Bush Reponse To 9/11 Driven By Panic; Bush To Chirac: “Gog And Magog At Work”: New Book

The book is by Vanity Fair contributing editor and former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald. It maintains that the Bush administration had a nervous breakdown after 9/11.

The assistant attorney general John Yoo comes across as particularly determined in his wrongheadedness, and full of passionate intensity. Furious over a federal judge’s decision to uphold habeas corpus rights for a detainee held on American soil, he snapped to colleagues, “I don’t think this one guy, this one judge, this outlier should, because of the luck of the draw, be allowed to dictate how American detention policies can work.”

…Bush said in his first State of the Union address that American soldiers had apprehended people in Bosnia who were plotting to bomb the American Embassy there. As Eichenwald shows, this was untrue. No evidence supporting that charge was ever found, and five of the six men were set free after being held for seven years, their detention ruled illegal by a federal judge…

A more deadly consequence of this heedlessness was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false belief that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. An exchange from that time conveys the mind-set of the Bush administration. When Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, told Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary, that there was no intelligence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, “Wolfowitz tightened his lips,” Eichenwald writes. “ ‘We’ll find it,’ he said with certainty in his voice. ‘It’s got to be there.’ ” The run-up to the Iraq war also elicits one of the most pungent lines in the book. After Bush told Jacques Chirac that biblical prophecies were being fulfilled and specifically that “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” the French president decided, in Eichenwald’s words, that “France was not going to fight a war based on an American president’s interpretation of the Bible.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.