But all of those were plans that were years in the making. There would be no reason to change them.
They really weren't -- except for 9/11, and no real action had happened by '98 -- the training of pilots had not begun at that time.
The embassies and the Cole were plans that came together in very short time frames -- very quick for the Cole, a few months for the embassies. The final casing of the embassies by Ali Mohamed occurred within 30 days of the bombing. And bin Laden's fatwa was issued a month after the Lewinski scandal broke. While the initial casings dated back years, the plans had not become serious until right before the bombings.
The bombing of the Cole was merely a "target of opportunity". There had been a previous failed plan to bomb the USS The Sullivans and when it failed they merely went for the next one that presented an opportunity.
We'll never know but there is little doubt that had Clinton done what he should have and taken Saddam out in the late 90s (as the letter suggested), the entire bin Laden picture would certainly have been different. Which bombings might have been stopped who knows.
As I (and many others) have pointed out before, the critical error was the failure of the United States to recognize it was at war until the 2001 attacks. To any objective observer, the war stated when AQ made an overt declaration of war against us -- first in '96, then again with the fatwa (which, at that time, included al Jihad).
Had they treated it as a war rather than a criminal situation, there were multiple opportunities that the White House passed on to get bin Laden when they refused to do so because they didn't feel they had "evidence". You don't need "evidence" for killing your enemy. You only need "evidence" for taking him to trial, American style.
I mentioned the situation where a former Air Force Top Gun pilot who was an FBI agent requested that a terrorist's laptop be investigated forensically that would have disclosed the direct linkage with others receiving pilot training they knew about. But there are at least a dozen instances where the treatment of these enemy combatants as criminal suspects resulted in thousands of American civilians losing their lives. This FBI agent was livid when his boss told him he could not touch the laptop. Furious. And in the end, that's the difference in uncovering 9/11 and not.
It was all blamed on a lack of communication between FBI and CIA -- and there was some of that. But the reality is that from the top down there was a failure to understand we were at war. There were those -- like John O'Neil, who clearly knew it, but there were others like Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger who just didn't understand the threat. |
