COULTER: Yeah. When I'm wrong, I admit I'm wrong. I think it's cruel to be foisting a 9-11 Commission on the nation, making terrorist attacks more likely by turning it into a Clinton whitewash committee. I think it's cruel to be endorsing John Kerry for president in the middle of a war on terrorism, the guy who voted for funding the troops before voting against it. I think it's cruel to be going around claiming the president of the United States is responsible for these women's husbands' deaths. I think that's cruel because it's going to put a lot of other women at risk for becoming widows. And there are a lot of 9-11 widows out there, Norah, and I'm hearing from a lot of them who think I wasn't harsh enough.
Under the very best-possible-case scenario (911Truth has a different view), the Bush Administration on and before 9-11 was guilty of negligence, incompetence and dereliction of duty. Bush was in office for over eight months before 9-11 and took a month-long vacation shortly before it occurred. Could we make the claim that Ronald Reagan tried to fix the awful situation that Jimmy Carter left the US military in? (I'm not sure we could make an accurate charge that Carter left the US military in bad shape, but that's another issue.) Yes, we could. Reagan took immediate action to pump up the US military budget and to make it clear that he was going to pursue a more aggressive policy. Had the Soviets charged through the Fulda Gap in September 1981, they would have met a military that was on the mend, that was enthused and that was energetically rebuilding.
Did Clinton leave the US military in awful shape? Actually, he's widely credited with rebuilding it. In late 1998, Clinton was able to threaten Iraq with a fully intact and functioning military and as Barney Frank pointed out in November 2001:
Number one, our military has performed superbly. There has been all this huffing and puffing in the Republican Party about how Clinton weakened our military. Well, that's ridiculous. George Bush just pulverized the Taliban with the military that he inherited from Bill Clinton.
Granted, Col. David Hackworth didn't feel that the military that Bush inherited was all that great:
* In the [1991] war with Iraq, it took the Pentagon five months to field a tank-heavy army that, once deployed, refought World War II -- mass bombing, units on line and virtually every movement controlled by the top. In the end, Saddam Hussein and his army escaped.
But gee, that sounds to me like exactly what the Army did in 2003! If Bush and Rumsfeld felt that the military was outmoded or inadequate, then what exactly did they do to fix it? (Matter of fact, how come the Army was still considered understrength in early 2004?) The point is, nobody has been able to point out what, if anything, Bush and Rumsfeld did to fix an allegedly broken military in the eight-plus months before 9-11.
As to "foisting a 9-11 Commission on the nation," how exactly is the US supposed to fix anything if nobody knows what went wrong in the first place? If no one has been able to answer the question of why the Air Force didn't adequately respond, then how can responses be assured in the future? 911Truth claims that the Air Force was busy running war games on that date. Did those war games interfere with responding to 9-11? Can future war games be better planned?
We simply can't fix these problems without a thorough investigation into what went wrong.
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