Four Years Ago Today...

On August 6, 2001 President Bush received a Presidential Daily Press Briefing titled "bin Laden Determined to Strike Within U.S." and it was shunted aside, ignored. That afternoon the President went fishing.

I spent some of my growing-up years in Brooklyn. My Dad was at the Navy Yard for a while. I watched the towers go up. I watched them come down, and I felt my heart break like the glass walls as I watched the towers crumble, one after the other.

Mr. President, meantime, continued reading "My Pet Goat" to a group of schoolchildren. Then there were the "undisclosed locations" of the president and the vice-president. I remember Bush looking like a deer in the headlights.

My son was a freshman in college when the towers came down. That evening, a car-load of university students pulled up- in front of our house. They all needed the comfort of home, and our home was the closest to the campus. I became everyone's mother that day, even as I worried about the classmates from my youth who were third, fourth, fifth generation policemen and firefighters. At last count, seven of my former classmates had been confirmed casualties from the public services branches of NYC government. Two more have since died horrible deaths involving neurological disorders. Millions of broken flourescent lightbulbs released tons of Mercury, an extremely potent neurotoxin.

There are reports of silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhalations of particulate matter being diagnosed among the workers who cleaned up Ground Zero. I do not have numbers for suicides among surviving rescuers, but I have heard that several of the rescuers have taken their own lives.

I'm not saying the administration could have prevented the attack, but they would have had a lot better chance of doing so if they had looked into the reports by FBI agents of Saudis showing up in flight schools and not caring to learn how to land; if they had listened to Richard Clarke; if they had read that damnable presidential daily brief and taken it seriously.

President Clinton did leave office with a warning that terrorism was our biggest concern re: national security. His warnings were rebuffed and ignored, and dismissed. The results were tragic. And it isn't like there was no track record of counter-terrorism successes with the Clinton administration. They got the first WTC bombers. Domestic terrorism was dealt with harshly and we don't have a "militia problem" anymore, They prevented the millenium bombings and thwarted the plan to blow up 12 passenger craft simultaneously that departed from LAX on a single day. They prevented the destruction of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge.

It would have behooved the current administration to at least read that briefing memo, even if they couldn't set aside their hubris and bring themselves to accept that Clinton and his people had actually done something right in preventing terrorist attacks in this country.