Trump drags the Republicans back to 9/11

Kudos to Donald Trump for performing a valuable public service. I kid you not.

Finally, a top-tier presidential candidate is publicly assailing the sainted axiom that George W. Bush kept us safe. Granted, Trump is an interloper and a demagogue, but, much like a stopped clock that’s accurate twice a day, he does occasionally score a bullseye. He’s doing it now by dredging up 9/11.

What havoc he’s wreaking inside the GOP! Republicans have been chanting the Kept Us Safe mantra for 14 years; they never imagined it would be questioned now. And the last thing Jeb Bush wants is to be dragged into defending his brother’s disastrous presidency – especially the one aspect of W’s reign that was deemed sacrosanct. Worse yet for Jeb and his party, it’s a losing proposition to re-fight the past, because presidential campaigns are supposed to be about the future.

Jeb actually started this fight when he chanted Kept Us Safe during the GOP debate in September. Trump, who has a shark’s nose for blood, instantly swooped in. And he’s still chomping.

This past week he has repeatedly questioned the party mantra. On Bloomberg Television, he said: “(W) was president, OK? The World Trade Center came down during his reign.” He riffed anew this weekend on Fox News Sunday: “The World Trade Center came down, so when (Jeb) said we were safe, we were not safe.” Yesterday, on Fox and Friends, he brought up the September debate: “If you look at it, Jeb, during the debate said, ‘My brother kept us safe,’ and I said to myself I didn’t want to embarrass him that night, but I said to myself, well, wait a minute, he kept us safe?”

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the two candidates are giving each other noogies in the schoolyard. Jeb is calling Trump “pathetic.” Trump is saying, “No, Jeb Bush, you’re pathetic.” Ronald Reagan, who popularized the notion that no Republican should speak ill of another, must be spinning in his grave.

But Trump is actually raising a valid point about W. I doubt he knows why it’s so valid (he hasn’t exactly steeped himself in the details of governance), and most Americans are probably a bit hazy about W’s pre-9/11 tenure as well. So let us review, with the help of five well-researched books — Bob Woodward’s “Bush at War,” Woodward’s “State of Denial,” Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies,” Barton Gellman’s “Angler,” Ron Suskind’s “The One Percent Doctrine” — and some revelations in the press.

Trump, in his scattershot way, doesn’t specifically blame W for 9/11. That would be impossible to prove. But lest we forget (as indeed we have), the public record is replete with evidence that W and his top advisers were insufficiently vigiliant, that they failed to heed the dire warnings of impending doom. W’s top counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, testified in 2004 that “although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don’t think it was ever treated that way.”

Clarke testified that he contemplated quitting, because he was so frustrated by the Bush team’s tepid ‘tude: “This administration didn’t either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem. And I thought, if the administration doesn’t believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there’s an urgent problem and if it’s unprepared to act as though there’s an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job.”

Clarke — who had previously worked for Ronald Reagan and Bush I — launched his warnings about Osama bin Laden as soon as W took office; it took him three months to get a high-level meeting. That’s when neocon Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense secretary, told Clarke, “I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about one man, bin Laden.”

Clarke was subsequently (and predictably) slimed by the Bush team and its conservative media acolytes, but it is now settled fact, as unearthed by Pulitzer Prize-winner Barton Gellman, that the CIA had tried, pre-9/11, to discuss al Qaeda with President Bush 36 times. The CIA reportedly rang the bell about bin Laden’s imminent intentions in its Daily Brief on May 1 (“a group presently in the United States” is preparing an attack), on June 22 (an attack might be “imminent”), on June 29, on June 30 (“Bin Laden Threats Are Real”),  on July 1 (a domestic attack “will occur soon”), in a meeting with Condolleezza Rice on July 10, in a warning on July 11, in its Daily Brief on July 24.

Then, and only then, came the famous Aug. 6 CIA brief, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike the U.S.,” which warned of a possible attack in New York, perhaps with hijacked airplanes. A CIA briefier flew to Texas to personally alert Jeb’s vacationing brother — who reportedly responded with my favorite W gem of all time: “All right. You’ve covered your ass now.”

Establishment Republicans, led by Jeb, are outraged that Trump has dared to malign the Kept Us Safe mantra — yes, W marched us into the wrong war on the basis of phony evidence, and he destabilized the Middle East at great cost of American blood and treasure, but Kept Us Safe is at least something that all Republicans can cling to — but look at the aforementioned evidence. As ex-counterterrorism chief Clarke has said, “There was a chance” to thwart 9/11, if only W’s top people had gone on high alert, but they “didn’t take it.”

And by the way, as if I even need to say this: If a 9/11-style attack had occurred on Barack Obama’s watch, and it later turned out that he had been warned by the CIA 36 times, and that he had told a briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass now” … well. We know what would happen next. Republicans would be citing it as proof that Obama coddles terrorists and hates America. And they’d be clamoring for impeachment.

In fact, isn’t Jeb suggesting that Hillary Clinton should be held responsible for Benghazi? How come she’s potentially responsible for four deaths on Obama’s watch — while Jeb’s brother is supposedly blameless for 3,000 deaths on his watch? Sounds like valid grist for a fresh round of Trump tweets. He’s truly the Republican establishment’s worst nightmare.

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In other news, whatever.

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