I’m not sure if I’ve made my feelings about President Bush and the current administration clear in this forum before; but just in case I haven’t, let me clarify. I think that President Bush is a typical politician, guided more by the big money interests that he is firmly in bed with (I think I prefer my Presidents to be fooling around with interns and not major oil companies) than by any genuine interest in what’s best for the country. I’m not sure he has any clue as to what is best for the country. I think he has a fine speechwriter, but I’m not impressed by his foreign policies nor his domestic ones. And I am not a fan of the current administration by any stretch of the imagination.

And yet, painful as it is for me to say this, I think that the current flap over what Bush might have known about an attack on our country on September 11th is overblown and driven not by patriotism but by politics. This is why I’m registered as "decline to state political party". I think that both Democrats and Republicans ought to be ashamed of themselves. The Democrats ought to be ashamed of themselves for manipulating the situation to their own political gain, and the Republicans ought to be ashamed of themselves for… well, for being Republicans. I think that’s enough.

Don’t get me wrong. I do think that there were massive failures of intelligence in the past few years; contrary to the Democrats, though, I don’t believe that anyone could have successfully put together enough information from the disparate pieces to conclude that nineteen insane martyrs would hijack four jets on the 11th of September and kill thousands of civilians. On the other hand, contrary to the Republicans, I believe very strongly that Congress ought to examine the failures occurred. It’s not so much a matter of finding out who was to blame, but of learning from our mistakes. Obviously, having different intelligence agencies working in isolation and not talking to each other didn’t work; we should investigate the ways the old model failed, and make improvements.

Some critics have said that the administration should have issued a serious terror alert prior to the 11th of September; but what good would that have done? In the eight months prior to September 11, there were a total of fifteen alerts issued to the airline industry about potential terrorist actions. Some of those alerts involved possible hijacking attempts. None of them was specific enough to allow the airlines to take any precautions.

And since September 11th, there have been at least four more terror alerts; and we are currently at yellow alert, an "elevated" risk of terror attack. These days, we take this alerts somewhat seriously, but that’s in light of a post-9/11 mindset. How seriously would such threats have been taken prior to that date? Pre-9/11, we, as a country, lived in a heightened state of complacency, knowing that there were a few people in the world who didn’t like us, but convinced that all of the world’s troubles were on the other side of the planet and didn’t affect us at all. For a few weeks after 9/11, as the political posturing continued and the spectre of bioterrorism in the form of anthrax mailings, we were shaken, and lived in the sort of ongoing state of alert that many people throughout the world accept as daily life. Since then, some of our complacency has returned, allowing the politicians to do what they do best: posture, cast blame, point fingers, find scapegoats, do anything but find answers and solutions.

The monstrous evil and stupidity of 9/11 are incomprehensible to rational, moral human beings. We’re all still looking for answers, trying to find ways to protect the freedom, security, and prosperity of our nation and the world. Part of that process will involve taking a hard look at where mistakes were made in the past, and finding ways to rectify them in the future. Tossing blame around will not contribute to that process.

On a side note, just as I was in the middle of the last paragraph, I found this article on MSNBC, which indicates the the United States already had plans for a full-scale war on al-Qaeda in place, and such plans were due to be signed by President Bush two days before September 11. I still don’t believe that anyone knew what was going to happen on that day, but I find the timing very interesting. Don’t you?