Depressingly, opinion polls seem to suggest that Richard Clarke’s testimony before the 9/11 panel isn’t changing anyone’s mind. Folks who already support Bush are playing back the White House attacks on him; those on the other side don’t really need any more reason to think that Bush is a disaster. The cynic in me says that Gary Hart’s damning account of how the White House blocked consideration of the report of the Hart-Rudman Commission is going to be equally ineffective in waking people up. Maybe. However, there is one shred of hope: that the accumulation of evidence will tip the media from cowering complacency into investigative enthusiasm. If they smell blood in the water, and a Pulitzer on the mantelpiece, who knows…..
Here’s the most critical bit from Salon‘s interview with Gary Hart, about what happened when the bipartisan commission completed their report in January 2001:
We didn’t meet with President Bush. But we briefed at length Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. And all of them at that time treated it seriously. I conducted the briefing, along with my co-chairman Warren Rudman, and Gen. Charles Boyd, who was our commission’s executive director, and maybe one or two other commissioners. I would say the response was respectful, professional, serious. […] We also sent copies of the report to every member of Congress. […] And in the spring of 2001, some members of Congress introduced legislation to create a homeland security agency. Hearings were scheduled. And our commission, which was scheduled to go out of operation on Feb. 15, 2001, was given a six-month extension so we could testify with some authority. Which we did in March and April.
And then as Congress started to move on this, and the heat was turned up, George Bush — and this is often overlooked — held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he was turning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney.
So this wasn’t just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, “I don’t want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me.” We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.