Connecting the Dots

For months during the 9/11 hearings, all we heard was how the Bush adminsitration did not do enough to prevent 9/11. The liberal media, led by the NY Times rambled and whined about not connecting the dots. Accusation after accusation filled the Times, (of course the Times praised the do nothing Clinton administration). Now that the administration has issed a terror warning for specific buildings, the Timea is trying very hard to discredit them, claiming the intel is old. Here is a flash for the Left and the Times, it took 5 years to plan 9/11. So we now see it is all about politics, not for Bsush, but for the Times and the left. - Sailor


DOTS ALL, FOLKS

By JOHN PODHORETZ
NY Post



August 4, 2004 -- THIS weekend, the Bush ad ministration took various pieces of data, turned them into data points, and placed each point on a piece of graph paper just like we did back in high school.
Data point No. 1: Multiple sources indicating al Qaeda fully intends to try and hit us before the election.

Data point No. 2: Hard evidence from the hard drive of an al Qaeda member featuring very specific information about five buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington. The information gathered on the buildings was several years old. But the United States only found out that al Qaeda had it over the weekend.

Then the Bush administration drew a line from point 1 to point 2. If al Qaeda wants to hit us and it has all kinds of material on those five buildings, then prudence dictates that we intensify our efforts to protect those buildings in order to stave off an attack.

In other words, the Bush administration connected the dots.

Remember how the Bush administration was attacked during the 9/11 Commission hearings precisely because it didn't "connect the dots" before 9/11? On March 25, the editorial writers at The New York Times excoriated the administration for what they called "the chain of miscommunications, wrong guesses and misplaced priorities that left the nation so poorly defended against the terrorists." The Times even praised the Clinton administration by contrast for being more serious about terrorism than the Bushies were.

The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission was that there had been a "failure of vision," an inability to see into a likely future in which al Qaeda would hijack planes and fly them into buildings.