Bush and History

Bush and History
El Pais, Spain
Translated By Joseph Locatelli
10 November 2010
Edited by Heidi Kaufmann

Those who watched his departure from the White House with relief should prepare themselves. George W. Bush, the former Republican president of the United States, returns. Starting today, and for a long season, it will be nearly impossible not to see him in the media. Before being released for sale yesterday, his memoir, “Decision Points,” was already one of the most in-demand books on Amazon, and now the ex-president is to commence a national tour that will include a few television appearances.

Bush has already granted one interview, in which he has reinvented himself as a man against the violence utilized to invade Iraq. He has had two years to rethink and explain. Two years in the refuge of his ranch in Crawford, Texas, after leaving Washington as one of the least-accepted presidents in history, to reappear now as a man that seeks understanding.

The president that invaded Iraq, created Guantanamo and authorized systematic torture and secret prisons not only presents himself as a naive politician, pushed by his advisors to enter Iraq, but he also says that he suffered for it. Perhaps for the 150,000 deaths — the majority civilian — that have been caused to date by that decision? No. Bush suffers because they never found weapons of mass destruction that supposedly were hidden by Saddam Hussein and that were the reason for the invasion. “I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do,” he laments.

There is another sorrow: how he reacted badly to Hurricane Katrina. For the rest, faithful to himself he explains, pleasantly (with his Texas boots on the table?), the most difficult decisions of his life through which, he thinks, he saved lives. How, when the CIA asked him for permission to torture a detainee of 9/11, he responded, “Damn right.” And along the same line, he clarified his permission of the water boarding of the detainees, in that it is a strong method that does not cause permanent harm.

Yesterday Bush signed books at a hectic pace. With a first printing of 1.5 million copies, there will be many benefits, but the CIA no longer asks him questions. Now, he can change his history, but his decisions do not change ours.

I AM NOT DEFENDING BUSH!

it is neigh impossible to accurately grade a president and determine his actual impact upon the world prior to about 50 years. It takes that long for documents to be declassified, emotions to be taken out of the equation and all the ripples to reach shore.

Take any president since, say, 1960ish. the truth (by the way of documents and recordings of nonpublic meetings - where the real information is revealed, examined and debated, not the press releases and analysis of those spun documents by folks who wish to drive an agenda) has not yet been revealed.

However, once begin to approach and pass the 50 year mark, you begin to get a much clearer picture of a president and his impact upon the world, both positive and negative.

within the next 20 years or so, the documents from the JFK, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter years will become declassified and how they fared and will fare the examination of history will become to take shape and then, as international documents become more and more available the picture will become even clearer.

On August 23 or 24, George Tenet flew to Crawford, TX for an unscheduled meeting with President Bush. He went there to follow-up on the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief that a CIA officer and Bush's personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, had read to him two weeks earlier. That PDB was entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

While nobody knows exactly what the CIA Director and the President said to each other during that visit -- Tenet's 2007 autobiography At the Center of Storm says, merely, "A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events" -- the question of whether the CIA should release its UBL files to the FBI surely arose. The CIA had until then refused to release information it had about an al-Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur and the travels from there of a pair of operatives to the United States, who the CIA noted at the time, had entered the U.S. on January 15, 2000, when a warning cable was drafted but withheld at the order of the Assistant Dircector of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CIA/CTC). Those files contained the details of the Agency's surveillance of at least two of the major hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, who would go on to hijack American Airline Flt. 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

Why didn't Bush issue the order to the CIA to release the full contents of those files, so the FBI could roll-up the 9/11 attack cells Bush, Tenet, and dozens within the CIA knew were inside the U.S.? That is perennial unanswered question that will be George W. Bush's real legacy.

See, http://mparent7777.blogspot.com/2007/05/they-knew-tenets-book-reveals-9-11.html