LONDON: Pictures may be worth a thousand words but the weakness of photography is that the meaning of an image shifts depending on the context. The now-famous snap in which George Bush’s eyes pop as an aide whispers the events of September 11 into his ear had always seemed to represent complete astonishment. It’s now possible that his expression can be read as horrified confirmation. Bush’s political future may depend on whether this rewritten caption becomes fixed in print.

Most discussion of the events of September 11 has worked from the assumption that Osama bin Laden out-imagined the American security forces by creating an event so immense that no functioning democracy could have had precautions in place against it. The revelations in Washington that the FBI and White House had at least three strong hints that the plot was in progress — in specific warnings of terrorists training at American flying schools for future hijacks — removes the White House’s consistent use of the Pearl Harbour parallel: unpredicted surprise attack. If a fourth newspaper story is confirmed — that one warning mentioned planes hitting the World Trade Centre — then the president really will be choking on his pretzels.

Let’s admit that many of those now criticising Bush for failure to act would have been damning him as a fascist if he’d started locking up Arabs on suspicion last summer, which is probably the only way in which the al-Qaeda plot could have been penetrated and prevented.

Even so, the White House’s explanation — that the reports it saw referred only to “conventional hijackings” of a kind seen in the past — is insultingly inadequate. So the Bush administration was happy for Americans to be held hostage on runways and perhaps one or two shot in the head and pushed out of the cargo door? Why did threats of even “conventional” gunmen in the cockpit not lead to an improvement in the security on internal American flights? The most damaging conclusion would be that the big business president feared imposing the extra cost on airlines.

The catastrophes of September 11 were frequently compared at the time to a Hollywood thriller. The parallells were with terrorists and huge explosions but it became clear this week that, in a previously unimagined way, that day made a particular screenplay stand-by come true. How many American movies have featured a dutiful law officer who has realised what is really going on but is ignored by his superiors? We now know that the FBI agent in Arizona who warned that Osama was sending terrorists to US flight schools is a living example of such thwarted foresight. How does that agent live with the realisation that they are simultaneously the most brilliant and most useless agent in FBI history?

These revelations also make sense of an oddity in the administration’s recent behaviour. The American government has taken to making public each vague terrorist threat to a bridge in Madison County or a bank in north-eastern Florida. Widely criticised for spreading panic, these just-in-case updates may now be read as the guilty over-reaction of people who know they under-reacted last summer.

On the basis of what has so far emerged, Bush should be able to blame the FBI for the most serious lapses of concentration. But it’s a rule of Washington politics that embarrassing trickles of leaks tend to be the prelude to a flood. It’s my melodramatic hunch that more sinister secrets will eventually emerge: most likely in the area of how much the government knew about the hijackers and the fate of the plane which was brought down in Pennsylvania.

Bush’s advantage is that — unlike his father, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — he would not be under investigation, in any Senate hearings, for illegality. The charges would be merely apathy and complacency. And most grown-up voters would accept that a president could not respond to every notional threat which floats across his desk without keeping his air force permanently in the skies and his citizens in jibbering terror.

Potentially most damaging to the president is not his decision but the location of it. The intelligence reports he ignored occurred during a contentiously long vacation which he took last summer at his ranch in Texas. Rattled by accusations of a part-time presidency, Bush aides stressed to the press at that time, that he would be receiving high-level briefings each day. Any perception that his head was really with his cattle at that time could become electorally ruinous. The real risk to the president is that he will live out the family curse of the Bushes: that they have the easy knack of becoming president but then serve a disappointing single term in which an apparent military triumph turns to failure.

All politicians know — and often quote — the response from the former British prime minister Harold Macmillan when asked what a prime minister most feared: “Events, dear boy, events.” Macmillan meant troubles that came out of nowhere. Dubya, if he should find himself writing his memoirs on the ranch earlier than he hopes, might himself reply to the same question: “Predictable events, ol’ buddy, predictable events.” Because the real threat to leaders — in an age of inquiries and tribunals and leaks — is occurrences which can be shown to have come out of somewhere.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.