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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (732355)	3/15/2006 9:51:31 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 769670

Absolutely not...Clinton: I warned Bush about bin Laden threat Describes his inability to 'convince' his successor as 'disappointment' Former President Bill Clinton is taking the proverbial "I told you so" stance with regards to terror chief Osama bin Laden. Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the History Channel yesterday, Clinton said he warned incoming President George W. Bush before he left office in 2001 that the founder of al-Qaida was the biggest security threat the United States faced. "In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defense," Clinton said, according to Reuters. "I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden." Clinton told the audience his inability to convince Bush of the danger posed by al-Qaida represented "one of the two or three of the biggest disappointments that I had." While he may have warned his successor, various reports suggest Clinton dropped the ball, himself. A former FBI agent claims former Attorney General Janet Reno scrubbed a clandestine plan to capture the terror mastermind in 1998. Jack Cloonan told ABC News a secret team of federal investigators he was a part of even practiced the daring operation in the Texas desert. The scheme was to have a plane from Uzbekistan swoop into the area of Kandahar, Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating at the time and execute an arrest warrant. "A U.S. plane was to fly in," Cloonan said. "And he [bin Laden] would have been greeted by an FBI agent, who would have said, 'Sheik bin Laden, there is a warrant for your arrest,'" he said. But when the details of the operation went up the chain of command for approval, according to Cloonan, Reno killed it. "They came to the decision that this plan was probably too dangerous, that the loss of life on the ground would have been significant," Cloonan told the news network. There was concern that people around the bin Laden compound would be killed." WorldNetDaily reported the Clinton administration "de-emphasized" fighting Arab international terrorism to focus on domestic terrorism – namely, white "right-wing" militia groups. Veteran FBI agents told WND this led to the FBI ignoring Arab nationals flocking to U.S. flight schools, namely the 19 hijackers who claimed nearly 3,000 lives on Sept. 11, 2001. Even though Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qaida had been responsible for a pattern of attacks from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the 1996 bombing of U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, FBI Director Louis Freeh told a Senate subcommittee in 1999 "a growing number (while still small) of 'lone offender' and extremist splinter elements of right-wing groups have been identified as possessing or attempting to develop/use chemical, biological or radiological materials." worldnetdaily.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (732355)	3/15/2006 9:53:55 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 769670

Bush dropped the ball Friday :: March 19, 2004 Clinton Aides to Testify They Repeatedly Warned Bush Aides of Al Qaeda Risk The 9/11 Congressional panel will hear some troubling information next week from aides of former President Clinton: Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation ? and how the new administration was slow to act. They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others. Richard Clarke, Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, whose book, Against All Enemies : Inside the White House's War on Terror--What Really Happened, is being released Monday, says: ...the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led. At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed. "It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in." The White House does not dispute that it received the information. The dispute is over what was done with the information. The Clinton aides say the Bush administration sat on it and that terrorism was a low priority until Sept. 11. Bush says he made terrorism a top priority and followed through on Clinton's policies.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (732355)	3/15/2006 9:54:32 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 769670

Bush ignored ALLLLLLL warnings, went his own stupid way: bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered earlier this year. 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. The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA's attention. Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission's suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. "Frankly, the White House shut it down," Hart says. "The president said 'Please wait, we're going to turn this over to the vice president. We believe FEMA is competent to coordinate this effort.' And so Congress moved on to other things, like tax cuts and the issue of the day."

To: Brumar89 who wrote (732355)	3/15/2006 9:56:25 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Bush was too busy focusing on Iraq: Given Warnings, Bush Administration Neglected Terrorist Threat Clinton Administration officials warned the Bush Administration about terrorist threat. Reporting for the Washington Post, Barton Gellman has written that "beginning on August 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office." (12/19/01) When President Bush took office in January 2001, Clinton Administration officials briefed the incoming Bush Administration on its efforts to eliminate al Qaeda. The 9-11 Commission's March 24, 2004 Staff Report notes that, on January 26, 2001, Richard Clarke provided the National Security Council leadership with two plans for increasing counterterrorism efforts, a 1998 comprehensive plan and a 2000 strategy paper. Neither of these plans were adopted, and the Bush Administration did not develop its own counterterrorism strategy before the attacks of September 11. The Bush Administration neglected warnings by outgoing Clinton staff during its transition into office. In his testimony before the independent commission investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that the Bush Administration had been briefed by outgoing Clinton Administration officials: "the outgoing Administration provided me and others in the incoming Administration with transition papers as well as briefings that reinforced our awareness of the worldwide threat from terrorism." (3/23/04). Daniel Benjamin, author of The Age of Sacred Terror, reported that Brian Sheridan, an assistant secretary of Defense under President Clinton, stated "I offered to brief anyone, any time on any topic [related to terrorism]. Never took it up." (Los Angeles Times, 3/30/04) Mr. Benjamin also noted that Don Kerrick, a three-star general who served as President Clinton's deputy National Security Advisor and continued through the first four months of the Bush Administration, issued a memo to the new National Security Council leadership about al Qaeda, saying, "We are going to be struck again." He never heard back: "I don't think it was above the waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen." Warnings about al Qaeda began to pour in. The Bush Administration was repeatedly warned by both the U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies that al Qaeda was planning an attack. In his testimony before the independent 9-11 commission, Richard Clarke asserted that both he and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet "tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the Al Qaida threat were frequently given to the president and other high-level officials." Clarke further stated that "President Bush was regularly told by the director of Central Intelligence that there was an urgent threat...He was told this dozens of times in the morning briefings that George Tenet gave him." The White House has confirmed that, on August 6, 2001, President Bush's Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) specifically focused on al Qaeda's intent to attack the United States, and specifically warned that airplane hijackings could be involved. According to press reports, the PDB included a fresh report from British intelligence warning that al Qaeda was planning multiple hijackings. The National Security Council focused on Iraq, not terrorism. The Associated Press reported that "President Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions, officials say...Bush's principals committee was focused on missile defense, Iraq, China, international economic policy, global warming and the U.S. stance toward Russia, a subject of particular interest to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, a Russian expert who has now worked for both Bush presidents." (6/29/02) One of the two meetings occurred just a week before the attacks.