I've remained pretty mum on the "was Bush responsible for 9/11" issue. Richard Clarke seems to suggest that there was a good deal that the Bush Administration could have done to stop nineteen Arabs (mostly from Saudi Arabia, a country that is technically our buddy) from hijacking planes on September 11 -- if only he and his people would have:

1) Implemented Richard Clarke's counterterrorism proposals instead of shelving them for nine months (Clarke maintains that the Bush Administration -- which considered Clinton a novice in the ways of foreign policy (how's that for a joke?) -- insisted on reviewing all the foreign policy proposals from the previous administration, and that meant that Clarke's report would not see the top level of the executive branch for nine months.

2) Listened to the FBI and CIA. George Tenet maintains that there was a lot of intelligence traffic leading up to September 11, causing the CIA to believe that there was something major in the weeks ahead.

Okay, okay. Condoleeza Rice is obviously covering her own butt when she says that she never sat down to meet with Clarke about al-Qaeda. She seems to be the only one that doesn't remember that meeting.

The problem is that no one within the Bush administration is willing to say "we made big mistakes." The attitude of the Administration is reminiscent of Stalin: say anything critical, and you're off to the Gulag, or in this case, you're branded un-American, or a traitor, or you're slapped with a gag order, as in the case an FBI whistleblower who would like to testify in front of the 9/11 commission, but cannot, thanks to Attorney General John Ashcroft. No one has been fired over this. There is zero accountability in the Bush Administration; everyone blames everyone else or nebulous "intelligence failures."

But this doesn't answer the question "Was Bush responsible?" Should he have known? Our problem is that we're looking back at the obvious intelligence failures, which are perfectly obvious now but not so obvious then. Bush himself isn't entirely to blame. The bureaucracy which squelched Richard Clarke's proposal for nine months is to blame; the attitude of suppressing intelligence problems instead of fixing them is to blame; a lack of communication (and the encouragement of a lack of communication) between the FBI, CIA, and NSA is to blame.

Actually, September 11 may not have been preventable at all. Those hijackers may still have found a way through our defenses. Remember that the CIA knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know when, or where, and we only had an inkling of how. I agree with Rice (never thought that would happen) that "actionable intelligence" is necessary. The United States can't act on every possible threat it receives; it would be chasing ghosts most of the time. Our resources are finite, and as such, we have to gauge whether or not the threat we've received is credible. In this case, the Bush administration didn't see the threats as credible, and it's the fault of a lot of intelligence officials for not making the threat clearer, and it's the fault of a lot more intelligence officials for creating an atmosphere where speaking up is verboten. In reality, the president himself has very little control over the government. Perhaps it's his cronies who are to blame; Bush has enough problems. He's got to worry about what he'll do after the American people toss his sorry butt out of office in November.