Enemies Within - Clinton Administration took away our military edge

THE FACT that we are at war is not news. We have been at war for more than half a century with the radicals who hate America and hate American capitalism. The World Trade Center was the symbol of "Wall Street" – the Great Satan of the radicals’ religion. It was the symbol of "globalization." That is why it was the prime target for these terrorist attacks.

This is a war that Communism started, and that post-Communist radicals are continuing. The radicals who hate America and America’s freedom will never give up. They have to be defeated.

The September 11 tragedy was not the first time the World Trade Center was hit. In 1993, the forces of terror, including those associated with Osama Bin Laden and Yassir Arafat detonated a bomb at the base of the towers that killed 6 people and injured 1,000. The architect of that bombing was a terrorist named Ramzi Yusef. He was a member of the Palestinian Hamas movement and was captured with plans for a coordinated series of hijackings and suicide crashes of U.S. commercial airliners. But no in one in government took the plans seriously enough to prepare a defense.

President Clinton refused to recognize that we were at war; he did not alert the nation; he did not call us to arms; and he did not mobilize U.S. security forces to prepare the nation (or even the World Trade Center) for a defense against these attacks.

Instead of crushing Arafat and Hamas and their comrade Osama Bin Laden, the Clinton Administration forced the Israelis into the Oslo "peace process," which legitimized the terrorists, provided them with billions of US dollars in aid, and gave them an army with tens of thousands of weapons.

Far from preparing America for the war it was already in, the Clinton Administration pretended we were at peace. It even acted as though America itself was the threat. Government security controls were removed on sales and transfers of high-tech instruments of war. Missile and satellite technologies and super computers were passed to China by the Clinton Administration and, through China, to North Korea, Iran, Libya and Iraq.

Through these transfers, the Clinton Administration took away our military edge and disarmed our high-tech defenses.

Why were US intelligence agencies unable to provide warnings despite the immense traffic of terrorist communications required to plan the September 11 terrorist attack? Because the Clinton Administration had given away the technology to encrypt such messages and make them invisible. These technologies included computer networks that cannot be monitored and spread-spectrum radios that change frequency and are impossible to penetrate. Our technological defenses were systematically disarmed by our own President.

The Clinton Administration also took steps to disarm our human intelligence defenses. In 1995, new "sensitivity" guidelines were issued for our intelligence agencies that gravely restricted their ability to gather information in the countries where the terrorists were based. Because an American leftist had been widowed by a "human rights violator" in Latin America who was employed by the CIA, the CIA was forbidden to use "human rights violators" as intelligence assets. This was like forbidding local law enforcement from using common criminals as informants. But common criminals do not bring down 100-story skyscrapers.

After the CIA was hamstrung, two of our African embassies were bombed by the terrorist network. Our response was an impotent missile launched into the Sudan by Clinton (on the day Monica Lewinsky appeared before the grand jury). Clinton’s response destroyed a medicine factory in the Sudan and antagonized hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. Other missiles were launched into Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden had his camps. But to no effect. More terrorist acts followed. Our warship the USS Cole was blown up in Yemen. A barracks containing our troops was bombed in Saudi Arabia. Nothing was done.

The Clinton Administration refused to recognize the threat, refused to mobilize the nation, refused to arm our security forces to the levels needed to defend us, refused to recognize that we were in a war and refused to declare a policy to win it. The terrorists got the message: America is weak. The refusals put us in danger as a nation, and made the tragedy of September 11th possible.

But now we have a new President, and a new Administration. "When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt," this President told a group of Senators. "It’s going to be decisive."

What this history tells us is that terrorists are not the only enemy we have within.

This is not about the critics of American policy. Policies are the work of human beings. They can always be criticized. This is about purpose. It is about faith in the basic good of this country. It is about those who have declared war on America.

On the very day that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, the New York Times ran a flattering profile of Bill Ayers, one of the leaders of "Weatherman," a Sixties radical group and the first terrorist cult in America. Ayers is now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. That is the way our educational system views unrepentant terrorists. The Weathermen bombed the U.S. Capitol Building in the 1970s. "I don’t regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers told the admiring New York Times reporter, "I believe we didn’t do enough."

This left is educating our children in our schools. It is out demonstrating on America’s campuses, with "teach-ins" against the war. It is proselytizing students with a message that is always the same: America is guilty; America is to blame.

The foes of free markets and free minds have not surrendered. They are even bolder now that they cannot be linked to the crimes of Communism which they encouraged and supported. They are behind our own lines. They have burrowed into our schools, our churches, our media, our government itself. And their message is always the same: America is guilty; America is to blame.

The months ahead will be difficult ones, but they will also bring opportunities. We can be grateful that many Americans have now begun to appreciate what they have in this country, and also that what they have can be lost. Already there is a new unity, a new patriotism in the land. Already Americans are beginning to realize how lucky they are to have a President who believes in America, and who is committed to winning America’s war.

But we must not forget how slim the margin was by which this President was elected to lead us in our nation’s crisis. We must not forget how deeply the forces that hate America have penetrated our institutions and weakened our national resolve.

Our task is to continue our efforts to strengthen the foundations of this great democracy of ours, to win the hearts and minds of those who are in America, but not yet of it, not yet for it.

This is the battle we are in together. It is a battle we lost in Vietnam. That loss led directly to America’s weakness and the terrorist attack of September 11th. It is a battle we must not lose again.

Kerry's World: Father Knows Best
CBS News ^ | March 3, 2004 | Franklin Foer

Posted on 03/03/2004 3:05:09 AM EST by Cincinatus' Wife

By the time John Kerry's father, Richard, published his only book, The Star-Spangled Mirror, in 1990, he should have been a mellow man. Nearly 30 years had passed since his retirement from the Foreign Service, where he'd filled mid-level posts in Washington, Berlin, and Oslo. His central issue, the cold war, had followed him into retirement with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and rise of glasnost in Russia. When the 75-year-old Kerry wasn't working on his book, he could be found building model ships and sailing off Cape Cod. If he had any reasons for professional bitterness, they should have long since faded.

None of these facts, however, becalmed him. His book has a young man's brash, polemical tone. The Star-Spangled Mirror is a critique of moralism in America's foreign policy -- and, more than that, it is a critique of America's national character.

"Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of U.S. moral superiority.

Despite its blunt arguments, The Star-Spangled Mirror received little attention. Foreign Affairs greeted it with a 90-word summation in its review section. But the work of Richard Kerry, who passed away in 2000, will soon experience posthumous reconsideration. It won't be because of the renewed relevance of his arguments (although his book does read like a contemporary brief against neoconservatism). It will be because his son is a leading candidate to run U.S. foreign policy.

According to the conventional telling of John Kerry's biography, largely told by Kerry himself, his foreign policy views were forged in the Mekong Delta. During his disillusioning four-month combat stint on a Navy Swift Boat, the limits of U.S. power were revealed to him. As Newsweek argued in a cover story last month, "Kerry's policy views, as well as his politics, were profoundly shaped by the war." But, for all the neatness this narrative provides, it overlooks an entire chapter in Kerry's intellectual history: his childhood. In fact, Kerry's foreign policy worldview, characterized by a steadfast belief in international institutions and a suspicion of U.S. hard power, had fallen into place long before he ever enlisted. As Kerry's biographer, the historian Douglas Brinkley, told me, "So much of his foreign policy worldview comes straight from Richard Kerry."

Richard Kerry's father, a Czech Jew, fled Europe. The son, by contrast, embraced it. As a law student at Harvard in the late '30s, he read continental philosophers like Kierkegaard and histories about Bismarck and Metternich; he traveled to France, where he took sculpture classes and met his wife. Hoping to parlay his love of Europe into a career, he chose international law as his law school specialty. After World War II, which he spent in the Army Air Corps testing new airplanes at high altitudes, he moved his family to Washington to take a spot in the Department of the Navy's Office of General Counsel, hoping that his proximity to the State Department might help him land a job there.

Two years into his Washington stint, Kerry's relocation paid off. The State Department's Bureau of United Nations Affairs hired him to help work through the thicket created by America's adherence to a new set of postwar international agreements. According to Brinkley, the cosmopolitan Kerry was a true believer in the United Nations and the postwar promise of global government.

But, as much as he believed in the United Nations, it was not his prime passion. A devoted Europeanist, Kerry was more preoccupied with the devastation of Europe and the monumental task of reconstructing it -- a romantic project that enticed a generation of young diplomats, including George Kennan and George Ball. The appeal of the task wasn't just the economic and physical rebuilding of the continent. Kerry and others like him viewed themselves as building a new political order for the continent, a new method for arranging international affairs that would consign war to the dustbin of history. In the early '50s, Kerry became an enthusiast for NATO and the nascent efforts at creating a unified Europe.

In 1954, Kerry received an assignment that put him at ground zero of the cold war. He moved to Berlin to advise former Harvard President James B. Conant, whom Dwight D. Eisenhower had charged with overseeing the rehabilitation of West Germany. Once again, Kerry's job consigned him primarily to lawyerly work. His chief task was to devise answers to the questions created by Berlin's confused status. Martha Mautner, a political officer who served with Kerry in Germany, told me, "There were so many questions about the status of Berlin that the lawyers had to handle. There were Four Powers [the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union] running the city. What was its relationship to the Federal Republic?" But Kerry's interests extended far beyond these matters. During his tenure in Europe, he attended conferences in Paris, London, and The Hague, where he discussed with other mid-level diplomats the future of the transatlantic alliance and the possibilities of a new continental order. According to Brinkley, through these conferences, Kerry established relationships with a group of like-minded government officials, including the famed French planning commissioner (and intellectual architect of the European Union) Jean Monnet.

These conferences reinforced Kerry's belief that the preservation of the Atlantic alliance and the creation of a new Europe should be the overriding priorities of U.S. foreign policy. But the reality of U.S. policy was far different. For most of the Eisenhower administration, America's prime objective was containing communism. And, unlike the administration he served, Kerry believed that cooperation and diplomacy, rather than militarism, should resolve these tensions. In The Star-Spangled Mirror, he condemns the United States for "lecturing" European allies about the horrors of communism and accuses it of "bad manners" and "spoiled behavior." He writes, "At times we expected the allies unquestioningly to follow our leads; sometimes we failed to consult them in advance before reversing policies; at other times we ignored their requests."

Even at the time, Kerry wasn't quiet about his disagreement with the hard-line anti-communists. Although he had initially viewed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a kindred spirit and cultivated a relationship with him, Kerry felt uncomfortable with his rhetoric about "godless communism." (In his book, Kerry spends several pages arguing against Dulles's "intensely moralistic outlook.") According to Brinkley, Kerry bluntly told Dulles the shortcomings of his increasingly hawkish approach, undermining their relationship in the process. This was typical behavior for Kerry, who had a growing reputation for outspokenness. John Kerry's friend and former aide Jonathan Winer says, "[Richard Kerry] was a dissident in a time of conformity."

For all his impolitic instincts, Kerry's undeniable competence kept propelling his career forward. Following his posting in Berlin, he served as top aide to Georgia Democrat Walter George, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And, in 1958, he took what would be his highest posting in the Foreign Service, as Oslo's chief political officer, where he played a vital role in opening Norway to American spies and weapons. But his competence could get him only so far -- which is to say, it couldn't overcome his maverick reputation and win him a coveted ambassadorship. By the Kennedy administration, Brinkley says, Kerry sensed he had hit a ceiling in the Foreign Service. Kerry told his family, "They seem not to listen to what I have to say, so I'm going to quit." Brinkley adds, "He saw his role as becoming a protester, criticizing the government from the outside in lectures and his book."

Richard Kerry, whose own father committed suicide, was not a very effusive parent. When his twelve-year-old son John lay quarantined with scarlet fever at his Swiss boarding school, Richard Kerry didn't make the trip from Berlin to visit him. But there was at least one subject that fostered easy conversation between the two: foreign policy. "It allowed them to break through an emotional wall," says Brinkley. "They talked about foreign policy the way most fathers and sons talk about football." Well into his Senate career, John Kerry would phone his father to ask his opinion about international issues ranging from arms control to Central America. Watching the conversations, Winer says, "I saw two people talking about policy very seriously with unexpressed affection."

From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.

As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."

If Richard and John Kerry were not in perfect political sync, it was because the father, in an inversion of the usual dynamic, was more radical than the son. John Kerry, for instance, had grown enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy and his robust, anti-communist foreign policy. Indeed, it was his fervor for Kennedy's "bear any burden" call to service that largely inspired Kerry to join the Navy. Richard Kerry, by contrast, was more skeptical about New Frontier idealism. In a 1996 interview with The Boston Globe, he groused, "[John's] attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction." When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."

John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians.

There are differences, to be sure, between Richard and John Kerry. Over the course of his political career, John Kerry has occasionally endorsed the use of force, as in the cases of Panama and Kosovo, and he has always found a rhetorical place for morality in his foreign policy pronouncements. But, more often than not, even as John Kerry stumps for president, the similarities shine through. Last month, for example, Kerry charged that the administration's "high-handed treatment of our European allies, on everything from Iraq to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, has strained relations nearly to the breaking point." It should be no surprise to hear John Kerry worry about European allies and to strike such liberal internationalist notes. These ideas aren't just deeply felt; they're in his blood.

Franklin Foer is associate editor at TNR.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1089641/posts

***On the very day that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, the New York Times ran a flattering profile of Bill Ayers, one of the leaders of "Weatherman," a Sixties radical group and the first terrorist cult in America. Ayers is now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. That is the way our educational system views unrepentant terrorists. The Weathermen bombed the U.S. Capitol Building in the 1970s. "I don’t regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers told the admiring New York Times reporter, "I believe we didn’t do enough." ***

***Ayers spent many years on the run before turning himself in. Despite his admitted guilt, federal conspiracy charges against him were dismissed because much of the evidence against him was obtained illegally by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. *** Source

***But then her Clinton patrons intervened. The agent of her mercy was the blimpish, New York congressman Jerry Nadler, one of President Clinton’s staunchest defenders during the impeachment process and one of Senator Clinton’s chief supporters during her election bid. Nadler appealed to Clinton and Clinton responded. As the last hours of the Clinton era expired, Linda Evans was freed. It was 24 years shy of her full sentence.***Source

***In 1992 or 1993, she pulled off what seemed to be an intelligence coup. She traveled to Cuba and interviewed Cuban generals about economic reforms on the island. In 1998, she played an important role in drafting a widely cited analysis that found that Cuba's much diminished military posed no strategic threat to the United States. As recently as the week before last, she briefed top Pentagon policy-makers on Cuba.

According to the FBI affidavit, Montes, who had a high-level security clearance, spied for Cuba for at least five years, and possibly longer. She identified at least one U.S. undercover agent to the Cubans, disclosed a top-secret intelligence-gathering program and reported on U.S. training in the Caribbean, the FBI said.

Current and former U.S. officials say she was in a position to tell have told Havana virtually everything the intelligence community knew about Cuba's military and might even have disclosed U.S. contingency plans for taking the island by force. *** Source ………..After her arrest, an important 1998 DIA report — suggesting that Cuba no longer poses much of a strategic threat to the United States — was immediately called into question. As the DIA's senior Cuba specialist, Montes would have exercised a major influence over the final product. When the report was completed, in fact, defense secretary William Cohen considered it too weak. He toughened the language, though not to the extent Castro's strongest critics would have liked. The broader problem with the report, however, is that it reflects the views of the foreign-policy establishment, which continues to downplay Cuba. Castro has "done good things for his people," said secretary of state Colin Powell at an April 26 House hearing. "He's no longer the threat he was." Source

*** A former congressional aide for several Democratic lawmakers was arrested yesterday as a spy and agent of influence for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Susan Lindauer, 41, was arrested at her home in Takoma Park. She was charged in an indictment unsealed yesterday for conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent for Iraq from October 1999 until February. As she was led to a car outside the Baltimore FBI office, Miss Lindauer shouted: "I'm an antiwar activist and I'm innocent.

…..From March to May 2002, Miss Lindauer worked as a press secretary for Rep. Zoe Lofgren, California Democrat. Mrs. Lofgren, a Judiciary Committee member, said in a statement, "To my knowledge, this former employee had no access to sensitive information." Miss Lindauer joined the staff of then-Sen. Carol Moseley Braun in January 1996 as a press secretary. Mrs. Moseley Braun said she does not remember the suspect, a spokeswoman said. *** Source

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