On its front page Tuesday, The New York Times published a photo of new U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers going over a briefing paper with President George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch “in August 2001,” the caption reads.
USA Today and the Boston Globe carried the photo labeled simply “2001,” but many other newspapers ran the picture in print or on the Web with a more precise date: Aug. 6, 2001.
Does that date sound familiar? Indeed, that was the date, a little over a month before 9/11, that President Bush was briefed on the now-famous “PDB” that declared that Osama Bin Laden was “determined” to attack the U.S. homeland, perhaps with hijacked planes. But does that mean that Miers had anything to do with that briefing?
As it turns out, yes, according to Tuesday's Los Angeles Times. An article by Richard A. Serrano and Scott Gold observes that early in the Bush presidency “Miers assumed such an insider role that in 2001 it was she who handed Bush the crucial 'presidential daily briefing' hinting at terrorist plots against America just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.”
So the Aug. 6 photo may show this historic moment, though quite possibly not. In any case, some newspapers failed to include the exact date with the widely used Miers photo today. A New York Times spokesman told E&P: "The wording of the caption occurred in the course of routine editing and has no broader significance."
Today, Bush is defending this nominee as the "most qualified he could find," or words to that effect. All that tell us is that he did not look very hard.
What is unfathomable to me is that yet another insider with foreknowledge of the September 11th terrorist attack, who did nothing to protect the country, is promoted or rewarded. Yet, anybody who points out any foreknowledge in the Administration is "swift-boated" by the Right.
Can we be so lucky that her comfirmation hearing turns into a mini-9/11 Commission and, to take a phrase Senator Baker from the 1973 Watergate hearings, "what did the President know and when did he know it?" about Bin Laden's plans for New York City? Perhaps better phrased would be "what did the President know and why did he act so unconcerned?" Or, "What did the President not know and why if it was in his hand? Can he not read?" "What did you know and what did you tell the President?" "Why was the decision made (or not made) to do nothing with this important information?"
Tenet gets a medal, but Miers gets a lifetime appointment. I think I want to gag.
Executive Privilege appears to me to have been waived merely by her nomination. Now, get in there, Senate Judiciary Committee, and find out what she was doing to protect the country as "the best he could find." Remember that so was Michael Brown. A lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful positions in government for a Presidential cover-up artist?
If that qualifies one for the Supreme Court, then the entire Watergate gang could have been appointed. If they were, then United States v. Nixon could have been fixed. (Rehnquist did not participate in Nixon's case, to his credit. Too bad Scalia and Thomas lack Rehnquist's scruples.)
