It's difficult to decide which is more outrageous -- federal aviation officials' failure to follow through on intelligence reports before Sept. 11, 2001, that warned of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden using airliner hijackings and suicide operations, or the Bush administration's refusal to let the American public know about it before the November election.
The administration has for five months blocked public release of the full version of the 9/11 commission report, even though former commission members insist that it provides what The New York Times calls a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system that contributed to the atrocities.
This revelation perhaps would not have changed the outcome of the presidential election. But that could not have been clear to the administration in the months between the report's completion and the resolution at the polls of what was widely presumed to be a very tight race with Sen. John Kerry.
In April last year, President Bush said, "Had I any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country. ..." The 9/11 commission report apparently found that there were indeed such inklings, which should have "raised alarms about the growing terrorist threat to civil aviation throughout the 1990s and into the new century."
We're left with a pretty good inkling as to why the president moved heaven and earth to keep it quiet before the election. Link
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