What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Our Freedoms, Mortgaged Our Economy, Ravaged Our Environment, And Damaged Our Standing in the World - Softcover

Carter, Graydon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312425279 ISBN 13: 9780312425272

Publisher: Picador USA, 2004

Synopsis

The editor of Vanity Fair magazine offers a hard-hitting assessment of the Bush administration's first term, and its disastrous effects on America at home and abroad, in this revised paperback edition which includes new material on Bush's re-election and second term.

What We've Lost addresses the fragile state of U.S. democracy with a critical review of the Bush administration by one of our leading magazine editors, Graydon Carter. Carter expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the state of the nation in his monthly editor's letters in Vanity Fair--which aroused widespread comment. In this updated edition of What We've Lost he provides a sweeping, painstakingly detailed account of the ruinous effects of this president's first term, and warns us what more we stand to lose following his re-election.

About this title

About the Author

Graydon Carter has been the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair since 1992. Previously, he was the editor of The New York Observer and the cofounder of Spy. He is the producer of the acclaimed film The Kid Stays in the Picture and the executive producer of the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning documentary 9/11. He lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What We've Lost
1THE PRESIDENT'S WARS"I'm not going to play like I've been a person who's spent hours involved with foreign policy. I am who I am."--GEORGE W. BUSH, April 2000 
"I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building."--GEORGE W. BUSH, April 1999 
"People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."--GEORGE W. BUSH, September 2002THE WAR ON TERRORWHILE Americans and much of the rest of the world mourned the dead from September 11, the administrationreacted reasonably and proportionately. It launched a full-out manhunt for the leaders of Al Qaeda that stretched to the far corners of the earth. But in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, members of the Bush White House also found arguments they could use to sell the American public on an invasion of Iraq--part of a grand plan to "rid the world," the president said, "of the evil-doers."In early 2004, a spate of books came out that showed what many suspected all along: In the days after the attacks, when the administration's resources should have been completely focused on the search for the terrorists and protecting Americans at home, the White House was almost irrationally keyed up on Iraq. A December 2003 report by Dr. Jeffrey Record for the Army War College summed up the situation thus: "The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the [global war on terror], but rather a detour from it."You would think that if we were to lash out at anybody it would have been against the Saudis, given that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are friends, though. Not necessarily friends of ours--but friends of the Bushes. Indeed, in the president's three post--September 11 State of the Union addresses, he didn't once even mention Saudi Arabia's role as an incubator of terrorists.Not only were the Saudis ignored in the days immediately following September 11, they were actively aided by the Bush administration. Within minutes of the terrorist attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all planes in the United States--an order that stood for the next two days. Former vice president Al Gore couldn't get back from Austria. Even former president Bill Clinton had to cancel his travel plans. As Craig Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud: The SecretRelationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties, initially pointed out in a report in Vanity Fair, "For the first time in a century, American skies were nearly as empty as they had been when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk."On September 13, in a meeting scheduled before the attacks, President Bush sat down with Prince Bandar, the well-connected Saudi ambassador to the United States (very well connected: he had been a racquetball partner of Secretary of State Colin Powell's years earlier, and in July 2003 he gave President Bush a painting worth $1 million). According to Unger, Bandar had been busy working the phones for two days, trying to get influential Saudis out of the United States. And though the nation's airspace was severely restricted, he was shockingly successful. Coincidentally, the day he met with the president, according to Unger, three Saudi men, all apparently in their twenties, were escorted to a private hangar in Tampa, where they boarded an eight-passenger Learjet and took off for Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky. There they were greeted by an American who helped them with their baggage as they made their way onto a waiting Boeing 747 with Arabic writing on it, which then departed.Over the next few days, planes around the country shuttled wellborn Saudis and members of the bin Laden family to East Coast airports for flights home. Incredibly, departure points along the way included Boston's Logan and Newark airports, two of the airports where the hijackers had boarded their planes on September 11--and ones that would likely have instituted the greatest degree of lockdown in the days following the attacks.On September 18, at least five members of the bin Laden family flew back to Saudi Arabia in a specially reconfigured Boeing 727. The next day, according to Unger, even as the president was crafting a speech to announce that "our war on terror ... will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated," a private plane that had originated in Los Angeles and made stops in Orlando andWashington, DC, arrived at Logan--where, Unger says, at least eleven bin Laden family members came on board--soon to exit the country under the cover of darkness. In all, some 140 Saudis, including more than a dozen bin Laden family members, made it out of the United States by the third week in September. Not only had they not been fully vetted by the FBI, but the FAA and the White House denied that the September 13 flight even took place. So close was Bandar to the Bush administration that, according to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, the vice president told the Saudi ambassador of the White House's decision to invade Iraq even before he told Secretary of State Colin Powell. Woodward quotes Cheney as saying, "Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast." 
 
The invasion of Iraq--so costly in terms of lives, dollars, and our international reputation--diverted attention and resources that could have gone toward securing the nation. The Bush administration tried to convince Americans it was doing everything in its power to ensure the country's safety on land and in the air. The truth of the matter is somewhat different. In almost every single instance, tax cuts took priority over security. "President Bush vetoed several specific (and relatively cost-effective) measures proposed by Congress that would have addressed critical national vulnerabilities," a 2002 report from the Brookings Institution said. "As a result, the country remains more vulnerable than it should be today." At one point Cheney was actually sent over to Congress to lobby for less spending on counterterrorism measures, rather than more.About a month after September 11, a New York Daily News investigative team attempted to take utility knives, razor knives, and pepper spray aboard twelve flights taking off from eleven different airports. They succeeded on all but one flight. A year later the paper tried again, boarding fourteen flights taking off from eleven airports while carrying the same banned items. They succeeded every time. Of even greater concern are the nation's general aviation airports like the ones at which theterrorists trained. There are nineteen thousand of these small airfields, according to CBS News, and few of them have much in the way of security, or even fences. Despite all the warnings about the possibility of passenger jets being attacked by shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, the perimeters of even big American airports are woefully unsecured. In the summer of 2003, a boat containing three young men washed ashore at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. The men freely walked up and down the runways until they stumbled upon a police station.And although passenger luggage is now more thoroughly screened at the gate, the vast majority of the nearly three million tons of cargo shipped in the holds of regular commercial airliners is not checked for weapons or explosives. Time reported that "security experts shiver when they talk about the nation's cargo-handling procedures. Thousands of low-paid workers have carte blanche to roam airports, ramps and runways without undergoing personal inspections or having their belongings checked."Underscoring these vulnerabilities was the bizarre case in September 2003 of a man who shipped himself as air cargo from New York to Dallas undetected. "Today it was just a guy trying to fly cheaply from New York to Dallas to visit his parents," Representative Edward Markey told CNN, "but in the future, a member of al Qaeda could have himself packed into an air cargo container." A report issued by the Century Foundation in early 2004 stated that the Transportation Security Administration "estimates there is a 35 to 65 percent chance that terrorists are planning to place a bomb in the cargo of a U.S. passenger plane. Yet, only about 5 percent of air cargo is screened, even if it is transported on passenger planes."Ninety-five percent of all foreign goods are shipped to America by sea--some eight million containers a year. Of those, only one in fifty is subjected to anything more than a cursory inspection, wrote Jonathan Chait in The New Republic in March 2003. Stephen Flynn, a former coast guard commander who oversaw a 2004 report on homeland security prepared by the Council on Foreign Relations, told Chait, "We havevirtually no security there." To test security at the ports, ABC News bundled just under fifteen pounds of depleted uranium in a lead-lined steel pipe and shipped it in a container from Jakarta, Indonesia--a notorious Al Qaeda rallying ground and a departure point that should have raised all sorts of flags. The container went out, bound for Los Angeles, a week before the August 2003 bombing of the Jakarta Marriott that killed twelve people. It arrived in LA intact and undetected. Rather than being embarrassed by the incident, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI investigated the ABC staff responsible for the shipment, claiming th...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0312425279
• ISBN 13: 9780312425272
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352