Posted on 03/16/2003 6:30:38 AM PST by Mia T
Biological Attack: clinton is no Jefferson
by Mia T, 3.16.03
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I have spent some late nights thinking a lot about this and reading a lot about it. I think in terms of offense versus defense, if you go back to where we started, the thing that I'm most interested in -- and you will see we've allocated several hundred million dollars basically to research and to applied research -- the thing that I'm most interested in is developing the ability to quickly contain biological agents.
A chemical attack would be horrible, but it would be finite. You know, it's just like -- for the people who went through Oklahoma City, nothing could be more horrible. But it didn't spread. And the thing that bothers people about biological agents is that, unless they're properly diagnosed, contained and treated, that it could spread.
For example, we know that if all of us went to a rally on the Mall tomorrow with 10,000 people, and somebody flew a low-flying crop duster and sprayed us all with biological agents from, let's say, 200 feet, that, no matter how toxic it were, half of us would walk away for reasons no one quite understands. You know, either we wouldn't breathe it, or we'd have some miraculous resistance to it. And the other half of us, somebody would have to diagnose in a hurry and then contain and treat. Otherwise it would be kind of like the gift that keeps on giving, you know. (Laughter.)
And I don't mean that -- I'm not trying to be macabre, but you asked me what keeps me awake at night, and that bothers me. And that's why the thing that I thought was most important about what we did last year, and what we learned a little bit from our defense scare -- even though it was on a computer issue, we had this defense issue, plus we were dealing with all this -- we'd studied for a year all this -- especially this biological issue -- is we had this work going on in 12 different places in the government. So we had to organize our efforts, so that we could be accessible to local governments, so we could work with them, to set up their own preventive mechanisms.
And I have to tell you, it may be -- we may have to await -- it's a note I made to myself that we may have to have a perfect defense. I mean, instantaneous. We may have to depend upon the Genome Project, interestingly enough, because once the human genes' secrets are unlocked, then -- if you and I think we've been infected, they could take a blood sample, and there would be a computer program which would show us if we had -- let's say we had a variant of anthrax. Let's suppose some terrorist hired a genius scientist and a laboratory to take basic anthrax and put some variant in it that would be resistant to all known anthrax antidotes.
Q: Okay. Or a Russian scientist.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. So let's just suppose that happened. And what you would want is to be able to take a blood sample, do an analysis, put it through a software program that had already been developed, and say, okay, here is -- this is how the genes are different, this is the difference. And then, presumably, not too long after we've developed this, they will already know, well, therefore, this is how you should -- how you should change the vaccine.
And we know now -- I know this is kind of bewildering, but keep in mind this is actually good news because, if there were no Genome Project, if there were no rapid way to do quick analysis that would go right to the tiniest variant, we would be in trouble.
...
Q: What do you do if the nightmare comes to pass, and some country hits us, hits us hard, with a biological weapon? What kind of response would you do?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, if some country were thinking about doing that, I would certainly hope that they wouldn't have the capacity to do it before we could stop them, or interrupt them, if it was a -- that is, if you're talking about somebody lobbing a missile over here, or something like that.
I think if it happened, it would be an act of war and there would be a very strong response. But I think we've demonstrated that. But I think the far more likely thing is somebody representing some interest -- maybe it could be a rogue state, maybe it could be a terrorist network -- walking around a city with a briefcase full of vials, or in spray cans, you know.
So what we have to do -- any country with any sense, if they wanted to attack us, would try to do it through a terrorist network, because if they did it with a missile we'd know who did it and then they'd be sunk. It would be -- that's a deal where they're bound to lose. Big time.
Kahlid Sheik Mohammed was indicted in 1996, as was Ramzi Yousef. What did Clinton know, and when did he know it?
47 posted on 03/15/2003 5:44 AM EST by The Great Satan
Antony and Cleopatra V, ii, 304-05
The comments of the impeached ex-ersatz-president (and ersatz ex-president) are especially telling...They reveal both hidden knowledge and hidden ignorance
. ('Hidden' to his sycophants, that is.)
The comments lead inexorably to the obvious, that clinton is both cognitively and psychologically dysfunctional, which explains why the rapist never did get it. ("It was the terrorism, stupid.")
Hidden Knowledge
His statement: "
any country with any sense, if they wanted to attack us, would try to do it through a terrorist network, because if they did it with a missile we'd know who did it and then they'd be sunk.," supports Laurie Mylroie's allegation, that clinton knowingly and self-servingly mischaracterized the nature of the terrorist threat. (Mylroie was clinton's Iraq expert, BTW.)
The Clinton administration "spun" America's terrorist problem when it re-emerged in February 1993, with the bombing of the World Trade Center, one month into Bill Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI believed that was a "false flag" operation run by Iraq, working with and hiding behind Islamic militants.
Another mistaken 'conceptzia
Hidden Ignorance
By waxing poetic about a genome solution for the biological attack, clinton reveals precisely his dilettantish ignorance, arrogance and essential stupidity even as he hints at his psychopathic essence.
Said another way, clinton reveals here precisely why he failed so utterly at his main charge, to protect the people and the country.
clinton demonstrates that he doesn't understand and/or doesn't care about the problem and that he doesn't understand the solution; clinton clearly doesn't understand that robust preventive measures -- pre-emption --is the only real protection against this threat.
I believe that the biological threat is the most ominous weapon currently in the terrorist's arsenal, but here my analysis departs from clinton's.
In my view, the obvious parameters for the ideal biological weapon,
underscore clinton's failure to "get it," notwithstanding his puffing and posing and trying so hard to pass himself off as some latter-day Jefferson to The New York Times and, thus, to his (fast-diminishing) audience of Upper West Side suckers.
The Renaissance-man pose, a clinton favorite -- the flower childen fall for it without fail, is, by the way, the flip side of the rapist's other double-helix hoax, the posthumous misappropriation of Jefferson's alleles to offset his peccantly misplaced ones
.
Because it is clear even to the most casual observer that tweaking a vaccine via the Genome Project is of no utility post-mortem, we must conclude that clinton is an utter fool as well as an utter failure.
The elimination of the threat of biological attack requires no less than complete eradication of the terrorists
and complete eradication pre-emptively.
Rogue states aiding and abetting terrorists had better understand this simple calculus
because should we espy, or even suspect, an imminent, or even not so imminent, biological attack, we will not have the luxury of time to pick off the terrorists one by one, if you get my drift
And, by the way, that other idiot, you know, the one in France, had better understand that he will be immune neither to this type of biological attack -- it will spread to gay Paris -- nor to our pre-emption should we learn that La Belle France is, in any way, behaving as ugly as she looks.
From Clinton's interview with The New York Times, January 21, 1999:
Q: Does one of these threats worry you more than another, and does any one in particular keep you awake at night?
Of life at once untie.
the double helix tongue twister
deoxyribonucleic acid,
became the Scotch Tape of forensic identification
during the sanguinary OJ Era.
Now that we are sloshing through the Semen Age of clinton,
DNA analysis has again resurfaced as a tool of lawyers
and the psychopaths they defend.
But Clinton did not want to hear it (he thought he took care of the problem slyly if the FBI was correct when he hit Iraqi intelligence headquarters several months later). So his administration claimed a new terrorism had emerged, consisting of "loose networks" of Islamic militants, unsupported by states.
[WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER CLINTON]
Another mistaken 'conceptzia'
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The Clinton administration "spun" America's terrorist problem when it re-emerged in February 1993, with the bombing of the World Trade Center, one month into Bill Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI believed that was a "false flag" operation run by Iraq, working with and hiding behind Islamic militants. |
Al-Qaida has struck again, or so it seems. "A virtual enemy," as a Clinton administration official describes it, al-Qaida is everywhere and anywhere. It is no less a threat than it was a year ago, according to CIA director George Tenet although the Taliban are defeated; al-Qaida's leadership is dead or on the run; and more than 3,000 others have been detained. "You see it in Bali. You see it in Kuwait," Tenet affirmed. And now, presumably, we saw it in Mombasa.
US government officials recently stated that missiles shot at an Israeli passenger plane were linked to a failed al-Qaida attack on an American fighter jet in Saudi Arabia. But does this idea that al-Qaida is acting alone really make sense? Not at all.
The Clinton administration "spun" America's terrorist problem when it re-emerged in February 1993, with the bombing of the World Trade Center, one month into Bill Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI believed that was a "false flag" operation run by Iraq, working with and hiding behind Islamic militants.
But Clinton did not want to hear it (he thought he took care of the problem slyly if the FBI was correct when he hit Iraqi intelligence headquarters several months later). So his administration claimed a new terrorism had emerged, consisting of "loose networks" of Islamic militants, unsupported by states.
Israel might have recognized this for the dangerous misconception it was, were it not for the unrealistic expectations that set in regarding the "peace process" when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. Already then, a new "conceptzia" had begun to blur Western vision.
"Conceptzia" was the term coined by the Agranat Commission to describe the intelligence failure that led to the surprise of the Yom Kippur War. As a friend at Tel Aviv University explained, "It is much more than a mistake." It is a fundamentally flawed understanding of events that prevents one from seeing what is before his eyes.
The new conceptzia is easy to explain. By the mid-1990s, the notion had taken hold that the US had decisively defeated Iraq in 1991 (in fact, many, including prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, were appalled when the US ended the war with Saddam in power).
Then following Iraq's defeat, so the conceptzia goes, a new threat emerged the spread of Islamic militants after the 1992 collapse of the communist regime in Afghanistan. Thus, the two threats, Iraq and the spread of Islamic militancy, are separated in time and space.
BUT THE Gulf War never really ended. The two phenomena the ongoing war with Iraq and the spread of Islamic militancy existed at the same time, the 1990s, and in the same space, the Sunni Muslim Middle East. Did they merge?
That is an important question, which almost no one asks. But it would seem they did. Consider Egypt, a key member of the anti-Iraq coalition. Without Egyptian backing, the Arab League would never have voted to support Iraq's ouster from Kuwait, as it did in August 1990.
Egypt seemed to have beaten back its post-Afghanistan Islamic challenge by 1997. On November 17, however, more foreign tourists were killed in one day in an attack at Luxor than were killed during Egypt's entire post-Afghan Islamic insurgency.
The attack occurred as the first crisis over UNSCOM ended. More crises would follow, as Saddam deliberately moved to end weapons inspections. When the next crisis began in early 1998, Egypt, through the Arab League, took a strong position that it not be resolved by force. No major terrorist attack has occurred in Egypt since.
What happened at Luxor? If Iraqi intelligence joins with an indigenous militant group, isn't the ensuing attack likely to be far more lethal than what that group might do on its own? Of course. Recently, I discussed this with the distinguished historian Bernard Lewis, who concurred. The subtle hints that Iraq was involved in Luxor were missed by those who jumped to the conclusion the militants had struck again, but not by the Egyptians.
A major debate rages in Washington as to whether Iraq supports al-Qaida. As Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland wrote, "The links become clear with a little digging. You miss them only if you have a strong need not to know." The attacks on tourists in Bali and Mombasa come as momentum builds for war with Iraq. As one US official, part of the new Bush team, noted, their main purpose is "to divert us from the war on Iraq.... Terrorism is an instrument of state, not a wildcat NGO."
The conceptzia needs urgent reexamination. If Israel accepts and endorses an erroneous explanation for this terrorism, that will only increase the risk more will follow.
Author and Expert on Saddam Hussein to Deliver 1998-99 Roemer Memorial Lecture on World Affairs
For Immediate Release -- September 23, 1998
GENESEO, N.Y. -- Dr. Laurie Mylroie, Senior Associate of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, will deliver SUNY Geneseo's 1998-99 Roemer Memorial Lecture on World Affairs on Thursday, Oct. 8 in the college's Alice Austin Theater. The lecture, titled "Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War," will begin at 12:45 p.m.
Dr. Mylroi holds a bachelor's degree from Cornell University and MA and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Harvard University. In addition to her affiliation with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Dr. Mylroi publishes Iraq News and has authored several books, monographs and articles on Saddam Hussein, Iraq and the Middle East. She is co-author of "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf" (Random House, 1990), a number one best-selling book in the U.S. which has been translated into 13 languages. Her articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, The National Interest, The New Republic and Newsweek, as well as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
Mylroi has held faculty positions at Harvard University and the United States Naval War College.
Among her many experiences, Mylroi has been a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University, a Fellow of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East, advisor on Iraq policy to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and a consultant to ABC News.
The Roemer Lecture Series was endowed by the late Dr. Spencer J. Roemer in honor of his brother, Kenneth, to bring issues of world affairs to Geneseo's undergraduates.
The lecture and reception to follow are free and open to the public. |
"Study of Revenge," the sequel to the New York Times best-seller "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf," co-authored by Laurie Mylroie and Judith Miller, exposes the threat Saddam Hussein still poses to Americans.
The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He had already recovered sufficiently by 1993 to undertake a campaign of terror, of which only the first two acts were planned in advance: the January shootings outside CIA headquarters in Virginia and the February bombing of one tower of the World Trade Center in New York, in an attempt to topple it against its twin.
"Study of Revenge" is, first of all, the story of the Trade Center bombing. Mylroie contends that the mastermind behind the bombing was an Iraqi intelligence agent, Ramzi Yousef, who escaped and left behind the Muslim fundamentalists who participated in the plot and were meant to be caught. She argues that the Clinton administration's mishandling of the event led to the emergence of a fraudulent and dangerous theory about Middle East terrorism--that it is no longer primarily state-sponsored but is carried out by individuals or "loose networks." The misunderstanding is particularly dangerous in light of the prospects for biological terrorism.
In addition to her account of events around the bombing, Mylroie describes how Saddam Hussein has steadily regained strength and eroded the system of postwar constraints that were supposed to hold him in check. She suggests that because of the proscribed unconventional-weapons capabilities Saddam retained in violation of the Gulf War cease-fire--and without the check of U.N. weapons inspectors--he is far more dangerous than is generally recognized.
Mylroie bases her case on a meticulous analysis of the government's evidence in the terrorism trials that followed the Trade Center bombing. Her book is written as a detective story, and the reader is invited to conduct the investigation into state sponsorship of the terrorism that the U.S. government failed to conduct. |
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Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense
The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon -- all within one hour on September 11, 2001 -- demonstrated America's shocking vulnerability to terrorism.
Yet terror had already emerged on America's shores eight years earlier, when the mysterious terrorist mastermind, Ramzi Yousef (arrested after a botched attempt to down a dozen U.S. airlines) bombed the World Trade Center in an attempt to fell the buildings. His attacks were viewed as the harbinger of a new terrorism, carried out by an elusive enemy driven by religious fanaticism to unprecedented hatred of the United States.
But is that perception accurate? A real-life detective story, The War Against America engages the reader in a gripping examination of the evidence regarding Yousef and his terrorism. It reveals the split between New York and Washington that emerged during the investigation and tells a terrifying tale of America left exposed and vulnerable following the mishandling of what was once the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted on U.S. soil.
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Without structure, terrorism would be hard to pull off and the masterminds would be much easier to catch. Most importantly, they have to get their funding from somewhere, and their arms from somewhere. That is, the armament has to be arranged for, paid for and transported from point A to point B To do this on a regular basis requires more than just the occasional 'charitible' donation from the leaders of the countries through which those weapons must pass. It requires their knowledge of the type, quantity and reason for transporting said weapons... and their approval.
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