Clinton did not do enough.....

[LuvDuke]

Unless by killing people, you encourage even more people to become terrorists.

Ah, but you missed the clue. By "killing people", you're doing something. Whether that something is working or is counter-productive is irrelevant as long as you're doing something.

And sure as God made little green apples, sooner or later, this thread is going to evolve into "we conservatives want to kill the terrorists and you liberals want to kiss the terrorists".

On my mark, start the countdown ...................

 

[CapeCodTenor]

This belief is the problem. ALL of the "terrorists" will NEVER be killed.
That is something that anyone could have figured out before this "war" ever started.
Maybe if President Bush wasn't so busy with his YEE HAWing Bring it on iron fisting he would have taken his brain out of neutral long enough to figure it out for himself.
This war is not the answer and it never was.

Unless by killing people, you encourage even more people to become terrorists.

If you ignore your credit card bill, does it go away? As much as we all would hope it would, it won't. The same goes for terrorism, if we ignore it, it won't go away.

 

[LuvDuke]

If you ignore your credit card bill, does it go away? As much as we all would hope it would, it won't. The same goes for terrorism, if we ignore it, it won't go away.

A question please: Who said we should ignore terrorism?

 

[CapeCodTenor]

...kiss the terrorists".

On my mark, start the countdown ...................

Eeeewwwww. Who would want to kiss a bearded man...I know I wouldn't and I'm a bearded man, for the time being...it's coming off at the end of Nov.

 

[CapeCodTenor]

A question please: Who said we should ignore terrorism?

No one, I was merely making a point.

 

[TheDoctor]

Doctor, I am curious, but do you think Bush deserves all the blame for 9/11, because that is what your posts seem to say. Maybe it is just me.

8 years . . . 8 months.

Btw, both are at fault, and I am sticking to it.

Your fellow conservatives have a different theory i.e. that it is okay to blame President Clinton for Sept. 11 but it is treason to question any actions done or failed to have been done by bush that could have prevented Sept. 11. This editoral from the Washington Post may clarify this for you.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/28/AR2006092801454.html?nav=hcmodule

But not everyone was nonpartisan. On Oct. 4, 2001, a mere three weeks and a couple of days after the twin towers fell and the Pentagon was hit, there was Rush Limbaugh arguing on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page: "If we're serious about avoiding past mistakes and improving national security, we can't duck some serious questions about Mr. Clinton's presidency."

To this day I remain astonished at Limbaugh's gall -- and at his shrewdness. Republicans were arguing simultaneously that it was treasonous finger-pointing to question what Bush did or failed to do to prevent the attacks, but patriotic to go after Clinton. Thus did they build up a mythology that cast Bush as the tough hero in confronting the terrorist threat and Clinton as the shirker. Bad history. Smart politics.

There is more that President Clinton could have done to stop Bin Ladin but at least he tried. The record is now clear that bush and his adminstration downplayed terorism and in doing so gave Bin Ladin the key time to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. President Clinton had taken responsibility for his mistakes but the bushies have not done so and continue to push the

mythology that cast Bush as the tough hero in confronting the terrorist threat and Clinton as the shirker

I object to the that mythology and am glad to have a chance to poke holes in it. bush has failed in the war on terror and his war in Iraq has made us less safe. I will be glad to back off when the right wingers drop their myths and when bush takes responsibility (as President Clinton already has) for his mistakes. I doubt that the later will occur anytime soon.

 

[eclectics]

Did you spit it out of your nose? I was going for the "nose" shot.

Almost! Hey, we still have a month till elections. There is still time to hit the jackpot!

 

[dcentity2000]

Why would you be surprised by this being a fox news poll? They truly are fair and balanced..

Ridiculous!



Rich::

 

[eclectics]

Why would you be surprised by this being a fox news poll? They truly are fair and balanced..

Not a "nose" shot, but headed in the right direction! Thanks for the guffaw.

 

[salmoneous]

Eeeewwwww. Who would want to kiss a bearded man...I know I wouldn't and I'm a bearded man, for the time being...it's coming off at the end of Nov.

But, but, but, what about....

 

[salmoneous]

If you ignore your credit card bill, does it go away? As much as we all would hope it would, it won't. The same goes for terrorism, if we ignore it, it won't go away.

Nobody said we should ignore terrorism. Just that our goal in dealing with terrorism should be to reduce the terrorist threat, not just to kill a bunch of terrorists.

 

[TheDoctor]

There is more from Bob Woodward's book on the bushies failing to take actions to stop the Sept. 11 attacks. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003189479

The Woodward excerpt describes how, on July 10, 2001, CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters "to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. The mass of fragments made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately."

Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser. "For months," Woodward writes, "Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy... that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden.... Tenet and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

"Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming....

"But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the intelligence, asking: Could it all be a grand deception?"

Woodward describes the meeting, and the two officials' plea that the U.S. "needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden."

The result? "Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

"Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long....

"Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, Tenet thought, but she just didn't get it in time. He felt that he had done his job and been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

"Black later said, 'The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.'"'

This meeting was not reported to the Sept. 11 Commission because

the Post's Peter Baker reveals: "The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black 'felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about.'

The bushies had the opportunity to do something about Bin Ladin and decided not to do so. The claim that the bushies were doing as much as the Clinton Administration is just plain silly.

 

[TheDoctor]

The White House is hving to backtrack on the claim that Condi did not meet with George Tenet in July of 2001 as reported in Bob Woodward's book, State of Denial. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/washington/03ricecnd.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 — A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday....

When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.

Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.

Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about an impending Al Qaeda attack that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the Central Intelligence Agency had collected pointing to an impending Al Qaeda attack. But both current and former officials took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account that Mr. Tenet and his aides left the meeting in frustration, feeling as if Ms. Rice had ignored them.

Woodward is too good on the facts to get this key assertion wrong. Condi and the bushies ignored clear warnings about Al Qaeda and that helped leade to the Sept. 11 attacks.

 

[TheDoctor]

One of the intelligence professionals who was at the meeting where the potential attack on the US was discussed with Condi Rice rated the seriousness of the threat at a TEN on a scale of one to ten. http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/03/rice-urgent-threat/

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10″ that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again…

“The briefing was intended to `connect the dots’ contained in other intelligence reports and paint a very clear picture of the threat posed by bin Laden,” said the official, who described the tone of the report as “scary.”

Rice and the Bush administration ignored both this presentation and the August 6, 2001 PDB where it was disclosed that Bin Ladin was determined to attack America. The intelligence community did everything that it could to lay out the seriousness of the matter and the bush administration just ignored the issue.

 

[Charade]

Nobody said we should ignore terrorism. Just that our goal in dealing with terrorism should be to reduce the terrorist threat, not just to kill a bunch of terrorists.

How??

 

[denisenh]

Rice and the Bush administration ignored both this presentation and the August 6, 2001 PDB where it was disclosed that Bin Ladin was determined to attack America. The intelligence community did everything that it could to lay out the seriousness of the matter and the bush administration just ignored the issue.

They (Bush and pals) had to let it happen. Something had to happen so that they would have an "acceptable" reason to invade Iraq.
Thats what the current administration has boiled down to, the Bush agenda.
What a weeny.

 

[Charade]

They (Bush and pals) had to let it happen. Something had to happen so that they would have an "acceptable" reason to invade Iraq.
Thats what the current administration has boiled down to, the Bush agenda.
What a weeny.

So Bush let 9-11 happen so he could invade Iraq?? (two because 1 isn't enough...)

 

[denisenh]

So Bush let 9-11 happen so he could invade Iraq?? (two because 1 isn't enough...)

well, gee whiz, sure is starting to look that way.

He had a desire for an Iraq invasion at the start of his term and probably before hand, which was handed down form his daddyO, no doubt.

Ignored warnings handed down from the Clinton administration

He let bin laden go

and when all else fails for him he can always refer to 9-11 and how he is keeping America safe.

It worked for a while...lets see what the future holds.....what else comes to light.

 

[Charade]

well, gee whiz, sure is starting to look that way.

He had a desire for an Iraq invasion at the start of his term and probably before hand, which was handed down form his daddyO, no doubt.

Ignored warnings handed down from the Clinton administration

He let bin laden go

and when all else fails for him he can always refer to 9-11 and how he is keeping America safe.

It worked for a while...lets see what the future holds.....what else comes to light.

Regime change (method NOT specified) in Iraq was US policy created by the Clinton administration.

 

[salmoneous]

How??

For starters, by not invading other countries when we don't have to. It's now become clear that the war in Iraq has increased rather than decreased the terrorists threat. Let's not mkae that mistake with the next country.

Second, by not maintaining a network of prisions where innocent people are held and tortured without any recourse.