Pataki Defends Bush on 9-11 Warning

May 16, 2002
New York Gov. George Pataki defended President Bush Thursday morning in the wake of Wednesday night's report that the White House had been briefed last August on the possibility that terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden were plotting to hijack U.S. airliners.

"After the fact, everybody knows everything and everybody's a genius," Pataki told radioman Don Imus.

"You can always put things together and say - you know, it's like Pearl Harbor. They're still writing books about how FDR knew about the attack. No one knows what information the president did or didn't have on Dec. 6."

The New York governor, who, along with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani became a symbol of America's resolve in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, suggested that no matter what information the CIA briefed to the White House last summer, the problem was one of coordination of the different intelligence services.

"I think that what the president has been saying is right," Pataki told Imus. "You can't have the FBI operating a little fiefdom and the CIA operating a separate one and other parts of the Justice Department just going their own way."

Pataki adressed reports this week that FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis had uncovered evidence of the 9-11 plot last summer, but didn't connect the dots.

"There's no question in hindsight that - why does someone who comes from the Middle East on a temporary visa want to learn only how to fly a plane level," the governor said. "It immediately has to raise enormous questions."

But he reminded Imus that Bush had inherited an intelligence community from the Clinton administration that had been oblivious to the terrorist threat.

"I think it just points out that you have to have people who are on top of things," he said. "And for the longest time, it seems to me, the administration - not this administration but prior administrations - weren't particularly focused on the global war against terrorism or the threat that it could place against American citizens."

Still, the New York governor said, regardless of what signals had been missed in the past, the government is now alert to potential attacks.

"Now we all are. And thank God we are," he told Imus. "But I don't think it's fair to go back and place ourselves in Sept. 10, pull together various pieces of information and link it together now."

http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2002/5/16/70202