NY Times: Bush Should Have Used Racial Profiling to Prevent 9/11

NewsMax.com ^ | 4/12/04 | Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

[kattracks]

Don't look now, but the oh-so politically correct New York Times has just endorsed racial profiling as a critical tool in fighting the war on terrorism.

In fact, says the Times, if only President Bush had ordered airports to use "threat profiling" to screen out suspected Muslim terrorists after receiving a CIA warning in August 2001 that al Qaeda was preparing to hijack U.S. airplanes, the 9/11 attacks might have been prevented.

"After receiving that briefing memo entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'," says the Times in Monday's lead editorial, Bush should have departed from his vacation in Crawford, Texas and "rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes."

Of course, since all the terrorists mentioned in the August CIA memo were Middle Eastern radical Muslims, passengers of Middle Eastern appearance would have "fit the airline's threat profile."

Hence, under the Times plan, Muslims by the thousands would have been yanked from airport ticket lines for thorough investigation.

But there's a reason that, even after 9/11, anti-terrorist racial profiling is verboten. It's because newspapers like the Times have spent the last 20 years demonizing law enforcement officials who even hint that racial profiling can be an effective way of ferreting out the bad guys.

The anti-profiling taboo has gone so far that often the Times and other like-minded news outlets will leave race out of the mix when describing a criminal suspect who's on the loose.

Alas, had the Times and the brethren not gone off the deep end on racial profiling, perhaps a sensible profiling program would have been in place at Boston's Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11.

[MrB]

So transparent.
Even if they started to profile them NOW, post 9/11, the NY Slimes would get its collective panties in a twist and denounce this gross violation of civil rights.

[PhiKapMom]

Actually burst out laughing when I read the headline. If President Bush had racially profilled Arabs prior to 9-11, the NY Times would have called for his head.

Do these news organizations know how dumb they are looking now?

[skeeter]

NYT endorses racial profiling. What a SCREAM.

Now I'm convinced there is no lengths these leftist crazies won't go to to get back in control.

[Old Sarge]

Do these news organizations know how dumb they are looking now?

You're looking down the MHole, aren't you?

Profiling is a good idea; profiling has ALWAYS been a good idea. Ignorance is strength, Brother...

[hoosiermama]

Thought it was a joke at first......

[TomGuy]

Now, the Libs/Dems are demanding that 9-11-01/Afghanistan/Taliban/al-Qaeda/bin Laden should have been presumptive.

Now, the Libs/Dems are demanding that Iraq/Hussein should not have been presumptive.

Now, how do you spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-C-Y?

[rj45mis]

I cannot understand why common sense people will pay money to read a fictional publication like the NYT. I haven't subscribed to a newspaper since 1992, the year the media put Clinton in office.

[Incorrigible]

Carl,

Thanks for pointing out what I was thinking this morning as I listend to Ron Kuby get all worked up over this editorial.

[Sabatier]

That's hilarious. That's funnier than a barrel of monkeys. Though a barrel of monkeys could do a better job of writing the NY Times.

[Dane]

Do these news organizations know how dumb they are looking now?

Probably the answer is no. The NYT is so full of themselves with hubris they would never notice.

[dirtboy]

Now I'm convinced there is no lengths these leftist crazies won't go to to get back in control.

Here they demonstrate yet again that they are devoid of any principle - other than the pursuit of power - and any stated principles are simply matters of political expediency that will be discarded or reversed as soon as they become inconvenient.

This is another of my favorites:

For example, during the 12 years after 1991, the anti-American press was filled with self-righteous hand-wringing over what was billed as the terrible suffering of the Iraqi people under UN sanctions. But when the administration of President George W Bush abandoned the sanctions policy (a policy that, incidentally, had been considered the cautious, moderate course of action when it was originally adopted) in favor of a policy of regime change by military force - which was obviously the only realistic way to end the sanctions - did these dyspeptic howler monkeys praise the United States for trying to alleviate Iraqis' suffering? No, of course not - instead, without batting an eyelash, they simply began criticizing the United States for the "terrible civilian casualties" caused by bombing.

In defense of the Stars and Stripes

[Grig]

Someone needs to do a search of post 9-11 articles warning the administration to NOT respond with raicial profiling, they are legion.

[ihatemyalarmclock]

If President Bush had racially profilled Arabs prior to 9-11, the NY Times would have called for his head.

Exactly. Their "coulda-shoulda" fit 2 1/2 years later is for the sole purpose of making Bush look bad.

[RightWhale]

Intellectual giants at the NYT

[F.J. Mitchell]

The Times should be asking Clinton why he didn't already have Terrorsit (racial-ethnic) profiling in place from the first time the Towers were bombed, if it feels this would work so well.

[Fiddlstix]

Typical NYT.
It's all Bush's fault.

[Junior_G]

Here in Seattle a couple years ago, there was a group of punks going around every night and randomly attacking people----throwing them to the ground, kicking and stomping their heads----real nice stuff. The local media outlets described them as young men with shaved heads and conspicuously did not mention their race because the perpetrators were all black. It's amazing to me that the news media will frequently not even offer the public a physical description of at-large criminals who are not white.

[pointsal]

Golly sakes!! The NYT has taken the flip/flop crown from Botox-Johnnie!

[TomGuy]

Bill Richardson seems to be the 'out front' guy for the Clinton Admin.

He was just on FoxNews with David Asman. He is now shrilling Ashcroft as the villain. He even said Clinton had determined to really go after bin Laden [yeh, righ! when?].

It would seem that the libs/dems couldn't get Dr. Rice, so now they are aiming at Ashcroft.

[FoxInSocks]

Now, how do you spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-C-Y?

H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y

Now, that's I-R-O-N-Y. :-)

[airborne]

If what I saw of the memo is accurate, it said Bin Laden was plaaning to attack the US since 1997. Why wasn't the Clinton Admin. racially profiling for 3 years???

[Paleo Conservative]

I thought it was 80-year-old grandmothers who were the problem.

[angkor]

"rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers"

If the NY Times thinks this is the way to respond to terror threats, it should responsibly move its offices out of New York and to Des Moines, post haste.

[astounded]

When was the last time El Al (Israeli airline) had a flight hijacked? Can't remember. They use very stringent profiling, no exceptions. Works for them, no complaints. If I were flying overseas, I'd take El Al.

[airborne]

plaaning = planning

[airborne]

plaaning = planning

[Dane]

He was just on FoxNews with David Asman. He is now shrilling Ashcroft as the villain. He even said Clinton had determined to really go after bin Laden [yeh, righ! when?].

As Richardson(UN ambassador at the time) himself, IIRC, was interviewing Monica for a job at the US UN mission.

[Puppage]

NY Times: Bush Should Have Used Racial Profiling to Prevent 9/11

MY...

[bootyist-monk]

The Democratic Position:

George Bush should have attacked Afghanistan and Al Qaeda with pre-emptive military strikes to have stopped 9-11.

George Bush should not have attacked Iraq with pre-emptive military strikes to not avoid a future 9-11 type attack from happening in the future.

That is all.

[finnman69]

This is worth a laugh at the op-ed page e-mail to the Slimes.

Send it to Gail Collins. I once busted her prompting a response from her. I complained that they should stop putting op-ed 'News-analysis" pieces on the front page which distirt the news. She wrote back saying the op-ed board has nothing to do with the news department. Riiiiiiiggggghhhtttttt.

gcollins@nytimes

editorial@nytimes.com

[krb]

LOL!

[TomGuy]

It's something in the water, I sware [sic].

I blame mine on getting used to my new keyboard.

[johnb838]

Need to fire Norm Mineta as well... he would have had to before any profiling would have taken place. Can't understand why that rat is still there.

[Howlin]

You said: He even said Clinton had determined to really go after bin Laden


From http://www.blogsforbush.com --

Clarke and Clinton in December 2000: al-Who?
The Washington Times has unearthed the final national security report from the Clinton administration to Congress, written in December 2000, and has discovered that it never mentions al-Qaeda and only mentions Osama bin Laden four times (via Drudge):

The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress — 45,000 words long — makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times.
The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an "urgent" threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "ignored" it.

The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke's testimony and new book.


In fact, not only does this document belie the Clarkean notion of a "high priority" given to fighting al-Qaeda by any means necessary, it specifically boasts about the success of the Clinton administration's law-enforcement policy. The report lists the number of terrorists apprehended and brought back to the US "to answer for their crimes." The total number of terrorists it reports as arrested: twelve, including the several who were captured and/or arrested for the first World Trade Center bombing, the man who shot two CIA employees outside of its headquarters in Langley and an attacker from an incident that occurred in the 80s.

This, then, is the result of eight years of counterterrorism efforts by the Clinton administration as led by Richard Clarke: twelve arrests. Only twelve arrests, after WTC I, Khobar Towers, the two embassy bombings in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. That isn't even the number of terrorists who died staging 9/11. No wonder al-Qaeda felt free to escalate their attacks against the US.

Even more curious is the contention from the Washington Times that this document has been in the public domain during the entire time that Clarke was testifying that he had given a high priority to al-Qaeda, and yet none of the mainstream media -- especially the ones who had headline-gathering interviews celebrating Clarke and his new novel -- ever saw fit to research and report it. There is an adage which instructs (in paraphrase), "Never assign to conspiracy what can be explained by simple laziness," but this seems beyond a simple lack of effort when the scope of the publicity given to Clarke and the gravity of the issue is considered. This is the best American journalists can do?

Just a cursory reading of the document, available here, demonstrates the sheer ludicrousness of the notion of Clintonian prescience regarding al-Qaeda, as well as other hot-spot issues. Here's the report on Afghanistan in its entirety:

Afghanistan remains a serious threat to U.S. worldwide interests because of the Taliban's continued sheltering of international terrorists and its increasing export of illicit drugs. Afghanistan remains the primary safehaven for terrorists threatening the United States, including Usama bin Ladin. The United Nations and the United States have levied sanctions against the Taliban for harboring Usama bin Ladin and other terrorists, and will continue to pressure the Taliban until it complies with international requests to bring bin Ladin to justice. The United States remains concerned about those countries, including Pakistan, that support the Taliban and allow it to continue to harbor such radical elements. We are engaged in energetic diplomatic efforts, including through the United Nations and with Russia and other concerned countries, to address these concerns on an urgent basis.
Here's the report on North Korea; does it sound like they had been well on the way to full WMD disarmament, as Madeline Albright repeatedly stated over the past few years?

Beyond fully implementing the Agreed Framework, we seek to eliminate North Korea's indigenous and export missile program and their weapons of mass destruction through a step-by-step process. Based on U.S.-North Korean discussions, North Korea has undertaken to refrain from flight testing long-range missiles of any kind as we move toward more normal relations. Working closely with our ROK and Japanese allies, we will improve relations with North Korea on the basis of it moving forward on the missile and WMD agendas, and we will take necessary measures in the other direction if the North chooses to go down a different path.
In fact, the report contains a trove of information that rebuts the myriad accusations of former Clinton advisors that the Bush administration has acted like a bull in a carefully crafted china shop. Iraq policy is described as primarily that of "containment", speaking of an almost-forgotten UNSC resolution 1284 which was supposed to tighten controls on the oil-for-food program that we now know was rife with corruption. It also relies heavily on an UNSCOM-like inspection process that never took place. Libya is only mentioned for its willingness to cough up the Lockerbie suspects; not a word is mentioned about any initiative to voluntarily give up its WMD programs. In fact, the report states that the official policy on Libya was "to block its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction."

It took me ten minutes to review this document to reveal, in hindsight to be fair, how clueless the previous administration had been on terrorism and foreign policy in general. Too bad American journalists couldn't be bothered to spend the time.


Captain Ed blogged for Bush at 7:39 AM in category Liberal Lies

The report: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nss/nss_dec2000_contents.htm

[NutCrackerBoy]

It has taken 2.5 years since 9/11 to finally reach the inevitable point where the lions of PC finally utterly contradict themselves.

[HurricaneD]

According to Lt. Colonel Robert Patterson in his book "Dereliction of Duty", Clinton had a chance to authorize a strike against Bin Laden in the fall of 1998. The NSC had tracked him and triangulated his position. Sandy Berger tried to contact Clinton for an authorization to strike. For over an hour Clinton did not answer. When he finally did he didn't have the guts to give the OK and the opportunity was lost. The terrorist strike against America on 9/11 is a direct result of Clinton's lack of leadership.

[chimera]

This is an opportunity to hoist the Times and other liberal rags with their own petard. Since they agitated for years against racial (or any other, for that matter) profiling, could they not be held at least in part responsible for 9/11 happening? I mean, they're out there blaming Bush for it happening on much flimsier premises. Here they are admitting that profiling should have been used to prevent 9/11, but they are in part responsible for it not being used. One could make a logical case that they are condemning themselves more than anyone else.

Then again, logic is something that libs are not generally known to pay much mind to.

[reformedliberal]

The homes of all Presidents contain an office w/all the communications essential to governance and to response to events. The NYT knows this. There is no *vacation* at the Western White House. The POTUS just gets to do his work in his own home.

The President's schedule is always public. From what I can tell, GWB has been busy w/leadership every day he is at Crawford.

The NYT didn't make its numbers in Q1. Not hard to figure out why.

[johnb838]

What irritates me is that they seem to be trying a tactic by which 9-11 was so huge that no one remembers anything that happened before it. Therefore, Joe Six-pack really doesn't remember if he'd heard of al-Queda before 9-11 or not. Joe Six-pack had known of al-Queda for at least 5 years before 9-11. Just because the media moves on doesn't mean everyone flushes everything down the mhole. It just seems that way.

[ravingnutter]

From a 2000 story:

Al Gore was the Administration's point man in charge of the plan developed in early 1996 to put a million aliens on the fast track to citizenship even if they didn't qualify and even if they had criminal records. Gore was responsible for keeping the pressure on INS to make sure the aliens were naturalized by September 1, the last day to register for the presidential election.

Source

From Sep 20 2001:

One senior government official said this week that some of the highest-level members of the Clinton administration asked Vice President Al Gore to take over the issue [of terrorism], possibly heading a high-visibility panel to push it to the front of the national agenda. It never happened.

Source

[airborne]

I can't blame it on my water. It's well water, and it's GREAT!

[Unicorn]

Richerdson fits right in with the democrats he's a pure phoney

[Yaelle]

Aw, now COME ON. The libs didn't want racial profiling the day AFTER 9/11 (I know because I argued with them)!! This is ridiculous.

If Bush had even SPOKEN OFF THE RECORD on ANY of the things the libs/media now say he should have done to prevent 9/11, he would have been hung on the nearest tree to the White House. The screaming lefties would never have known that the draconian new laws Bush was putting into effect prevented 9/11 BECAUSE IT WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED.

[This to the media and liberals] Shut up, idjuts! You can't have it both ways! Hindsight is 20/20 and not everything can be prevented! If Bush did not protect us from 9/11, do you think it was incompetence or cruelty? If incompetence, he had only 7 months to be incompetent while Clinton had 8 years. If cruelty, you tell me what Bush having his Saudi buddies blow up 3000 people over here has done for his career. YEAH, RIGHT. Siddownanshuddup!!!

[TomGuy]

Clarke, like Richardson, makes it sound like Clinton was really after bin Laden.

When Richard Clarke's allegations came out a couple of weeks ago, Mansoor Ijaz on FoxNews was livid. Mansoor said HE [Mansoor] personally negotiated 2 or 3 times for the Sudanese to turn bin Laden over to Clinton, and Clinton turned them down.

Someone said they had copies of the actual Sudenese documents, but I've never seen them published.

Newmax has an audio tape of Clinton himself saying he turned down the arrest (by Sudan) of bin Laden because Clinton didn't really see any legal offense that bin Laden had committed against the US.

[Yaelle]

George Bush should not have attacked Iraq with pre-emptive military strikes to not avoid a future 9-11 type attack from happening in the future.

I know. BIG CLUE to the Democrats: We may have prevented another 9/11 in our country ALREADY by getting Saddam's regime out. WE WILL NEVER KNOW.

[kcvl]

According to The New York Times;

It is time for the president to drop his political posture

I can guarantee you that The New York Times will NEVER ask Bill Clinton what he was doing, about terrorism, for EIGHT LONG YEARS, before President Bush was elected!!!

The Silent President

Published: April 12, 2004

President Bush was asked, during a very brief session with reporters yesterday, about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo he received on domestic terrorism. He responded with the familiar White House complaint about lack of specificity in the C.I.A.'s warnings — although the memo mentioned a plot, possibly involving hijacked planes and New York City. The most striking thing about the president's comment, however, was his bottom line: that he did everything he could. Over the last few weeks we have heard lawmakers and officials from two administrations talk about their feelings of responsibility, about how they compulsively re-examine the events leading up to 9/ll, asking themselves whether they could have done anything to avert the terrible disaster that day. It is beginning to seem that the only person free of that kind of self-examination is the man who was chief executive when the attacks occurred.

No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes. Even that sort of prescient response would probably have been too little to head off the disaster. But those what-if questions should haunt the president as they haunt the nation. In all probability, they do and it is only the demands of his re-election campaign that are guiding Mr. Bush's public stance of utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.

• It is time for the president to drop his political posture and reassure the country that his first and foremost concern is not his re-election but the safety of Americans at home and abroad. Instead of passively noting that it is the job of the 9/11 commission to figure out whether anything could or should have been done differently, he must demonstrate that he is asking those questions of himself. Instead of preparing — as the administration seems to be preparing — to blame the C.I.A. and F.B.I. for everything that went wrong, he needs to ask whether the structure of the Bush White House itself is part of the problem.

Perhaps no other administration would have responded differently to the skimpy document Mr. Bush received in August 2001. But most other presidents did not limit critical briefing papers to little more than a page, give political advisers such a prominent place in the White House and so dramatically restrict the number of policy makers who had access to the Oval Office. All of Mr. Bush's recent predecessors had at least one of those flaws, but no one else had them all.

The "fact sheet" the White House released over the weekend along with the August 2001 briefing memo hardly shows any rethinking of the way Mr. Bush operates his government. It is instead an extraordinary exercise in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirection. It says that the notion that Osama bin Laden wanted to mount an attack on the United States was familiar information and "publicly well known." It said the presence of Qaeda agents in the United States was equally old news to the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies. It makes it sound as if everyone knew about Osama bin Laden's danger to America except the inattentive president.

Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, gave a bureaucrat's hedged responses in her appearance before the 9/11 commission. The public needs to hear a leader's candid answers from President Bush, who so far has agreed to appear before the commission only in private and in the company of the vice president.

This is not a time for more secrecy and presidential isolation. Mr. Bush is asking Americans to simply take his word for the need to stick to an increasingly bloody and chaotic mission in Iraq that he won't even define clearly. (When asked by NBC's Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi leaders the coalition planned to hand over the government to on the target date of June 30, the American proconsul Paul Bremer III chillingly began his answer with "That's a good question.")

Mr. Bush needs to speak out fully in public, both about 9/11 and about Iraq. He is chief executive of a country that once trusted him to lead in perilous times. The public supported his decision to go to war in the Middle East because most Americans believed his judgment was sound. That kind of faith is not just what he needs to win an election in November. It is what he needs to run the country, and he is in grave danger of losing it. Neither administration officials nor political advisers nor the White House spin team can hold on to the country's ebbing confidence. The president must do this himself, and quickly.

[HurricaneD]

It's a shame the mainstream media won't take these people to task for the monumental lies they tell. Clinton never had any intention of doing anything to punish those that harmed Americans or planned to harm Americans. Makes me sick.

[Let's Roll]

So did I - Onion or something.

[ravingnutter]

Holy cow...look whose name popped up:

However, the IG report also said its investigation revealed that at least one official at the National Performance Review office "believed that the [citizenship] program had a deadline that was directly connected to the upcoming election."

That official, Douglas Farbrother, raised his concerns with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick and senior INS officials in March 1996 that the program was behind schedule.

Source