Posted on 05/25/2002 1:54:58 PM PDT by freeforall
TERRORISM: What Clinton Knew and When He Knew It (PP: Recovery) By E.G. Ross, Editor [The anti-conceptual mind] is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. —Ayn Rand, "The Missing Link"
U.S. DEMOCRATIC LEADERS, led by Sen. Tom Daschle, are asking about President Bush's awareness of events leading to the 9/11 Massacre. "What did he know and when did he know it?" The question is deliberately crafted. It is patterned after the question the Watergate inquirers asked about President Nixon's awareness of events leading to a burglary at the Watergate Hotel over a quarter-century ago. The answers to those questions eventually led to Nixon's downfall. So….
Right. Well, good luck. President Bush isn't going to fall by the same technique. Nixon knew a lot more about the burglary details than Bush did about any impending act of terrorism. There is no serious evidence to suggest otherwise.
Let's get it right. About all Bush knew was what every president has known about terrorism for decades—that there was a lot of it and it could eventually hit the U.S. in unexpected forms. If this is to be the standard for Bush's implied "guilt"—in this age when political accusations too often suffice for proof—then every individual in the House and Senate is equally guilty. Why? They've all known as much as Bush knew ahead of time. Indeed, the leaders of the House and Senate committees on intelligence knew considerably more than Bush because they'd been privy to CIA, DIA, and other briefings for far longer. If you were to ask, "What did Tom Daschle know and when did he know it?" you'd find a trail winding a lot farther back into the dark canyons. Yet even there, I'd find it difficult to hold Daschle or Gephardt or any other stinkers of Congress culpable. For when it comes to guilt about terrorism—either proactive or passive—it is not a matter of knowing general things. It is a matter of knowing specifics.
For example, if someone calls the police department and says, "Hey, you guys better watch out because there are a lot of criminals out there and they are going to hurt people!" he'd not be taken seriously. Such information is too broad to be useful. But if someone were to call and say, "If you want it, I have a diagram and records of how the Whackem 'n' Smackem crime syndicate operates and where they are now and how you can take them out"—well, that would probably get the cops' attention.
That brings us to a revelation Tuesday from Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. As Fox News reported, "One year before 9/11 [well prior to the November 2000 election, by the way]… the capability that Special Forces built actually identified to us the network of al Qaeda, and they went beyond that and gave us recommendations where we could take out five cells to eliminate their capability." The SpecOps guys at McDill Air Force Base used advanced computer technology to not only reveal al Qaeda's international network, but to devise at least five missions to cut the heart out of the organization.
This, you will recall, was on the watch of Bill Clinton.
A Missed Blow to the Heart Do we know what Clinton knew and when he knew it? We know that the McDill boys' work reached the desk of Clinton's head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Shelton. Whether he passed it on to Clinton is unknown—but the idea is certainly worth pursuing; much more worth chasing down than the generalized warnings that had existed prior to that. Some top officials of the Clinton administration had access to extremely specific information about al Qaeda, long known to be a nasty, anti-American organization with a hand in other acts of terrorism. Yet the administration did not act on the SpecOps recommendations; they did not even become public 'til this week. Why? The mission was so well-targeted that it could have disrupted al Qaeda for years. That implies that the SpecOps boys had many—if not all—of the top al Qaeda leadership in their sights and probably had a way of wrecking some critical part of their structure.
What did Clinton know and when did he know it? Dick Morris, the long-time confidant and aide to Clinton, has said in recent months that the Clinton cabinet repeatedly—often urgently—advised Clinton that the al Qaeda network and other terrorists were becoming too bold and dangerous to ignore. They practically begged him to go to war before it was too late. But as Morris notes, Clinton almost always found some reason to put off any but the most piddling action.
One reason he might not have acted on the McDill boys' facts was the oldest in politics: the November election was drawing near. The charitable theory is that Clinton did not want to be seen as starting a war in order to help Al Gore get elected. The uncharitable view is that Clinton felt an anti-terrorism war at that time would work against Gore's election. However, there's another way to look at it, and I suspect it's much closer to the truth.
Clinton feared—as he does today—that any U.S. action against the al Qaeda group might provoke a major retaliation against the U.S. Clinton believed that the retaliation could permanently destroy his legacy as a peace president; he could be blamed for the attacks and for pursuing a war that brought them on. Given Clinton's long legacy of mouthing peacenik slogans—chief among them the ideas that (1) preemptive strikes provoke conflict rather than deter it and (2) that "war is never the answer"—it's right down the line of his deepest distrust of military options.
What? You say that Clinton was merely worried about the unseemliness of starting a war right before an election? That he wanted to remain aloofly impartial and not influence the election one way or the other? But if that were true, why did he campaign for Gore? Consider that Clinton could have ordered al Qaeda taken out right after the election. Yet he didn't. He had time, too. He wasn't scheduled to leave office until January of 2001. There's little doubt that the quick strike envisioned by SpecOps could have finished the job by then, or at least gravely degraded al Qaeda. The fact that Clinton ordered no such action speaks volumes—as does the fact that he ordered no action in the year prior, for that is how long the window was open from the SpecOps work, and probably from other work as well. (Despite occasional high profile press leaks, the Pentagon does manage to keep many of its options secret.)
Desktop Dodge Being the dissembler and stonewaller that he is, if the Clinton-loving media ever get around to asking these types of questions, Clinton will undoubtedly respond that he didn't know about the SpecOps recommendations and that they stopped at Shelton's Joint Chiefs desk. The phrase, "I don't recall," is one of the Clintons' unintended, polished contributions to the legacy of political evasion. He didn't know? Really? Well, maybe. There's a chance. And there's also a chance that a benign asteroid will carve a perfect swimming pool in my back yard next Tuesday at 4:09 p.m.
Let's remember a crucial detail: Shelton was the first Joint Chiefs head to come out of Special Operations. He was a SpecOps guy himself and respected SpecOps capabilities. He surely would have found the McDill SpecOps recommendations worthy of passing on to his president. If nothing else, he'd have mentioned them in an intelligence briefing and, given that most of his advisors were urging him to tackle terrorism, that would have reached Clinton's desk in synopsis form at minimum. It's beyond the bounds of credulity to imagine Shelton doing otherwise. And if he did sit on the McDill boys info, ignoring it or burying it, then we ought to be asking of Shelton, "What did you know and when did you know it" And: "Why didn't you recommend action?"
However, I doubt that Shelton was culpable. This has the notch marks of an anti-defense president's distrust of military action. It took him forever to act when anything might require serious military intervention. His mode of motion was to watch the bodies pile up and see how they affected the polls. Because terrorism hadn't hit the U.S. in a large enough way—even the first attempt on the World Trade Center quickly faded in the public's mind—Clinton had little to fear by not acting against al Qaeda. The polls showed scant interest in it—not because people weren't interested, but because they naively trusted their government to learn from the warning—and hence, in the Clinton radar room, it wasn't on the screen.
Now, one final question. I think it's fine that Rep. Weldon spilled the beans about the McDill boys' plan and its implications. Sooner or later the public deserved to hear about that piece of info. But now we can also ask, "What did Weldon and the other members of Congress know and when did they know it?" The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Why did Congress sit on its hands if it knew al Qaeda was as mean and dangerous as it apparently did know? Why didn't Congress exercise its constitutional authority—and duty—to defend the U.S. when it had the opportunity to do so? These are questions that no one is asking.
There are plenty of places to apply the "what" and "when" inquiries—and they don't stop at the White House. There was widespread failure elsewhere, too: in Congress, in the FBI and the CIA. Only the military seemed to realize—at least at the level of the SpecOps Command at McDill—the urgency of going after al Qaeda, and actually came up with a way to do so. The American people have lost thousands of their fellow citizens to the government's failure to intervene against al Qaeda. One day soon, the people themselves may begin to demand answers. And the more the politicians scurry about pointing fingers at each other, the more the average citizen is going to wonder, "What did they know and when did they know it?"
They have a huge investigative staff already working on it.
They want to go back as far as 1985, so that should please everyone in both parties.
I love the idea of everybody having to fess up!
On with the investigation!
That f'ing igNobel peace prize strikes again.
You have to wonder if the Dems aren't wishing they'd never opened this can of worms. The main concern to me, though, is that the Pubbies have always played softball while the Demos play hardball. IOW, it will be a miracle if the Pubbies manage to fully get Clinton's complete dereliction of duty across to the American public.
Shelton used to have lots of respect within the Spec Ops community, but when he became Chairman, JCS under Clinton he turned into a POS.
Relaxing on Air Force One after the election, Bill Clinton told reporters it was the Oklahoma bombing that proved the turning-point in his political fortunes. It was the moment when the militias, the Christian Right and the Gingrich onslaught against government, all melded together in the public mind as one rampant movement of extremism. "It broke a spell in the country as the people began searching for our common ground again," said Clinton.
I put together a series of articles including the above on my web site....to big to post here..... Click Here......scroll half way down the page!
One of these days,Billy-Jeff, you are going to have to explain your actions and legacy to God. I fear he will judge you harshly.
"The Rowley Memo
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON Why did F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller desperately stamp "classified" on last week's memo to him from the Minneapolis agent and counsel Coleen Rowley?
Answer: Because he is protecting the bureau's crats who ignored warnings from the field before Sept. 11, and because he is trying to cover his own posterior for misleading the public and failing to inform the president in the eight months since.
In an example of gutsy newsmagazine journalism, Time reports this week on "The Bombshell Memo: How the FBI Blew the Case." The entire 6,000-word memo from the field agent who dared to blow the whistle — edited presumably for national security and libel — can be found on the Web site of time.com.
Last summer, the Phoenix field office, on the trail of a couple of radical Islamists, recommended strongly that F.B.I. headquarters examine flight schools around the nation for potential terrorists; the Washington bureaucrats did nothing.
Soon after, Minneapolis agents took action to jail another radical, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen now accused as "the 20th hijacker," for overstaying his visa. The agents asked F.B.I. headquarters for permission to examine his laptop computer. Permission was denied, despite reports from French intelligence relayed from our Paris embassy of his involvement with international terrorists. Not until after Sept. 11 did we learn it contained the phone number of Mohamed Atta's roommate.
Intimidated by the brouhaha about supposed ethnic profiling of Wen Ho Lee, lawyers at John Ashcroft's Justice Department wanted no part of going after this Arab. F.B.I. Washington bureaucrats were, in agent Rowley's words, "consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis F.B.I. agents' efforts."
To this day, Mueller — Eric Holder's gift to Justice, held over by an entranced Ashcroft and determined to protect his benefactor from embarrassment — insists that even an unencumbered investigation would not have stopped 9/11. Not so, says Rowley; her memo told Mueller last week that his protestation was "an apparent effort to protect the F.B.I. from embarrassment and the relevant F.B.I. officials from scrutiny."
She asserts that "discovery of other terrorist pilots prior to September 11th may have limited the attacks and resulting loss of life" and "your statements demonstrate a rush to judgment to protect the F.B.I. at all costs."
This is an unprecedented indictment not only of the time-servers at Justice and F.B.I. headquarters last summer, but also of the director who has been insisting that the bureau is blameless ever since. Rowley, a 21-year veteran of the F.B.I. and mother of four (superagent and supermom), suggests that Mueller's men have been neglecting their duty to report potential violations of relevant directives to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board (as if that sleepy gang would lift a finger).
I was struck by déjà vu in her account of headquarters' dismissal of the warning from French intelligence about the suspect detained in Minneapolis. Higher-ups told the field agents that maybe it was another Zacarias Moussaoui — just as the spooks at C.I.A. told reporters that the Arab photographed meeting an Iraqi spymaster in Prague was another man with the name of Mohamed Atta.
Last week, recalling last August's request by George W. Bush to the C.I.A.'s George Tenet for a memo detailing the terrorist threat inside the U.S., I opined that the president had asked the wrong man. The officer charged with that responsibility is the director of the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. chief failed to ask the F.B.I. for his information. That would have blasted loose the suppressed reports from Phoenix and Minneapolis.
In unattributable response, a "senior administration official" claimed that some analyst at C.I.A. talked to somebody down the line at the F.B.I. That's foof dust; when the president needs to know the threat, our national security staff must knock top heads to provide it quickly and thoroughly.
Instead of identifying and promoting the best antiterrorist field agents experienced in operating within the U.S., as Rowley suggests, Director Mueller is importing from the C.I.A. a flock of analysts he touts as a "super squad." That compounds his mistakes and may undermine law enforcement. The C.I.A. and F.B.I. can work more closely together while remaining distinctly apart.
Mr. Bush: don't tear down that wall."
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