The following comes from an email I received. The message was originally written by Cdr. Hamilton McWhorter USN (ret). A little political review---time to think & remember!! After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and injured 1,000; President Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished. After the 1995 bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed five U.S. military personnel; Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished. After the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 and injured 200 U.S. military personnel; Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished. After the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, which killed 224 and injured 5,000; Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished. After the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 and injured 39 U.S. sailors; Clinton promised that those responsible would be hunted down and punished. Maybe if Clinton had kept his promise, an estimated 3,000 people in New York and Washington, D.C. that are now dead would be alive today. AN INTERESTING QUESTION - This question was raised on a Philly radio call-in show. Without casting stones, it is a legitimate question. There are two men, both extremely wealthy. One develops relatively cheap software and gives billions of dollars to charity. The other sponsors terrorism. That being the case, why is it that the Clinton Administration spent more money chasing down Bill Gates over the past eight years than Osama bin Laden? ____________________________________________________ I post this merely to illustrate how lax the Clinton administration was in regards to responding to attacks against our interests. People wonder why the terrorists continue to attack us every so often. One reason is that they had no reason to fear a retaliation...Clinton talked tough and then followed with no action.
Then the top terrorist leaders have nothing to fear from continuing to attack us. That's the problem. Sometimes good leadership involves doing what is unpopular. Being popular does not make the action right.
Reason #1,000,001 why I voted for Bush. I wake up every morning and am thankful Al Gore is not our president.
Bush promised the same thing, he still hasn't delivered. Where's the head of OBL!? I think most politicians are the same... liars. rH is not a donkey or an elephant
I got an email once that said if I forwarded it to 10 people, I would be the happy recipient of a sizable check.
Here's the counter to the simplistic first post. (From January 2002) Pay particular attention to the concluding paragraph. Softer on Terrorism? Why Bush deserves his share of the 9/11 blame. By Aaron Marr Page Following September 11, many on the right made an instant pastime out of lambasting anyone who dared suggest that U.S. foreign policy might be partially responsible for the attacks -- "blame America first" thinking, as they liked to call it. Recently, though, conservatives have discovered the joys of blaming one American in particular: Bill Clinton. In the process, they have seized upon a spate of lengthy serial reviews in the The New York Times and The Washington Post examining the history of the hunt for bin Laden and painting a tableau of indecisiveness, uncertainty, and missed opportunities by the Clinton administration. Andrew Sullivan summarized the Times-Post case against the former president recently in Salon.com: "[Clinton] was more responsible than anyone for the gaping holes in national security and intelligence that made Sept. 11 possible. The buck must stop with him." For a while, it almost seemed as though Sullivan's analysis was becoming conventional wisdom. Yet the serial reviews have rolled on, in their methodical way, so that finally the latest front-page Washington Post installment examines the Bush administration's own anti-terror accomplishments in 2001. And it turns out that compared to Bush, Clinton was practically Wyatt Earp. In fact, the latest Post article suggests a whole new line of inquiry: Did Bush, at a key moment, dismantle the Clinton administration's increasingly effective anti-Al Qaeda apparatus (which, though hardly flawless, was far better than nothing)? And on a related note: Would a less meddling Gore administration have been able to prevent tragedy? Sullivan defends Bush in his Salon.com article by emphasizing reports of a supposed Al Qaeda retaliation proposal that arrived on the president's desk, fatefully, one day before the attacks. "It was too late," he writes. "But it remains a fact that the new administration had devised in eight months a strategy that Bill Clinton had delayed for eight years." Yet the Post and other press accounts allow us to see that this is a ridiculous claim. Al Qaeda was not a static threat it took us eight years to discover; it was a rapidly growing cancer that only became terminal within the last few years. Clinton-bashers attempt to trace the beginning of the Al Qaeda era back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but bin Laden couldn't be linked to that attack until the 1995 arrest of Ramzi Yousef. And even then, he could only be classified as one of many hostile Arab terror financiers (as late as 1997 the Post still referred to him as a "wealthy Saudi businessman," not a terrorist). Real evidence of bin Laden's unique capability arrived only with the synchronized embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. At this point, the Clinton administration acted pretty darn fast, building up retaliation capability against a shadowy enemy ensconced in a no man's land in a politically hyper-sensitive region of the world. From 1998 onward, according to an earlier Post story, Clinton stationed two submarines in the Indian Ocean so as to be able to strike within six hours of reliable intelligence on bin Laden's location. The first 1998 cruise missiles fired into Afghanistan and Sudan reportedly missed bin Laden by just one hour. Looking to score political points at home, Republicans spun these attacks as a political ploy by the president to distract attention from the Lewinsky scandal; and the public, having just seen the eerily coincidental Wag the Dog, swallowed the spin. Nevertheless, Clinton authorized three more strikes in the next two years, though each was called off at the last second due to questionable intelligence. Sullivan's 8 years/8 months defense of Bush turns on the assumption that what landed on the president's desk on Sept. 10 was an immediate panacea, the glorious final solution that had eluded Clinton all those years. But foreign policy initiatives are notoriously long-term projects. The Bush proposal, favoring what the Post terms "phased escalation," would have taken at least as long to implement as Clinton's policy, along a similar gradual learning curve of trial and error. Corners might have been cut if Bush's people had been willing to build upon the successes and failures of the Clinton administration, but they weren't. Bush abandoned Clinton's high-alert submarine operations, which, between January and September 2001, might have done the job. He fought against international anti-money laundering accords that would have helped track down Al Qaeda financial assets; he abandoned a CIA-trained Uzbek insurgency force; and like Clinton, he abandoned the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. In reality, eight months does not amount to a success story for the formulation of Bush's anti-bin Laden policy. Rather, it's a catastrophe. The latest Post story reports that when Clinton's national security adviser Sandy Berger sat down with his successor Condoleezza Rice during the transition period, he told her she was "going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and Al Qaeda specifically than any other issue." In other words, this is a priority. But the Post also relates the story of Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, a top National Security Council staffer who stayed with Bush through May: He noticed a difference on terrorism. Clinton's Cabinet advisers, burning with the urgency of their losses to bin Laden in the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the [U.S.S.] Cole attack in 2000, had met "nearly weekly" to direct the fight, Kerrick said. Among Bush's first-line advisers, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" that kind of focus, he said. If Bush's advisers hadn't been so instinctively dismissive of all things Clinton, they might have had a policy within a month or two of Bush's inauguration, maximum. Yet certain basic factors of Bush's foreign policy in the spring and summer of 2001 suggest that he was fundamentally lost to the Al Qaeda threat. The story of Bush's sacrifice of foreign policy before the shrine of missile defense has already been told, but we should remember that one area of that sacrifice was the Islamic fundamentalist threat. Bush's first budget increased counterterrorism funding modestly -- to $13.6 billion from $12 billion. When concerned House members tried to make up for this by shifting $600 million away from missile defense funds, according to the latest Post account, none other than Donald Rumsfeld demanded that Bush threaten a veto. The only Middle East issue that the Bush administration apparently gave a damn about was Saddam Hussein. Throughout the spring the papers were full of reports of Colin Powell's efforts to tinker with Iraq "smart sanctions"; of Paul Wolfowitz's pining for a full-scale invasion; of a "Shultz/Weinberger" gulf opening between Powell and Rumsfeld on the issue. Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland started an April column thus: "President Bush is said to have empowered three administration working groups to think hard and devise one more new-and-improved U.S. policy on Iraq. Have no doubt: This means war." It's no secret why Iraq loomed so large: Saddam's continued existence was a stain on Bush's father's proudest presidential moment, the Gulf War. Dick Cheney, during the campaign, used to stop and take a deep breath before explaining his unique, impassioned antipathy for the enduring despot. The attention to Iraq was commendable, as was the attention to China and other issues. But as we now know, the prioritization was all wrong. Bush should have been talking with submarine captains in the Indian Ocean and CIA chiefs along the Afghan-Pakistan border. He should have been memorizing Pervez Musharraf's name. And here's where we can easily imagine a Gore administration unhampered by these factors and capable of intervening before disaster struck. Gore's foreign policy team would likely have been manned by Richard Holbrooke as secretary of state and Leon Fuerth as national security advisor. Both have demonstrated recently that they probably would have been immune to the two key factors which distracted the Bush team from the Al Qaeda threat: national missile defense and Saddam Hussein. Holbrooke was pointing out that the dangers of Al Qaeda were more serious than those affected by missile defense long before 9/11. On a trip to Europe in the spring of 2001, the former ambassador called Bush's passion for missile defense "almost a religious matter." Robert Kagan, the conservative foreign policy writer deeply connected to and influential in the Bush administration, subsequently devoted a whole Washington Post column to mocking Holbrooke and questioning his loyalty. He quoted him sardonically: "'We have to ask ourselves,' Holbrooke exhorted the Europeans, 'in what way are we really threatened.' Osama bin Laden, he noted, has no missiles." Fuerth, in turn, has risen to oppose the Iraq fixation; his last two op-eds in the Times and the Post were titled "One Terrorist at a Time" and "Not the Most Urgent Goal," respectively. Fuerth and like-minded thinkers, such as Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, have taken plenty of heat from influential conservatives, but their opposition to targeting Hussein has wisely prevailed for the time being. Would that it had been so in the summer of 2001, back when Mohammed Atta was putting the final touches on his plans. In the final analysis, it appears that whatever his flaws, Clinton responded in kind to the Al Qaeda threat as it existed in his time. Yet Bush -- who presided through the summer of 2001 when U.S. embassies across the world were buzzing with word of an impending attack -- did not. It's all there in the Times and the Post, if you're willing to see it
Maybe if Ken Starr hadn't preoccupied Clinton by wasting $60 million of taxpayer's money investigating Clinton's pecker, perhaps Bin Laden would have been captured or killed during the Clinton Administration! I've got an idea....let's spend the same amount on a Special Prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration's ties to the Enron debacle and see how much Bush Junior accomplishes with his never-ending "War on Terrorism". My guess would be...not a hell of a lot. Two can play this stupid game.
Maybe if Clinton hadn't been busy getting his balls blown in the Oval Office, then lying about it under oath, he wouldn't have had to deal with Ken Starr. Three can play this stupid game. I for one think that this madness will never stop unless the United States invades the entire middle east including Israel, and governs the whole region indefintely under martial law.
Mr. Clinton shouldn't be immune to criticism if there is some proof of responsibility there. Families of the WTC victims have been on "The Hill" recently putting together a case for those who should take the blame for this failure. Do you believe they are lowlifes?
No, he shouldn't be immune to criticism, but ultimately, only one person should be blamed for the WTC tragedy. Also, how do we know how Clinton would've reacted if 3,000 people would've been killed at once under his watch instead of 270 or so a multiple times? I bet he'd be doing the same thing as Bush is now, and Bush would be doing the same thing Clinton did then. Wasn't there a trial for the first WTC bombers?
Maybe if the politicians would quit playing political games and protect and serve this great country then both Sadam and his WMD would be nonexistant.
RM95 -- agreed..you can't lay all of this at the feet of Bill Clinton. i'm mildly disgusted with all of these congressional hearings regarding what we knew about 9/11 before 9/11, as well. the only thing regarding bill clinton in all this mess that makes me a bit upset is the whole "we're changing the way we conduct the war on terrorism by taking it to them first"...that was the day lewinsky testified. albright got on tv and said, "it's a new day in fighting terrorism" or something to that effect....and then....nothing. no evidence to back up any real policy shift. and i've seen interviews and tapes of bin laden saying that al qaeda didn't fear america because america didn't have the resolve to fight back. i think inaction on that front did ultimately cost lives...but i can't lay all of that at the feet of one man.
If Clinton goes and sends out 10,000 American troops to hunt down OBL in Afghanistan in the mid-90's, you'd have had a revolt in America. America had no appetite for war. The people did not sense any immediate danger, the economy was good, things were great here. He would never have had anything CLOSE to public support for the war. Congress blasted him for the missile attacks that went after OBL -- what do you think they would have done had he asked to actually put troops in harm's way? Everyone on this board would have been yelling and screaming about how ridiculous an idea that was. You'd think we'd have learned the simplest lesson in the world by now: You can't win a war without public support at home, and there was NO PUBLIC SUPPORT for going after OBL before 9/11. None. Nothing outside of something like 9/11 was going to change that. Sometimes it takes tragedies to create the necessary momentum to make good things happen - the same was true of Pearl Harbor. No way we can enter or win WW2 without it - the people just wouldn't have supported it. Backwards history using today's knowledge is nice, but its rarely actually based on looking at the realities of the time. If you want to play this little game, 9/11 wouldn't have happened if we hadn't funded & trained OBL in the first place - perhaps we should blame Reagan and Bush Sr instead?
Good read rimrocker. Hey Nomar, maybe we could use the blitzkrieg to get it done in a hurry. See you in the Reichstag.
No he isn't. He's working the drive-thru at a Burger King on Spencer Highway in Pasadena. He spoke to me when I drove through last week... "Would you like fries with that, you American infidel puppet of Zionism?" "No thanks, but can you give me an order of onion rings and supersize my order? Thanks so much."
