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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (36502)	3/26/2004 2:54:28 PM
From: aladin	Respond to of 794379

Mike, Assume the best - that Clinton's team actually did listen to Clarke and that Al Queda was their highest priority. Also assume Clarke is telling the truth and Bush came into office discounting their opinions and plans and was focused domestically. What does this tell you? That Clarke and Clinton were very bad at the National Security portion of their jobs and that Bush was a neophyte without foreign policy experience - perhaps even isolationist. Ok - so in the absolutely best way 9/11 can be painted for the Democrats - they still look bad and Bush is no worse off - after all that’s how they described him in the 2000 election. Bush is running on how he reacted to 9/11 and the prior administrations people are just running from their record. Could Bush have done better? Absolutely, but imagine how the NY Times would play it if on 9/11 a large group of Arabs was profiled and detained. Not one of them had committed any crime - we would have been arresting them for flying while Islamic. The ACLU would have jumped to their defense. Kerry, or any other Democrat, needs to define exactly how they plan to enable the Intelligence, Military and Law Enforcement communities to prevent such attacks. Taking the ACLU 'party line' that the Patriot Act is unnecessary is not the answer. That retreats to the point of criminalizing terrorism. The problem with criminalization is that it is always reactive. No one is arrested for future crimes (except 'conspiracy to commit' - but that requires covert penetration missions which are extremely hard to do with the Jihadi's). John