Some Lives Are More Precious Than Others
Administration Equates Life Of One Attorney General to More Than 3000 Civilians
By Gummi Bear, Jr.
WASHINGTON —
An innocuous reference to special security measures put into place
for our Attorney General last summer
apparently has escaped much media attention.
The following paragraph (seventh from the bottom of the rather long article)
appeared May 17, 2002 in a Washington Post article:
In a closed-door meeting between Democratic senators and
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Sen. Richard J.
Durbin (Ill.) pressed her about why the administration did
not connect a series of events from the summer of 2001: an
FBI memo indicating several Arabs were taking flight training,
the CIA briefing that al Qaeda was interested in hijacking
American planes, a decision that Attorney General John D.
Ashcroft should not take commercial flights, and the arrest of
Zacarias Moussaoui, who was believed to be training for a suicide
hijacking. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) asked Rice whether
anybody in the White House was coordinating and linking the
information received from the FBI and CIA. "That wasn't
answered," a participant said.
NOTE: The (unedited) Washington Post article can be viewed in its entirety by
clicking here.
I was shocked when I read this revelation. Who made the decision that John Ashcroft
should cease to use commercial flights - was it a decision from above ("We can't afford
to lose you, John. From now on, either fly with me on Air Force One, or we'll arrange for you to
fly on military aircraft.") - or was it John Ashcroft's own initiative, or perhaps a
consensus decision by the heads of the Justice Department, deciding that their glorious chief could not be sacrificed to
the random acts of terrorism.
In either event, the decision to shield John Ashcroft from the perils of finding himself on a hijacked airplane
was probably not a "lucky guess" - one has to assume it was based
on an assessment that travel on commercial aircraft from that day forward
represented a risk which didn't exist the day before.
Therefore, it is fair to ask the question:"What specific information gave rise to this
individualized travel advisory, and if the risk to John Ashcroft's life was deemed
unacceptable, how were the lives of the hundreds of thousands of
business and leisure travellers routinely
utilizing commercial flights on a daily basis,
dealt with in this equation?"
|
