As 9/11 spin goes, this is even dumber than most:
Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him.
Damn that George Bush. The election was still two months away and already he was a freakin' slacker.
Oh wait, it gets even worse. It turns out that by April of 2000, even as they were approving a drone program to go after bin Laden, budget cuts were forcing the CIA to go into a defensive posture:
“The idea of using UAVs originated in April 2000 as a result of a request from the NSC’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism to the CIA and the Department of Defense to come up with new ideas to go after the terrorists in Afghanistan,” a 2004 document summarizes. The Pentagon approved the plan for surveillance purposes.
And yet, simultaneously, the CIA declared that budget concerns were forcing it to move its Counterterrorism Center/Osama bin Laden Unit from an “offensive” to a “defensive” posture. For the CIA, that meant trying to get Afghan tribal leaders and the Northern Alliance to kill or capture bin Laden, Elias-Sanborn says. “It was forced to be less of a kinetic operation,” she says. “It had to be only for surveillance, which was not what they considered an offensive posture.”
That son of a bitch Bush was so evil he was screwing everything up a full nine months before he took office. I'm telling ya, that's some powerful evilness.
Obviously, if Bush hadn't messed everything up we wouldn't have missed this opportunity to kill bin Laden:
Still, the drone program began in September 2000. One drone swiftly twice observed an individual “most likely to have been Bin Laden.” But since the CIA only had permission to use the drones for intelligence gathering, it had no way to act on its findings. The agency submitted a proposal to the National Security Council staff in December 2000 that would have significantly expanded the program. “It was too late for the departing Clinton Administration to take action on this strategic request,” however. It wasn’t too late for the Bush administration, though. It just never did.
Damn you, George W. Bush! If you hadn't been so short-sighted back in April 2000 those drones would have been armed and they could have killed bin Laden in September 2000. And then, to top it all off, after the valiant and urgent efforts by the Clinton administration came up with a plan 3 months later, you still didn't go back in time and fix everything.
You bastard!
Sigh...
It takes some real chutzpah to take what are obviously Clinton administration mistakes and try to stick them on Bush.
I'll discuss the failure to get bin Laden with anybody, but we have to start at the beginning, which is roughly 1995 or so. After we get through five years of Clinton administration fecklessness we can start with the seven+ months that the Bush team had.
I mean, if people want to play the blame game we can do that. I'll start with "3000 people died on 9/11 because Bill Clinton screwed around for five freakin' years." I don't see that kind of discussion leading to anything constructive, but if we're going to get it on, let's get it on.
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