Great link Laz...........here it is in full print:
Clinton/Gore and Terrorism
Taken from various CITED sources, including my own research. Special thanks to Mediawhores Online and Samela from the Bartcop Forum.
UPDATE!
The memos issued under the Clinton administration warned airports and airlines of specific Bin Laden/Al Qaeda threats of hijacking against U.S. civil aviation. One of the three (3) memos the Globe obtained specifically alerts airports at risk in metropolitan areas in the Eastern United States. The print version of the paper shows the actual memos--unfortunately, these don't appear on the electronic version, but they are described in the article. Read Here
The Federal Aviation Administration warned the nation's airports and airlines in late 1998 about a possible terrorist hijacking ''at a metropolitan airport in the Eastern United States'' and urged a ''high degree of vigilance'' against threats to US civil aviation from Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, according to classified security bulletins obtained by the Globe.
The three FAA information circulars - issued nearly three years before the Sept. 11 attacks - raise new questions about how much specific information US intelligence and regulatory agencies had about threats to US aircraft from bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
Despite the gap in time between the 1998 warnings and the 2001 attack, the memos indicate ongoing concern about Al Qaeda's intentions. Bush administration and FAA officials have characterized pre-Sept. 11 intelligence warnings as too broad to defend against and said they lacked a ''credible'' hijacking threat.
The first of the three circulars, issued on Oct. 8, instructs airports and airlines to maintain a ''high degree of alertness'' based on statements made by bin Laden and other Islamic leaders and intellegence information following US cruise missile attacks against suspected Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Sudan. The August 1998 missile attacks followed the terrorist bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Bin Laden, the circular states, had praised one of the bombers arrested in a failed 1995 plot to blow up US civilian airlines in the Far East and another Islamic leader had stated that ''militants had been mobilized to strike a significant US or Israeli target, to include bringing down or hijacking aircraft.''
''While this threat remains unsubstantiated, there is information from one of the incarcerated suspects in the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi that he received aircraft hijack training,'' the document states.
''The arrest and pending extradition of bin Laden cadre raises the possibility of a US airliner being hijacked in an effort to demand the release of incarcerated members.''
Exactly two months later, the FAA released another information circular, which warned of a threat against an Eastern US airport.
''The FAA has received information that unidentified individuals, who are associated with a terrorist organization, may be planning a hijacking at a metropolitan airport in the Eastern United States,'' the circular states.
Under the ''FAA Comment'' section, the circular further states: ''The FAA cannot at this time refute this threat to civil aviation. We believe the threat is current.'' --end snips--
Compare and contrast to airport and airline statements that they received NO hijacking threat alerts prior to 9/11.
The right-wing and the Media Whores continue to spread the atrocious lie that Bill Clinton did little or nothing to stand up to Osama bin Laden.
It has been part of the right-wing excuse machine since September 11 -- the old trick of, when cornered, blame Clinton.
Rush Limbaugh's smear in the Wall Street Journal was typical:
"Mr. Clinton can be held culpable for not doing enough when he was commander-in-chief to combat the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon."
And now, in the wake of the continuing breaking news of the Bush 9/11 scandal, the right wing and the Whores are at it once again, trying to apply a fresh coat of Teflon to the pitted Bush Administration by telling lies about Bill Clinton.
Supposedly, Clinton did nothing when Al Qaeda attacked American embassies in Somalia and elsewhere, when it attacked the U.S.S. Cole, and so on and so on.
The right wing and its pliable Whores have even convinced a sizeable portion of the American people -- at least according to one of the Media Whore polls -- that Clinton's inaction is in partly to blame for the atrocities of September 11.
CLINTON'S INACTION? This is one of the ugliest right-wing/Media Whore lies yet. But since the news media are too frightened of Dubya and Karl to tell the truth, MWO has to fill in the gap.
Here, adapted from one of Bill Press's old columns, is a highly incomplete list of steps that Bill Clinton and his Administration took against bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Compare it to the utter inaction -- indeed, the complete abandonment of Clinton's determined anti-terrorist policies -- by the Bush Administration over the first eight months of 2001.
1996
Clinton administration brokers an agreement with the government of Sudan to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to Saudi Arabia. For 10 weeks, Clinton tried to persuade the Saudis to accept the offer. They refused. With no cooperation from the Saudis, the deal fell apart. No media operation bothers to look into what influence the Saudis' old friends in the Bush family may have had in convincing the Saudis to refuse to cooperate.
1998
-- Clinton gives the CIA a green light to use whatever covert means are necessary to gather information on Osama bin Laden and his followers, and to disrupt and preempt any planned terrorist activities against the United States.
-- The CIA, under Clinton, trains and equips five dozen commandos from Pakistan to enter Afghanistan and capture bin Laden. The efforts collapse when a military coup overthrows the Pakistani government and installs a new one.
-- Clinton signs a secret agreement with Uzbekistan to begin joint covert operations against bin Laden and Afghanistan's Taliban regime. U.S. Special Forces have been training there ever since.
-- Clinton's unleashes cruise missile attacks on bin Laden in Afghanistan and the Sudan, following the terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Operating on limited intelligence -- at that time, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tazikistan refused to share information on the terrorists whereabouts inside Afghanistan -- American forces miss killing bin Laden by only a couple of hours.
-- Republicans (led by Trent Lott) and Naderites (led by Ralph Nader) accuse Clinton of only firing missiles in order to divert media attention from the Lewinsky hearings. A longer campaign against bin Laden would have stirred up even more criticism.
1998-99
-- Clinton sponsors legislation to freeze the financial assets of international organizations suspected of funneling money to bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, but it is killed, on behalf of big banks, by Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. George Bush will later call for identical legislation
-- but only after September 11, 2001.
1999-2000
-- Clinton Administration, through press spokesman Joe Lockhart, goes public with warnings of a "general" threat from Al Qaeda. Clinton's intelligence agencies then stop cold bin Laden's planned "millennium" bombing plot aimed against the Los Angeles International Airport.
As we say, this is a HIGHLY incomplete list. (MWO invites readers to send in their favorite additional examples.) For more details about Clinton Administration anti-bin Laden activities in 2000, and Bush Administration indifference, see Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff's current Newsweek article, including the following passage:
By the end of the Clinton administration, the then national-security adviser Sandy Berger had become "totally preoccupied" with fears of a domestic terror attack, a colleague recalls. True, the Clintonites had failed to act decisively against Al Qaeda, but by the end they were certain of the danger it posed. When, in January 2001, Berger gave Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in detail, and, sources say, warned her: "You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other."
Rice was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategy review. But the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like national missile defense (NMD) and Iraq.
Clinton fought bin Laden tooth and nail -- whereas the Bush Administration cut off drone tracking of bin Laden, abandoned federal oversight of terrorist money laundering and offshore banking operations, and, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, ordered federal agencies to "back off" the bin Laden family.
Earlier this year, Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick was asked to compare the counter-terrorism efforts of the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Kerrick, who had come from top posts on the Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency to manage Clinton's National Security Council staff, remained at the NSC nearly four months after Bush took office.
Kerrick noticed a big difference on terrorism, according to a front-page report in the Washington Post:
Clinton's Cabinet advisers, burning with the urgency of their losses to bin Laden in the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the Cole attack in 2000, had met "nearly weekly" to direct the fight, Kerrick said. Among Bush's first-line advisers, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" that kind of focus, he said. "That's not being derogatory. It's just a fact."
Kerrick had both the expertise and the access to draw this conclusion.
So did others.
"The U.S. government can only manage at the highest level a certain number of issues at one time; two or three," said Michael Sheehan, the State Department's former coordinator for counterterrorism. "You can't get to the principals on any other issue. That's in any administration."
Before September 11, the Post concluded, terrorism and counter-terrorism just didn't make the cut inside the Bush Administration.
At several crucial points, the report showed, the Bush Administration either vacillated in dealing with Osama bin Laden or backed off completely:
-- The administration did not resume its predecessor's covert deployment of cruise missile submarines and gunships, on six-hour alert near Afghanistan's borders. The standby force gave Clinton the option, never used, of an immediate strike against targets in al Qaeda's top leadership. The Bush administration put no such capability in place before Sept. 11.
-- At least twice, Bush conveyed the message to the Taliban that the United States would hold the regime responsible for an al Qaeda attack. But after concluding that bin Laden's group had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole -- a conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice President Cheney -- the new administration did not choose to order armed forces into action.
-- In the spring, CIA officers traveled into northern Afghanistan to assess rebel forces commanded by Ahmed Shah Massoud. They found him worse than he had appeared the autumn before. The agency gave Massoud cash and supplies in small amounts in exchange for intelligence on al Qaeda but did not have the authority to build back his fighting strength against the Taliban.
-- In his first budget, Bush spent $13.6 billion on counterterrorist programs across 40 departments and agencies. That compares with $12 billion in the previous fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget. There were also somewhat higher gaps this year, however, between what military commanders said they needed to combat terrorists and what they got. When the Senate Armed Services Committee tried to fill those gaps with $600 million diverted from ballistic missile defense, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he would recommend a veto. That threat came Sept. 9.
-- On May 8, Bush announced a new Office of National Preparedness for terrorism at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. At the same time, he proposed to cut FEMA's budget by $200 million. Bush said that day that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and "I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place.
-- Bush did not speak again publicly of the dangers of terrorism before Sept. 11, except to promote a missile shield that had been his top military priority from the start. At least three times he mentioned "terrorist threats that face us" to explain the need to discard the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
-- The Treasury Department created a new deputy assistant secretary's post last summer to coordinate anti-terrorist efforts among its five enforcement arms, and it took the first steps toward hosting a Foreign Terrorist Assets Tracking Center. It also spent months fending off the new laws and old global institutions that are central to the war against al Qaeda's financing. Unresolved interagency disputes left the administration without a position on legislative initiatives to combat money laundering. And until the summer, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill suspended U.S. participation in allied efforts to penetrate offshore banking havens, whose secrecy protects the cash flows of drug traffickers, tax evaders and terrorists.
ALL OF THIS CAME TO LIGHT FIVE MONTHS AGO, but got effectively buried under the Administration's posturing and the media's adoring coverage of that posturing.
Is the adoration over? Or will the press finally get to the bottom of how the Bush Administration's dismissal of terrorism, so at odds with the Clinton Administration's policies, contributed to the slaughter of September 11?
What the Clinton adminstration did do to fight terrorism, according top reports was, extensive.. Following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the new president sent stringent anti-terrorism legislation to Congress as part of his first crime bill, including new deportation powers and a federal death penalty for terrorists.
In 1996, Mr. Clinton once again sent anti-terror legislation to the Republican-controlled congress yet key parts were not passed by Congress. Their reasons were that they felt the parts infringed on civil liberties. Interestingly, those parts not passed in 1996 were passed after 9/11.
(http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/30/clinton.terrorism/)
(http://www.cdt.org/policy/terrorism/cnss_habeas.html)
Also in 1996, President Clinton signed Airport Security measures into law (http://www.cnn.com/US/9610/09/faa/) based upon wide-ranging security measures recommended by Vice President Al Gore's aviation security commission (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17818-2001Dec9?language=printer). Interestingly, key senators on the Senate Aviation Subcommittee shot down mandated changes recommended by Gore and the White House and instead urged "further study." (Eight of the nine Republicans on the subcommittee had received contributions from the major airlines.)
"Among those attacking the Gore Commission recommendations, incidentally, was the New Republic, which noted that "two billion dollars a year to guard against terrorism and sabotage" would amount to "a cost per life saved of well over $300 million." The cost of such libertarian dogma must now be measured in thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars." (salon.com)
On 20 August 1998, President Clinton amended Executive Order 12947 to add Usama Bin Laden and his key associates to the list of terrorists, thus blocking their US assets--including property and bank accounts--and prohibiting all US financial transactions with them. The Washington Post, among others, reported.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/eafricabombing/stories/strikes082398.htm)
The United States conducted a bombing run -- Operation Infinite Reach -- against bin Laden's facilities there on 20 August 1998.
President Clinton took additional steps as outlined in this executive order dated July 1999 (http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1999/07/F.RU.990707135633.html) as announced in the world media - such as Radio Free Europe (http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1999/07/F.RU.990707135633.html)
This second report, known as the Hart-Rudman report, was completed in late 2000 and submitted to the Bush administration in January, 2001. But the Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh. (http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/12/bush/)At the same time, he proposed to cut FEMA's budget by $200 million. Bush said that day that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and "I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place.
Critics say the United States was too dependent on high-tech means like satellites intelligence on bin Laden's and Al Queda and that there was a shortage of people to translate and analyze the vast amounts of data.
For example, ABCNEWS learned that weeks before Sept. 11, NSA intercepts detected multiple phone calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden's chief of operations, to the United States. The intercepts were never passed on.
"We do have a joint antiterrorism center, and that is a failure of information consolidation and analysis," said Rudman. "It obviously (a) wasn't consolidated and (b) wasn't analyzed. I mean, those are serious shortcomings."
All three reports recognized the shortcomings and made recommendations including closer monitoring of student visas, the creation of a homeland security office, the freezing of financial assets that supported terrorism, and more coodination between the CIA and the FBI on intelligence.
But, the reports' authors say, their recommendations went largely unheeded. Though they apparently weren't aware of the anti-terrorism measures that were taken.
Bremer said that no action was taken on any of his commission's recommendations — until the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: "Interestingly, since Sept. 11 almost every one of our recommendations has either been enacted by the executive branch or been put into law by Congress, which suggests that we probably had a pretty good menu of things to do before Sept. 11."
Other key events prior to 9/11 was a Clinton proposal defeated by then Senator John Ashcroft along with computer-industry lobbyists. They rejected proposals to tighten controls on encryption software and to ensure that law enforcement officials could crack the kind of coded messages found on the laptop owned by Ramzi Yusef, the man who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Intelligence experts believe that encrypted computer links were probably used by the Sept. 11 plotters and their masters in al-Qaida.
Don't blame Clinton
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason
When terrorists first tried to take down the World Trade Center with a truck bomb in February 1993, there was no organized outcry of recrimination against George Herbert Walker Bush, who had left the Oval Office a scant six weeks earlier. Nobody sought political advantage by blaming Bush for the intelligence failures that had allowed the terrorist perpetrators to conspire undetected for more than three years.
And no liberal commentator attempted to pronounce that former president guilty of "criminal negligence" based on the sort of fabrications and falsehoods deployed since Sept. 11, here and elsewhere, against Bill Clinton. Yet recently, opportunistic critics have mounted a false indictment of Clinton, attempted to erase his administration's extensive record of action against terrorism and smeared him by suggesting he should have prevented the tragedy of Sept. 11.
To expect fairness and forbearance from these critics would be foolish at this late date. For them, indicting Clinton remains the most compelling obsession of all. As Mark Steyn warned (surely only half-jokingly) in the National Review: "If we members of the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy don't get back to our daily routine of obsessive Clinton-bashing, then the terrorists will have won."
Not to worry, as Andrew Sullivan's readers can attest. Nearly every day he eagerly promotes the slurring and sliming of Clinton, shooting first and checking later. Sullivan's Salon essay ("While Clinton Diddled") arraigning Clinton, in which he pugnaciously introduces himself as presenting "the facts" and challenges the rest of us to "deal with them," continues this sorry pattern. He distorts and misuses the few facts he selects for his polemic. He presumes that his readers are too ignorant and lazy to check for themselves.
Sullivan's favorite method is to attach his wacky accusations to reporting and quotes from reputable sources, appropriating their authority for his false interpretations. Supposedly citing the New York Times and the Washington Post, Sullivan asserts that Clinton "got his warning about Islamist terrorism very early on" in the first World Trade Center bombing, because "the investigation found links to Osama bin Laden." He adds that "the State Department confirmed" bin Laden's complicity in the killing of American soldiers in Somalia.
Sullivan thereby implies that Clinton should have acted against bin Laden immediately, when in fact nobody knew about the Saudi millionaire's alleged involvement with the WTC bombing or the Mogadishu murders until at least three years later. In 1993, U.S. authorities were scarcely aware of bin Laden's existence, and al-Qaida had not yet been formed. Conservative journalists, such as the New Republic's Fred Barnes, were then suggesting that the likeliest perpetrator of the World Trade Center bombing was Iran. Even now, hard evidence linking bin Laden to those earlier events remains scarce.
Perhaps the most sensational charge against Clinton to emerge in the months since Sept. 11 is the dubious claim that he somehow let an offer from Sudan to turn over bin Laden slip through his fingers. Sullivan blatantly misrepresents a definitive article that appeared in the Washington Post on Oct. 3, 2001, on this topic. "The Sudanese government offered to hand over bin Laden to the United States," Sullivan writes. "Astonishingly, the Clinton administration turned the offer down." But that phony accusation is exploded by the very first sentence of the Post article, which says only that Sudan offered to "arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody."
Specifically, the Post reported that during secret negotiations in 1996 between American officials and Sudan defense minister Elfatih Erwa, "The [Khartoum] government was prepared to place [bin Laden] in custody and hand him over, though to whom was ambiguous. In one formulation, Erwa said Sudan would consider any legitimate proffer of criminal charges against the accused terrorist. Saudi Arabia, he said, was the most logical destination." The Post then detailed efforts by the White House and the State Department to induce the Saudis to accept custody of bin Laden, which the authorities in Riyadh adamantly refused.
Nowhere does the Post's carefully worded story state that Sudan agreed to "hand bin Laden over to the United States" -- because that never happened, except perhaps in Sullivan's imagination.
Still referring to the same Post article, Sullivan complains that the Clinton administration "didn't even use the negotiations with the Sudanese to disable bin Laden's financial assets in the Sudan." But as the Post reported, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan pointedly inquired whether those assets would remain under bin Laden's control after his expulsion. He got no reply from Sudan's foreign minister, and within a few days after his query, the Saudi terror chief departed for Afghanistan.
The Sudanese have always had their own agenda, by the way, which Sullivan doesn't think worth mentioning. They promised to cooperate against terrorism only if the United States ended economic sanctions imposed to punish their genocidal campaign of murder and enslavement against black Christians.
"There were meetings between U.S. and Sudanese officials, including in New York, involving senior counter-terrorism officials, where [Sudanese envoys] would hint that they had great stuff if we lifted sanctions," says a former NSC official with direct knowledge of those events. Other former administration officials have publicly confirmed this account. (And imagine the howling protest from pundits like Sullivan if the Clinton White House had suddenly turned "soft" on Sudan.) But neither the FBI nor the CIA believed that Khartoum was providing anything valuable on bin Laden or al-Qaida.
Sullivan refers to other alleged foreign "offers" to arrest or track bin Laden, but there appears to be little substance to those stories beyond mere speculation. As if he knows what he's talking about, he complains that "it is astonishing that more effort wasn't made to clinch the deals." But of course he knows nothing more than what he read in the London Sunday Times's murky account. What's truly astonishing is that he plays the useful idiot in a Sudanese disinformation gambit, with which Khartoum hopes to win friends in the Bush White House.
While Clinton never got bin Laden, Sullivan cannot honestly fault him for lack of zeal. In 1998, he authorized an intensive, ongoing campaign to destroy al-Qaida and seize or assassinate bin Laden by signing a secret National Security Decision Directive to that effect.
Several attempts were made on bin Laden's life, aside from the famous cruise missile launches that summer, which Sullivan and other Republicans reflexively denounced as an attempt to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal.
(It never seems to occur to them that they are smearing not only Clinton, but also ranking intelligence and military officers, such as Gen. Anthony Zinni, now President Bush's Mideast envoy, who encouraged the president to take that shot in the dark.)
In 1999, the CIA organized a Pakistani commando unit to enter Afghanistan on a mission to capture or kill bin Laden. That operation was aborted when Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized the Pakistani government from Nawaz Sharif, the more cooperative civilian prime minister. A year later, the Saudi terrorist leader was reportedly almost killed in a rocket-grenade attack on his convoy; the missiles hit the wrong truck.
Simultaneously, the White House tried to persuade or coerce the Taliban regime into expelling bin Laden from their country. Clinton signed an executive order freezing $254 million in Taliban assets in the United States, while the State Department kept the Taliban internationally isolated. But as we have learned since last September, there was nothing the United States could have done, short of full-scale military action, to separate al-Qaida from the Taliban. And there was no guarantee that such action would lead to the apprehension of bin Laden, as we have also discovered lately.
Sullivan charges that "Clinton did little that was effective" and "simply refused to do anything serious about the threat." But his bogus "chronology" ignores nearly everything that the Clinton administration did or tried to do. |
