I have been looking at September 11, 2001, and the response by Pres. Bush to the unfolding events of that day.

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with your comment that failures extended back to earlier administrations, including Bill Clinton's, but the fact remains that it was Pres. George W. Bush sitting in that Florida classroom when word came down that "America is under attack," and it was that same Pres. Bush who, in this moment of national crisis, did effectively nothing.

That was President Bush. A fact which has nothing to do with election-year politics and everything to do with responsibility and accountibility. Bush did nothing and his press secretary was prompting him to say nothing. In my mind at least, those two facts are highly peculiar and must be addressed.

In order to fix any system, it is first imperitive to understand what went wrong in the first place. The 9/11 Commission may be a start in that direction, but by now it should be apparent that the kinds of questions I'm asking are not being aired by Kean's commissioners.

To that end, and to continue demonstrating the implausibility of the various cop-outs, deflections, excuses, and disclamers by responsible officials concerning 9/11, I have in this thread reprised national security advisor Condoleezza Rice's incredible claim that nobody could have imagined aircraft used as weapons, and juxtaposed it against this new story about Attorney General Ashcroft's brush-off of warnings about possible Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in the US, and noted that he didn't brush off his staff's recommendation that he cease flying commercial aircraft because of security concerns.

In plain language, you might say that he covered his own fanny, but left the nation's exposed.

The attacks of Black Tuesday succeeded in the face of numerous warnings, acute awareness of possible methods - including suicide jetliners - and knowledge of potential targets such as the WTC and pentagon.

President Bush, VP Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Acting JCS chief General Myers, NSA Condi Rice, and everybody else in a position of authority, for one reason or another, seems to have been curiously unavailable at this moment of crisis. Bush froze, stalled, spaced out - whatever it was. Everybody else appeared to be studiously looking in the other direction. Only transportation secretary Mineta's behavior seems real.

No politics; just a search for the truth about one of the greatest crimes in American history.

S