The president who took bin Laden seriously
Republicans are trying to blame 9/11 on Clinton, but the official report
shows that he responded to al-Qaida threats far more effectively than Bush.

By Joe Conason



July 24, 2004 | While the nonpartisan members of the 9/11 commission have
sounded excruciatingly even-handed as they issued their final report, the
Republican congressional leadership -- which has always tried to thwart the
9/11 investigation -- blatantly insists on blaming Clinton for the
intelligence failures that resulted in the fateful attacks.

Two days before the report appeared, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and his
leadership team exploited a briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/po...l.html?fta=yon the report
to mount a partisan assault.

Their script, repeated by Hastert and his whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., suggested
that "eight months of the Bush administration" couldn't make up for the
policies established during "eight years of the Clinton administration."

Readers of the report will also note its sharp criticism of the inadequacy
and inattention to the real "gathering threat" during the '90s in Congress,
where the "overall attention ... to the terrorist threat was low ... [and]
not impressive." Of course, the Republican caucus has exercised iron control
over the nation's legislative agenda since 1995.

"Beginning in 1999," the 9/11 report notes, various expert and well-intended
commissions "made scores of recommendations to address terrorism and
homeland security but drew little attention from Congress." Hastert's
colleagues are too busy preparing an investigation of Sandy Berger to act on
the report's recommendations -- in an obvious attempt to deflect attention
from its findings.

That's an understandable tactic, because anyone who reads the report's
actual text may well conclude that in confronting the terrorist threat, the
Clinton administration was considerably more serious and alert than its
successor. Consider the critical chapters devoted to the Millennium plot and
the months preceding 9/11.

"President Clinton was deeply concerned about [Osama] Bin Ladin," remarks
the opening section of Chapter 6, titled "From Threat to Threat." It goes on
to note that by the summer of 1998, Clinton and his national security
advisor Sandy Berger "ensured that they had a special daily pipeline of
reports feeding them the latest updates on Bin Ladin's reported location."

Stopping the Millennium plot -- in which al-Qaida operatives planned to bomb
Los Angeles International Airport and other major targets at the end of
1999 -- was in great measure the result of a lucky break, as the report
acknowledges. An alert customs agent arrested al-Qaida operative Ahmed
Ressam, who was bringing a carload of explosives into the United States from
British Columbia.

Along with other intelligence alarms, Ressam's arrest spurred Clinton and
his aides, including Berger and counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, into
a desperate, unrelenting effort to prevent disaster. To Clinton, the
Millennium alert required what one commissioner called "knocking heads
together" every day in the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department and the
National Security Council.

Among the effects of that daily head-knocking, according to the 9/11 report,
was to force usually reticent FBI officials to disgorge the kind of critical
information that they habitually held back from other federal agencies.
Ordered to appear in person before a committee of Cabinet-rank officials,
"it was hard for FBI officials to hold back information." Operations were
mounted simultaneously in eight countries to disrupt the Islamist
conspiracies. After Ressam's arrest, more wiretaps than ever before were
authorized to find the sleeper cells that Clarke warned were preparing
attacks here.

Again and again, the report takes careful note of Clinton's active, personal
participation in the effort against al-Qaida during the Millennium alert,
exploding myths about his supposed distraction by domestic scandals. Clarke
spoke directly with the president on several occasions that month. "In
mid-December," the report reveals, "President Clinton signed a Memorandum of
Notification (MON) giving the CIA broader authority to use foreign proxies
to detain Bin Ladin lieutenants, without having to transfer them to U.S.
custody. The authority was to capture, not kill, although lethal force might
be used if necessary."

The commission confirms Clinton's widely reported "obsession" with al-Qaida,
describing in detail his efforts to raise international awareness, increase
spending on counterterrorism and homeland security long before that phrase
became fashionable, and to demand action by the nation's covert forces.
Indeed, their report credits Clinton with ignoring a serious threat to his
own safety to seek foreign assistance in the struggle against bin Laden.

In early 2000, immediately following the millennium crisis, Clinton was
scheduled to visit India. He insisted on visiting Pakistani strongman Pervez
Musharraf as well -- despite the fact that both the Secret Service and the
CIA had "warned in the strongest terms that visiting Pakistan would risk the
President's life." Musharraf made promises that were never carried out,
despite carrots and sticks brandished at him by American diplomats.

The contrast with the Bush administration could scarcely be clearer. On that
score, the report's most relevant section is Chapter 8, "The System Was
Blinking Red." And the most damning paragraphs of that report involve the
notorious Presidential Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001. Under the bold headline,
"Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," the briefing states the al-Qaida
leader "would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef
and 'bring the fighting to America.'"

Before examining the report's findings about the PDB, however, another
usually ignored aspect of this story is worth noting in Chapter 6, where the
drumbeat of warnings about an impending al-Qaida attack in spring 2001 first
comes up. By then, Richard Clarke's hair was on fire, as was that of CIA
director George Tenet. Enter Vice President Dick Cheney, whose important
contributions during the months preceding the disaster merit a single
paragraph:

"In May, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would himself
lead an effort looking at preparations for managing a possible attack by
weapons of mass destruction and at more general problems of national
preparedness," the report says on page 204. (Remember that the
comprehensive, bipartisan Hart-Rudman report on those issues had been
published and ignored by the new administration a few months earlier.) "The
next few months were mainly spent organizing the effort and bringing an
admiral from the Sixth Fleet back to Washington to manage it. The Vice
President's task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack
occurred."

For reasons best known to the commissioners, they made little effort to
learn why Cheney did so little for so long, or what his role was in dealing
with the terrorist threat before that fateful September. That was the sole
reference to the Cheney task force that I could find in the report, which
contains no index.

While the report describes repeated chances to thwart the 9/11 plot, its
authors were deeply reluctant to say that it could have been stopped. But
the report adds a significant new detail to the tale of the famous briefing
that the president received while on vacation at his ranch in Crawford,
Texas.

What Bush and his national security advisor Condoleezza Rice dismissively
termed a "historical document" -- before its stunning contents were
declassified -- was dispatched to Texas with far more urgent intentions. So
testified the two CIA analysts who authored it. The two analysts -- one of
whom is identified in the report's voluminous footnotes only as "Barbara
S." -- told the commission bluntly that they regarded the PDB as "an
opportunity to communicate their view that the threat of a Bin Ladin attack
in the United States remained both current and serious." While the Aug. 6
PDB was the 36th in a series dealing with al-Qaida or bin Laden, it was the
first one given to the president in 2001 that was "devoted to the
possibility of an attack in the United States."

Unfortunately, the alarmed analysts were unable to pinpoint the time, date,
place or method by which bin Laden's minions would wreak bloody havoc on us.
Without such specific data, the president responded complacently to their
warning. The commission's report says that he never discussed the threat of
a domestic attack with any of his aides, including the attorney general --
although the PDB highlighted the news that the FBI was then conducting
"approximately 70 full field operations throughout the US that it considers
Bin Ladin-related."

The report records what President Bush told the commission about the Aug. 6
PDB during his closed interview, without additional comment. Perhaps none is
required:

"He ... remembered thinking that it was heartening that 70 investigations
were under way ... He said that if his advisers had told him there was a
cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That
never happened."


-

It looks like the new records from the army indicate Bush wasn't paid
for a three month period in 1972, which tells me and other veterans he
wasn't performing any of the duties of his job either. We wouldn't have
been considered merely AWOL had we been missing for such a period but
would have been "dropped from the rolls" after 30 days as a DESERTER.
But then most of us didn't have George H. W. Bush as a daddy, either.

And this guy is at the helm?

Capt. Jeff

My crystal ball shows something.....wait....it's becoming clear:

George Bush, late October 2004, press conference: "As a cervix to my
country, I chose not to be paid for three months of my service. What about
Mr. Kerry? Was he patriotical enough to do that?"

"Tamaroak" wrote in message
...
It looks like the new records from the army indicate Bush wasn't paid
for a three month period in 1972, which tells me and other veterans he
wasn't performing any of the duties of his job either. We wouldn't have
been considered merely AWOL had we been missing for such a period but
would have been "dropped from the rolls" after 30 days as a DESERTER.
But then most of us didn't have George H. W. Bush as a daddy, either.

And this guy is at the helm?

Capt. Jeff

Doug Kanter wrote:

My crystal ball shows something.....wait....it's becoming clear:

George Bush, late October 2004, press conference: "As a cervix to my
country, I chose not to be paid for three months of my service. What about
Mr. Kerry? Was he patriotical enough to do that?"

"Tamaroak" wrote in message
...
It looks like the new records from the army indicate Bush wasn't paid
for a three month period in 1972, which tells me and other veterans he
wasn't performing any of the duties of his job either. We wouldn't have
been considered merely AWOL had we been missing for such a period but
would have been "dropped from the rolls" after 30 days as a DESERTER.
But then most of us didn't have George H. W. Bush as a daddy, either.

And this guy is at the helm?

Capt. Jeff





This morning, Hillary Clinton jokingly said she that after Bush loses
this fall, she hopes the inauguration can be moved up a few months, so
as to get Bush out of town.

One can only imagine the damage Bush will try to do after he loses and
before he is sent packing.





--
A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush;
A vote for Bush is a vote for Apocalypse.

One can only imagine the damage Bush will try to do after he loses and
before he is sent packing.


Take all the monogrammed items, i.e. keyboard keys ....

Get back to work you guys!

Rick