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Posted on 09/11/2002 3:59:21 AM PDT by rdb3
Clinton Skates on 9/11 Responsibility A full year after the most devastating attack on U.S. territory in the country's history, both Congress and the press have yet to undertake a thorough investigation into the national security failures that left America vulnerable.
Yes, Bush administration officials have been skewered in congressional hearings, as well as on the front pages of almost every newspaper in the land. The president himself has been lanced by headlines like "Bush Knew," suggesting that he could have prevented the 9/11 attacks because of a vague warning of "hijackings," but didn't.
His FBI director, Robert Mueller - on the job just four business days before terrorists struck - has been raked over the coals for not "connecting the dots." FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley was celebrated by the establishment press after she charged that Mueller had engaged in a deliberate post-9/11 cover-up.
Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft has been accused by no less a media personage than CBS News anchorman Dan Rather of taking advantage of intelligence warnings to remove himself from commercial flight travel, while leaving the flying public to the mercies of the 9/11 hijackers.
Meanwhile, with the exception of the Internet and talk radio, news of the role played by the Clinton administration in decimating U.S. capacity to prevent a 9/11-type strike has been almost completely ignored.
Fearing the media's wrath for pursuing yet another "Clinton investigation," congressional probers on both sides of the aisle remain uninterested in grilling ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh about how his agency, which had dubbed terrorism the No. 1 threat to national security in 1998, managed to miss the handwriting on the wall.
Former Attorney General Janet Reno, who makes herself available to reporters several times a week as she campaigns for the Florida governor's seat, has yet to be asked to explain how her Justice Department dropped the ball.
Doris Meissner, who headed up the Immigration and Naturalization Service under Clinton, hasn't been called upon to answer for the virtual open-borders policy that allowed the Sept. 11 hijackers to slip in and out of the U.S. at will.
On the other hand, Clinton CIA Director George Tenet, who inexplicably retains his post in the Bush administration, did testify before Congress in February - fully five months after the catastrophe of 9/11.
But rather than accept any responsibility for the intelligence failure leading up to 9/11, he denied his agency had failed at all.
"Intelligence will never give you 100 percent predictive capability on terrorist events," he explained shamelessly to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Those who worked under Tenet, however, disagree - pointing to the restrictive spy recruitment policies ordered by the Clinton White House that went unchallenged by Tenet.
Less than 24 hours after the 9/11 attack, NewsMax executive editor Christopher Ruddy reported on an e-mail exchange he had that night with a former CIA field agent. It was the first report anywhere on what was likely the single most important factor in the agency's inability to predict the attacks.
"Roger," Ruddy's CIA source, had resigned from the agency in disgust because, he said, his bosses had lost interest in obtaining human intelligence, a task the veteran agent knew was key to fighting the war on terrorism.
The CIA in the mid-1990s had implemented a "human rights scrub" policy, he revealed.
"Clinton's anti-intelligence plants implemented a universal 'human rights scrub' of all assets, virtually shutting down operations for six months to a year," Roger told NewsMax.
"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 told Ruddy that the CIA, even under new leadership, had never recovered from the Clinton administration's "human rights scrub" policy.
Roger's information turned out to be 100 percent on the mark.
In a report issued by the House Intelligence Committee in July, limitations put on CIA's spy recruitment program were cited as a key reason for the agency's inability to anticipate the 9/11 attacks.
Since the ex-CIA agent gave his account to NewsMax, dozens of others with inside information have stepped forward - some with accounts just as startling.
Still, none were given the Coleen Rowley star whistle-blower treatment by the press, which relegated their reports to the op-ed pages - when they were covered at all.
One of the most persistent has been Mansour Ijaz, a Pakistani-American investment banker and one-time major Clinton contributor who acted as the White House's unofficial liaison between the U.S. and the government of Sudan during the late 1990s.
Ijaz's story is well known to NewsMax.com readers.
But it's a measure of how thoroughly his remarkable account has been swept under the rug by the prestige press that it's never garnered any headlines.
The one-time Clinton operative says officials in Sudan, where Osama bin Laden had settled after being booted out of Saudi Arabia, offered the U.S. three separate opportunities to take the notorious terrorist out of circulation - and were rebuffed by the White House each time.
"By May of 1996 the Sudanese had decided to get rid of bin Laden because he was becoming a problem there as well," Ijaz explained in May to Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity - one of dozens of interviews he has granted that mainstream reporters have ignored.
"They called the Clinton administration one last time and said, 'If you don't want him to go to Saudi Arabia, we're prepared to hand him over to you guys directly.' And the Clinton administration's response to that was 'We don't have enough legal evidence against him.'"
Ijaz explained that he had turned over reams of files to the Senate Intelligence Committee on his bin Laden negotiations with Sudan, but had not been called to testify under oath.
But committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., wasn't particularly interested in Ijaz's story, and even trashed the London Times for covering it last January.
"One thing we've learned is to be a little skeptical of these London-based news accounts," Graham told Fox News. "So I'm not prepared to give them an initial presumption of credibility."
Attacks on Ijaz grew sharper as it became obvious he wasn't going away, with Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri telling one interviewer that he was "a crackpot" who was "lying."
The Clinton administration's ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney, subsequently corroborated Ijaz's account, confirming to Fox News that "there was an offer to send [bin Laden] to us." He explained that Sudan's offer was rejected because "we did not have an indictment [against bin Laden] at the time."
Mainstream press and congressional reaction to Carney's statements? Zilch.
The cover-up is no mystery to Ijaz. "I'm absolutely convinced that the Democrats are desperately trying to find a way to deflect the attention from the complicity of the Clinton administration in letting this terrorism problem get so far out of hand," he told one radio interviewer.
Ijaz isn't the only 9/11 witness the Democrat-media complex wishes would go away.
Dick Morris, the former political consultant widely credited with turning Bill Clinton into the first Democrat to win re-election since FDR, has written column after column for the New York Post describing how his former boss was asleep at the wheel when it came to terrorism.
The former White House political guru revealed, for instance, that when the World Trade Center was bombed by al-Qaeda-connected terrorists in February 1993, his ex-boss never even bothered to visit the site.
"When the bombing happened, he just issued a statement saying we'll fight them and all that. And then he gave it his Saturday radio address," Morris said. "It was never a big priority."
The ex-president gave the same back-of-the-hand treatment to terrorist warnings against U.S. targets in the Mideast, says Morris, who recounted a complaint by Clinton's No. 1 foreign policy troubleshooter, the U.S.'s then-U.N. ambassador.
"In 1996, I got a phone call from Dick Holbrooke," the one-time White House insider revealed earlier this year.
"He said, 'We're getting hard intelligence that terrorists are planning another hit on our guys in Riyadh. I've been trying to get a hold of the president for two weeks about this and we're getting increasing reports about [the threat]."
Incredibly, Clinton's own U.N. ambassador felt he had no choice but to importune Morris to intercede, begging, "Can you call him?"
Despite these accounts and others like them, Bill and Hillary Clinton have not only not accepted any responsibility for what happened on 9/11, they've actually attempted to shift blame to the Bush administration.
"At least in my time, more of these things were prevented than occurred," the ex-president claimed bizarrely to Fox News in June.
"I spent an enormous amount of time on this when I was president," he insisted. "We must have talked about [Osama] bin Laden several days of every week for the last few years I was president. We did a lot of work on it."
In November, Mrs. Clinton claimed the Bush tax cut had left the U.S. vulnerable to terrorism, telling CNN, "If we hadn't passed the big tax cut last spring, that I believe undermined our fiscal responsibility and our ability to deal with this new threat of terrorism, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in today."
Astonishingly, neither of the Clintons' comments made mainstream news headlines.
Many political observers, conservatives included, argue that because Washington's No. 1 power couple no longer control the White House, their off-stage antics are largely irrelevant. But it’s easy to forget the sway the Clintons still have over that indispensable element of any democracy - a free press.
Given journalists' enduring love affair with Bill and Hillary, it’s not likely the prestige press will inform Americans anytime soon about the role the Clintons played in the national security breakdown that left the U.S. vulnerable on Sept. 11.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:NewsMax.com Staff
Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2002
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Politicians in office are always in collusion with one another. They pose as our servants and one another's opponents, but in fact they're predators with a common prey -- us -- and their only real disagreements are over how large a slice of us each one will get. There are reasons "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" has a firm hold on the #2 spot on the list of All-Time Great Lies.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say "exculpate," but there is something to what you're saying.
The way I see it, "inept" is a better word. Let's face it, the Pubs overall simply don't know how to fight. The one effective fighter they had, Newt Gingrich, they left hanging out to dry.
Were the Pubs complicit in the evils of Clinton? The only way I would say "yes" to that is their ineffectiveness in properly punishing him. But I don't think they are evil like the former-President Clinton was, and her husband.
History Will Remember
September 11th, 2001
Two reasons: fear of the leftist media, and they know Clinton had (and still has) the goods on 'em (900+ FBI files).
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