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Politics : Discuss the candidates honestly. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Andrew N. Cothran who wrote (2297)	7/26/2004 10:29:04 AM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 4965

Republicans are trying to blame 9/11 on Clinton, but the official report shows that he responded to al-Qaida threats far more effectively than Bush. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Joe Conason July 24, 2004 \| While the nonpartisan members of the 9/11 commission have sounded excruciatingly even-handed as they issued their final report, the Republican congressional leadership -- which has always tried to thwart the 9/11 investigation -- blatantly insists on blaming Clinton for the intelligence failures that resulted in the fateful attacks. Two days before the report appeared, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and his leadership team exploited a briefing on the report to mount a partisan assault. Their script, repeated by Hastert and his whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., suggested that "eight months of the Bush administration" couldn't make up for the policies established during "eight years of the Clinton administration." Readers of the report will also note its sharp criticism of the inadequacy and inattention to the real "gathering threat" during the '90s in Congress, where the "overall attention ... to the terrorist threat was low ... [and] not impressive." Of course, the Republican caucus has exercised iron control over the nation's legislative agenda since 1995. "Beginning in 1999," the 9/11 report notes, various expert and well-intended commissions "made scores of recommendations to address terrorism and homeland security but drew little attention from Congress." Hastert's colleagues are too busy preparing an investigation of Sandy Berger to act on the report's recommendations -- in an obvious attempt to deflect attention from its findings. That's an understandable tactic, because anyone who reads the report's actual text may well conclude that in confronting the terrorist threat, the Clinton administration was considerably more serious and alert than its successor. Consider the critical chapters devoted to the Millennium plot and the months preceding 9/11. "President Clinton was deeply concerned about [Osama] Bin Ladin," remarks the opening section of Chapter 6, titled "From Threat to Threat." It goes on to note that by the summer of 1998, Clinton and his national security advisor Sandy Berger "ensured that they had a special daily pipeline of reports feeding them the latest updates on Bin Ladin's reported location." Stopping the Millennium plot -- in which al-Qaida operatives planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport and other major targets at the end of 1999 -- was in great measure the result of a lucky break, as the report acknowledges. An alert customs agent arrested al-Qaida operative Ahmed Ressam, who was bringing a carload of explosives into the United States from British Columbia. Along with other intelligence alarms, Ressam's arrest spurred Clinton and his aides, including Berger and counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, into a desperate, unrelenting effort to prevent disaster. To Clinton, the Millennium alert required what one commissioner called "knocking heads together" every day in the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department and the National Security Council. Among the effects of that daily head-knocking, according to the 9/11 report, was to force usually reticent FBI officials to disgorge the kind of critical information that they habitually held back from other federal agencies. Ordered to appear in person before a committee of Cabinet-rank officials, "it was hard for FBI officials to hold back information." Operations were mounted simultaneously in eight countries to disrupt the Islamist conspiracies. After Ressam's arrest, more wiretaps than ever before were authorized to find the sleeper cells that Clarke warned were preparing attacks here. Again and again, the report takes careful note of Clinton's active, personal participation in the effort against al-Qaida during the Millennium alert, exploding myths about his supposed distraction by domestic scandals. Clarke spoke directly with the president on several occasions that month. "In mid-December," the report reveals, "President Clinton signed a Memorandum of Notification (MON) giving the CIA broader authority to use foreign proxies to detain Bin Ladin lieutenants, without having to transfer them to U.S. custody. The authority was to capture, not kill, although lethal force might be used if necessary." The commission confirms Clinton's widely reported "obsession" with al-Qaida, describing in detail his efforts to raise international awareness, increase spending on counterterrorism and homeland security long before that phrase became fashionable, and to demand action by the nation's covert forces. Indeed, their report credits Clinton with ignoring a serious threat to his own safety to seek foreign assistance in the struggle against bin Laden.