Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?

Time online ^ | Sunday, Aug. 04, 2002 | Micheal Elliot

[not-alone]

From the start of the Clinton Administration, the job of thwarting terror had fallen to Clarke. A bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's office on cyberterrorism, he has served four Presidents from both parties-staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two sides, one for a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat. Aggressive and legendarily abrasive, Clarke was desperate to persuade skeptics to take the terror threat as seriously as he did. "Clarke is unbelievably determined, high-energy, focused and imaginative," says a senior Clinton Administration official. "But he's totally insensitive to rolling over others who are in his way." By the end of 2000, Clarke didn't need to roll over his boss; Berger was just as sure of the danger

Berger and Clarke wanted something more robust. On Nov. 7, Berger met with William Cohen, then Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. The time had come, said Berger, for the Pentagon to rethink its approach to operations against bin Laden. "We've been hit many times, and we'll be hit again," Berger said. "Yet we have no option beyond cruise missiles." He wanted "boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces deployed inside Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he would look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were dead set against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One, the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in Iran during an abortive mission to rescue American hostages.

[not-alone]

lots of interesting spin

[evm]

The report of the 9/11 commission should be awfully interesting.

[not-alone]

It is too bad it has become so political, I dought it to be helpful

[rageaholic]

Zero Islamic immigration would have prevented 9/11. It would prevent the next domestic terror strike too, and the one after that. Of course, even after they nuke us with a backpack nuke, nobody in the US Goobermint will be prepared to take that measure, so we'll have to pay for worthless "diversity" in much valuable blood and treasure.

[Spotsy]

Could 9/11 have prevented? Of course.

9/11 represented the culmination of at least 3 decades of increasing failure (rapidly increasing failure under Clinton) to confront the threat of terrorism.

The very people (Dems and their lackeys) who claimed to have foreseen 9/11, were the very people who wanted to do away with the CIA, slash defense spending, and turn inward after the end of the Cold War. They don't have a leg to stand on when they try to place blame on President Bush.

The Dems desire to reframe 9/11 as an isolated, singular event (unrelated to the multiple attacks of the 90s) and to blame Bush, demonstrates their continued lack of understanding of the nature of the threat and their continued lack of will to confront the problem.

Bush will be reelected in November, but the Dems will inflict some serious damage on this country before then.

[section9]

9-11 could have been prevented by 9-12 America, but not by 9-10 America. That's the key to understanding why AQ succeeded. We were, literally, unwilling to take the steps necessary to defend ourselves as a society.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[Semper Paratus]

The 'rats running on the premise that they would fight terror better is as big a mistake as the Republicans running as the party of compassion.

[kaktuskid]

What do you do with the home-grown Islamics?

[NCC-1701]

If clinochio had done his job and accepted any one of Yemen's offers to take possession of OBL, you bet. The WTC towers would still be standing and the 3,000 live lost that day would not have occurred.

[Kiss Me Hardy]

What do you do with homegrown weeds? Mow 'em down.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

After the Cole bombing [Clarke] had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda

Yet he could not get Bill Clinton to clear the way for his friend John O'Neill and the FBI to investigate the Cole bombing. All Clinton had to do is tell his own ambassador to Yemen to "get out of the way!"

Dem Rats' own network (one of them), PBS, interviewed Clarke. Here is what he said about the trouble John O'Neill had with Clinton's ambassador to Yemen, Ms Bodine. If Clinton was so concerned about Al Qaeda why didn't he back O'Neill? (My emphasis.)

"I think there were two things going on in Yemen. The first thing was the government of Yemen didn't want us to know all the details; in part, because that would reveal that some low-level people in the Yemeni government may have been part of the conspiracy; in part, because it would have shown that the Yemeni government didn't really have control over a large section of Yemen; in part because it would have shown that Yemen was filled with terrorists from a whole variety of different organizations. So Yemen didn't want to cooperate fully, didn't want us to see everything that was there.

"The other thing that was going on was that you had an U.S. ambassador who wanted to be fully in control of everything that every American official did in the country, and resented the fact that suddenly there were hundreds of FBI personnel in the country and only a handful of State Department personnel. She wanted good relations with Yemen as the number one priority.

"John O'Neill wanted to stop terrorism as the number one priority, and the two conflicted. Almost all of us who were following the details in Washington, whether we were in the Justice Department, the FBI, the White House, State Department, the Defense Department -- almost all of us thought that John O'Neill was doing the right thing.

"But the State Department has to support its ambassador. State Department doesn't have a lot of assets. It doesn't have a lot of airplanes or a lot of guns. It's basically got its ambassador. It's got a letter to every ambassador from the president of the United States saying, "You, Ambassador, are my personal representative in the country. You're in charge of everything the United States does." So when the ambassador makes the decision, the State Department feels, for institutional reasons, that they have to back her up.

"So I think even though the people we were working with in the State Department who were following the case thought the ambassador was wrong, nonetheless, they decided to back her up." [end excerpt]

"they decided to back her up"

Some say the FBI could have connected the Cole to the 9/11 plot. Where was Bill Clinton?

Bill Clinton's State Department "decided to back her up" and

3000 PEOPLE DIED HORRIBLE DEATHS!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/interviews/clarke.html

I am not forgetting the military dead and wounded, but it was the Clinton administration after all and we know how they feeeeeeeel about the American military. Hmmm, maybe that's why they didn't do anything.

[eyespysomething]

9-11 could have been prevented by 9-12 America, but not by 9-10 America.

Yep, imagine if the Bush admin tried to close down airlines, even for a day, or start more stringent searches. Hell, even after 9-11 we still have people complaining about their civil rights being trampled on. Before 9-11? Even I would have thought no.

[mabelkitty]

Sure, if Clinton had decided to do something about terrorism in 1993 - the year we were first attacked.

[mabelkitty]

No kidding.
I don't understand that logic - Clinton killed them on national security - for at least two generations.

[Jeff Gordon]

We could have avoided 9/11 if we had implemented the John Kerry solution:

Demolish the WTC building so they would not be temptation for the terrorists.

[Spotsy]

We could have avoided 9/11 if we had implemented the John Kerry solution:

Demolish the WTC building so they would not be temptation for the terrorists.

Exactly!!! And the "Peaceful Tomorrows" group wants safety regulations requiring all future skyscrapers to be constructed on their sides.

[inquest]

Could it have been prevented? Well, it depends in part on whether the administration was telling the truth when it claimed it never occurred to anyone that terrorists might crash a plane into a building.