Sunday, 18 April 2004

Moment of truth. It was September 12, 2001, and the White House press secretary had just uttered a transparent lie: Bush had spent most of 9/11 flying from one undisclosed location to another, Ari Fleischer claimed, because a specific threat had been lodged against Air Force One.

Fleischer had spoken the truth in his briefing the day before, while en route to the White House on the afternoon of 9/11: Bush spent the day in midair because that's what the playbook says to do. The plan for responding to an attack on Washington, written back in the days of Truman and Eisenhower, starts with getting the President airborne and to (relative) safety; the attack was always assumed to be nuclear, but nonetheless Step One in the federal government's response to any attack on D.C. is to get the President in motion and preserve the National Command Authority.

Nonetheless, Bush or his handlers apparently decided that the truth — that Bush was in hiding for most of the day on 9/11 — might be a bit damaging to the President's image, even though it was the appropriate course of action for the commander in chief. And so, instead of defending the truth, the administration adopted a convenient lie. Air Force One was a target, they proclaimed, in spite of the obvious absurdity: How could a hijacked passenger jet possibly find Air Force One, much less intercept it? Commercial aircraft are not equipped with Top Gun-style radar systems that identify friends and foes — and even if they did identify the plane by sight, they wouldn't be able to catch it without active cooperation from Air Force One's pilot.

The moment I heard this impossible claim, I realized that its source was someone who could never be trusted: If you're willing to lie about something like this, at a time like that, you're willing to lie about anything. Given the choice between admitting an unpleasant truth and inventing a lie to cover it, someone in the Bush Administration instinctively chose the latter; conceding the truth and defending the President's actions would have cost almost nothing, but for this person the lie came quickly and easily.

If this had been an isolated act by one person — if one bad apple had been the culprit — then I'd have been willing to give Bush the benefit of continued doubt. But too many people from within the Bush Administration came forward to confirm the details of a story that was entirely bogus. Fleischer. Rove. Cheney. In a matter of days the truth came out, and it was clear that Bush's press secretary, his senior adviser, and his Vice-President were brazenly lying to the American people.

There was never a threat to Air Force One on 9/11. Senior members of the Bush Administration made up a terrorist threat, for partisan political gain — and if Bush saw anything wrong with that, the silence was deafening.

Before 9/11 Bush's credibility was already thin in my book: His explanations for why millionaires needed tax cuts shifted along with the economy, and his plans for a missile defense sounded great so long as the North Koreans never learned about boats. But it was really on September 12th that I realized that Bush just couldn't be trusted: Not with the economy, not with homeland security, and not with the plain and simple truth.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:44 pm. comments.