While George W. Bush has been President, we've had two of the biggest intelligence screw-ups in US history. The intelligence community overstated the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Iraq (and Bush overstated the exaggerations), and the national security and law enforcement systems failed to detect and thwart the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001. In response to each of those tragic mistakes, Bush did nothing to discover what had gone wrong. He called for no accountability, no reviews, no investigations, no changes. For more than a year after the attacks, his Administration opposed the creation of an independent bipartisan commission to examine what happened on and before 9/11. Even after chief WMD hunter David Kay declared earlier this year that he had found no unconventional weapons in Iraq, Bush resisted establishing a body to review the prewar intelligence. He eventually yielded, but created a commission to study WMD-related intelligence issues that is made up only of people handpicked by the White House. And it is unclear whether they are examining the prewar use--or abuse--of the intelligence by the White House.

Bush has shown a profound lack of curiosity about these intelligence failures. And the final report of the 9/11 commission illustrates why he was uninterested--or escapist. Although the report declares, "Our aim has not been to assign individual blame," it does cite errors and negligent policy-making of both the Bush II and Clinton administrations. And it contains bad news specifically for the man who's up for re-election in November.

The report shows that the Al Qaeda threat was not on the White House A-list. For instance, according to the commission, just days into the Bush Administration, Richard Clarke, the chief counterterrorism coordinator, sent National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice a memo asking for a senior-level review "to decide whether al Qaeda was 'a first order threat' or a more modest worry being overblown by 'chicken little' alarmists." (Clarke took the dire view.) The commission notes that Rice "did not respond directly to Clarke's memorandum. No Principals Committee meeting on al Qaeda was held until September 4, 2001 (although the Principals Committee met frequently on other subjects, such as the Middle East peace process, Russia and the Persian Gulf)." The report details the many steps the Bush Administration took in its first eight months to establish an Al Qaeda counterterrorism policy. But counterterrorism was not on the fast track. Even when the Administration eventually finalized a "three-phase, multiyear plan to pressure and perhaps ultimately topple the Taliban leadership"--on September 10, 2001--the plan was not ready to be implemented and there was no funding for it.

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