If the foiled airline bomb plot sounded familiar, it should. In 1995, al-Qaida planned the same thing as the Clinton administration slept. Democrats hope to press the snooze button again in November.
The 1995 plot was uncovered when Ramzi Yousef, subsequently convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, hastily fled a burning Manila apartment, leaving behind bomb materials and a laptop with disks containing plans for something called Project Bojinka — the Arabic word for "loud explosion."
The plot was to blow up 11 American jetliners over the Pacific Ocean, then crash a plane into CIA headquarters — a mission to be carried out by a Pakistani pilot who had trained at flight schools in North Carolina, Texas and New York. Sound familiar?
One would have thought that after al-Qaida had tried to blow up the WTC in 1993 and was discovered to be plotting to blow up airliners and fly them into buildings, the Clinton administration would have connected the dots and taken action. But it didn't.
A disgusted Philippine Gen. Avelino Razon was so shocked at 9-11 that he called a hasty press conference in Manila. "We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995," he complained. "Why didn't they pay attention?"
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Democrats who whined after 9-11 about what President Bush knew and when he knew it forget about the 1995 plot. They also forget it was Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, who erected the famous "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement, making "connecting the dots" before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.
She wrote the 1995 memo that helped establish what former Attorney General John Ashcroft testified was the "single greatest structural cause" of Sept. 11 — "the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents," Ashcroft said. "Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before Sept. 11, government was blinded by this wall."
http://tinyurl.com/joffe
for the past year, the Dems have made much of W's waiting four days instead of going immediately to New Orleans after Katrina .... is there some published record of what Slick did in the days/weeks/months after the first WTC bombing? My memory is that he never visited the site.