We are willfully malinformed

In a sane world, this would be a bombshell. In this world it will be interesting to see if anyone notices. This is from the March 26 mailing of The Daily Misleader.

A previously forgotten report from April 2001 (four months before 9/11) shows that the Bush Administration officially declared it "a mistake" to focus "so much energy on Osama bin Laden." The report directly contradicts the White House's continued assertion that fighting terrorism was its "top priority" before the 9/11 attacks.

Specifically, on April 30, 2001, CNN reported that the Bush Administration's release of the government's annual terrorism report contained a serious change: "there was no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden" as there had been in previous years. When asked why the Administration had reduced the focus, "a senior Bush State Department official told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden."

The mailing also notes that AP reported in 2002 that in the months prior to 9/11, the Bush national security team met nearly 100 times - with terrorism the topic of only two. And Newsweek reported around the same time that

internal government documents show that the Bush Administration moved to "de-emphasize" counterterrorism prior to 9/11. When "FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents" to deal with the problem, "they got shot down" by the White House,

the mailing says. (The original included references to the original articles.)

Actually, I have to amend my opening statement - in a sane world, CNN, AP, and Newsweek would have come up with all this themselves from their own files. Yeah, like that's gonna happen.