I’m surprised and disappointed by how many of my friends sincerely believe that President Bush knew specifically about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks beforehand and still allowed them to occur. These are smart and usually levelheaded people, and I’m flabbergasted that they give credence to such an outlandish accusation.

The theory that Bush had some nefarious connection to the Sept. 11 plot has gained a surprising amount of traction among liberals. Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean even called the foreknowledge theory “interesting.”
One would think that if President Bush knew about the attacks ahead of time, he would have gotten his secretary of defense out of the Pentagon before it got hit. He would have squirreled away his family and Cabinet before the arrival of United Airlines Flight 93, which was headed for Washington, D.C. and crashed in rural Pennsylvania..
But it should be noted that the theorists do have some factual support for their arguments. The Bush family has deep interests in Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, and strong ties to much of the country’s elite. And it’s an open secret that many of the Bush administration’s policies have been handsomely beneficial to President Bush’s personal finances as well as those of members of his administration.
There are also many bizarre and unexplainable occurrences surrounding the attacks, such as why the bin Laden family was ushered out of the United States in the immediate aftermath of the attacks without thorough questioning by intelligence professionals. Yet I can’t wrap my head around the idea that Bush could be quite so evil as to let 2,800 people die in the most horrific and audacious terrorist attack in world history.
It’s true that President Bush has done nothing to earn our trust. He and members of his administration exaggerated, misrepresented and flat-out lied their way into a war of choice that is turning out just about as well as many liberals thought it would.
Other examples of the administration’s selective honesty abound, including cherry-picking science that supports the administration’s agenda while ignoring stronger science that contradicts it. It’s also despicable that the administration withheld the true cost of its Medicare bill from Congress while Bush’s allies on Capitol Hill, according to various media reports, exerted unprecedented pressure to get the bill passed, including holding the usual fifteen-minute roll call open for three hours and allegedly attempting to bribe Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., a moderate Republican who voted against the bill, to the tune of $100,000 (which would be a federal crime and deserves far more attention than it has received).
Of course we all wish Sept. 11 didn’t happen. But the attacks were the result not of a mischievous plot by Bush, but of a colossal failure of intelligence coupled with a bureaucracy that moves at the speed of molasses.
The best-known pre-Sept. 11 indication of the impending attacks is the memorandum written by Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams expressing concern about the presence of suspected terrorists at flight schools. The fact that this memorandum didn’t receive close attention at the highest levels of the FBI, nor in Bush’s Cabinet, may well be the biggest bureaucratic blunder in American history.
However, it might have to compete with the CIA monitoring a terrorist meeting in Malaysia that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers attended. The CIA failed to put the men, who were already linked to al-Qaida, on a terrorist watch list of people barred from entering the country. The future hijackers entered the United States one week after the meeting, The Toronto Star reported.
Yet you can’t blame Bush or his top advisers for the failures of lower-level bureaucracy. Even if they had gotten the Phoenix memorandum, it’s a long step from having a notion that something’s afoot to knowing that an attack is planned on a specific date with specific targets and specific perpetrators. Likewise, keeping two of the 19 hijackers out of the United States would probably not have prevented the attacks.
Revelations may be forthcoming from National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s testimony on Thursday or from the final report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. But barring any new information, I’m inclined to give Bush the benefit of the doubt.
Democrats face an extremely difficult challenge in unseating President Bush this November, and spouting conspiracy theories does not give voters the impression that Democrats are serious about confronting the very real threat of terrorism. If liberals want to have any chance of winning this election, they have to speak in terms to which moderates can relate.