Here's a Picture...

Imagine Bush, Rice, Tenet, And the Others Across the Table from Trump on 'The Apprentice.' After Hearing Their Excuses, What Would He Say?
By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPoliticstoday.com

On one of the most popular current TV shows, wannabe young business types are given such mundane assignments as figuring out how to sell lemonade. Teams compete against one another, and the show closes with Donald Trump telling someone that he’s (or she’s) “fired.”

Why are they fired? Because they didn’t do the job. Or maybe they did do the job, but not as well as someone else. It’s a tough business. But as Trump keeps telling the contestants, if you want to succeed you have to be accountable for your mistakes.

This week the latest in a long line of witnesses is scheduled to appear before the commission investigating 9/11. So far we have heard that the people who run the airlines and the airports were not accountable for letting terrorists board their flights because no one told them to be more careful. The FAA’s leaders have assured us they feel just terrible about what happened, and they might have taken stronger measures to prevent it, but existing laws, restrictions, lack of financing and a lack of urgency from the top got in the way.

George Tenet and others from the CIA have warded off responsiblity because the CIA’s principal job is foreign intelligence operations and there were restrictions on their activities inside the U.S. The Immigration Service wasn’t responsible for permitting the hijackers to enter the U.S. and remain here for a whole laundry list of reasons.

Last week we heard from Condoleezza Rice that she wasn’t accountable for the 9/11 tragedy because her office was doing everything it could to develop a new and better strategy for dealing with al Qaeda than the previous administration had.

Now we’re about to hear from the FBI about why, even though the President was told by the Washington office that 70 ongoing al Qaeda investigations were under way, the FBI officers in the field didn’t think so. And, of course, we will have the Bush-Cheney tag team appearance before the commission. They already have disclaimed responsibility, even though they received the famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Briefing Document entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

In her testimony, Condoleezza Rice said the memo was a “historical” document. She testified that the memo revealed “no new threat information, it was not a warning.”

Here are the exact words of the memo, as released by the White House:

“FBI information indicates patterns of suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters were in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.”

If this information was not new, then we have to assume that Rice and the President knew all this before August 6. Whenever they learned it, there’s no evidence they treated it with any sense of urgency.

If this was not a threat warning, how much closer to the mark did they expect the warning to be? Is it only “actionable intelligence,” if the information includes the exact targets, the day of the planned attack and the names and addresses of the conspirators?

The U.S. spends upwards of $50 billion a year on intelligence gathering and covert activities for the express purpose of digging out information from leads like those in the PBD and then following up to stop the threat before it succeeds. Isn’t that what we pay them to do?

The only person so far who has admitted failure is Richard Clarke. As the counter-terrorism chief, his job was to stop 9/11 or anything like it. The terrorists defeated every defense we had in place. It was his job to protect us. Why shouldn’t he apologize? Why should his be the only apology?

And it’s ironic that of all the people in responsible positions on 9/11, Clarke seems to be the one who was most alert to the danger, and now he’s the only one no longer on the bridge. From the President on down, those who had the responsibility for protecting us from such attacks as 9/11, and failed, and are unapologetic, are all still in place---disclaiming responsibility.

If you take their arguments at face value, there was nothing anyone could have done to anticipate the attacks or to have defeated them.

None of those wannabe business executives would get by Donald Trump with that argument. Those on TV lose their jobs for failing to place their lemonade stand on the right street corner. What would Donald Trump say if Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Mueller, and the others in charge on 9/11 were sitting across the conference table giving him the same story they are giving the 9/11 commission and the rest of us?

What would Trump say?

Come on. You know. All together now, “You’re _ _ _ _ _!”