How a two-term president became the quiet man of American politics

[BEAL]

Or maybe it was in this moment when he realized that they should have done more. I know it would have been near the top of my mind had I known about this information of an attack, did nothing, and now there's an attack.

I do not think he's a horrible man, but I do think he was a horrible President, and he let his staff do all the work for him.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Or maybe it was in this moment when he realized that they should have done more. I know it would have been near the top of my mind had I known about this information of an attack, did nothing, and now there's an attack..

I think that's a good point, especially if this new story is true

 

[Moonlit_Angel]

I always wondered why they had someone come into the classroom to inform him of the news. Why didn't they just poke their head in, say, "Sorry to interrupt, but we need the President for a moment" or something, call him out to the hallway, and then tell him the news? I don't know if it would've changed much in his decision-making, but at least it would've been less awkward than being told in a classroom and having to figure out a way to keep calm around the children.

Anywho, the classroom thing, damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess, but it does still infuriate me that they had the warnings coming for months leading up to that day and didn't bother to investigate them further. This tragedy did not need to happen, and had people been doing their job, it wouldn't have.

 

[Pearl]

I always wondered why they had someone come into the classroom to inform him of the news. Why didn't they just poke their head in, say, "Sorry to interrupt, but we need the President for a moment" or something, call him out to the hallway, and then tell him the news? I don't know if it would've changed much in his decision-making, but at least it would've been less awkward than being told in a classroom and having to figure out a way to keep calm around the children.

That is a good point. I think last year for the 10th anniversary, some news program interviewed those students and asked what was going through their minds that moment. They said they were a bit frightened and confused to see Bush very angry. Of course, now they know why. So yes, the decision to tell Bush in front of the children was not smart or good for anyone in that room or school.

 

[nathan1977]

This tragedy did not need to happen, and had people been doing their job, it wouldn't have.

Careful. From the NY Times article:

"Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t ever know. And that may be the most agonizing reality of all."

In his book "What the Dog Saw," Malcolm Gladwell writes persuasively in his chapter on "Enron, Intelligence and the Perils of Too Much Information" about the notion that too much information actually drowns everything out. The build-up to 9/11 is, IMHO, a great example of that: so much information coming from so many different arenas that everything cancels out. (This in contrast to the build-up to the Iraq war, where too little information was conflated and inflated beyond significance.) He talks about the difference between puzzle and mystery. The defining difference: in a puzzle, you don't have enough information. In a mystery, you have too much.

It feels like this is relevant to this part of the discussion:

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it's the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we've been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren't very smart about making sense of what we've been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don't.

Anyway, his article is here:
gladwell dot com - open secrets