Former President George W. Bush has been popping up a lot in the news lately, thanks mostly to a random and cheerful appearance on The Tonight Show and the slow reveal of his late-in-life hobby of creating so-bad-they’re-charming paintings of domesticated animals. Awwww, it’s all so cute coming from the same politician who falsified information and coerced us into a war that claimed the lives of 4,489 U.S. soldiers and upward of half a million Iraqi civilians.
Oh, man. Sorry if the second half of that sentence rained on the George W. Bush Puppy and Kitten parade (which has resulted in some conflicting emotions) that’s been happening lately, but it’s important to remember this very important fact: At his worst, George W. Bush is the war criminal who — in addition to his war crimes — shat on abortion and gay rights, botched hurricane relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and drove the U.S. economy into the ground.
At his best? He is an noted asshole who made a bunch of fucked up cat paintings.
Just in case he’s somehow managed to win you over with this bullshit, let’s go back in time and remember all of the reasons George Bush was one of the most terrible things to ever happen to the United States and to the entire world. Don’t look so sad! It’ll be like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, only instead of visiting 15th century England to flirt with mega babes, we’ll be revisiting 2001 to examine the epic fuck-ups that led to 9/11.
Speaking of 9/11…
By now, the August 6, 2001 presidential daily brief headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” is infamous. Ignored by the people in charge, the brief contained information that warned of an attack much like the one that happened just over a month later on September 11.
In response to probing by the 9/11 Commission in 2004, the Bush administration released the brief, defending that it contained merely an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history and no information that could have prevented the attack that was to come. For years, the Bush administration’s response was deemed acceptable. Then, in 2012, a different previously-withheld brief was released to a select few that proved the administration’s knowledge of the threat of Al Qaeda actually went much deeper than previously thought.
From Kurt Eichenwald at the New York Times:
While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.
The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
And:
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