Quote:
Originally posted by Not Me
So I take it you are pretty happy that Cheney and Rummy run the show then.
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I used to think that the joke that Cheney runs the show was just a tired way for lefties to call Bush dumb. But I've seen a bunch of things recently that suggest to me that Bush is disengaged and that those who control the flow of information to him and know how to push his buttons (in particular, Cheney) exercise enormous power. This is clear from Suskind's book, re domestic policy. On foreign policy, Condi Rice has access to Bush, too, but Cheney complicates her life by sitting in on the meetings and throwing in with Rumsfeld (who doesn't have the access Cheney
and Rice do).
Meanwhile, here's tomorrow's NYT editorial page on the "wall":
- The attorney general argued that a "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence gathering had kept officials at the F.B.I. from communicating with one another, and with the C.I.A., and had led to both agencies' missing the 9/11 plot. Mr. Ashcroft was eager to blame the previous administration for those failures, and he offered up a newly declassified 1995 Justice Department memo that he said made the wall even larger and more impenetrable. After months in which the administration has refused to make other documents and testimony available, Mr. Ashcroft's eagerness to put this one bit of classified material on the record seemed more than a little self-serving — especially since Mr. Ashcroft affirmed that policy in August 2001.
Mr. Ashcroft was also intent on claiming credit for moving the policy on Osama bin Laden to "kill" instead of "capture," until some of the commissioners suggested that papers held by the White House until just recently contradicted that account.
The "wall," which reaches back to concerns over domestic spying in the Nixon administration, had indeed become a problem before 9/11, in part because F.B.I. agents were eager to use it as an excuse not to pursue cases. It was certainly not the culprit when the F.B.I.'s own offices failed to share information about terrorism suspects going to flight schools. Information about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minneapolis never made it up the F.B.I.'s degraded reporting chain to Washington — although somehow the head of the C.I.A. knew about it.
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