I see you aren't arguing the actual facts presented.
Perhaps this journalist should write them as well.
Clinton to blame for intelligence failures
Jonah Goldberg
April 14, 2004
Yes, "everyone" is to blame for 9/11. "Everyone" is also to blame for the outrageous, silly and counterproductive nonsense coming out of the 9/11 commission's quest to assign blame.
Let's take the second point first. Bush made a strategic blunder by essentially insisting he would not do anything differently if he could relive the pre-9/11 months over again. This is not only obvious nonsense, it's politically dumb.
The Bush campaign wants to run on its post-9/11 leadership not its pre-9/11 leadership. But by refusing to acknowledge, even rhetorically, the obvious fact that the government failed when the terrorists succeeded, they created the perfect incentives for political posturing, moral preening and partisan grandstanding from the 9/11 commission, the media, a tiny number of "9/11 families," the Democrats and, yes, the public.
An example: The New York Times editorialized this
week, "No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the
terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking
there was no other conceivable action he could have taken
to prevent them."
"Conceivable"? Yes, there were all sorts of conceivable
actions the president could have taken. He could have
interned Muslim-Americans like FDR did with the Japanese.
He could have grounded the airlines. He could have
declared war on Afghanistan. All of these thing
were "conceivable." But since when is "conceivable" the
standard for governmental conduct, even in hindsight? The
fair - or at least fairer - question is, did Bush take
every reasonable action to prevent the 9/11 attacks?
The Times went on to offer some "conceivable" actions the
president might have taken after receiving that notorious
Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing, namely he
should have flown back to D.C. and demanded that airlines
start "screening passengers" to fit their "threat
profiles."
Considering that it'd been reported in Time magazine in
1998 that government officials believed Osama bin Laden
was determined to attack inside the United States, I'm not
sure the president should have raced back to Washington
from his ranch in August 2001.
But I am 100 percent sure that the folks at The New York
Times editorial board would have snapped their pencils in
rage if the president had suggested increased "profiling"
of passengers in August 2001, let alone proposed the
Patriot Act - which the Times detests - and never mind
doing everything "conceivable."
This blame game stuff is counterproductive and dangerous when Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq. But if that's the game we're stuck with, it's an indisputable scandal that the Clinton Administration is getting off scot-free.
From the day George W. Bush was elected president, he reinstituted the policy of having daily meetings with the head of the CIA, a tradition Bill Clinton canceled. Indeed, Clinton never met privately at all with his first CIA Director James Woolsey after the initial job interview. When a plane crashed on the White House lawn in 1994, the joke in Washington was that it was Woolsey trying to get an appointment.
According to a New Yorker article, FBI Director Louis Freeh considered Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, to be a "public relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press."
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton despised Freeh and could barely stomach talking to him. Whoever was to blame for the sour relationship is irrelevant. Clinton was to blame for letting a spat get in the way of national security.
As we've heard from so many witnesses, throughout the 1990s the CIA, FBI and Justice Department were actively - not passively - impaired in their work to a scandalous extent. The CIA was told that it couldn't work with individuals with dubious "human rights" records. Unfortunately, people with ties to terrorists are not captains of their Mormon bowling leagues.
And, of course, there was Clinton's string of underwhelming, ineffectual and largely counterproductive responses to a string of attacks on America, starting with the first World Trade Center bombing.
The one recurring theme in the 9/11 hearings is the
unanimous agreement that the "wall" between intelligence
gathering and criminal prosecutions was too high and too
thick, and that this was the single most obvious
explanation for our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks.
Well, as we learned from John Ashcroft's testimony, the
Clinton Administration took its trowel and cemented a new
layer of bricks to that wall of separation. In 1995, the
FBI was instructed that intelligence and criminal
investigations had to be separated even further than "what
is legally required" to avoid "the unwarranted appearance"
that our intelligence operatives were - shriek! - sharing
their information with prosecutors, and vice versa.
The author of this directive? Clinton's Deputy Attorney
General (and Al Gore confidant) Jamie Gorelick, who now
sits in self-righteous judgment on the 9/11 commission -
when she should be called before it to explain herself.
The Bush team may not have done everything it could have
prior to 9/11. But, for the previous team, not doing
everything they could was policy.
Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.
©2004 Tribune Media Services
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