Footnote to the preceding

"The Saudis tipped the White House about 9/11" story has an always assumed but rarely spoken second half: "and the Bush team decided to do nothing." Personally, I have to say I'm with Dean on this one. As I wrote to a friend in May, 2002, "I don't believe that even the people around Bush would knowingly allow September 11 to happen." (If that sounds familiar, it's because I recently referenced the same quote in a somewhat different context.) However, in that same letter I also mentioned several things that were at that time already acknowledged to have been known to the White House prior to September 11, which together pointed to at least a large-scale intelligence coordination failure. "I mean," I asked, "just how big do the dots have to be before they get connected?"

The point of this trip down memory lane is that plenty of embarrassing info was already out there over 18 months ago. Since I'm prepared to assume that the Bushites lack of cooperation with the 9/11 commission is based on political rather than security concerns, and since this stuff was already known, I'm free to wonder what additional revelations they fear.

Could it just be that the Saudi tale, the sheer persistence of which should at least cause an eyebrow to be cocked in its direction, is in some way true? Because I can think of two ways the first, explicit, half could be true but not the second, tacit, half.

Perhaps - just perhaps, mind you - the Saudis did tip the Bush administration. And the intelligence services looked at that warning and said it didn't match the chatter they'd been hearing and so discounted it. Or it got lost in the shuffle of rumors, hints, and possibilities and was never examined directly.

Neither of those scenarios would make the White House guilty of deliberately letting 9/11 happen. But either of them would point to intelligence failures going far beyond screwups and well into outright incompetence on a level far exceeding what is already known and that would be a serious blow to a 2004 campaign expected to be based largely on how Bush is supposedly protecting our security.

So I'm with Dean again. It's an "interesting theory." And while he may indeed have meant something more along the lines of "curious," I mean interesting.

Footnote to the footnote: That's not to say I believe it. I still tend toward the explantion I suggested in that same May, 2002 letter. The relevant paragraph:

I mean, just how big do the dots have to be before they get connected to at least the point of tipping the airlines that something was up? At what point do we shift from suspecting incompetence to suspecting willful ignorance? And just what role does the Bush administration's connection to the Saudis have to do with this? Now, I don't believe that even the people around Bush would knowingly allow September 11 to happen. But I do wonder how much a concern about offending the Saudis - which aggressive attention to al-Qaeda certainly could threaten to do - lead to a policy of handling things "carefully" which in turn lead to downplaying the potential (and in retrospect, obvious) threat.