MISSED SIGNALS: Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action

Missed Signals
This is the last of three articles. The first report examined Saudi Arabia's policies toward militants who left home to wage holy war. The second looked at how Muslim militancy took root in Europe and how European governments failed to understand its danger and depth.

Inside the White House situation room on the morning terrorism transformed America, Franklin C. Miller, the director for defense policy, was suddenly gripped by a staggering fear: "The White House could be hit. We could be going down."

The reports and rumors came in a torrent: A car bomb had exploded at the State Department. The Mall was in flames. The Pentagon had been destroyed. Planes were bearing down on the capital.

The White House was evacuated, leaving the national security team alone, trying to control a nation suddenly under siege and wondering if they were next. Mr. Miller had an aide send out the names of those present by e-mail "so that when and if we died, someone would know who was in there."

Somewhere in the havoc of the moment, Richard A. Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism chief, recalled the long drumbeat of warnings about terrorists striking on American soil, many of them delivered and debated in that very room. After a third hijacked jet had sliced into the Pentagon, others heard Mr. Clarke say it first: "This is Al Qaeda."

An extensive review of the nation's antiterrorism efforts shows that for years before Sept. 11, terror experts throughout the government understood the apocalyptic designs of Osama bin Laden. But the top leaders never reacted as if they believed the country was as vulnerable as it proved to be that morning.

Dozens of interviews with current and former officials demonstrate that even as the threat of terrorism mounted through eight years of the Clinton administration and eight months of President Bush, the government did not marshal its full forces against it.

The defensive work of tightening the borders and airport security was studied but never quite completed. And though the White House undertook a covert campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden, the government never mustered the critical mass of political will and on-the-ground intelligence for the kind of offensive against Al Qaeda it unleashed this fall.

The rising threat of the Islamic jihad movement was first detected by United States investigators after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The inquiry into that attack revealed a weakness in the immigration system used by one of the terrorists, but that hole was never plugged, and it was exploited by one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. And President Bill Clinton's own pollster told him the public would rally behind a war on terrorism. But none was declared.

By 1997, the threat of an Islamic attack on America was so well recognized that an F.B.I. agent warned of it in a public speech. But that same year, a strategy for tightening airline security, proposed by a vice- presidential panel, was largely ignored.

In 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the country with explosives, a secret White House review recommended a crackdown on "potential sleeper cells in the United States." That review warned that "the threat of attack remains high" and laid out a plan for fighting terrorism. But most of that plan remained undone.

Last spring, when new threats surfaced, the Bush administration devised a new strategy, which officials said included a striking departure from previous policy — an extensive C.I.A. program to arm the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That new proposal had wound its way to the desk of the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and was ready to be delivered to the president for final approval on Monday, Sept. 10.

The Sept. 11 attack "was a systematic failure of the way this country protects itself," said James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence. "It's aviation security delegated to the airlines, who did a lousy job. It's a fighter aircraft deployment failure. It's a foreign intelligence collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a visa and immigration policy failure."

The Clinton administration intensified efforts against Al Qaeda after two United States Embassies in Africa were bombed in 1998. But by then, the terror network had gone global — "Al Qaeda became Starbucks," said Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official — with cells across Europe, Africa and beyond.

Even so, according to the interviews and documents, the government response to terrorism remained measured, even halting, reflecting the competing interests and judgments involved in fighting an ill-defined foe.

The main weapon in President Clinton's campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants was cruise missiles, which are fired from thousands of miles away. While that made it difficult to hit Mr. bin Laden as he moved around Afghanistan, the president was reluctant to put American lives at risk.

But a basic problem throughout the fight against terrorism has been the lack of inside information. The C.I.A. was surprised repeatedly by Mr. bin Laden, not so much because it failed to pay attention, but because it lacked sources inside Al Qaeda. There were no precise warnings of impending attacks, and the C.I.A. could not provide an exact location for Mr. bin Laden, which was essential to the objective of killing him.

At the F.B.I., it was not until last year that all field offices were ordered to get engaged in the war on terrorism and develop sources. Inside the bureau, the seminars and other activities that accompanied these orders were nicknamed "Terrorism for Dummies," a stark acknowledgment of how far the agency had not come in the seven years since the first trade center attack.

"I get upset when I hear complaints from Congress that the F.B.I. is not sharing its intelligence," said a former senior law enforcement official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. "The problem is that there isn't any to share. There is very little. And the stuff we can share is not worth sharing."

Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency said that they had some success in foiling Al Qaeda plots, but that the structure of the group made it difficult to penetrate. "It is understandable, but unrealistic, especially given our authorities and resources, to expect us to be perfect," said Bill Harlow, a C.I.A. spokesman.

Dick Morris said he will break a series of exclusives (about Clinton being AWOL in the terror war) over the next 5 weeks on Hannity and Colmes

2 posted on 12/30/01 8:20 AM Pacific by spycatcher

MISSED SIGNALS: Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action

Morris says the usually communicative Clinton clammed up and was unresponsive when recommendations were made on terrorism. I think Clinton whose political instincts were always sharp, knew that he could not go down the road of fighting terror. His style of politics had badly polarized the country so that about half the population could never support him - the trust was gone. He had squandered the moral authority inherent in the office, and knew any effort to call on the people for support in a difficult course of action was unlikely to succeed.

4 posted on 12/30/01 8:49 AM Pacific by thucydides

MISSED SIGNALS: Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action

Don't you think he would have revelled in his "chance for greatness?" This would have been a narcissistic apotheosis for him. But I think he knew he simply could not muster the kind of trust that is essential to having the moral authority to put men in harm's way. We are learning the terrible danger of putting a frivolous, feckless man of no character in office. I think once the cold war was over and the gulf war was easily one, people came to regard the presidency and presidential campaigns as a form of popular entertainment. Clinton was more like the late night hosts than was Bush Sr. or Dole, so they voted for him. It never occurred to them that a president can be called on at any time to deal with serious matters, and that all our lives are literally in his hands.

6 posted on 12/30/01 9:39 AM Pacific by thucydides

MISSED SIGNALS: Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action

Q ERTY6 bump!
(FOR ANOTHER POST: Note The Times' attempt to draw an equivalence between Bush's first 8 months of acclimation and clinton's lack of inaction for 8 years despite numerous attacks during his tenure by bin Laden et al.)

Absolute evidence of utter 4th-estate, academic and senatorial malfeasance

by Mia T, Dec. 31, 2001

As Clinton continured his search, he lamented that he could not see a big, clear task before him. Part of him yearned for an obvious call to action or even a crisis. He was looking for that extraordinary challenge which he could define and then rally people to the cause. He wanted to find that galvanizing moment. "I would have preferred being president during World War II" he said one night in January 1995. "I'm a person out of my time."

Bob Woodward, The Choice - p 65

"There wasn't a sicker person than I on September 11. I was on the telephone when it happened. The instant that second plane hit, I said to the person with whom I was speaking, 'Bin Laden did this.' I knew immediately. I know what this network can do.

bill clinton

Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize

"What harm can clinton do? He has less than two years left".

Dale Bumpers

It is clear that clinton's failure to wage war against the terrorists--especially when considered in the context of clinton's hyper-narcissistic, obsessive quest for greatness via his "WWII"--

is directly traceable to his loss of moral authority...
is the indisputable evidence of 4th-estate, academic and senatorial malfeasance of the basest kind...
is the indisputable evidence that clinton should have been removed from office--POST HASTE...
is the indisputable evidence that, indeed, he should never have attained office in the first instance...
is the indisputable evidence that The New York Times and those 400 hog-and-bow-tied-save-clinton, retrograde-obsessing historiographers, along with the 100 corrupt and cowardly cullions--otherwise known as the U.S. Senate--that these three watchdog entities--allowed their political agendas and/or their cowardice trump our national security...not to mention rational thought...

The indisputable nature of the above is confirmed by the position of 'the smartest woman in the world' -- (which she proferred in 1974 when she wanted to impeach a president):

"Impeachment," wrote Rodham, "did not have to be for criminal offenses -- but only for a 'course of conduct' that suggested an abuse of power or a disregard for the office of the President of the United States...A person's 'course of conduct' while not particularly criminal could be of such a nature that it destroys trust, discourages allegiance, and demands action by the Congress...The office of the President is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."

--Mia T, THE OTHER NIXON




I think that history will view this much differently. They will say I made a bad personal mistake, I paid a serious price for it, but that I was right to stand and fight for my country and my constitution and its principles...

-----the First Psychopath, himself

...[bill clinton], a man who will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents.

-----Al Gore at clinton's post-impeachment rally

I suspect that, to spite us all,
Arthur Schlesinger will live to 120
just so he can write
the definitive clinton hagiography.

--------Mia T, Musings: Senatorial Courtesy Perverted

History Lesson

by Mia T

Someone--was it Maupassant?--
once called history "that excitable and lying old lady."
The same can be said of historians.

Surely it can be said of Doris Kearns Goodwin,
the archetypical pharisaical historian,
not-so-latently clintonoid,
Lieberman-Paradigmatic
(i.e., clinton is an unfit president;
therefore clinton must remain president),
intellectually dishonest,
(habitually doing what the Arthur Schlesingers of this world do:
making history into the proof of their theories).

The Forbids 400's argument is shamelessly spurious.
They get all unhinged over the impeachment of clinton,
claiming that it will
"leave the presidency permanently disfigured and diminished,
at the mercy as never before of the caprices of any Congress."

Yet they dismiss the real and present--and future!!--danger
to the presidency and the country
of not impeaching and removing
this admittedly unfit, (Goodwin)
"documentably dysfunctional," (NYT)
presidency-diminishing, (Goodwin)
power-abusing,
psychopathic thug.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and those 400 other
hog-and-bow-tied-save-clinton,
retrograde-obsessing historiographers
are a supercilious, power-hungry,
egomaniacal lot in their own right.

For them, clinton validates
what Ogden Nash merely hypothesized:
Any buffoon can make history,
but only a great man can write it.

See also:

2-21-01

CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme Fails in its 1^st Effort

Bill O'Reilly Laughs Lanny Davis Off Stage

Calls "It's the economy, stupid" an Utter Absurdity Post-9/11

The Placebo President (aided and abetted by the media myrmidons of the left) strikes again...
by Mia T

What is most interesting about clinton's revisionist leaks is that the impeached ex-president has decided that incompetency is a preferable legacy to idiocy or a sui generis narcissistic sedition.

compulsive clinton CYA-ing CONTINUES
(so does 4th-estate malfeasance)

Q ERTY6 REALITY CHECK!
AN UNPARDONABLE DECISION [not only did clinton not fight terrorism--he aided and abetted it]

Clinton's Failure to Confront Iraq

11-30-01

New York Times Chairman/Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. admits to Brian Lamb:

"Times dropped ball during Holocaust by failing to connect the dots"
Times was able to endorse clinton by separating clinton's "policies" from "the man" [i.e., by failing to connect the dots!]

2-27-01
Frankenstein, The Sequel:
Hollywood--premier clinton creator--edits out its own culpability for 9/11 by editing out clinton's culpability for 9/11
Will its own vulnerability to terrorism (and worse) finally impel LA-LA LAND to reject "through the looking-glass for real" clinton ineptitude and depravity?

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