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It was nice of Osama to warn us that we could be attacked again. It’s too bad we didn’t know before 9/11 that he was going to hijack planes and fly them into buildings.
Oh, wait. We did know. Or rather, the president knew. And Condoleezza Rice knew. They had in their hands a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, telling us what bin Laden was planning. Planes. Buildings. And it wasn’t exactly couched in highly technical language that the president wouldn’t have been able to understand. The title of the briefing was, “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.”
So that’s why we were so well-prepared on September 11.
Oh, wait. We weren’t. Because the president didn’t hold a single meeting about the warning, not on August 6 or any of the 35 days following, up to the day he read “My Pet Goat” to Florida schoolchildren while the World Trade Center burned.
And afterward, did he smoke Osama out of his cave, as he promised to do? It sure doesn’t seem like it, based on the fact that he’s still making threats three years later. It didn’t take the president long to get diverted from his hunt for the mastermind behind the deaths of 3,000 people in the U.S.
The president wanted to tie Iraq to the attacks, so that he could go after Saddam and his oil fields. When he couldn’t find any evidence, he made stuff up. There was no doubt Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. There was no doubt he was planning on using it to attack the United States. But the president would build a coalition like the one his father put together in 1991. He wouldn’t start a war without world opinion on his side, and without a clear reason, and without enough troops to win the war and keep the peace. Would he?
Oh, wait. He did. | 
