One thing you’re forced to recognize, leafing through reports from 2001, is that when the Bush White House talked about “security” any time in the first eight or nine months of 2001, it was usually about “energy security.”

In other words, their eyes were on the prize, from the first – the prize being oil. 

• A basic point here, first:  don’t let the administration’s hokum about “dependence on foreign oil” fool you.  Any dependence on oil, in our country now, is dependence on foreign oil, because US oil companies are mainly in the business of buying and selling oil.  US companies mainly are NOT in the business of drilling and pumping oil; many wells in this country – and this is something the public has not been let in on – are dry or underproducing.
• Not that the administration is looking for other sources of energy, or supporting research to develop alternative energy sources.  Heck, they’re even trying to infest the world of horse-breeding with gambling in the form of slots machines that are really just computers that eat your cash.  Too bad, because we’re going to need those horses in another forty years.

Anyway, a quick run-through articles archived in Lexis-Nexis generates the following chronology:

Throughout Jan 2001 and Feb 2001, the White House harped on “energy security, sometimes using even the California energy crisis – which we now know to have been exacerbated by Enron -- as reminder that we need “energy security,” etc.  Typically, “energy security” was mentioned in connection w/ either ANWR or mining, hewing to the White House’s commercial agenda if not to energy and environmental concerns.  In March 2001, Frank Murkowski proposed a so-called “National Energy Security Act” – with harping from the White House on “foreign sources [of energy] that we can’t rely on.”  Meanwhile, of course, there was no Washington-led reduction in demand; quite the reverse:  a huge military-spending bonanza, with more oil-guzzling than ever.  (VP Cheney was big on ANWR, natch.)

In April 2001 and May 2001, still something of a big push for drilling on federal land, in the name of “energy security” – a line also used to defend the coal industry.   “And our prosperity agenda makes a priority of energy security.”  (May 17, quoted from White House)  (In Aug 2001, the House of Reps passed the “Natl Energy Security bill”; Bush was on vacation in TX). 

Meanwhile, regarding the home front:  on Jan. 31, 2001. – Hart and Rudman appeared on Hardball, with some warnings:  “One of the things we have concluded, and this is serious Americans for two and a half years, that the national security of this country is threatened by the lowering of the caliber of appointed officials. It's a serious...”; Rudman also said that there was little coordination betw agencies; we’re unprepared. 

Response:  Feb. 5, 2001. – Pres announces he will nominate Dr. Paul Wolfowitz to be Deputy Secretary of Defense (along with proposing big tax cuts).

March 14, 2001. – Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, says to reporters that Russia is waiting for new person to be appointed to replace Pickering (on the Pickering Commission), so Russia and US can cooperate on terrorism.

Response:  March 20, 2001. – Bush meets with Ariel Sharon, says nothing to rein Sharon in, re the settlements, etc.  The same day, Murkowski spoke to the National Energy Summit (Chamber of Commerce), saying that soon, half of the world’s energy demand will be supplied by unstable countries

.

The same day, CNN aired a program about the NSA:  “It was simpler during the Cold War when NSA had one major target, the Soviet Union.  Now, there are many new targets and problems.  Encryption, secret codes that can be bought by anybody, or downloaded off the Internet, fiber-optic cable that cannot easily be tapped -- they threaten NSA's ability to eavesdrop on adversaries from Saddam Hussein to Colombian drug lords.  U.S. officials say, for example, that the group headed by accused terrorist Osama bin Laden has put encrypted messages to its members on public Web sites.”

March 21, 2001. – Bill Kristol as Chair of the “Project for the New American Century” is the 4^th witness at a congressional hearing.  Kristol cites project defense report authored by the PNAC, published Sept 2000. – Also refers to 1992 Draft, prepared under Wolfowitz for Cheney; regrets that first Bush White House backed off that policy.  Says defense spending now lowest since Pearl Harbor.  Predicts that we won’t have a bigger surplus in 2-3-4 yrs than now; won’t learn anything new from Rumsfeld’s review of the DoD.  Says we shdn’t be too afraid of “nation-building,” too spooked by it.  Keeps saying money for defense now, figure out how to spend it later; military the first priority. 

May 4, 2001.  US voted off UN Human Rights panel, costing us yet another avenue for international cooperation and information gathering.

May 7, 2001.  CNN:  Panels’ recommendations on domestic terrorism rejected, the White House announces.  “As CNN national security correspondent David Ensor reports, the White House this week will officially reject some key findings by several terrorism commissions. . . . GARY HART, CO-CHAIRMAN, 21ST CENTURY COMMISSION: “We do recommend the creation of a national homeland security agency, which will coordinate the preparation for what we believe is an inevitable effort to attack this country by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction.”

ENSOR:  “The Hart-Rudman commission proposed a Cabinet-level agency which would fold in the Border Patrol from the Justice Department, customs from Treasury, Coast Guard from Transportation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

But Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration officials will tell senators the Bush administration does not agree, that the president will keep the existing [sic] while creating an office of national preparedness and a task force under Vice President Dick Cheney to look at the federal, state and local efforts and make recommendations by October on how to improve them.”  [By October?]