If one were to sit down and examine all the assumptions about terror the Clinton Administration made that were absolutely bizarre two would stand out. The first of course was the decision to treat the WTC 93 bombing as a Law Enforcement issue which effectively, because of the laws separating criminal investigations from espionage investigations, sealed the fate on being able to gather enough information about the perpetrators to find out whether there was state involvement. Hint, there was involvement by Iraq, effectively documented by Laurie Mylroie and recently confirmed by our forces in Iraq.
Consider this when you wonder why this was such a grievous error. The Terrorists who bombed the WTC in 93 weren’t some bunch of incompetent idiots who we should dismiss as bumbling fools. The head Bombmaker was a person who was identified, Ms. Mylroie shows this is probably a stolen identity, as Ramseh Yousef who far from being incompetent devised an ingenious altitude activated bomb made from common materials that were disassembled prior to deployment. He planned to use it in an attempt to down 12 US Airliners. His plan to destroy the WTC in 1993 would have caused as many as 250,000 deaths when one building collapsed into the other bringing them both down. And yet the Clinton Administration refused to even believe that it was a terror attack at first. When they did finally accept that it was a terrorist attack they approached the attempted murder of 250,000 NOT as an act of war but a violation of the law. Absurd you say..?? Consider John Kerry…See below.
The other massive error is related to this error. Finally when they accepted that Bin Laden was waging war on us they still did NOT want to wage war on him, turning down offers to gain control of Bin Laden because the Janet Reno Justice Dept couldn’t make a case against him. Then finally they even refused to kill him when they had the chance. Barring the CIA from assassinating him.
Will John Kerry bring us back to this nightmare absurdity? Oooh yea but give him a chance to change his mind a few more times. When he finally acts it will differ little from Clinton except that it will probably be even less effective.
But it’s primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world — the very thing this administration is worst at. And most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven’t embraced, because otherwise we’re inviting a clash of civilizations.
MSNBC - Osama bin Laden: missed opportunities : “It’s dynamite. It’s putting together all of the pieces, and that doesn’t happen every day. I guess you could say we’ve done it once, and this is it, Arkin added. The tape proves the Clinton administration was aggressively tracking al-Qaida a year before 9/11. But that also raises one enormous question: If the U.S. government had bin Laden and the camps in its sights in real time, why was no action taken against them? We were not prepared to take the military action necessary, said retired Gen. Wayne Downing, who ran counter-terror efforts for the current Bush administration and is now an NBC analyst.
We should have had strike forces prepared to go in and react to this intelligence, certainly cruise missiles either air- or sea-launched very, very accurate, could have gone in and hit those targets, Downing added. Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, says the White House required the CIA to attempt to capture bin Laden alive, rather than kill him. What impact did the wording of the orders have on the CIA’s ability to get bin Laen. It reduced the odds from, say, a 50 percent chance down to, say, 25 percent chance that we were going to be able to get him, said Schroen.
A Democratic member of the 9/11 commission says there was a larger issue: The Clinton administration treated bin Laden as a law enforcement problem.”
So naturally any sane person would believe that the Clinton’s administration policy of treating terrorism as a Law Enforcement Issue would be abandoned by the current apparent Democratic Nominee for President right? Ooopsie apparently not! Here is John Kerry in the South Carolina debate describing how we should proceed.
Bears repeating….
But it’s primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world — the very thing this administration is worst at. And most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven’t embraced, because otherwise we’re inviting a clash of civilizations.
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