Posted on 09/12/2001 5:13:03 AM PDT by truther
The worst, single most tragic day in the history of America has just passed. Tuesday more Americans likely died than all the casualties of the Battle of Antietam on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 1862.
Already the media spin on yesterday's events is relentless.
The talking heads are pushing several themes, including:
* Now is not the time to point fingers at responsible parties in America, i.e., political figures like Clinton or our own security agencies.
* The events of Tuesday are the "worst-case scenario" the worst is over.
* Osama bin Laden is the culprit.
On these points of spin, the first one is baloney. Of course we need to find why our security failed. This is basic.
And unless the big media are consulting a psychic better than the one I use, no one knows what the future days, weeks and months may yield. This is not the worst-case scenario. A worst-case scenario is a 25-megaton nuclear bomb detonated in New York or a full-scale attack against the U.S.! These should not be ruled out.
These dangers can be avoided, we pray, but only if we stop listening to the media idiots that feed us a diet of blow-dried nonsense. Is Katie Couric going to say how bad she feels for the terrorists who were driven to these cowardly acts?
It is the big media and the hack politicians that led us to this nightmarish day.
We are Amercans, so let's get our feet back on the ground and use common sense.
The media say we shouldn't point fingers. (Funny, isn't it, how the media have spent 30 years pointing fingers at Richard Nixon for his alleged crimes, but when one of their liberal favorites is due for some blame, they feed us the mantras like "Let's move on!" and "No time to point fingers!")
Common sense, in fact, dictates that we need to critically examine the people who are to blame for this incident, both the perpetrators (and if you believe Osama bin Laden was the major mastermind behind this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you) and the people we pay to protect us that is, our national security agencies.
Without question, these agencies failed miserably in preventing this sophisticated, wide-scale and coordinated attack against America.
Tuesday I received an e-mail from a recently retired high-ranking CIA official. I will identify him as "Harry":
Here's what Harry said:
"... Reacting effectively and justly to this [attack] makes us hugely dependent on intell [intelligence] capabilities that failed us miserably. This is an enormous liability, which we shall not be able to fix before we have to react. Payback time for the last eight years!"
He continued: "There were clearly enormous failures here. This operation was ingenious in its simplicity, which would have limited the size (number of people, actions) of the operation and hence detectability. But it could not have been that small for at least a dozen men to hijack four carefully chosen aircraft (routes, fuel load) with carefully coordinated timing. And to get through security with knives big enough to subdue four relatively large crews. If the intell and security systems claim that this challenge is simply too hard for them, they have to be replaced, root and branch. Because this challenge is the challenge. It is now pretty self-evident that claims of reform and adjustment [at the intelligence agencies] to new realities that we've heard over the past eight years or so are hollow."
Of course, it's obvious why the media doesn't want any finger pointing.
Guess who ran the U.S. government and was responsible for our national security for the past eight years? Yes, you got it,
The Clintons were supported vociferously by the media through the worst imaginable scandals.
During that time I was one of the lead reporters opposing the Clintons. I was mocked and vilified by my colleagues for doing so. I said throughout that period that Bill Clinton's personal corruption was wholesale and mirrored how he was corrupting America's national security.
I wrote articles and said repeatedly that America, sadly, may end up paying a heavy price for Bill Clinton and the major media's complicity.
I don't believe the worst has passed with the incidents of today.
Brutally, we witnessed our weakness today.
During eight years, Clinton decimated America's military. Our forces were cut almost in half under his stewardship. Research and development on all new weapons systems were brought almost to a halt as other nations continued to build. Clinton destroyed nearly our entire arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. Monsters like Saddam flourished as Clinton bombed aspirin factories, tent cities in Afghanistan and worthless radar stations in the Iraqi desert.
These are open facts, easily verifiable.
But Clinton, the ever-clever bastard, was more insidious. Little, systematic changes were undertaken to destroy America's intelligence agencies.
Let me explain. A regular NewsMax reader, "Roger," was a CIA spy in the Mideast.
I met him almost two years ago. Roger wanted to tell me why a gung-ho American quit the CIA in disgust. Roger said the CIA was not interested in recruiting spies.
Clinton and company knew they could not just tell the CIA to stop recruiting spies. That would look stupid and embarrassing.
So they just changed the rules of how spies are recruited, raising the bar on requirements to such a high degree that the most valuable spies could never meet CIA standards and couldn't work for us.
Previously, I wrote how Clinton effectively stopped the recruitment of Chinese nationals by demanding that only high-ranking embassy officials could be recruited knowing this is almost impossible.
Roger told me that. Roger reminded me again of this today. He noted that Clinton policies reached their zenith under 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.
Here's how Roger described it in an e-mail Tuesday evening: "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.
But we, the American people, Congress, and honest media need to examine all of these issues, now and quickly. If we don't, we risk even more grave dangers than those that we just lived through.
AP John Diamond 9/16/98 "The CIA is pumping money and people into recruiting efforts to battle a trend that the agency's departing inspector general says has sapped the clandestine service of its most experienced hands. Agency officials outlined Tuesday initiatives that CIA Director George Tenet announced internally last month to increase pay, provide hiring bonuses and shorten the waiting time for job offers..The program is intended to combat a problem outlined in an op-ed article by outgoing CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz who said the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the clandestine spy service, is losing its best people amid organizational drift and declining morale.."
The Electronic Telegraph UK 9/24/98 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard "In an interview with The Telegraph , Mr Woolsey gave a caustic assessment of the President he served until his abrupt resignation in January 1995 . Dismissing Bill Clinton as a "tactician" , he said the foreign policy of the administration was driven by opinion polls , short -term PR calculations and the spin-cycle rythmn of an election campaign. "If you want to know how they make decisions , all you need do is watch the War Room , " he said , referring to the documentary of Mr Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. During his two years as Director of Central Intelligence , Mr Woolsey managed to secure only two conversations with Mr Clinton. "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with him . I just didn't have any relationship ," said Mr Woolsey. He believes the damage to the American national interest has been substantial , though largely hidden from view. Mr Woolsey compared the global scene to the late 1920's when inchoate foreign threats were ignored , played down , and ultimately allowed to escalate.."
AP 10/7/98 John Diamond "White House procedures for protecting highly secret information are often lax, congressional auditors said Wednesday. Security clearances are granted before completion of background checks, they said, and failing in some cases to order adequate CIA investigations.."
AP 10/14/98 John Diamond ".The Energy Department and Pentagon discovered sensitive nuclear weapons information in boxes of Cold War-era materials that were about to be publicly released at President Clinton's orders..."
Drudge Report 11/20/98 ".When the CIA uncovered "conclusive evidence" of the personal corruption of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia in 1995, they sent a report to the White House, expecting Clinton administration officials to be impressed, according to a report in Monday's NEW YORK TIMES. "Instead, when the secret CIA report on Chernomyrdin arrived in the office of Vice President Al Gore, it was rejected and sent back to the CIA with a barnyard epithet scrawled across its cover," reports TIMES spook writer James Risen..."
Center for Security Policy 11/23/98 Decision Brief "."At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the message seemed clear: The vice president did not want to hear allegations that Chernomyrdin was corrupt and was not interested in further intelligence reports on the matter. As a result, CIA analysts say they are now censoring themselves."... Obviously, the highest levels of the Administration -- most especially Vice President Gore, Chernomyrdin's interlocutor in a highly secretive joint commission -- did not want to change American policy towards Russia in light of the thoroughly dishonest character of the government in Moscow. It did not even want to know about the Kremlin's dishonesty...History will record that the world became a much more dangerous place on Bill Clinton's watch. Worse yet, it will probably show that -- thanks to his unwillingness to see, let alone to take appropriate measures in response to, emerging dangers -- the Nation was woefully ill-prepared to deal with them. ."
Associated Press 2/21/99 "...The night before Cuban MiGs shot down two Miami-based planes of a civilian rescue group, an adviser to President Clinton warned the White House of a possible confrontation, a newspaper reported Sunday. Richard Nuccio told The Miami Herald that he never got a reply to the memo he sent at 6:44 p.m. on Feb. 23, 1996, using the White House's electronic mail system. The e-mail went to Sandy Berger, now Clinton's national security adviser, said Nuccio, who has since left the White House..."
Global Intelligence Update 3/8/99 But even behind this, even behind the hints of corruption and malfeasance, there has been a deep-seated sense within the defense and intelligence communities that the Administration was simply not sensitive to the national security needs of the United States. From the beginning, there has been a deep policy and cultural divide between the national security apparatus that was honed and seasoned during the Cold War and the Clinton Administration... Someone in the national security community, or among its congressional allies, decided this week to open a new campaign against the President. Whoever the leakers were this week, they are trying to paint a picture of an Administration that was simply indifferent to the classical concept of national security. The end of the Lewinsky affair has, it appears to us, opened a new battlefield in which the stakes are much higher. The President and his Administration are being charged with being either fools or knaves when it comes to defending the security interests of the United States .
Capitol Hill Blue 3/9/99 Doug Thompson The FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) all warned the White House three years ago that China was obtaining U.S. weapons secrets at will, but the Clinton administration ignored the warnings and approved contracts that involved key Democratic campaign contributors..
Wall Street Journal 3/19/97 Editorial Just in the last week, we learned that FBI officials tipped off two NSC underlings last June about Chinese government intentions to influence U.S. politics. Mr. Lake says he was never told because the FBI advised the pair to keep it to themselves.
Capitol Hill Blue 3/10/99 Doug Thompson Many career intelligence officers consider President Clinton and the White House a security risk and withhold sensitive information whenever possible to prevent it falling into enemy hands, Capitol Hill Blue has learned. Often, information is also withheld from Clinton appointees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), veteran intelligence operatives say. "The White House is not secure when it comes to matters of national security," says one recently-retired intelligence analyst. "Career operatives realize this and place the security of their country above politics." .
LA Times 3/14/99 Bob Drogin In one report, GAO investigators said security was so sloppy at the three labs until last fall that foreign visitors, including suspected spies, often were allowed 24-hour, unescorted access to areas where sensitive and classified information was stored. In one case, the material was stashed in boxes placed in an open hallway. .
The Washinton Post via NewsMax 4/1/99 John F. Harris "...The warnings were there for President Clinton. For weeks before the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, sources said, CIA Director George J. Tenet had been forecasting that Serb-led Yugoslav forces might respond by accelerating their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the province of Kosovo -- precisely the outcome that has unfolded over the past week. All during this time, U.S. military leaders were offering Clinton a corresponding assessment of their own. If the Serbs did launch such an assault, they said, air power alone would not be sufficient to stop it -- precisely the analysis that NATO's supreme commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, articulated publicly this week when asked what the military could do to halt the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Balkans. ..."
ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST 4/8/99 "... I received a call March 23 from a national security source who told me of secret U.S. intelligence that Serb forces were prepared to abduct American troops stationed in Macedonia. I could not confirm the tip, and besides, it seemed inconceivable that the U.S. military would permit this to happen. Wrong indeed. On March 31, three American soldiers were seized along the Macedonia-Kosovo border in an incident drenched with ambiguity and mystery...."
The American Spectator 5/99 Kenneth R. Timmerman "...One of the more shocking details I uncovered in my investigation of China's California networks was that a front company owned by the PLA's largest weapons manufacturer had set up shop directly above the CIA office responsible for contacts with U.S. aerospace manufacturers in the Los Angeles area, where some of the agency's most secret projects have been developed. The Chinese operated there for more than two years without the CIA ever knowing, U.S. law enforcement officers in the L.A. area told me. ..."
Washington Times 4/30/99 Editorial Board "...Attorney General Reno's Justice Department is far more culpable for this catastrophic national-security debacle. Time and again, the New York Times reports, the Justice Department declined to pursue FBI requests for wiretaps...">{? American Spectator 5/99 John B. Roberts II "...Intelligence insiders expect the publicly disclosed assessments to be a whitewash. Citing the administration's strenuous efforts to suppress publication of Rep. Chris Cox's committee report on Chinese espionage, they expect the White House to try to keep the details of the W-88 theft classified...."
Reuters 5/10/99 "...A scientist assigned to a classified Pentagon project in 1997 supplied China with secrets about advanced radar technology being developed to track submarines, a report in the New York Times said Monday. Submarine detection technology is closely guarded by the Pentagon because the U.S. Navy's ability to hide its submarines is a key military advantage, the newspaper said.....The Justice Department in Washington also blocked any prosecution of Lee, officials quoted by the paper said..... On March 26, 1998, a judge declined to put Peter Lee in prison and sentenced him to 12 months in a halfway house with three years' probation and a fine of $20,000, according to the newspaper..."
USA Today 5/16/99 AP LA Times "...The National Imagery and Mapping Agency and its predecessor organization have produced charts or maps that played a role in at least a dozen accidents since 1985, some involving fatalities and loss of military aircraft, according to documents and interviews reviewed by the Times. On May 7, fighter pilots using outdated maps attacked the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists and injuring 20 people.... NIMA maps were a factor in three accidents in the last 15 months that killed a total of 28 people, including the clipping of an Italian gondola cable by a Marine fighter jet in February 1998 that left 20 people dead..... The agency has encountered funding shortages, a loss of senior analysts and cartographers and friction between intelligence and defense communities for its services. NIMA was created in 1996 by merging the 24-year-old Defense Mapping Agency with photographic analysts and intelligence personnel from seven other Pentagon and CIA branches...."
AP 5/20/99 JOHN DIAMOND "... Though the government is prone to leaks, the unauthorized publication of classified documents that in most cases are just a year or two old is rare. It has touched off widespread concern in the intelligence community..... But his book [Gertz/Betrayal] states the Clinton administration carried out a policy of appeasement of real or potential U.S. enemies that ``so angered some intelligence, defense and foreign policy officials that they responded in the only way they knew how: by disclosing to the press some of the nation's most secret intelligence.'' Gertz wrote that his sources were ``unsung heroes'' who ``jeopardized their careers to expose wrongdoing.'' ..."
House of Representatives 5/24/99 Rep. Kurt Weldon (R-PA) "...For 7 years, Mr. Speaker, we have heard the rhetoric coming from the White House that the world is safe, there are no problems, our security is intact, and therefore, we can dramatically cut the size of our defense forces and we can, in fact, shift that money over to other purposes...."
Washington Weekly 11/17/97 "...The most shocking and devastating revelation made by Bob Woodward's story Friday is that after Chairman Thompson announced two weeks ago that he was suspending his public hearings, the FBI obtained intelligence showing that the Ministry of State Security in Beijing -- the Chinese equivalent of the CIA -- boasted it had been successful in "thwarting" the congressional inquiry. ..."
Curt Weldon Website 6/8/99 "... Now, as extensive as this is, Mr. Speaker, I can tell you this is only scratching the surface. In one of our House hearings one of our colleagues asked the FBI when they were doing the investigation of these linkages how much of what they know is now available in public form with all the reports, all the investigations, how much of what the FBI and the CIA knows is available to the public, and this was the answer: Less than 1 percent...."
New York Times 6/27/99 James Risen Jeff Gerth "...Berger, now the national security adviser, has said that it was not until after he received a second, more specific briefing in July 1997 that he told Clinton about security problems at the nuclear weapons laboratories...."
I agree,,, it was Satan's biggest day so far... (or one of them)...
But what's a day?
Second, it is ABSOLUTELY TRUE that the bulk of the problem we have with hamstrung intell can be laid at the feet of Bill Clinton.
BUT...
You will NEVER get the media to repeat this or even discuss it rationally, and you will hear HOWLS of outrage from the Democrats if you try to make this part of the public debate.
Clinton is still a big part of who the DNC is, and who the Democrat party is. If Gore decides to run in 2004, they will need to keep Clinton's "legacy" intact.
No, you will NOT be able to pin this on Clinton as it justly deserves to be, but thanks for pointing out the truth.
I'm a Christian but I thought what Graham said was ill-chosen. Not all who believe in God believe in Jesus Christ. Why say things that can only serve to divide?
You're not paying very good attention.
The way you PREVENT things like this is just that: Prevention. You find out about these things and you defuse the situation. You knock on doors in the early hours of the morning and herd half-awake, half-clothed would-be suicide Jihad-ers into waiting police vans.
This is how we have always prevented the majority of these tragedies. Even in situations like the Murrah building and the WTC bombing in '93, the intell community knew something was up but couldn't put all the pieces together in time to prevent what happened.
This time NO ONE KNEW!!! NO ONE HAD A CLUE!!!!
That's why we can say with confidence that our intelligence capability has suffered so drastically under Clinton.
I pictured the producer on the ear piece telling him to fill to break with the party line. Obviously GMA wants no blame to accrue to the Clinton regime.
Surely you don't believe the truth should be suppressed because it might offend someone?
There is much truth in this statement. During the same time period, Senator Frank Church pushed legislation that passed and was signed that seriously weakened the CIA's ability to gather information, as well.
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