In his first prime time press conference in more than a year, reporters grilled President Bush with questions about the war in Iraq — where 700 American soldiers have died since the beginning of the war, as of this weekend — and whether his administration satisfactorily responded to warnings that foreshadowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Laced with what CNN.com somewhat pejoratively dubbed the “usual mix of misspoken words and grammatical conundrums,” Bush’s less-than-succinct but generally adequate responses tackled reporters’ rough questions, often meandering into soliloquies about national security, meeting with fallen soldiers’ families and the like, and usually returned full circle.
For example, one reporter asked, “Two and a half years later, do you feel any personal responsibility for Sept. 11?” Several sentences into his reply, Bush discussed the importance of the inter-agency synergy that the Department of Homeland Security enables, saying, “The hearings will show that the PATRIOT Act is an important change in the law that will allow the FBI and the CIA to better share information together.”
While providing context is important, discussing the issue of personal responsibility for a great tragedy is a poor moment to advertise an ethically dubious law that restricts civil liberties.
Still, Bush’s (rare) prime time appearance brought to the forefront some important points previously buried under a health of conjecture and stock phrases.
At least one remark was particularly disturbing. A reporter asked about the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing: “You pointed out that it did not warn of a hijacking of airplanes to crash into buildings, but that it warned of hijacking to obviously take hostages and to secure the release of extremists that are being held by the U.S. Did that trigger some specific actions on your part in the administration, since it dealt with potentially hundreds of lives and a blackmail attempt on the United States government?”
Bush’s short answer is no, provisionally: The PDB indicated that “bin Laden might want to hijack an airplane but, as you said, not to fly into a building, but perhaps to release a person in jail,” he explained. Bush said that the threat concerned him, but “Frankly, I didn’t think there was anything new.” By contrast, Bush assured us, “Had I had any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country.”
But the mention of a threat of hijacking a plane and using hundreds of civilian travelers as blackmail didn’t deserve that same attention? Was the specific mention of such a dastardly plan, even if it wasn’t specific, worth any less heed because Bush had heard of the threat before?
In any case, at least one question caught the president off-guard: A reporter asked, “In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You’ve looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?”
A surprised Bush admitted, “I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.” Unable to come up with an answer, Bush admitted, “I don’t want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I’m confident I have.”
But this inability is probably the most dangerous revelation of the conference. If Bush isn’t familiar enough with the ramifications of his own policy decisions to identify which were poor ones, how can he learn from those mistakes? Worse, what does that ignorance mean for future decisions?