Pointing fingers
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
Lots of professional pundits, newscasters, talk-show hosts and analysts have scrupulously tried to avoid playing what they call a "blame game" in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City.
But after learning that thousands of our countrymen lay at the bottom of the rubble in NYC and the Pentagon, I think it is horrendously irresponsible not to point fingers at those who are most responsible here. After all, if we don't find out who is to blame and why, then we are liable to repeat our mistakes – and we can't afford that.
So whose fault is it? For my money, the blame rests almost solely with the former Clinton administration.
Now, wait. Before you groan about this paper "picking" on Clinton again, hear me out.
About the only thing kept secret during the Clinton administration was the fact that nearly all aspects of national security were cast aside in lieu of political expediency. If national security concerns stood in the way of a possible campaign donation, for example, those concerns were bypassed, ignored or eliminated altogether.
Besides the debacle of losing many of our nuclear weapons secrets to probable espionage, Clinton administration officials at various federal agencies – including the State Department, the FBI and the CIA – oversaw the loss of laptop computers containing critical information, the reduction of internal security procedures, the de-funding of security apparatuses, the reduction of overseas intelligence assets and the sale of sensitive, previously unattainable, communications and other high-technology gear to pariah states.
At the same time, not so ironically, the Clinton administration witnessed a substantial increase in the number of terrorist attacks against the U.S. and U.S. assets.
Remember that the World Trade Center was first attacked during Clinton's watch, in 1993, by some of the same people who likely attacked it last Tuesday. Ditto the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996. Ditto the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Ditto the USS Cole guided-missile destroyer in Yemen in 2000.
What did Clinton do? Did he discuss anything to enhance our national security short of asking for more restrictive gun-control laws? No. He didn't beef up security at our airports, didn't beef up security at our intelligence agencies, didn't push for more intelligence funding, didn't declare war on terrorism and didn't do much to see that those who stole our nation's most prized secrets and technology were punished.
In fact, he did little in response to each of these acts of war – except launch millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles that kicked up desert dirt and leveled Sudanese aspirin factories, but little else. Such lame, benign "responses" only emboldened our terrorist enemies to strike harder, more often and with more lethal results.
Just last week, WND Washington Bureau Chief Paul Sperry reported that the Clinton administration waived national security concerns to allow the sale of super-sophisticated communications equipment to Syria – a known state sponsor of terrorism. This commo gear, by the way, cannot be monitored, even with U.S. technology.
Worse, all the experts are saying these attacks aren't over. They're saying that next time, they could be worse.
In an interview with Fox News' Brit Hume last week, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Americans are lucky the weapons chosen weren't bigger and more lethal.
"Such groups nullify, in large measure, the need to have air power or intercontinental missiles as delivery systems. For an Islamic nuclear payload, they will be the delivery system. In the worst of such scenarios," Netanyahu wrote, "the consequences could not be a car bomb, but a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center."
"I think what we have (in the world) is a network of terror. There is an empire of terror. There are chiefdoms. Arafat has his own chiefdoms. Bin Laden has his own chiefdom. The Hezbollah in Lebanon have their chiefdom. There is Hamas and Islamic Jihad working under Arafat's chiefdom," he told Hume.
"… [These] regimes that are part of this terror network are developing now nuclear weapons. If we don't dismantle this terror network in time, the regimes and the organizations that have absolutely no inhibition in destroying the United States and its allies. Then what we will see is that one day their mad fantasy will bring about not tens of thousands or even 20,000 victims in the United States, but hundreds of thousands or millions," Bibi said.
By the way, Netanyahu all but predicted last Tuesday's attacks – right down to the terrorists' choice of using airliners – in a 1995 book he wrote.
Congress shares some responsibility for not wrangling Clinton in and pushing harder for reforms many members knew were needed. But presidents are looked upon as the national "leader" – the person who ought to be guiding our nation in a direction that enhances its national security. Clearly, Clinton did not do that.
Knowing this is the case, Americans are now supposed to just ignore Clinton's negligence and not learn anything from it? Didn't that kind of willful ignorance get thousands of our countrymen killed a week ago?
Now is not the time to be polite. There are people who should shoulder most of the responsibility for what happened last week, and most of them can be found in the former Clinton administration.
If, as a nation, we don't have the stomach to point fingers at those who are most to blame, how in the world are we going to muster the courage to fight this lengthy war against terrorism?
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