessly around the country, to bunkers designed to survive thermo-nuclear war, while the people he was sworn to protect were incinerated in the thousands and his self-decapitated government huddled in bunkers of their own.

Why did the president stay on the run? The government told us of a specific threat to Air Force One. Really? Huh. There was a "specific threat" to Air Force One, so you put the president on....Air Force One. Bullshit. This is where we must get angry, because this is clearly, without a doubt, an explicit and intentional lie of commission by the government in a pathetically transparent attempt to gloss over the presdient's cowardice and lack of leadership and decision-making. Indeed, by all accounts, the president gave exactly zero orders that day. Perhaps there was a "specific threat" to his telephones and computers and larynx.

Beyond this staggering, staggering lack of leadership is another thought that I can't quite slip. The president not only acted as if he had no warnings of the attacks and no responsibility or authority to attempt to mitigate them; he also, in a sense, acted guilty. Normally I would chalk this up to his Promethean adeptness at ignoring the obvious and forgetting the already-known. But there is something else here...

Why wasn't the President scared? Two planes have intentionally been flown into two buildings. This is already the largest terrorist attack in history, and there is no way of knowing when it will end. It is clearly targeted at symbols of American power. You are the president. Your whereabouts (Emma T. Booker elementary school) are public knowledge. And you're not scared? And what of the Secret Service? They're not assuming that, at that very moment, a commandeered aircraft is steering towards the school? No urge by the President or his bodyguards to get the hell out of there? Is this not guilty behavior? Does it not imply, in some sense, that the Secret Service knew that the President, and the children surrounding him, were in no danger?

The tragedy of all this is that it leaves us with just two possibilities. The president's actions were a perfect microcosm of the actions of the government as a whole that day; after we assess them, with the cool analytical detachment that 6 years can bring, we are left with only two possible explanations for the conduct of our leadership. The first possibility is an Olympian scale of negligence, which it would not be hyperbolic to call criminal. The second possibility is an indifference and deceit which borders on collusion. Which possibility makes you feel safer?