Clinton did not do enough.....

[Charade]

President Clinton has done a valuable service by clearing the record and putting the bush record on trial.

So you think Clinton did all he could to prevent 9/11?

Or any of the other terrorist attacks on US interests before he left office?

 

[chorlick]

Now if people want to argue that both of them did what they thought was best at the time and it's only in retrospect we see the problems, that's still open for debate.[/QUOTE]



I have to agree with you on that one.

 

[caitycaity]

The ENTIRE government let us all down. The left, the right, the CIA, the FBI, and on, and on, and on, and on.

then ultimately it is us (citizens) at fault.

 

[bsnyder]

then ultimately it is us (citizens) at fault.

I don't know that I'd define it that way (fault), but I think you're saying what I've been saying. The entire electorate, not just our elected officials, didn't perceive the threat to be all that big of a deal. Not that there was no ackowledgement of the threat, but in hindsight, it's clear that we vastly underestimated it.

Is there anyone here on the DIS who voted in the 2000 election that based their vote on which candidate would fight Bin Laden harder?

 

[Charade]

Is there anyone here on the DIS who voted in the 2000 election that based their vote on which candidate would fight Bin Laden harder?

I didn't even know who OBL was in 2000. I doubt many people did.

 

[bsnyder]

I didn't even know who OBL was in 2000. I doubt many people did.

Based on this, I'm not sure Gore, Bush or CNN did either - no mention of OBL in this issues summary:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/resources/where.they.stand/

 

[caitycaity]

The entire electorate, not just our elected officials, didn't perceive the threat to be all that big of a deal. Not that there was no ackowledgement of the threat, but in hindsight, it's clear that we vastly underestimated it.

yes, i am agreeing with you.

i have taken a few classes on organizational dysfunction and the topic is really fascinating. for one of these classes i did my final paper on 9/11 and the events leading up to it.

there were some people in government who perceived the threat to be of supreme importance, but i think that most citizens and govt officials had a "it could never happen" mentality.

i also feel one of the faults of our country, politically speaking, is that citizens have abdicated too much responsibility to government and yet the government tends to be pretty tied into the whims of the people. the general public are pretty ill informed of current and global events. on the other hand, we have a bunch of elected officials whose primary goal in most cases is reelection and the maintenance of their own political power (both democrat and republican, not trying to be partisan here). because we have elected officials caring about the opinions of people who generally don't know the first thing about foreign policy, i think a lot of times foreign policy takes a back burner to domestic issues even when it probably shouldn't. prior to 9/11 if a president had diverted the necessary resources into reform of the intelligence community, national security, and going after al qaeda, i think they would have gotten a lot of heat from the electorate, other politicians, and our own party. while ultimately i think our system of checks and balances is a good one, it can cause a lot of problems and inefficiency too.

 

[caitycaity]

Based on this, I'm not sure Gore, Bush or CNN did either - no mention of OBL in this issues summary

don't know for sure about bush/cnn, but i'm sure gore did. i was an international affairs major in college and i took a lot of classes on the middle east. we discussed obl and al qaeda in some of my classes. i'm sure bush knew about him after he was elected, but prior to 9/11 as well.

cnn and the politicians just knew that 99.9% of the electorate didn't care.

 

[bsnyder]

yes, i am agreeing with you.

i have taken a few classes on organizational dysfunction and the topic is really fascinating. for one of these classes i did my final paper on 9/11 and the events leading up to it.

there were some people in government who perceived the threat to be of supreme importance, but i think that most citizens and govt officials had a "it could never happen" mentality.

i also feel one of the faults of our country, politically speaking, is that citizens have abdicated too much responsibility to government and yet the government tends to be pretty tied into the whims of the people. the general public are pretty ill informed of current and global events. on the other hand, we have a bunch of elected officials whose primary goal in most cases is reelection and the maintenance of their own political power (both democrat and republican, not trying to be partisan here). because we have elected officials caring about the opinions of people who generally don't know the first thing about foreign policy, i think a lot of times foreign policy takes a back burner to domestic issues even when it probably shouldn't. prior to 9/11 if a president had diverted the necessary resources into reform of the intelligence community, national security, and going after al qaeda, i think they would have gotten a lot of heat from the electorate, other politicians, and our own party. while ultimately i think our system of checks and balances is a good one, it can cause a lot of problems and inefficiency too.

I'd add something to this that's also a problem, and particularly germane to 9/11 and "homeland" threats, while it doesn't really come into play when discussing the stakes of something purely domestic like oh, say Medicare policy. And that is the overwhelming natural human instinct to point fingers, engage in CYA and blame "the other guy". And in an bureaucracy as massive and complex as ours, that tendency is bound to reach epic proportions when we have something as shocking and fear-inducing as 9/11.

I'm curious if you addressed that at all in your paper?

 

[bsnyder]

don't know for sure about bush/cnn, but i'm sure gore did. i was an international affairs major in college and i took a lot of classes on the middle east. we discussed obl and al qaeda in some of my classes. i'm sure bush knew about him after he was elected, but prior to 9/11 as well.

cnn and the politicians just knew that 99.9% of the electorate didn't care.

That was a little bit tongue-in-cheek, Caity. I had heard of OBL too. And I was still shocked to the core by 9/11.

My only point with the link was that it wasn't perceived as a campaign issue, by the candidates, or the media, and certainly not by the voters. That's why I think the current "blame game" is so pointless and stupid. We already had the investigations about the failures - not that it really settled a lot of the questions, witness the Clinton interview and all these new threads about how "my guy" fought harder than "your guy" did. Egged on by the unserious media....

 

[caitycaity]

And that is the overwhelming natural human instinct to point fingers, engage in CYA and blame "the other guy". And in an bureaucracy as massive and complex as ours, that tendency is bound to reach epic proportions when we have something as shocking and fear-inducing as 9/11.

hell yes. think about the kinds of things that devolve to finger pointing and cya in our government *every day*. none of which even remotely reach the level of 9/11.

and there is probably no feasible solution to that either. on paper the president has control over the bureaucracy, but in reality it's the 4th branch of government.

can you tell i am really interested in bureaucracy? sorry to semi-hijack this thread!

 

[Luv'sTink]

W. had 8 months of which he was trying to take over as President and deal with Osama. Clinton had years! Clinton was only worried about who was under his desk and what they were doing!

 

[Alicnwondrln]

If there is a single DIS poster who does not agree with the following - "Neither Bill Clinton nor George W Bush did enough to stop alQaeda from attacking us on 9/11" they are a complete idiot.

Now if people want to argue that both of them did what they thought was best at the time and it's only in retrospect we see the problems, that's still open for debate.

so true

 

[Disney Doll]

My opinion is that a lot of our former Presidents missed a lot. I think a lot of the reason for it was in our mindset as Americans. We never expected "them" to bring it to "us". All of the various attacks, except for the OK City bombings and the first WTC attack, were not on our soil. OK City was perpetrated by an American, the first WTC attacks had little major impact, so most folks "forgot" about it rather quickly.

We also don't think like radical Muslim terrorists. I have read several very good articles, most of which agree that this terror war has nothing to do with oil, Israel or anything other than the radical Muslim faction's desire to have the entire world follow their form of Muslim practice. It is a war with our way of life, not about oil or our alliance with Israel or anything else. And that is something that we, as Americans, just cannot understand. For the most part, most of us cannot fathom hatred for hatred's sake, yet that is what we are dealing with.

Did President Clinton "miss" some things? Sure he did. But so did Bush I, Reagan, Carter. I'm not quite old enough to recall if there were any real radical Muslim perpetrated acts under President Ford's administration...I think we were still more in the "Cold War" years back then.

Bottom line...a lot of us missed it because we thought it could never happen here, would never happen in the USA, would never happen to us because we are Americans. 9/11 eradicated what was probably our false sense of security by making us painfully aware that it could happen here.

This war is a war like no other. I don't know what the answer is, but I do truly and wholeheartedly believe that we must be vigilant for acts of terrorism to the best of our ability. They don't want us out of Israel, they don't want us to leave their oil alone...they want us Muslim or dead.

As far as President Clinton's reaction during that interview...well, I am sure he felt like he was being attacked, so he fought back. Understandable, although probably not his best course of action because it is getting him into the news again at a time when Hillary is probably trying to "feel out" her options for running for President, and this is negative press which will reflect on her and has put her in the position of having to support and defend her husband's behavior once again.

 

[TheDoctor]

So you think Clinton did all he could to prevent 9/11?

Or any of the other terrorist attacks on US interests before he left office?

Yes, President Clinton actually did something as compared to the nothing done by the bushies. This quote sums the matter up very well

"I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team."

 

[Charade]

Yes, President Clinton actually did something as compared to the nothing done by the bushies. This quote sums the matter up very well

Ah yes. That vague (and known before Bush became President) threat that OBL was determined to do something to the US at some point in time.

The bottomline is they (OBL and friends) found SERIOUS holes in our security measures and exploited them. They are fully responsible for the attacks.

Hopefully we can stay one step ahead of them.

I'm sure you've read it, but here's the Aug 6th PDB again. Of course SEVENTY FBI field investigations OBL related is "nothing".

http://www.cnn.com/2004/images/04/10/whitehouse.pdf

 

[N.Bailey]

Yes, President Clinton actually did something as compared to the nothing done by the bushies. This quote sums the matter up very well

I have refrained from posting this because I see it as playing the same old tiring game that gets us nowhere. I will never give either side a free pass. YES, Clinton passed the buck, TOO. Your failure to acknowledge that really leaves me dumbfounded. So, answer me this, if the presidency was SO perfect:

After TWA Flight 800 was downed in 1996, President Clinton appointed Al Gore to chair the White House Commission on Aviation Safety. MANY expected Gore to center on fighting terrorism as part of his proposal. That is after all, why he was appointed in the first place, is it not? So, why don't you tell us exactly what Al Gore did? I'll tell you what he did, he lined his pockets full of pay out money at minimal for the Democratic party (to the tune of almost a half a million) from various airlines, but my guess is, he got some nice little kick backs personally too.

In the end, he did propose a few things, but he NEVER gave them a deadline for ANY of these things, did he? Do you think tougher airline security may have prevented 9/11 altogether? I guess we'll never know, will we?

 

[aquinas]

The bolded line in the second article typifies the hero worship of Clinton on the Dis by some. Passion but not reason. What a minute, I think that describes most liberals.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009001

With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.
In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.

By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.

• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.

• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.

• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.

• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.

• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.

Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.

• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.

• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.

When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"


http://www.richardminiter.com/Archives/2006/09/clinton.html

September 27, 2006
Clinton and his record
Here is extended take on former President Clinton's sharp exchange with Chris Wallace, which appears in today's Wall Street Journal. You can read it at that link for free.
Here are some quick additional thoughts:I don't think that Clinton's rage was calculated or planned. Wallace said that off-camera Clinton threatened to fire his aides if he had to endure another television interview like that one. Also, his incoherent anger did not advance the positive case for his record (capturing Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in 1995, stopping the Millenium plots in 1999, arming the Predator spy drone plane in 2000 and so on).It was accusatory, contradictory and times flat wrong. I could make a better case for his Administration than he did. Still, his base wants to give him credit for his passion, not his pure reason. That is not a hopeful sign for them or the country

 

[aquinas]

More Clinton failures, lies, and revisionism. Just more of Clinton trying to rewrite history. As if his library wasnt a big enough attempt at revisionism

http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/09/what_bill_clint_1.html

 

[TheDoctor]

Wrong. The Democrats are looking at facts. Here is an example of a fact that demonstates the differences between the bushies and the Clinton administration. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/washington/27hillary.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

....the 9/11 Commission Report found that after President Clinton received intelligence warnings in 1998, he immediately mobilized his National Security Council, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. while also increasing security and putting airports and airlines on high alert. By contrast, he said, the commission found no indication of any further discussion before Sept. 11 among President Bush and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an attack by Al Qaeda in the United States, even after Mr. Bush received an August 2001 briefing that Mr. bin Laden intended to attack inside the United States.

“President Clinton saw the warnings and took action,’’ Mr. Reines said. “President Bush saw the warnings and took no action.’’

Is that simple. The bushies did nothing whatsoever and the Clinton Administration at least listen to briefings and tried.