RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events "It's not about oil or Iraq..."

Quote:

---

Rob Kamphausen said:
whomod, that sounds like a lot of "what ifs," and even still, i simply disagree.

bush had nine months. for the president of the US, thats such a small period of time -- especially the first nine months, when weeks at a time are spent answering questions about your favorite shoe, your favorite meal, etc, etc.

i simply can't imagine how it would be possible to stop something on a scale of 9-11 within that brief a period of time.

you repeatedly claim how much clinton did to prevent terrorism, ....and yet even with all that, the US still suffered several high profile attacks during his term.

.

---

Quote:

---

On 26 February 1993, a car loaded with 1,200 pounds of explosives blew up in a parking garage under the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring about a thousand others. The blast did not, as its planners intended, bring down the towers — that was finally accomplished by flying two hijacked airliners into the twin towers on the morning of 11 September 2001.
Four followers of the Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman were captured, convicted of the World Trade Center bombing in March 1994, and sentenced to 240 years in prison each. The purported mastermind of the plot, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in 1995, convicted of the bombing in November 1997, and also sentenced to 240 years in prison. One additional suspect fled the U.S. and is believed to be living in Baghdad.


On 13 November 1995, a bomb was set off in a van parked in front of an American-run military training center in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indians. Saudi Arabian authorities arrested four Saudi nationals whom they claim confessed to the bombings, but U.S. officials were denied permission to see or question the suspects before they were convicted and beheaded in May 1996.

On 25 June 1996, a booby-trapped truck loaded with 5,000 pounds of explosives was exploded outside the Khobar Towers apartment complex which housed United States military personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen Americans and wounding about three hundred others. Once again, the U.S. investigation was hampered by the refusal of Saudi officials to allow the FBI to question suspects.
On 21 June 2001, just before the American statute of limitations would have expired, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted thirteen Saudis and an unidentified Lebanese chemist for the Khobar Towers bombing. The suspects remain in Saudi custody, beyond the reach of the American justice system. (Saudi Arabia has no extradition treaty with the U.S.)


On 7 August 1998, powerful car bombs exploded minutes apart outside the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding about 5,000 others. Four participants with ties to Osama bin Laden were captured, convicted in U.S. federal court, and sentenced to life in prison without parole in October 2001. Fourteen other suspects indicted in the case remain at large, and three more are fighting extradition in London.

On 12 October 2000, two suicide bombers detonated an explosives-laden skiff next to the USS Cole while it was refueling in Aden, Yemen, blasting a hole in the ship that killed 17 sailors and injured 37 others. No suspects have yet been arrested or indicted. The investigation has been hampered by the refusal of Yemini officials to allow FBI agents access to Yemeni nationals and other suspects in custody in Yemen.
(The USS Cole bombing occurred one month before the 2000 presidential election, so even under the best of circumstances it was unlikely that the investigation could have been completed before the end of President Clinton's term of office three months later.)

In August 1998, President Clinton ordered missile strikes against targets in Afghanistan in an effort to hit Osama bin Laden, who had been linked to the embassy bombings in Africa (and was later connected to the attack on the USS Cole). The missiles reportedly missed bin Laden by a few hours, and Clinton was widely criticized by many who claimed he had ordered the strikes primarily to draw attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. As John F. Harris wrote in The Washington Post:


In August 1998, when [Clinton] ordered missile strikes in an effort to kill Osama bin Laden, there was widespread speculation — from such people as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) — that he was acting precipitously to draw attention away from the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, then at full boil. Some said he was mistaken for personalizing the terrorism struggle so much around bin Laden. And when he ordered the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House after domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City, some Republicans accused him of hysteria.
. . . the federal budget on anti-terror activities tripled during Clinton's watch, to about $6.7 billion. After the effort to kill bin Laden with missiles in August 1998 failed — he had apparently left a training camp in Afghanistan a few hours earlier — recent news reports have detailed numerous other instances, as late as December 2000, when Clinton was on the verge of unleashing the military again. In each case, the White House chose not to act because of uncertainty that intelligence was good enough to find bin Laden, and concern that a failed attack would only enhance his stature in the Arab world.

. . . people maintain Clinton should have adapted Bush's policy promising that regimes that harbor terrorism will be treated as severely as terrorists themselves, and threatening to evict the Taliban from power in Afghanistan unless leaders meet his demands to produce bin Laden and associates. But Clinton aides said such a policy — potentially involving a full-scale war in central Asia — was not plausible before politics the world over became transformed by one of history's most lethal acts of terrorism.

Clinton's former national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger . . . said there [was] little prospect . . . that Pakistan would have helped the United States wage war against bin Laden or the Taliban in 1998, even after such outrages as the bombing of U.S. embassies overseas.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/clinton.htm

---

Quote:

---

"Clinton's advisors met nearly weekly on how to stop bin Laden...I didn't detect that kind of focus from the Bush adminsitration."
- Two Star General Donald Kerrick

---

Quote:

---

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.

---