Bush ordered 'contingency' plan for confronting Iraq during Afghan war

Both Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, signed a letter to Clinton in 1998 that spurred the creation of the Iraq Liberation Act.

The Feb. 18, 1998 letter states, "Iraq today is ripe for a broad-based insurrection. We must exploit this opportunity."

*****

Iraqi Rebel Weapons, Security Training Beginning Soon

February 13, 2001

WASHINGTON -- In the next month, a handful of Iraqi rebels are scheduled to go to College Station, Texas, for their first round of weapons training from retired federal lawmen and retired members of the military's Special Forces under a U.S. plan to support insurgency activities inside Iraq.

The Iraqi National Congress, the coalition of Iraqi dissidents and rebels that the United States has officially supported since 1998, is in the final stages of completing a $98,000 contract with the Guidry Group, a consulting firm comprised of former secret service agents. Under that contract, INC security officers would learn the fine art of diplomatic security.

What distinguishes this training from previous courses for the INC, is that the rebels attending the five-day seminar would also learn how to use pistols, Kalishnikov rifles, 12-gauge shotguns and a variety of other firearms. Previous U.S.-backed training for the INC has been limited to "non-lethal" activities, such as emergency medical care, public relations and war-crimes investigations.

Although the State Department still considers this assistance to be of the non-lethal variety, the INC clearly does not.

"This is important because this is the first time we are receiving lethal training with the United States government funding," said Francis Brooke, the Washington adviser for the INC.

Retired Gen. Wayne Downing, the commander of the joint special operations task force during the Gulf War, concurred.

"This is significant because this is the first lethal training," he told United Press International. "It is designed to protect, so the significance is that this is the first time they are being trained to do anything on this level."

But State Department officials disagreed.

"This is not lethal assistance," one official said. "The skills involved are purely protective and defensive in nature of the type necessary for the INC to protect any non-lethal presence or activities inside Iraq."

The debate over lethal assistance marked the INC's fiercest battle with the Clinton administration. The lethal aid promised in the 1998 legislation that authorizes $98 million for the group was never delivered largely under the premise that the INC was not ready to challenge Hussein militarily.

But this thinking may change under the Bush administration. Although Secretary of State Colin Powell has carefully avoided making any comments on the military aspect of the Iraq Liberation Act, his counterpart at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, is a long-time supporter of a plan to oust Hussein through U.S.-backed rebels.

Both Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, signed a letter to Clinton in 1998 that spurred the creation of the Iraq Liberation Act.

The Feb. 18, 1998 letter states, "Iraq today is ripe for a broad-based insurrection. We must exploit this opportunity."

It goes on to outline a series of steps the government should take to aid the INC, including positioning "U.S. ground force equipment in the region so that, as a last resort, we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq."

The $98,000 contract with the Guidry group is tucked into a larger $4 million aid package - separate from the Iraq Liberation Act funding - aimed at establishing an alternative Iraqi media through radio transmitters, satellite television stations and newspapers. The plan, approved initially in September by the Clinton administration, also sets aside money for INC members to go inside Iraq to collect information on war crimes, Iraq's military and political changes in Baghdad.

One of the INC's principal leaders Ahmad Chalabi, speaking to reporters and analysts Friday at the American Enterprise Institute, said he believed his group could attract a number of defectors from Iraq's military if they established a presence inside the country.

"The Iraqi army is unwilling to defend Saddam, but they are too weak to overthrow him," Chalabi said, estimating that 40 percent of Iraq's elite Republican guard is absent without leave.

To be sure, the five-day security seminar is a far cry from the battlefield training and U.S. military support envisioned by Chalabi and his supporters in Washington. Chalabi on Friday said he hoped the Pentagon would change the rules of engagement for U.S. aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone in northern and southern Iraq, to allow fighters to attack Iraqi army battalions when they were moving against civilian targets.

Downing, who has worked as an adviser on a volunteer basis with the INC for three years, called the security training in the State Department aid package a "drop in the bucket."

"This is not the training they will need to put together a liberation army," he said. "There you would need individual training, basic training, weapons training, involving anti tank weapons, machine guns, rockets and that sort of thing."

Downing estimates this sort of training would take six to eight months and could be provided by either the U.S. military or the CIA.

INC officials will meet Edward Walker, the acting assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, Tuesday to discuss the remaining details of the $4 million aid package.

White House Commission on

Aviation Safety and Security

FINAL REPORT
TO
PRESIDENT CLINTON

VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE, CHAIRMAN
FEBRUARY 12, 1997

February 12, 1997

President William J. Clinton

The White House

Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President,

We are pleased to present you with the report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. You established this Commission by issuing Executive Order 13015 on August 22, 1996 with a charter to study matters involving aviation safety and security, including air traffic control and to develop a strategy to improve aviation safety and security, both domestically and internationally.

During the past six months, we have conducted an intensive inquiry into civil aviation safety, security and air traffic control modernization. Commission and staff have gathered information from a broad range of aviation specialists, Federal Agencies, consumer groups, and industry leaders.

After many months of deliberations we have agreed on a set of recommendations which we believe will serve to enhance and ensure the continued safety and security of our air transportation system.

We are privileged to submit these recommendations herewith.

Sincerely,

Vice President Al Gore, Chairman

In compliance with the Executive Order 13015 of August 22, 1996, the undersigned present the report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security.

http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:kp-sXxQD6OcJ:www.fas.org/irp/threat/212fin~1.html+1997+White+House+Commission+on+Aviation+Safety+and+Security&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security
Also known as the Gore Commission, the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security finished its work on February 12, 1997. Below, you will find copies of the Commission's initial and final reports, as well as supporting documentation and AAAE's comments.
For more information you can also visit the Commission's official website.

Click here for:

The Commission Reports:

Final Report - issued 2/17/97

Initial Report - issued 9/9/96

Additional information on:
Guidelines for Completing an Initial Consortium Vulnerability Assessment and Action Plan - issued 9/30/96

Listing of Airports required to submit action plans.

AAAE's response to the Commission's request for comments on:
Aviation Safety. - October 16, 1996

Aviation Security - December 11, 1996

http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:GMbcDL_5fDYJ:www.airportnet.org/depts/regulatory/gorecom.htm+1997+White+House+Commission+on+Aviation+Safety+and+Security&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

BTTT

The Culpability of William Jefferson Clinton

Finding the Fault Line

Oliver North

Washington Times, October 7, 2001

No one in Washington wants to spoil the "bipartisan consensus" or the genial atmosphere that has effused our nation's capital in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden's deadly terror attacks on Sept. 11.
The Bush administration, busy pursuing a broad domestic and foreign policy campaign against terrorism, is loath to point to its predecessor's failures that prepared the ground for the assault. From the Pentagon to the Justice Department, all the president's men (and women) dutifully dismiss questions about the previous administration's culpability in an attack that intelligence sources say could have been prevented.

On Capitol Hill, there is no stomach for probing lax immigration enforcement, abysmal aviation security and appalling intelligence defects that made the attacks possible. Why? It's simple. The solons know they are complicit as well. And now, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's Democrats have whipped compliant Republican legislators into delaying any serious investigations to answer the question: "How could this happen?"

In the aftermath, the media is semi-schizophrenic. Some potentates of the press seem determined to discern where the first terrorist will fall in the Hindu Kush so they can capture "live" coverage of dead killers. Others are creating fear over the unlikely prospect that Osama's cowards will release deadly plumes of sarin nerve agent or billows of anthrax spores. Those not engaged in these pointless endeavors ask how the Bush administration is going to close the barn door now that the horse has fled. Nobody, it seems, cares to ask who left the door open in the first place.

At the risk of disrupting all this comity, the record is clear: the finger of blame ought to be pointed where it belongs - at the tawdry tenure of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.

Intelligence and law enforcement agents now believe that planning, positioning and financial arrangements for the 9-11 attacks began as early as 1995 - the year Sudanese intelligence officers first approached U.S. officials with information on Osama bin Laden's operations in the Sudan. The offer was rebuffed on State Department orders.

In 1996, the Sudanese offered to turn over Osama himself and two days after the Tanzanian and Kenyan embassy bombings, Sudanese authorities detained two bin Laden operatives thought to be complicit in the attacks. FBI Director Louis Freeh wanted them extradited. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright nixed the deal. Three days later, Bill Clinton leveled a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum and blasted a tent camp in Afghanistan with cruise missiles. But that's not all.

After the July 17, 1996 TWA 800 disaster, Mr. Clinton appointed Vice President Al Gore to chair a "Commission on Aviation Safety and Security." To the acclaim of his pals in the press, Mr. Gore produced a report on Sept. 9, "just 45 days after beginning deliberations," crowed Mr. Clinton. Congress rushed to implement the report's recommendations and on Oct. 11, less than three months after 230 people died aboard TWA's Flight 800, Mr. Clinton signed into law H.R. 3539 which, he said, would "improve the security of air travel and carry forward our fight against terrorism." Among the bill's many new security requirements: criminal background checks on airport workers with access to secure areas and new certification standards for private employees who screen passengers and baggage. Neither of these requirements, nor many others in the legislation, were ever fully implemented.

In February 1998, just 16 months after the law was enacted, the Clinton Transportation Department published a "Status Report" on Aviation Safety and Security. In it, the administration claimed the FAA was finally "preparing new rules to verify the backgrounds of airport employees and certify the people at our airport checkpoints." None in Congress condemned the Clinton foot-dragging. Al Gore, the vice president, never uttered a peep. The media lapped it up.

In June 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism delivered a 64-page report to Mr. Clinton on "Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism." Among the 37 recommendations: "The secretary of state should designate Afghanistan as a sponsor of terrorism and impose all the sanctions that apply to state sponsors." The Clinton administration ignored the advice - along with most of the other recommendations from the control of visas for foreign nationals entering the United States to improvements in intelligence sharing and monitoring of terrorists' financial transactions. Nobody noticed.

What the Clinton-Gore Team did notice was the CIA - which suffered for the attention. When James Woolsey, the first Clinton-era spy chief quit in disgust in 1995, John Deutch replaced him. The White House directed Mr. Deutch to work with then-Rep. Robert Torricelli, New Jersey Democrat, to rid the CIA's Clandestine Service of anyone who had contact with foreign nationals less savory than Mother Theresa. Mr. Deutch also implemented "sensitivity seminars" to improve "tolerance" - apparently forgetting that terrorists don't get "sensitivity training." By the time the thoroughly discredited Mr. Deutch departed in December 1996, CIA morale and the ability to collect human intelligence, "HUMINT," had hit rock bottom.

Months or years from now, once the bodies are buried and the rubble is cleared, someone needs to ask "How could this happen?" For the answers, they need to look to those who pulled Washington's levers of power between 1995-2000, when these attacks were planned. The Clinton-Gore Team failed in their principle responsibility - protecting America's citizens. They ought to be ashamed.

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/Ldotvets/Bubba.html

lest we forget

After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and injured 1,000, President Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.
After the 1995 bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed five U.S. military personnel, Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

After the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 and injured 200 U.S. military personnel, Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

After the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, which killed 224 and injured 5,000, Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

After the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 and injured 39 U.S. sailors, Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished.

Perhaps if Clinton had kept his promises, over 3,000 people would be alive today.

In 1996 the government of Sudan had Osama bin Laden in their custody and offered to hand him over to the United States. Bill Clinton and his liberal cohorts elected not to take the Sudanese up on their offer. Why? Because they couldn't figure out a legal means of trying him! But Clinton sure knew how to argue the meaning of is!

Everything was more important than fighting terrorism. Political correctness, civil liberties concerns, fear of offending the administration's supporters, Janet Reno's objections, considerations of cost, worries about racial profiling and, in the second term, surviving impeachment, all came before fighting terrorism.
- Dick Morris, New York Post, Jan. 2, 2002

btt

This should be required reading before Americans vote in November!

As usual, you've found a gem.

Bill Clinton's Failure on Terrorism

Caspar W. Weinberger

Washington Times, September 2, 2003

Richard Miniter's new book, "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror," tells the sad, infuriating history of the number of opportunities President Clinton had to capture and imprison or kill the terrorist Osama bin Laden. Instead, we are still hunting. Bin Laden is still at large and alive enough to sponsor and concoct the details of the worst attack on America in our history — the destruction of the World Trade Center and the bombing of the Pentagon. What other horrors he is planning we do not know, simply because he is still uncaptured.
That reality is the sickening part of this remarkably well-researched and -sourced new book. Mr. Miniter — part of the reporting team that broke the "The Road to Ground Zero" story in the Jan. 6, 2002 London Sunday Times — has told how many real, actual and missed opportunities the Clinton administration had to capture and defang bin Laden. Why in the world would any U.S. administration not accept any and all offers to help dispose of one of the most vicious and well-financed terrorist leaders?

For several reasons, as the author points out.

The Clinton foreign policy was to get re-elected. Therefore, anything that might be controversial had to be avoided. So, from the beginning to the end of the administration, the Clintons "demanded absolute proof before acting against terrorists." This high bar guaranteed inaction. At the beginning of his term, after the attack of Feb. 26, 1993, Mr. Clinton refused to admit that the World Trade Center had been bombed. Later, he referred to it only as "regrettable" and "treated the disaster. . . like a twister in Arkansas." Earlier, he had "urged the public not to 'overreact' to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."

That attitude was typical of the Clintonites. The president did not want to hear about bad news — such as our terrible losses in October 1993, when Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu, Somalia, or the even more terrifying losses in New York. That would require a strong response which might upset some of the strange group of advisors and officials Mr. Clinton had collected. So it was with all the other missed opportunities to get bin Laden. CIA Director James Woolsey rarely had any meetings with Mr. Clinton. The president never supported Mr. Woolsey's urgent request for Arabic-language translators for the CIA in 1994. A separate feud between Mr.

WoolseyandSen.Dennis DeConcini, Arizona Democrat, was allowed to run its course without direction by the Clinton White House, which further set back the CIA director's appeal for Arabic translators. So, as the author concludes, "a bureaucratic feud and President Clinton's indifference kept America blind and deaf as bin Laden plotted."

The Sudanese would offer to let the U.S. see their intelligence files and all the data they had gathered about bin Laden and the associates who had visited him in Sudan, "and would be repeatedly rebuffed through both formal and informal channels. This was one of the greatest intelligence failures of the Clinton years as the result of orders that came from the Clinton White House." Had the Clinton administration accepted and examined these files, countless terrorists could have been tracked. Sudan's offer to arrest bin Laden and deliver him to U.S. officials was likewise refused.

The Clinton Administration did try to get Saudi Arabia to accept bin Laden from Sudan, but the Saudi government apparently had as difficult a time as Mr. Clinton in making up its mind. The issue finally resolved itself thus: "The Clinton Administration refused to work with the government of Sudan," and so all the Sudanese efforts to help us by cooperating in the capture and delivery of bin Laden failed. Nothing more happens — even after Mr. Clinton won re-election in November 1996.

This is the long sad story of the Clinton Administration's blind refusal to accept offer after offer to deliver one of the world's terrorist leaders before and after his minions killed thousands in various terrorist attacks. The book is climaxed by a documented recital of the links between bin Laden's al Qaeda units and Iraq that should convince all but the most extreme Bush-haters that these links exist and continue. In all of this, we should try to remember and be grateful for the brilliant military achievements of our forces in overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

There have always been disputes within administrations. What is important is to contrast the methods President Reagan used to resolve these differences with Mr. Clinton's indecisiveness. If Mr. Reagan had so feared taking any kind of position that might become controversial or might injure his chances for re-election, as Mr. Clinton did every day, we would never have won the Cold War. "Losing bin Laden" is a valuable history that should serve as a training manual in how not to run a foreign policy.

Another priceless post! :-)

Clinton White House axed terror-fund probe

Jerry Seper

THE WASHINGTON TIMES , April 2, 2002

The Clinton administration shut down a 1995 investigation of Islamic charities, concerned that a public probe would expose Saudi Arabia's suspected ties to a global money-laundering operation that raised millions for anti-Israel terrorists, federal officials told The Washington Times.
Law enforcement authorities and others close to the aborted investigation said the State Department pressed federal officials to pull agents off the previously undisclosed probe after the charities were targeted in the diversion of cash to groups that fund terrorism.

Former federal prosecutor John J. Loftus said four interrelated Islamic foundations, institutes and charities in Virginia with more than a billion dollars in assets donated by or through the Saudi Arabian government were allowed to continue under "a veil of secrecy."

"If federal agents had been allowed to conduct the investigation they wanted in 1995, they would have made the connection between the Saudi government and those charities," said Mr. Loftus, now a St. Petersburg, Fla., lawyer who filed a lawsuit last week accusing a Florida charity of fraud.

"Had the charities been shut down, they would have been unable to raise the millions that since have been used by terrorists in hundreds of suicide attacks," he said.

Federal agents last week began a new investigation, known as "Operation Green Quest," into the funding by charities of suspected terrorists, raiding 14 Islamic businesses in Virginia. Agents from the U.S. Customs Service, Internal Revenue Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and FBI, coordinated by a Treasury Department counterterrorism task force, seized two dozen computers, along with hundreds of bank statements and other documents.

Records in the case have been sealed and no arrests have been announced, although the probe is continuing.

The Loftus suit, filed March 20 under the Florida Consumer Protection Act, accuses the Saudi government in a massive scheme involving charities in Virginia and Florida that routed cash to terrorists.

The suit's main target is Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor who created or was associated with several Florida charities or think tanks, including the International Committee for Palestine, Islamic Concern Project and the now-defunct World and Islam Studies Enterprise.

Warrants served by agents in the Virginia raids last week targeted, among others, the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, a major source of funding for Mr. Al-Arian's World and Islam Studies Institute.

The warrants sought information on Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Islamic Concern Project, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, and Mr. Al-Arian. They also sought information on the SAAR Foundation, an educational and health charity founded by the Al-Rajihi family of Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Concern Project and the World and Islam Studies Enterprise have been named by the State Department as front organizations that raised funds for militant Islamic-Palestinian groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas. They have been tied to the diversion of millions of dollars to terrorists for weapons, safe haven, training and equipment.

Nail Al-Jubeir, spokesman for the Saudi information office in Washington, called the accusations "simply nonsense," adding that Saudi Arabia has cracked down on terrorists and those who fund them.

"There is not one iota of evidence to support these accusations," Mr. Al-Jubeir said. "It is nothing more than an effort to smear our name. If there is any proof, I would suggest it be taken directly to the U.S. government."

Mr. Al-Arian and Mazen Al-Najjar, director of the Islamic Concern Project, have been the focus of federal investigations since the mid-1990s. No criminal charges have been filed against the two, although the government shut down the World and Islam Studies Enterprise.

Mr. Al-Najjar, who is Mr. Al-Arian's brother-in-law, was detained and ordered deported by the INS on visa violations after the September 11 attacks on America. He is being held at a federal detention center in Florida pending appeal.

In the aborted 1995 investigation, the FBI said in a sealed affidavit that the Islamic Concern Project and World and Islam Studies Enterprise — working with charities in Virginia — committed fraud and "served as a vehicle by which [Islamic Jihad] raised funds to support terrorist activities in the occupied territories."

In that probe, investigators found that checks drawn on a bank account of the International Committee for Palestine had been cashed by people in the Middle East. They said the checks had been signed by Mr. Al-Arian.

Mr. Loftus is seeking an injunction blocking Florida charities, including those headed by Mr. Al-Arian, from transferring "money, weapons, equipment or communications gear" to terrorists.

Mr. Al-Arian has vigorously denied any wrongdoing, calling the Loftus lawsuit a "publicity stunt." His attorney, Robert McKee, did not return calls to his office for comment.

Julie Payne, spokeswoman for former President Bill Clinton, did not repond to inquiries about State Department policy in 1995 during his administration.

Accusations that the Saudi government used charities as front organizations to fund international terrorism are long-standing, first surfacing 20 years ago when U.S. intelligence officials warned Congress that the Saudis had taken over the direct funding of terrorist groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

One former and three current federal law enforcement officials said the new probe began after U.S. officials learned that intelligence agents in India had wiretapped the telephone of a Pakistani charity funded by the Saudi government and discovered the transfer of $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, one of the 19 al Qaeda hijackers in the September 11 attacks.

That information helped U.S. officials identify the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were from Saudi Arabia, the officials said.

After the suicide strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the officials said Treasury's interagency task force was created to investigate ties between charitable organizations in this country and international terrorist groups.

That ongoing probe, according to the officials, has focused on accusations that several tax-exempt and nonprofit charities operating from Virginia to Florida have contributed millions of dollars to international groups that support terrorism, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh and this stupid 9/11 commission/Kangaroo Court is trying to blame President Bush for 9/11?

Clinton Has No Clothes: What 9/11 revealed about the ex-president

Byron York

National Review, November 30, 2001

On June 25, 1996, a powerful truck bomb exploded outside the Khobar Towers barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, tearing the front from the building, blasting a crater 35 feet deep, and killing 19 American soldiers. Hundreds more were injured. When news reached Washington, President Bill Clinton vowed to bring the killers to justice. "The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished," he said angrily. "Let me say again: We will pursue this. America takes care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished." The next day, leaving the White House to attend an economic summit in France, Clinton had more tough words for the attackers. "Let me be very clear: We will not resist" — the president corrected himself — "we will not rest in our efforts to find who is responsible for this outrage, to pursue them and to punish them."

As Clinton spoke, his top political strategist, Dick Morris, was hard at work conducting polls to gauge the public's reaction to the bombing. "Whenever there was a crisis, I ordered an immediate poll," Morris recalls. "I was concerned about how Clinton looked in the face of [the attack] and whether people blamed him." The bombing happened in the midst of the president's re-election campaign, and even though Clinton enjoyed a substantial lead over Republican Bob Dole, Morris worried that public dissatisfaction with Clinton on the terrorism issue might benefit Dole.

Indeed, Morris's first poll showed less support for Clinton than he had hoped. But by the time Morris presented his findings to the president and top staffers at a political-strategy meeting a few days later, public approval of Clinton's response had climbed — something Morris noted in his written agenda for the session:

SAUDI BOMBING — recovered from Friday and looking great

Approve Clinton handling 73-20
Big gain from 63-20 on Friday
Security was adequate 52-40
It's not Clinton's fault 76-18

The numbers were a relief for the re-election team. But soon there was another crisis when, on July 17, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on its way from New York to Paris. There was widespread suspicion that the crash was the result of terrorism (it was later ruled to be an accident), and Morris's polling found the public growing uneasy not only about air safety but also about Clinton's performance in the Khobar investigation. Morris found that the number of people who believed Clinton was "doing all he can to investigate the Saudi bombing and punish those responsible" was just 54 percent, while 32 percent believed he could do more. Morris feared that White House inaction would allow Dole to portray Clinton as soft on national security.

"We tested two alternative defenses to this attack: Peace maker or Toughness," Morris wrote in a memo for the president. In the "Peacemaker" defense, Morris asked voters to respond to the statement, "Clinton is peacemaker. Brought together Arabs and Israelis. Ireland. Bosnia cease fire. Uses strength to bring about peace." The other defense, "Tough ness," asked voters to respond to "Clinton tough. Stands up for American interests. Against foreign companies doing business in Cuba. Sanctions against Iran. Anti-terrorist legislation held up by Republicans. Prosecuted World Trade Center bombers." Morris found that the public greatly preferred "Toughness."

So Clinton talked tough. But he did not act tough. Indeed, a review of his years in office shows that each time the president was confronted with a major terrorist attack — the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers attack, the August 7, 1998, bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole — Clinton was preoccupied with his own political fortunes to an extent that precluded his giving serious and sustained attention to fighting terrorism.

At the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, his administration was just beginning, and he was embroiled in controversies over gays in the military, an economic stimulus plan, and the beginnings of Hillary Clinton's health-care task force. Khobar Towers happened not only in the midst of the president's re-election campaign but also at the end of a month in which there were new and damaging developments in the Whitewater and Filegate scandals. The African embassy attacks occurred as the Monica Lewinsky affair was at fever pitch, in the month that Clinton appeared before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury. And when the Cole was rammed, Clinton had little time left in office and was desperately hoping to build his legacy with a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Whenever a serious terrorist attack occurred, it seemed Bill Clinton was always busy with something else.

The First WTC Attack:

Clinton had been in office just 38 days when terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. Although it was later learned that the bombing was the work of terrorists who hoped to topple one of the towers into the other and kill as many as 250,000 people, at first it was not clear that the explosion was the result of terrorism. The new president's reaction seemed almost disengaged. He warned Americans against "overreacting" and, in an interview on MTV, described the bombing as the work of someone who "did something really stupid."

From the start, Clinton approached the investigation as a law-enforcement issue. In doing so, he effectively cut out some of the government's most important intelligence agencies. For example, the evidence gathered by FBI agents and prosecutors came under the protection of laws mandating grand-jury secrecy — which meant that the law-enforcement side of the investigation could not tell the intelligence side of the investigation what was going on. "Nobody outside the prosecutorial team and maybe the FBI had access," says James Woolsey, who was CIA director at the time. "It was all under grand-jury secrecy."

Another problem with Clinton's decision to assign the investigation exclusively to law enforcement was that law enforcement in the new administration was in turmoil. When the bomb went off, Clinton did not have a confirmed attorney general; Janet Reno, who was nominated after the Zoë Baird fiasco, was awaiting Senate approval. The Justice Department, meanwhile, was headed by a Bush holdover who had no real power in the new administration. The bombing barely came up at Reno's Senate hearings, and when she was finally sworn in on March 12, neither she nor Clinton mentioned the case. (Instead, Clinton praised Reno for "sharing with us the life-shaping stories of your family and career that formed your deep sense of fairness and your unwavering drive to help others to do better.") In addition, at the time the bombing investigation began, the FBI was headed by William Sessions, who would soon leave after a messy forcing-out by Clinton. A new director, Louis Freeh, was not confirmed by the Senate until August 6.

Amid all the turmoil at the top, the investigation missed some tantalizing clues pointing toward a far-reaching conspiracy. In April 1995, for example, terrorism expert Steven Emerson told the House International Relations Committee that there was information that "strongly suggests . . . a Sudanese role in the World Trade Center bombing. There are also leads pointing to the involvement of Osama bin Laden, the ex-Afghan Saudi mujahideen supporter now taking refuge in Sudan." Two years later, Emerson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the same thing. In recent years, according to an exhaustive New York Times report, "American intelligence officials have come to believe that [ringleader Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman] and the World Trade Center bombers had ties to al-Qaeda."

But the Clinton administration stuck with its theory that the bombing was the work of a loose network of terrorists working apart from any government sponsorship. Intelligence officials who might have thought otherwise were left out in the cold — "I made repeated attempts to see Clinton privately to take up a whole range of issues and was unsuccessful," Woolsey recalls — and some of the nation's most critical intelligence capabilities went unused. In the end, the U.S. tried six suspects in the attack. All were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Another key suspect, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was released after being held by the FBI in New Jersey and fled to Baghdad, where he is living under the protection of the Iraqi government. Today, with many leads gone cold, intelligence officials concede they will probably never know who was behind the attack.

Khobar Towers:

"In June of 1996, it felt like an entire herd was converging on the White House," wrote Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos in his memoir, All Too Human. A herd of scandals, that is: In late May, independent counsel Kenneth Starr had convicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker in the first big Whitewater trial; in June, the Filegate story first broke into public view, and Sen. Alphonse D'Amato issued his committee's Whitewater report recommending that several administration officials be investigated for perjury. It was also in June that the White House went into full battle mode against a variety of allegations contained in Unlimited Access, a book by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich.

All these developments were heavy on the minds of Clinton, Dick Morris, and the other members of the re-election strategy team when the bomb went off at Khobar Towers on June 25. As it had after the World Trade Center bombing, a distracted White House gave the case to law enforcement. But there is significant evidence to suggest that the White House was even less interested in finding answers than it had been in the World Trade Center case. In the Khobar investigation, the Clinton administration not only failed to follow potentially productive leads but in some instances actively made the investigators' job more difficult.

From the beginning, the administration ran into significant Saudi resistance (the Saudis quickly identified a few low-level suspects and beheaded them, hoping to end the matter there). According to a long account of the case by Elsa Walsh published earlier this year in The New Yorker, FBI director Louis Freeh on several occasions urged the White House to pressure the Saudis for more cooperation. More than once, Walsh reports, Freeh was frustrated to learn that the president barely mentioned the case in meetings with Saudi leaders.

Freeh — whose own relations with the White House had deteriorated badly in the wake of the Filegate and campaign-finance scandals — became convinced that the White House didn't really want to push the Saudis for more information, which Freeh believed would confirm strong suspicions of extensive Iranian involvement in the attack. Walsh reports that in September 1998, Freeh, angry and losing hope, took the extraordinary step of secretly asking former president George H. W. Bush to intercede with the Saudi royal family. Acting without Clinton's knowledge, Bush made the request, and the Saudis began to provide new information, which indeed pointed to Iran.

In late 1998, Walsh reports, Freeh went to national security adviser Sandy Berger to tell him that it appeared the FBI had enough evidence to indict several suspects. "Who else knows this?" Berger asked Freeh, demanding to know if it had been leaked to the press. Freeh said it was a closely held secret. Then Berger challenged some of the evidence of Iranian involvement. "That's just hearsay," Berger said. "No, Sandy," Freeh responded. "It's testimony of a co-conspirator . . ." According to Walsh's account, Freeh thought that "Berger . . . was not a national security adviser; he was a public-relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press. After more than two years, Freeh had concluded that the administration did not really want to resolve the Khobar bombing."

Ultimately, Freeh never got the support he wanted from the White House. Walsh writes that "by the end of the Clinton era, Freeh had become so mistrustful of Clinton that, although he believed he had developed enough evidence to seek indictments against the masterminds behind the attack, not just the front-line suspects, he decided to wait for a new administration." Just before Freeh left office, Walsh reports, he met with new president George W. Bush and gave him a list of suspects in the bombing. In June, attorney general John Ashcroft announced the indictment of 14 suspects: 13 Saudis and one Lebanese. It is not clear whether any of them are the "masterminds" of Khobar; none is in American custody and no Iranian officials were named in the indictment.

Both the Khobar investigation and the World Trade Center bombing presented Clinton with daunting challenges; there were sensitive political issues involved, and in each case it was not immediately clear who was behind the violence. But in neither instance did Clinton press hard for answers and demand action; Berger would not have taken the position he did if the president fully supported a vigorous investigation. In the coming years, Clinton would be faced with clear acts of terrorism carried out by an organization with undeniable state support. But again, busy with other things, he did little.

The Embassies:

On August 7, 1998, bombs exploded at U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. More than 200 people were killed, including 12 Americans. The morning of the attacks, Clinton said, "We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes. . . . We are determined to get answers and justice."

Investigators quickly discovered that bin Laden was behind the attacks. On August 20, Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. But the strikes were at best ineffectual. There was little convincing evidence that the pharmaceutical factory, which admin istration officials believed was involved in the production of material for chemical weapons, actually was part of a weapons-making operation, and the cruise missiles in Afghanistan missed bin Laden and his deputies.

Instead of striking a strong blow against terrorism, the action set off a howling debate about Clinton's motives. The president ordered the action three days after appearing before the grand jury investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair, and Clinton's critics accused him of using military action to change the subject from the sex-and-perjury scandal — the so-called "wag the dog" strategy. Some of Clinton's allies, suspecting the same thing, remained silent. Even some of those who, after briefings by administration officials, publicly defended the strikes privately questioned Clinton's decision.

The accusations came as no surprise to the White House. "Everyone knew the 'wag the dog' charge was going to be made," recalls Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism expert on the National Security Council. But Benjamin and others believed — mistakenly, as it turned out — that they could convince the skeptics the attacks were fully justified. "I remember being shocked and deeply depressed over the fact that no one would take seriously what I considered a grave national-security problem," says Benjamin. "Not only were they not buying it, they were accusing the administration of essentially playing the most shallow and foolish kind of game to deflect attention from other issues. It was astonishing."

In particular, reporters and some members of Congress were not convinced by the administration's evidence that the al-Shifa plant was involved in chemical-weapons production. The attack came to be viewed, by consensus, as a screw-up. In a new article in The New York Review of Books, Benjamin suggests that that skepticism, particularly on the part of reporters, scared Clinton away from any more tough action against bin Laden. "The dismissal of the al-Shifa attack as a blunder had serious consequences, including the failure of the public to comprehend the nature of the al-Qaeda threat," Benjamin writes. "That in turn meant there was no support for decisive measures in Afghanistan — including, possibly, the use of U.S. ground forces — to hunt down the terrorists; and thus no national leader of either party publicly suggested such action."

After the cruise-missile raids, the administration restricted its work to covert actions breaking up terrorist cells. Benjamin and others say a significant number of terrorist plots were short-circuited, preventing several acts of violence. "I see no reason to doubt their word on that," says James Woolsey. "They may have been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes." But breaking up individual cells while avoiding larger-scale action probably had the effect of postponing terrorist acts rather than stopping them. Woolsey believes that such an approach was part of what he calls Clinton's "PR-driven" approach to terrorism, an approach that left the fundamental problem unsolved: "Do something to show you're concerned. Launch a few missiles in the desert, bop them on the head, arrest a few people. But just keep kicking the ball down the field."

The Cole:

The last act of terrorism during the Clinton administration came on October 12, 2000, when bin Laden operatives bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen American sailors were killed, 39 others were wounded, and one of the U.S.'s most sophisticated warships was nearly sunk.

Clinton's reaction to the Cole terrorism was more muted than his response to the previous attacks. While he called the bombing "a despicable and cowardly act" and said, "We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable," he seemed more concerned that the attack might threaten the administration's work in the Middle East (the bombing came at the same time as a new spate of violence between Israelis and Palestinians). "If [the terrorists'] intention was to deter us from our mission of promoting peace and security in the Middle East, they will fail utterly," Clinton said on the morning of the attack. The next day, the Washington Post's John Harris, who had good connections inside the administration, wrote, "While the apparent suicide bombing of the USS Cole may have been the more dramatic episode for the American public, the escalation between Israelis and Palestinians took the edge in preoccupying senior administration officials yesterday. This was regarded as the more fluid of the two problems, and it presented the broader threat to Clinton's foreign policy aims."

As in 1998, U.S. investigators quickly linked the bombing to bin Laden and his sponsors in Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Together with the embassy bombings, the Cole blast established a clear pattern of attacks on American interests carried out by bin Laden's organization. Clinton had a solid rationale, and would most likely have had solid public support, for strong military action. Yet he did nothing. Perhaps he didn't want to endanger the cherished goal of Middle East peace. Perhaps he didn't want to disrupt the 2000 presidential campaign, then in its last days. Perhaps he didn't know quite what to do. But in the end, the ball was kicked a bit farther down the field.

In early August 1996, a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing, Clinton had a long conversation with Dick Morris about his place in history. Morris divided presidents into four categories: first tier, second tier, third tier, and the rest. Twenty-two presidents who presided over uneventful administrations fell into the last category. Just five — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt — made Morris's first tier.

Clinton asked Morris where he stood. "I said that at the moment he was at the top of the unrated category," Morris recalls. Morris says he told the president that one surprising thing about the ratings was that a president's standing had little to do with the performance of the economy during his time in office. "Yeah," Clinton responded, "It has so much to do with whether you get re-elected or not, but history kind of forgets it."

Clinton then asked, "What do I need to do to be first tier?" "I said, 'You can't,'" Morris remembers. "'You have to win a war.'" Clinton then asked what he needed to do to make the second or third tier, and Morris outlined three goals. The first was successful welfare reform. The second was balancing the budget. And the third was an effective battle against terrorism. "I said the only one of the major goals he had not achieved was a war on terrorism," Morris says. (This is not a recent recollection; Morris also described the conversation in his 1997 book, Behind the Oval Office.)

But Clinton never began, much less finished, a war on terrorism. Even though Morris's polling showed the poll-sensitive president that the American people supported tough action, Clinton demurred. Why?

"He had almost an allergy to using people in uniform," Morris explains. "He was terrified of incurring casualties; the lessons of Vietnam were ingrained far too deeply in him. He lacked a faith that it would work, and I think he was constantly fearful of reprisals." But there was more to it than that. "On another level, I just don't think it was his thing," Morris says. "You could talk to him about income redistribution and he would talk to you for hours and hours. Talk to him about terrorism, and all you'd get was a series of grunts."

And that is the key to understanding Bill Clinton's handling of the terrorist threat that grew throughout his two terms in the White House: It just wasn't his thing. Clinton was right when he said history might care little about the prosperity of his era. Now, as he tries to defend his record on terrorism, he appears to sense that he will be judged harshly on an issue that is far more important than the Nasdaq or 401(k) balances. He's right about that, too.

Someone SHOULD ask George Stephanopoulos if he FEELS/thinks he is guilty for the death of 3,000 INNOCENT LIVES along with his former boss!!!

Stephanopoulos cited "potential abuse and political harm to the president's Hispanic base," and said that he'd killed the idea by raising "the practical grounds of prohibitive cost."

WHY CLINTON SLEPT

Dick Morris

New York Post, January 2, 2002

LAST month, President Bush shut down three U.S.-based "charities" accused of funneling money to Hamas, a terrorist organization that last year alone was responsible for at least 20 bombings, two shootings and a mortar attack that killed 77 people. These "charities" - The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Global Relief Foundation and the Benevolence International Foundation - raised $20 million last year alone.
But the information on which Bush largely relied to act against these charities was taped nine years ago, in 1993.

FBI electronic eavesdropping had produced compelling evidence that officials of Hamas and the Holy Land Foundation had met to discuss raising funds for Hamas training schools and establishing annuities for suicide bombers' families - pensions for terrorists.

Why didn't Clinton act to shut these people down?

In 1995 and 1996, he was advised to do just that. At a White House strategy meeting on April 27, 1995 - two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing - the president was urged to create a "President's List" of extremist/terrorist groups, their members and donors "to warn the public against well-intentioned donations which might foster terrorism." On April 1, 1996, he was again advised to "prohibit fund-raising by terrorists and identify terrorist organizations," specifically mentioning the Hamas.

Inexplicably, Clinton ignored these recommendations. Why? FBI agents have stated that they were prevented from opening either criminal or national-security cases because of a fear that it would be seen as "profiling" Islamic charities. While Clinton was politically correct, the Hamas flourished.

Clinton did seize any bank accounts of the terrorist groups themselves, but his order netted no money since neither al Qaeda nor bin Laden were obliging enough to open accounts in their own names.

Liberals felt that the civil rights of suspected terrorists were more important than cutting off their funds. George Stephanopoulos, the ankle bracelet that kept Clinton on the liberal reservation, explains in his memoir "All Too Human" that he opposed the proposal to "publish the names of suspected terrorists in the newspapers" with a "civil liberties argument" and by pointing out that Attorney General Janet Reno would object.

So five years later - after millions have been given to terrorist groups through U.S. fronts - the government is finally blocking the flow of cash.

Political correctness also doomed a separate recommendation to require that drivers' licenses and visas for noncitizens expire simultaneously so that illegal aliens pulled over in traffic stops could be identified and (if appropriate) deported. Stephanopoulos cited "potential abuse and political harm to the president's Hispanic base," and said that he'd killed the idea by raising "the practical grounds of prohibitive cost."

Had Clinton adopted this recommendation, Mohammed Atta might have been deported after he was stopped for driving without a license three months before be piloted an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center.

Nothing so illustrates the low priority of terrorism in Clinton's first term than the short shrift he gave the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Six people were killed and 1,042 injured; 750 firefighters worked for one month to contain the damage. But Clinton never visited the site. Several days after the explosion, speaking in New Jersey, he actually "discouraged Americans from overacting" to the Trade Center bombing.

Why this de-emphasis of the threat? In Sunday's New York Times, Stephanopoulis explains that the 1993 attack "wasn't a successful bombing. . . . It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"

In sharp contrast, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over the WTC-bombing trial, noted that the attack caused "more hospital casualties than any other event in domestic American history other than the Civil War."

But Stephanopoulos was just the hired help. Clinton was the president and commander-in-chief. For all of his willingness to act courageously and decisively - against the advice of his liberal staff - on issues like deficit reduction and welfare reform, he was passive and almost inert on terrorism in his first term.

It wasn't until 1998 that Clinton finally got around to setting up a post of Counter Terrorism Coordinator in the National Security Council.

Everything was more important than fighting terrorism. Political correctness, civil liberties concerns, fear of offending the administration's supporters, Janet Reno's objections, considerations of cost, worries about racial profiling and, in the second term, surviving impeachment, all came before fighting terrorism.

CIA Director John Deutch and his top assistant, Nora Slatkin. The pair ran Clinton's CIA in the mid-1990s and implemented a "human rights scrub" policy.

"Deutch and Nora, Clinton's anti-intelligence plants, implemented a universal 'human rights scrub' of all assets, virtually shutting down operations for 6 months to a year. This was after something happened in Central America (there was an American woman involved who was the common law wife of a commie who went missing there) that got a lot of bad press for the agency. "After that, each asset had to be certified as being 'clean for human rights violations.' "What this did was to put off limits, in effect, terrorists, criminals, and anyone else who would have info on these kinds of people." Roger says the CIA, even under new leadership, has never recovered from the "Human Rights Scrub" policy.

"Roger," was a CIA spy in the Mideast.

*****

Wednesday Sept. 13, 2001; 12:02 a.m. EDT

A former CIA official said late Wednesday that U.S. spy recruitment had been decimated by strict Clinton administration rules that tied the agency's hands in its war against terrorism.

"We don't have enough people on the ground in the right places," former Iraqi bureau station chief Whitney Bruner told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.

"Partly it's because there's a culture that I think has developed in Washington concerning human operations over the last several years," Bruner said; a policy that limited the kind of people the agency could deal with.

"When you're dealing with a terrorist target you are dealing with what might charitably be called slimeballs - very, very unpleasant type people who probably have criminal records," the former station chief explained.

But the people in a position to know about terrorists' plans were off limits under Clinton-era CIA regulations.

"We're not allowed to deal with them ... if the person you are trying to recruit against a terrorist target has questions of human rights or other kinds of crime," Bruner revealed.

Oh good grief!

Let me know if you all want me to stop posting this stuff. There is SO MUCH information, it might take the ENTIRE forum to get it all posted. Would you rather I post links or entire articles? Please let me know. I will work on it when and if I have more time.

Post EVERYTHING;please. I have the thread bookmarked, so having everything on here, makes it easy to reference. I send this stuff out and the more facts the better.

You're an absolute wonder...better than Nexus/Lexus! :-)

I have some recordings of radio broadcasts on 9-11-01, notably the stirring and patriotic "call to arms" opening of The Savage Nation in the late afternoon of 9-11-01, roughly 7:07 PM EST.

Anyway, about 1:40 minutes into the clip, Doc Savage notes the breaking news on the web that Sen Orrin Hatch of the Senate Inteligence committee reported that we had intel that 2 messages were sent over private airwaves to Osama Bin Ladin - the message was "we hit two targets."

I also recall seeing a news replay (pretty sure it was Fox) of some of the confusion on the streets of downtown manhattan - a journalist in a truck maybe speculates who is responsible and mentions something along the lines of "One name that must come up for those possibly responsible is Osama Bin Ladin."

Bin Ladin was definitely prominent in the news as early as the evening of 9-11-2001, and maybe as early as late morning of 9-11 based on my memory (maybe faulty) of the news broadcast.

If anyone wants the link to the streaming audio of the Savage Nation 9-11 opening clip (really stirring), Freepmail me, ok?

In the wee hours of the morning you hear screams of STOP!...STOP! Is it a home invasion...is it a case of domestic violence....is it a nightmare...NO! It's kcvl providing ammunition! :)

Don't stop, please. I have additions of material to the "Clinton White House axed terror-fund probe" story. I'll try to stay awake long enough to get it posted tonight and will reference Post #130.

"But the people in a position to know about terrorists' plans were off limits under Clinton-era CIA regulations."

Might be because Clinton already had his own deals with those people.