White House Misses

[H]ad my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September the 11th, we would have acted.
George W. Bush
March 23, 2004

Really? It’s reassuring to know that had the Bush White House received Mohammed Atta and company’s flight plans in advance, they would have been competent enough to act on it. That kind of leadership must be why he is the most powerful man in the world.
The point is that America spends billions of dollars to anticipate and respond to such incidents. The system failed spectacularly, and these silly statements are merely efforts to obfuscate the real issues surrounding this collapse.
On Monday, Press Secretary Scott McClellan had this to say:

Q Scott, this morning, you said the President didn’t recall the conversation in the Situation Room on September 12th that Mr. Clarke said he had, where the President asked Dick Clarke three times to pursue links between 9/11 and Iraq. And you said he doesn’t — I had two questions. So did the President tell you or somebody in the White House over the weekend, he doesn’t recall?
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, I talked to him. He doesn’t recall that conversation or meeting.
Q And that was — he said it this morning, or this weekend? When did he say that?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, this weekend and this morning, yes.
Q Okay. And secondly, Clarke now says that he has three eyewitnesses, and he repeated it again this morning, and he named them — to the conversation.
MR. McCLELLAN: Let’s just step backwards — regardless, regardless, put that aside. There’s no record of the President being in the Situation Room on that day that it was alleged to have happened, on the day of September the 12th. When the President is in the Situation Room, we keep track of that.

As Jon Stewart pointed out on last night’s Daily Show, if 9/11 didn’t warrant meeting in the Situation Room, exactly what does? What kind of “situation” are we saving it for?