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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (127539)	3/28/2004 3:33:52 AM
From: boris_a	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

And what exactly was the difference between the alerts of late 1999 and the alerts of summer 2001? Neither case had specific information, as far as I can see. The difference? R. Clarke: "... Contrast December '99 with June and July and August 2001. In December '99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaida was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he "NEVER" chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi rice to chair a meeting about what we're doing about stopping the attacks. "SHE DIDN'T HOLD ONE MEETING DURING ALL THOSE THREE MONTHS." Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaida terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn't know that. The leadership of the FBI didn't know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don't know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others. ..." guardian.co.uk Despite the the earth shaking cigar games, the Clinton Admin was up to its tasks.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (127539)	3/28/2004 12:32:44 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Now Clarke says they made a difference, but as the actual LAX terrorist was a nervous and inept terrorist who triggered the suspicions of an alert customs agent, it's frankly unclear to me if all those alerts did anything or not. Good questions. Again, read the books. In the 99 millenium stuff, they stopped multiple attacks, at least 3 and possible 5. Talking globally. The degree to which the "shake out" business contributed to that is unknowable. But if the shoe were on the other foot right now and Gore were president in the summer of 01 and had not gone to maximum alert as in late 99, you would be first up on the podium attacking them. And with justification. My own concern, at least right now, is not so much that the Bush folk did not do that, though they should have. My larger concern is that they are trying to do a cover up. Had they simply said in late 01, look we were focused on different things, we were caught by surprise, but we get it now, here's what we are doing. And we're going to dump the memory slots onto commissions so everyone knows precisely what happened, the better to do systemic corrections to guard against the next. Had they done that, they would have been in much better shape now and we would all be a bit safer. Instead, they chose the "we made no mistakes" route, the noncooperation route. And the price for going that direction doesn't look good.