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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (306318)	10/13/2006 6:52:22 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572502

Brumar, quit lying. It's clear Osama got away at Tora Bora because the CIA's urgent demand for 600 Army Rangers to block the escape routes was ignored by the Pentagon and White House. Since Bush is commander in chief, he's responsible. It's also clear the 8-6-01 warning was a HUGE OBVIOUS wake-up call to an administration which hadn't done anything on counter-terrorism by August 20901 except disband all Clinton's counter-terrori units and call the FBI off Saudis in the US. That is all they did, let our guard down completely. And the warning said OBL DETERMINED TO STRIKE WITHIN US -- probably using hijackings. What did Bush do? Nothing? That alone is grounds for removing him from office. As for Clinton, he didn't even know OBL was behind any bombings until 1998. Once he found out he went after him. Aggressively. And so what if he missed? He tried hard. Bush didn't try at all. Bush did nothing. Less than nothing.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (306318)	10/14/2006 8:57:29 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572502

No, Clinton didn't try as hard as he could to kill OBL. Of course, in the interest of fairness, AQ is more than one man and the 911 plot may have proceeded even with OBL dead. You are probably right. In retrospect, Clinton should have tried harder. However there were at least two extenuating circumstances in play at the time that made this oversight both very probable as well as very serious. First is that at the time, al Qaida/bin Ladin were just one terrorist group among many in the world......there was Hebollah, Hamas, the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, etc and, while its true that bin Laden seemed to have his sights on the US along with Saudi Arabia and some other countries, so did some of the other groups like Hezbollah. I think that over time Clinton had become more and more convinced that bin Laden was a particular threat to the US but at that time, no one knew exactly how desperate, motivated and insane the people were behind that threat. Remember suicide bombings still were an oddity and rather infrequent at that time. Secondly, if you read anything about bin Laden or read his interviews during the '90s, he was still developing his particular brand of evil. This is a man who has turned on his own class of people. That is pretty unusual.......people may reject their peers at one point in their development but they usually overcome that reaction as they mature. bin Laden did not. In any case, that suggests something very significant happened to him growing up. This is also a man who was an average student but has turned out to be a brilliant terrorist. That makes me believe that the mad scientist syndrome is in play here; that is, its in his madness that comes his 'genius' for terrorism. In other words........there is no way anyone could have known this was happening and predicting its eventual outcome. I suspect that bin Laden is probably one of the more unique people on the planet in the way he has developed as a human being. So when people say Clinton didn't do enough........well how could he have possibly know with what he was dealing. Its why Bush and Rice and Cheney didn't take the intel they were being given before 9/11 very seriously. After all, how can relatively normal people understand and anticipate the workings of a mad man? How can relatively normal people really believe that someone is planning to fly jet airliners full of people into buildings. Yes, I know that its the stuff of fiction but its not unusual for fiction to be stranger than reality, or even for reality to be stranger than fiction........but both scenarios are fairly rare. Bottom line: if you want to blame Clinton, then you need to blame the Bush administration as well. Since Bush et al have made so many huge mistakes, adding another one more to the list hurts them far more than it hurts Clinton who had a very successful presidency. So my suggestion is to give it up.