Another mistaken 'conceptzia [WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER CLINTON]

Another mistaken 'conceptzia'

by Laurie Mylroie
Jerusalem Post
December 4, 2002

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.

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.

North Korea doesn't stop doing anything. Then comes 1993. Abruptly, with inspectors hot on their trail, the Kims pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The reactor at Yongbyon is up and running. The Clinton administration swings into action. By the end of 1994, the Clintonites announce with great fanfare a deal called "the Agreed Framework."
The "Agreed Framework" looks suspiciously like the 1985 deal with the Soviets. The U.S. agreed to build two reactors in North Korea. But wait, there was so much more. We also agreed to supply Dear Leader (by this time, Great Leader had died) with fuel oil and food aid. This bribe was, as they used to say on game shows, a package worth something like $4 billion.
Bill Clinton celebrated. "North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program," he announced in one of the innumerable statements for which history will deride him.
Then, in 1998, North Korea got scary all over again by launching an intercontinental missile directly over Japan. The United States demanded that the North Koreans allow international inspectors into the country to determine the extent of its nuclear program.
The North Koreans said: Fine; pay us $300 million and we'll let the inspectors in. The United States went one better. It didn't hand over the cash. Instead, it sent food aid in a package worth far more than $300 million.
Even after this debacle, the Clintonites kept on acting as if their 1994 deal was a good one. "We made a lot of progress with them," the president said on Dec. 28, 2000. "I think it will make the world a much safer place. I feel very good about what we've done."
Now here we are. We know North Korea has at least one nuclear weapon - and that, unchecked, it will be able to make 50 nuclear bombs a year by 2009. Yet influential voices continue to insist that all we need to do is continue to give Dear Leader money - the very money he uses to subsidize his nation's efforts to become a major nuclear power.
Hence, Tom Friedman in the New York Times: "When dealing with a heavily armed crazy state like North Korea. . . . All you can do is is shrink its nuclear programs in exchange for food, and expand trade and investment to alleviate some of its abject poverty - so when it does collapse, it does the least damage possible."
North Korea is the perfect object lesson in the failure of appeasement: Without appeasement, it would not be a nuclear power today. And yet the Friedmans of the world keep insisting that appeasement is the only workable strategy.
So who's really crazy here? Dear Leader - or the appeasers?

CRAZY KOREA 'CURES'

New York Post | 12/27/02 | JOHN PODHORETZ

Rumor has it William Jefferson Clinton himself is to recite Honest Abe's lines in this New Year's Eve pageant. Whoever writes these scripts has a natural talent for irony. For some irrepressible reason, one cannot help but think of that costume party in "The Manchurian Candidate,'' complete with Red Queen and Abe Lincoln in stovepipe hat and fake beard.

Hey, what a party! New Year's at the White House

by Mia T

The Republicans' latest talking point is that the breach of national security enabled by clinton must be simple incompetence, that the concept that anyone in government would commit treason is too outrageous even to contemplate.

If the Republicans believe what they are saying, then they are morons.
If they don't believe what they are saying, then they, too, are traitors.

Outrageousness is an essential element of clinton corruption. The clinton crimes -- rape, murder -- and now treason -- are so outrageous that they allow clinton hacks to reasonably brand all clinton accusers clinton-hating neo-Nazi crazies (notwithstanding the plain fact that some of us are Northeast Jews of leftist origin)..
Yet privately few clintonites would deny that Bill Clinton facilitated China espionage. Their only question: "Why?"
Some call clinton a quisling, a Manchurian Candidate, bought off in Little Rock by Riady and company decades ago (and much too cheaply, according to his Chinese benefactors), trading our national security for his political power. This argument is persuasive but incomplete; clinton, a certifiable megalomaniac, is driven ultimately by his solipsistic, messianic world view and by that which ultimately quashes all else -- his toxic legacy.
William J. Broad suggests (Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes, The New York Times, May 30, 1999) that clinton had another reason to empower China and disembowel America. Broad argues that clinton sought to disseminate our atomic secrets proactively in order to implement his postmodern, quite inane epistemological theory, namely, that, contrary to currently held dogma, knowledge is not power after all -- that, indeed, quite the contrary is the case.
Broad writes in part:

Since 1993, officials say, the Energy Department's "openness initiative" has released at least 178 categories of atom secrets. By contrast, the 1980s saw two such actions...
Its overview of the disclosures, "Restricted Data Declassification Decisions," dated January 1999 and more than 140 pages long, lists such things as how atom bombs can be boosted in power, key steps in making hydrogen bombs, the minimum amount (8.8 pounds) of plutonium or uranium fuel needed for an atom bomb and the maximum time it takes an exploding atomic bomb to ignite an H-bomb's hydrogen fuel (100 millionths of a second).
No grade-B physicist from any university could figure this stuff. It took decades of experience gained at a cost of more than $400 billion.
The release of the secrets started as a high-stakes bet that openness would lessen, not increase, the world's vulnerability to nuclear arms and war. John Holum, who heads arms control at the State Department, told Congress last year that the test ban "essentially eliminates" the possibility of a renewed international race to develop new kinds of nuclear arms...
"The United States must stand as leader," O'Leary told a packed news conference in December 1993 upon starting the process. "We are declassifying the largest amount of information in the history of the department."
Critics, however, say the former secrets are extremely valuable to foreign powers intent on making nuclear headway. Gaffney, the former Reagan official, disparaged the giveaway as "dangling goodies in front of people to get them to sign up into our arms-control agenda."
Thomas B. Cochran,:..."In terms of the phenomenology of nuclear weapons...the cat is out of the bag."
...[F]ormer Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the "extensive declassification" of secrets had inadvertently aided the global spread of deadly weapons. ["inadvertently" ???!!!!]

Broad would have us believe we are watching "Being There" and not "The Manchurian Candidate." His argument is superficially appealing as most reasonable people would conclude that it requires the simplemindedness of a Chauncy Gardener (in "Being There") to reason that instructing China and a motley assortment of terrorist nations on how to beef up their atom bombs and how not to omit the "key steps" when building hydrogen bombs would somehow blunt and not stimulate their appetites for bigger and better bombs and a higher position in the power food chain.
But it is Broad's failure to fully connect the dots -- clinton's wholesale release of atomic secrets, decades of Chinese money sluicing into clinton's campaigns, clinton pushing the test ban treaty, clinton's concomitant sale of supercomputers, and clinton's noxious legacy -- that blows his argument to smithereens and reduces his piece to just another clinton apologia by The New York Times.
But even a Times apologia cannot save clinton from the gallows. Clinton can be both an absolute (albeit postmodern) moron and a traitor. The strict liability Gump-ism, "Treason is as treason does" applies.
The idea that an individual can be convicted of the crime of treason only if there is treasonous intent or *mens rea* runs contrary to the concept of strict liability crimes. That doctrine (Park v United States, (1974) 421 US 658,668) established the principle of 'strict liability' or 'liability without fault' in certain criminal cases, usually involving crimes which endanger the public welfare.
Calling his position on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty "an historic milestone," (if he must say so himself) clinton believed that if he could get China to sign it, he would go down in history as the savior of mankind. This was 11 August 1995.
According to James Risen and Jeff Gerth of The New York Times, "the legacy codes and the warhead data that goes with them" -- apparently stolen from the Los Alamos weapons lab by scientist, Wen Ho Lee aided and abetted by bill clinton, hillary clinton, the late Ron Brown, Sandy Berger, Hazel O'Leary, Janet Reno, Eric Holder and others in the clinton administration [not to mention congressional clinton accomplices Glenn, Daschle, Bumpers, Harkin, Boxer, Feinstein, Lantos, Levin. Lautenberg, Torricelli et al.] -- "could [especially when combined with the supercomputers that clinton sold to China to help them finish the job] be particularly valuable for a country, like China, that has signed onto the nuclear test ban treaty and relies solely on computer simulations to upgrade and maintain its nuclear arsenal. The legacy codes are now used to maintain the American nuclear arsenal through computer simulation.

play tape

Most of Lee's transfers occurred in 1994 and 1995, just before China signed the test ban treaty in 1996, according to American officials."
Few who have observed clinton would argue against the proposition that this legacy-obsessed megalomaniac would trade our legacy codes for his rehabilitated legacy in a Monica minute and to hell with "the children."
Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize

Bill Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but surely he is the worst person to be president.*

-GEORGE WILL, Sleaze, the sequel

Had George Will written Sleaze, the sequel (the "sequel" is, of course, hillary) after 9-11-01, I suspect that he would have had to forgo the above conceit, as the doubt expressed in the setup phrase was, from that day forward, no longer operational.
Indeed, assessing the clinton presidency an abject failure is not inconsistent with commentary coming from the left, most recently the LA Times: "Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize."
When the clintons left office, I predicted that the country would eventually learn--sadly, the hard way--that this depraved, self-absorbed and inept pair had placed America (and the world) in mortal danger. But I was thinking years, not months.

It is very significant that hillary clinton didn't deny clinton culpability for the terrorism. (Meet the Press, 12-09-01), notwithstanding tired tactics (if you can't pass the buck, spread the blame) and chronic "KnowNothing Victim Clinton" self-exclusion.
If leftist pandering keeps the disenfranchized down in perpetuity, clinton pandering,("it's the economy, stupid"), kept the middle and upper classes wilfully ignorant for eight years.
And ironically, both results (leftist social policy and the clinton economy) are equally illusory, fraudulent. It is becoming increasingly clear that clinton covertly cooked the books even as he assiduously avoided essential actions that would have negatively impacted the economy--the ultimate source of his continued power--actions like, say, going after the terrorists.
It is critically important that hillary clinton fail in her grasp for power; read Peggy Noonan's little book, 'The Case Against Hillary Clinton' and Barbara Olson's two books; it is critical that the West de-clintonize, but that will be automatic once it is understood that the clintons risked civilization itself in order to gain and retain power.
It shouldn't take books, however, to see that a leader is a dangerous, self-absorbed sicko. People should be able to figure that out for themselves. The electorate must be taught to think, to reason. It must be able to spot spin, especially in this age of the electronic demagogue.
I am not hopeful. As Bertrand Russell noted, "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. "

Mia T, hillary clinton blames hubby for terrorism

(SHE knew nuttin')

Meet the Press, 12-09-01

*George Will continues: There is reason to believe that he is a rapist ("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he told her concerning her bit lip), and that he bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life, and that. ... Furthermore, the bargain that he and his wife call a marriage refutes the axiom that opposites attract. Rather, she, as much as he, perhaps even more so, incarnates Clintonism

Q ERTY3 co-rapist bump!

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Another mistaken 'conceptzia'

Author and Expert on Saddam Hussein to Deliver 1998-99 Roemer Memorial Lecture on World Affairs