WHAT CLINTON KNEW
Dick Morris
May 21, 2002 -- THE Democrats, with Hillary in the lead, have blown it big time in their recent outraged flurry of questions about what President Bush knew and when he knew it. A close examination of the memos Condoleezza Rice discussed last week yields a clear, if unsettling answer: not a whole lot.
All the president had to go on were generalized threat warnings about increased "chatter," including nothing more specific than less-than-novel speculation that terrorists may hijack airplanes. Obviously, Bush could not have "acted" based on such limited information.
While the accusations seemed not to wound Bush, they may well exact a daunting toll on those who made them. In overreaching, the Democrats look like vicious partisans in a nonpartisan environment. All the polls after 9/11 suggest that its major political effect was to drain America of any latent enthusiasm it may have had for partisanship.
By shattering the melody of bipartisan harmony with the screeching cacophony of partisan accusation, Democrats in general - and Hillary Rodham Clinton in particular - have left themselves with a gaping vulnerability. The party of Clinton and the wife of Clinton seem also to have forgotten the admonition that those who dwell in glass houses should not throw stones, let alone hurl boulders.
If Bush did not know much about al Qaeda intentions before 9/11, why didn't he? The blame rests not on his incumbency, then only months old, but on that of his predecessor.
After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and then the bombings of Khobar Towers, of U.S. embassies in Africa and of USS Cole, why did our intelligence on al Qaeda's activities remain so pathetically limited? Was the most that the Clinton intelligence apparatus could generate in the way of information to protect the nation the kind of generalized threat warnings Bush got? Why didn't it learn more from the intercepts that revealed terrorist plots to hijack airliners or the efforts to fly a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower? Why did we know so very little?
Even had Bush known about specific threats to hijack planes, what could he have done?
In the aftermath of the Olympic bombing of 1996 and the downing of TWA Flight 800 that spring, the Clinton administration was alive with a flurry of proposals to increase airport safety. In polling in July of 1996, we examined four specific proposals to heighten air safety:
* Require photo identification for all air passengers.
* X-ray all checked luggage.
* Hand inspect all carry-on luggage.
* Federalize airport security personnel.
In the Clinton presidency, such polling usually presaged policy recommendations for executive or for congressional action. But not this time. The president decided not to take action on these ideas and, instead, named a commission, headed by Vice President Al Gore, to examine the safety of our airports and to report specific suggestions to improve it.
Gore labored and brought forth a mouse. His recommendations didn't include any of the steps outlined above; it amounted to little more than an informational exchange of airport-safety procedures and a call for stepped-up vigilance. Indeed, very few of his suggestions had anything at all to do with the menace of terrorism or with preventing the hijacking of American planes.
So, even had Bush received notification of the nature of al Qaeda's plans, there was little he could have done, in the weeks before 9/11, to stymie them. Clinton and Gore had simply not left behind them the tools to permit an increase in airport security.
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