Enemies Within

Enemies Within

FrontPageMagazine.com| September 18, 2001

THE FACT that we are at war is not news. We have been at war for more than half a century with the radicals who hate America and hate American capitalism. The World Trade Center was the symbol of "Wall Street" – the Great Satan of the radicals’ religion. It was the symbol of "globalization." That is why it was the prime target for these terrorist attacks.

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This is a war that Communism started, and that post-Communist radicals are continuing. The radicals who hate America and America’s freedom will never give up. They have to be defeated.

The September 11 tragedy was not the first time the World Trade Center was hit. In 1993, the forces of terror, including those associated with Osama Bin Laden and Yassir Arafat detonated a bomb at the base of the towers that killed 6 people and injured 1,000. The architect of that bombing was a terrorist named Ramzi Yusef. He was a member of the Palestinian Hamas movement and was captured with plans for a coordinated series of hijackings and suicide crashes of U.S. commercial airliners. But no in one in government took the plans seriously enough to prepare a defense.

President Clinton refused to recognize that we were at war; he did not alert the nation; he did not call us to arms; and he did not mobilize U.S. security forces to prepare the nation (or even the World Trade Center) for a defense against these attacks.

Instead of crushing Arafat and Hamas and their comrade Osama Bin Laden, the Clinton Administration forced the Israelis into the Oslo "peace process," which legitimized the terrorists, provided them with billions of US dollars in aid, and gave them an army with tens of thousands of weapons.

Far from preparing America for the war it was already in, the Clinton Administration pretended we were at peace. It even acted as though America itself was the threat. Government security controls were removed on sales and transfers of high-tech instruments of war. Missile and satellite technologies and super computers were passed to China by the Clinton Administration and, through China, to North Korea, Iran, Libya and Iraq.

Through these transfers, the Clinton Administration took away our military edge and disarmed our high-tech defenses.

Why were US intelligence agencies unable to provide warnings despite the immense traffic of terrorist communications required to plan the September 11 terrorist attack? Because the Clinton Administration had given away the technology to encrypt such messages and make them invisible. These technologies included computer networks that cannot be monitored and spread-spectrum radios that change frequency and are impossible to penetrate. Our technological defenses were systematically disarmed by our own President.

The Clinton Administration also took steps to disarm our human intelligence defenses. In 1995, new "sensitivity" guidelines were issued for our intelligence agencies that gravely restricted their ability to gather information in the countries where the terrorists were based. Because an American leftist had been widowed by a "human rights violator" in Latin America who was employed by the CIA, the CIA was forbidden to use "human rights violators" as intelligence assets. This was like forbidding local law enforcement from using common criminals as informants. But common criminals do not bring down 100-story skyscrapers.

After the CIA was hamstrung, two of our African embassies were bombed by the terrorist network. Our response was an impotent missile launched into the Sudan by Clinton (on the day Monica Lewinsky appeared before the grand jury). Clinton’s response destroyed a medicine factory in the Sudan and antagonized hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. Other missiles were launched into Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden had his camps. But to no effect. More terrorist acts followed. Our warship the USS Cole was blown up in Yemen. A barracks containing our troops was bombed in Saudi Arabia. Nothing was done.

The Clinton Administration refused to recognize the threat, refused to mobilize the nation, refused to arm our security forces to the levels needed to defend us, refused to recognize that we were in a war and refused to declare a policy to win it. The terrorists got the message: America is weak. The refusals put us in danger as a nation, and made the tragedy of September 11^th possible.

But now we have a new President, and a new Administration. "When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt," this President told a group of Senators. "It’s going to be decisive."

With this new leadership, our war has begun. And we will win it.

What this history tells us is that terrorists are not the only enemy we have within.

This is not about the critics of American policy. Policies are the work of human beings. They can always be criticized. This is about purpose. It is about faith in the basic good of this country. It is about those who have declared war on America.

On the very day that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, the New York Times ran a flattering profile of Bill Ayers, one of the leaders of "Weatherman," a Sixties radical group and the first terrorist cult in America. Ayers is now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. That is the way our educational system views unrepentant terrorists. The Weathermen bombed the U.S. Capitol Building in the 1970s. "I don’t regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers told the admiring New York Times reporter, "I believe we didn’t do enough."

This is the face of the hate-America left.

This left is educating our children in our schools. It is out demonstrating on America’s campuses, with "teach-ins" against the war. It is proselytizing students with a message that is always the same: America is guilty; America is to blame.

The foes of free markets and free minds have not surrendered. They are even bolder now that they cannot be linked to the crimes of Communism which they encouraged and supported. They are behind our own lines. They have burrowed into our schools, our churches, our media, our government itself. And their message is always the same: America is guilty; America is to blame.

The months ahead will be difficult ones, but they will also bring opportunities. We can be grateful that many Americans have now begun to appreciate what they have in this country, and also that what they have can be lost. Already there is a new unity, a new patriotism in the land. Already Americans are beginning to realize how lucky they are to have a President who believes in America, and who is committed to winning America’s war.

But we must not forget how slim the margin was by which this President was elected to lead us in our nation’s crisis. We must not forget how deeply the forces that hate America have penetrated our institutions and weakened our national resolve.

Our task is to continue our efforts to strengthen the foundations of this great democracy of ours, to win the hearts and minds of those who are in America, but not yet of it, not yet for it.

This is the battle we are in together. It is a battle we lost in Vietnam. That loss led directly to America’s weakness and the terrorist attack of September 11^th. It is a battle we must not lose again.

Another Enemy within:

Clinton's December 1969 letter to his ROTC Director

The following is Bill Clinton's December 1969 letter to his ROTC Director, Colonel Eugene Holmes. This text was taken verbatim from "SLICK WILLIE", by Floyd G. Brown.

Not a word has been changed.

I am sorry to be so long in writing. I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month, and from now on you will, but I have had to have some time to think about this first letter. Almost daily since my return to England I have thought about writing, about what I want to and ought to say.

First, I want to thank you, not just for saving me from the draft, but for being so kind and decent to me last summer, when I was as low as I have ever been. One thing which made the bond we struck in good faith somewhat palatable to me was my high regard for you personally. In retrospect, it seems that the admiration might not have been mutual had you known a little more about me, about my political beliefs and activities. At least you might have thought me more fit for the draft than for ROTC.

Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I did it for the experience and the salary but also for the opportunity, however small, of working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam. I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there was a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did. I have written and spoken and marched against the war. One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine, After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans for the demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16.

Interlocked with the war is the draft issue, which I did not begin to consider separately until early 1968. For a law seminar Georgetown I wrote a paper on the legal arguments for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objection, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not simply to "participation in war in any form."

From my work I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.

The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case. Nor was Korea an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.

Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong. Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is one of the bravest, best men I know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.

The decision not to be a resister and the related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system. For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead. I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years. (The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway.)

When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted you. ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance. Going on with my education, even coming back to England, played no part in my decision to join ROTC. I am back here, and would have been at Arkansas Law School because there is nothing else I can do. In fact, I would like to have been able to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.

But the particulars of my personal life are not nearly as important to me as the principles involved. After I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm. Also, I began to think I had deceived you, not by lies because there were none but by failing to tell you all the things I'm writing now. I doubt that I had the mental coherence to articulate them then.

At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1-D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and loss of my self-regard and self confidence really set in. I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep. Finally, on Sept. 12 I stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying to help in a case where he really couldn't, and stating that I couldn't do the ROTC after all and would he please draft me as soon as possible.

I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it on me every day until I got on the plane to return to England. I didn't mail the letter because I didn't see, in the end, how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved.

So I came back to England to try to make something of this second year of my Rhodes scholarship.

And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel. I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal.

Forgive the length of this letter. There was much to say. There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait.

Please say hello to Col. Jones for me.

Merry Christmas.

Sincerely,

Bill Clinton

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