I think you attribute a little backward thinking... i.e., Clintons failure to do anything about the growing Al-Qaeda threat allowed 911 to transpire. Now after 911 George W. Bush acted... unlike Clinton i.e., he responded, took it to them, called them out etc. Had Clinton done this after WTC I in 93 there would not have been a WTC II in 01. That is the bottom line and also don't forget that GW was sworn in in Jan 01 and was heavy in it with the Chinese in May because of the P-3 that clipped the Chinese MIG and went down in Hunana. I was intimately involved in that diplomatic effort and we got everyone of our aircrew back unharmed and repatriated... So in other words GW was on no cake walk from the begining.
During 1993-1995, you were part of that administration as the CIA chief. Wasn't what you called a "feckless and flaccid" policy in place at the time?
It started when President Clinton decided to respond to the attempt to assassinate former President Bush in the spring of 1993 merely by shooting two dozen cruise missiles into an empty building in the middle of the night. I think killing some night watchman and Iraqi cleaning women had the opposite effect on Saddam that one would want.Were you not part of the group of advisors that decided on that action?But surely you cannot put the blame on the Clinton administration and try to keep out the CIA?
I can tell you that they were not instrumental in making any decision between 1993 and early 1995. After that you'll have to ask my successors. No advice of the intelligence agencies was asked at that decision.
Of course the first World Trade Center attack and the following investigation took place under your watch.
As far as the WTC bombing of 1993 was concerned, all the information that was collected by law enforcement was kept under grand jury secrecy. The intelligence agencies were not permitted by law to see it until the trials of conspirators like Ramzi Yousef were completed. That was the way that the Clinton administration chose to approach acts of terrorism. As law enforcement matters and not as acts of security.
You put a lot of blame on the Clinton administration. But doesn't the principal blame for Saddam's survival fall on the first Bush administration, which, instead of toppling him, left Saddam in place out of deference to regimes in the region, like the Saudis, that fear democracy in Iraq?
The first Bush administration made a serious error in judgment in not supporting Iraqi opposition after the war. The Clinton administration made eight years of that.
There is a theory that there are Iraqi fingerprints in the 1993 attack. You have recently suggested that evidence linking the 1993 WTC attack to Iraq was overlooked during the investigation process.
What I've said was that the original investigator for the FBI in 1993 to early 1994, Jim Fox, had those suspicions. After Fox was retired, the U.S. government prosecution veered off to another theory, namely that this was a network of terrorists inspired by the blind sheik [Omar Rahman], more or less abandoning the approach of looking for ties to Iraq. None of this was available to anyone outside the small circle of prosecutors and the FBI till after the trials were finished. That was a rule of law, not a policy decision.
Since B.J.clinton's failure to act, except acting with moooonica physically or doing phone sex at late evenings, -at 9/11 or before,- President Bush were faced with problems greater than FDR were!!!