Bush Administration Only Spent An Hour On Afghanistan Report
Monday October 26, 2009 1:09 a.m.
While former Vice President Dick Cheney has chided President Obama for "dithering" on Afghanistan, it is being reported that Cheney's administration spent approximately one hour preparing a comprehensive report on Afghanistan for the Obama administration.
The upside is that this was one more hour than was spent reviewing the "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The U.S." memo.
On ABC's "This Week," Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed some startling information regarding the report on Afghanistan which Cheney touts as his administration's recommendations for an effective strategy in Afghanistan.
They did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.
A "C" student move if ever there was one, this new information is shocking to no one. What better way to culminate almost eight years of neglect than to hurriedly assemble a last minute report like a college freshman scrambling to finish a term paper because he was too busy funneling beers.
Sen. Ted Kaufman, a former Biden aide, also said that Bush officials "threw some kind of report" on Afghanistan policy "to the transition team as they were going out the door." Kaufman also indicated that the Obama team did not put much stock in the report as it came from an administration that had spent years neglecting Afghanistan.
It is ludicrous for the former Vice President to criticize an administration that is developing a clear approach for handling a situation with such serious implications. It also happens to be a far cry from his administration's level of attention to such grave matters.
Bob Woodward reported that during his second term, President Bush became so disengaged from the decisionmaking in both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts he helped spawn, he skipped key meetings on the conflicts saying, "I'm not in these meetings, you'll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do."
If only these "other things" included thinking.
There are 6 comments
You are probably right that SOME repubs will say that. I'm also quite sure that MOST Dems will say BO couldn't have done a thing.
Uff, you got a link that show's that the info was detailed enough to make a difference? I'm pretty sure they investigated that and found that while hind site is 20/20, nobody was truly negligent. If the info was so accurate, then why wasn't it acted on. I mean did Billy Bob wake up the day b4 Bush took office and find all of this info on the white house doorstep or did they have it for a while and NOT act on it? Now that would be criminally negligent. Did they have positive ID of the highjackers or do you propose strip searching all middle eastern people getting on the planes? I think the ACLU would frown on that.
Actually, it was far more than just a suggestion to Bush. Richard Clarke had written a document detailing what was known or suspected about Al Qaeda plans. As president, it was Bush's job to do more than just blow it off.
No, it's possible that even with Bush taking the report seriously, 9-11 may still have happened. However, being warned about the use of aircraft to attack targets in the US, airport security could have been beefed up, the FBI could have worked on tips, (such as the information from the Minneapolis FBI office about Moussaui and his flight training. Instead, as usual, repubs blew off all warnings about Al Qaeda, just as they criticized Clinton in 98 when he went after their training camps. At the very least, it was incompetence, at worst, criminal negligence. I'm betting that if we suffer a terror attack on Obama's watch where thousands of Americans die, repubs will be the first to say "He should have known about it and prevented it".
Hey everybody, a paid shill for AAR just wrote a report on Bush. Must be gospel. Explain to me again how the so called warning from Clinton to Bush on Al-queda mattered squat? I guess if we would have racially profiled every Arab or middle eastern person at the airport, detained them, questioned them, and then locked them up, 9-11 MIGHT have been prevented. How long was spent on that report? Lets see, it probably went like this, "Hey George, we think a bunch of middle eastern terrorist types might try to use airplanes as weapons. We don't know who they are, where they are, or how to stop them. Good luck with that. Bye." Yeah, that must of taken a long time to put together.
And he probably had to have Condi read it to him. I'm sure it was tough for her when she had to explain there were no pictures in the report for him to color.
"...but...but...uhhhh...uh huh-huh-huh-huh...oh yeah....uhhh...my dog ate my home work....yeah, that's it---my dog ate my homework......"
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