Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
The Blame-America's-Ex-President-First Crowd
exerpt from al franken
Six months after 9/11, the Gallup Poll of Islamic Countries found that an overwhelming majority of those surveyed believed the at-tacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been the work of Arabs. Well-educated Egyptians and Saudis believed that the Israelis were behind the murder of three thousand inno¬cents on 9/11, in large part because of articles in their countries' of¬ficial state newspapers. One of the widely disseminated stories was that no Jews died in the collapse of the Trade Towers because they had received calls telling them not to go to work that day.
To tell you the truth, I got the Jew call. I had an office in the Trade Center where I used to do most of my writing. The call came from former New York mayor Ed Koch. "Al," he told me, "don't go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul."
Actually, I watched the events of that awful day from Minneapo¬lis, where I was visiting my mom. Mom's in a nursing home, so I was staying at a hotel. That morning, as I grabbed some coffee, I noticed people huddled around a TV. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Must have been a commuter plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack or something. Then the second plane hit. It was sickening. Then came the Pentagon. We were under attack.
Somehow, I got through to my wife in Manhattan. She was fine, at home on the Upper West Side, about five miles north of the Trade Center. My son was at school on the Upper East Side. My daughter was away at college. As I watched the first tower co lapse, I was stunned. But I still couldn't register the magnitude what was happening, even as the second one went down.
I spent the rest of the day at the nursing home watching tv
with my mom. She didn't understand what had happened?as if any of us really did. A friend of mine watched with his elderly mother in Queens. As he left that evening, she said to him, "At least no one was hurt."
That night, like all Americans, I just kept watching. Giuliani was masterful. Bush seemed a little shaky.
On Wednesday, I couldn't reach my family. I desperately wanted to be home in New York. The airport was closed, of course. But Northwest said they'd start flying on Thursday, so instead of driving back, I played golf. In the charity tournament for my mom's nursing home where I had been billed as the celebrity guest. It was a very weird day for golf. Everyone was there to support the nursing home, but we all felt funny enjoying the beautiful day after the ugliest day in American history. At the closing ceremony, as I thanked the nurses who take care of my mom (she can be difficult), I started to choke up.
Thursday, I got a reservation on an afternoon flight to La-Guardia. Dropped my rental off at the airport Hertz. Just as I got to the Northwest ticket counter, they announced that the airport was closing down because of a security threat. I did a one-eighty and ran back to the Hertz counter, where I was told they were now charging $300 a day for cars. The world was falling apart, and I was being bilked.
"So, let me get this straight," I said. "Hertz is taking advantage of a horrific tragedy to jack up the price of your cars?" Yes. But the woman recognized me as the guy who had just turned in his car rented at the pre-terrorist-attack rate. So she gave me the same rate, plus a reasonable drop-off fee in New York. America was pulling together.
It was late afternoon. I left the Twin Cities, determined to drive straight through, listening to local radio and NPR. On September 11, 2001, NPR had more foreign correspondents abroad than any other network news organization in the United States. Americans, so the other networks thought (probably correctly), had lost in¬terest in the world.
Listening to twenty straight hours of coverage as I drove alone through the heartland, I was overwhelmed with the enormity of what had happened. Friday afternoon, I pulled into a truck stop in Eastern Pennsylvania to watch President Bush lead a memorial service at the National Cathedral. For twelve bucks, I got a room with a bed, a shower, and a TV. I showered, changed into some clean underwear, and, lying in bed, watched the memorial and wept.
In times of crisis, people often respond by instinctively doing the things they find most comforting. For many Republicans, then, it is hardly surprising that their way of coping with the horror of 9/11 was to attack Bill Clinton.
Some attacks were more instinctive than others. A clearly rat¬tled Orrin Hatch was all over the news that day, blaming Clinton because he had "de-emphasized" the military. Hatch was also the first to confirm al Qaeda's involvement by disclosing classified in¬tercepts between associates of Osama bin Laden about the attack. Asked about it on ABC News two days later, a miffed Donald Rumsfeld said Hatch's leak was the kind that "compromises our sources and methods" and "inhibits our ability to find and deal with the terrorists who commit this kind of act." Thanks, Orrin.
So if it hadn't been for Hatch, we probably would've gotten bin Laden right away. The disclosure that al Qaeda was responsible did allow Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to identify the "root of the problem" just hours after the attack: "We had Bill Clinton backing off, letting the Taliban go, over and over again."
The right-wing media followed suit. The Washington Times blamed Clinton. The New York Post blamed Clinton. You know who Rush Limbaugh blamed? Clinton. The National Review's White House correspondent Byron York wrote that Clinton's "record is a richly detailed manual of how not to conduct a war on terrorism." Within two days, Newt Gingrich was blaming Clinton for the attacks because of his "pathetically weak, ineffective ability to focus and stay focused." You really got to give Gingrich credit
for how hard he tried to disrupt Clinton's focus: His Republican-run House conducted dozens of hostile investigations against the President.
But it had kind of been a waste of Gingrich's time. Clinton, as I will demonstrate below, focused more on terrorism than any pre¬vious president. A month before Clinton left office, his adminis¬tration was praised by two former Reagan counterterrorism officials. "Overall, I give them very high marks," Robert Oakley, who served as ambassador for counterterrorism in the Reagan State Department, told the Washington Post. "The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama, which made him stronger." Oakley's successor in the Reagan administration, Paul Bremer, dis¬agreed slightly. Bremer, who is currently the civilian administrator in Iraq, told the Post he believed the Clinton administration had "correctly focused on bin Laden." Notice the word "focused" next to the words "on bin Laden." I'm talking to you, Newt. And all of you "Blame-Clinton-Firsters."
Right-wingers like to call us the "Blame-America-First Crowd." But they've blamed Clinton, who's not just an American, but was the President, virtually nonstop. And Clinton was not just the President. He was the last elected president, who received more votes than any other candidate running against him. In two straight elections! So who's blaming America? The left, which is blaming the terrorists? Or the right, which is blaming a twice-elected Pres¬ident of the United States?
But, you know what, I don't want to get into a whole partisan politics thing here. Not in this book, anyway. We'll leave that for my next book, I FVcking Hate Those Right-Wing Motherfuckers!, due out in October 2004. I'm hoping it will "fire up the troops" for the final weeks of the campaign season.
No, this book, the one you are reading now, is about giving both sides a fair shake and getting to the bottom of the big issues that face us all as America transitions into the twenty-first cen¬tury. Who was to blame for 9/11, other than the terrorists? It's an important question, one that serious-minded people want an-
swered. It's also one that less serious people like Sean Hannity are curious about. And I think it's time to go to the record with an open mind and, more important, an open heart.
Anyone with an open mind and an open heart must admit that, as with the budget deficit, Reagan's antiterror record was a disas¬ter. Radical Islamic terrorists killed more Americans during his ad-ministration than during any before, and more than would die under Bush Sr. and Clinton combined. Between the 1983 embassy and Marine barracks bombings in Beirut and the destruction of Pan Am flight 103, nearly five hundred American lives were lost. Reagan's only direct response was a single bombing run against Libya in 1986.
To be fair, two days after the Marine barracks bombing, Rea¬gan did invade Grenada. Although he cut and ran in Lebanon, which might have been interpreted as capitulation, I think his bold attack on Grenada sent a clear message to violent Muslim extrem¬ists: If you attack us, we'll invade a Club Med.
The Great Communicator scored another direct hit in the fight against terror by supplying arms to violent Muslim extremists among the Afghani Mujahedeen, as well as to his friends in Iran and Iraq. Crazy, you say? Crazy like a fox, say I!
Now, the Gipper wasn't the kind of president who saw terrorism just in terms of black and white. No, Reagan distinguished between good terrorists and bad terrorists. He loved his terrorist death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, and most of all, Nicaragua. Enough to vi¬olate the Constitution to support the Contras as they raped and tor¬tured nuns. Bad terrorists, on the other hand, were those who used terror irresponsibly. See, Reagan saw the shades of gray, where a less nuanced politician may have only seen unmitigated evil.
On to Bush Sr. No huge terrorist attacks, thank goodness. And there was no way he could have known that Ramzi Yousef and a vast network of violent Muslim extremists were planning the World Trade Center bombing that would take place February 26, 1993. You may remember that no one blamed Bush Sr. for this bombing of the World Trade Center by radical Islamic terrorists.
After all, it did happen on Clinton's watch. He had been president for thirty-eight days.
The only tiny little thing I fault Bush Sr. for is the way he han¬dled Afghanistan. After he continued arming his violent Muslim extremist friends there, the Soviets eventually withdrew in early 1989. Bush promptly implemented the top-secret Project Neglect, which consisted of abandoning (or "neglecting") Afghanistan and allowing it to become a breeding ground for anti-U.S. terrorist training camps. As you will see, Project Neglect would prove a useful template for the far more extensive Operation Ignore put into effect during the first few months of his son's presidency.
In his four State of the Union speeches, George Herbert Walker Bush said the word "terror" only once, in the context of the "environmental terrorism" perpetrated when Saddam set fire to the oil fields. That was it. Bush Sr. cared even less about terror than he did about the economy. Stupid, stupid.
Thirty-eight days after taking office, when the World Trade Cen¬ter was attacked the first time, the handsome, brilliant young Pres¬ident Clinton learned a painful lesson about the consequences of ignoring the terrorist menace. He swung into action. No, he didn't invade a Caribbean nation. Though later he did help restore democracy to Haiti. The way Clinton responded to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was to capture, try, convict, and imprison those responsible. Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wall Khan Amin Shah are all currently behind bars. You can visit them and ask them if they think Clinton was tough on terror. I hear they enjoy having visitors.
You can ask them, too, about the Clinton administration's abil¬ity to thwart planned terrorist attacks. They were involved in fur¬ther plots to kill the Pope and blow up twelve U.S. jetliners simultaneously. But neither happened. And neither did the huge at-tacks that were planned against the UN Headquarters, the FBI building, the Israeli embassy in Washington, the LA and Boston
airports, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Wash¬ington Bridge. Why? Because Clinton thwarted them. He thwarted them all. Why, he even thwarted a terrorist truck bomb plot against the U.S. embassy in Tirana, Albania.
That's a lot of thwarting. How did he do that? Well, for one thing he tripled the counterterrorism budget for the FBI. And doubled counterterrorism funding overall. And rolled up al Qaeda cells in more than twenty countries. And created a top-level national security post to coordinate all federal counter-terrorism activity.
His first crime bill contained stringent antiterrorism legisla¬tion. As did his second. His administration sponsored a series of simulations to see how local, state, and federal officials should co-ordinate their responses to a terrorist strike. He created a national stockpile of drugs and vaccines (including forty million doses of smallpox vaccine). He coaxed, cajoled, and badgered foreign lead¬ers to join in the fight internationally or to do more within their own borders. And a huge long list of other stuff.
"By any measure available, Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him," Bar-ton Gellman reported in his definitive four-part series for the Washington Post. Clinton's, he wrote, was the "first administra¬tion to undertake a systematic anti-terrorist effort."
Now, you know how Washington is. It's almost impossible to get anything done unless both parties are willing to put politics aside and work together. So, on this counterterrorism stuff, you're thinking the Republicans must have been cooperating the whole way. Isn't that what you're thinking? If so, I wish I lived in the same fantasy world as you. No, once the Republicans took hold of Congress, they fought Clinton with the same bitterness that the hostile Whig Congress fought President Polk during the storied second half of his first term. I still get angry thinking about that.
Just as the Whigs fought Polk every inch of the way on tariff reform, so did Republicans fight Clinton on counterterrorism spending. When Clinton asked for more antiterrorism funding in
1996, Orrin "Loose Lips" Hatch objected. "The administration would be wise to utilize the resources Congress has already pro¬vided before it requests additional funding."
The year before, after the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, Republicans rejected Clinton's proposed expansion of the intelli¬gence agencies' wiretap authority in order to combat terrorism. Speaker Gingrich explained his opposition by questioning the FBI's integrity. On Fox News Sunday, Gingrich said, "When you have an agency that turns nine hundred personnel files over to peo¬ple like Craig Livingstone . . . it's very hard to justify giving that agency more power." Gingrich, of course, was making a remark about Filegate, one of the many Fox-hyped investigations that yielded zip and then fizzled out. It is unusual to see a man of Gin¬grich's integrity compromise national security in order to score a cheap political point. Just proves that even the finest of our public servants can slip now and then.
Gingrich was more supportive in 1998, when Clinton struck targets in Sudan and Afghanistan with Tomahawk missiles in re¬taliation for terrorist strikes against our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. "The President did exactly the right thing," said Gin¬grich. "By doing this we're sending the signal there are no sanctu¬aries for terrorists." See? He's not so bad.
And that's why I just know there must be some good explana¬tion for why, on September 13, 2001, Newt said on Fox, "The les¬son has to be that firing a few Tomahawks, dropping a few bombs totally inadequate," and implored Bush to "recognize that the ton policy failed." On the surface this might seem to be a spite-y worded direct contradiction to his earlier position. But I think maybe Newt was having some trouble at home with his new wife, former staffer he started porking while he was still married to second wife. I mean, when good people say hurtful things, there's always something going on inside that none of us can truly w.
Immediately after the embassy bombings, Clinton issued a presidential directive authorizing the assassination of Osama bin
Laden. Assassinate bin Laden? Amen, I say. Sean Hannity, though, has devoted a substantial amount of time, both on the air and in his book, to pretending this never happened and criticizing Clinton for not having the balls to do it. On his show, he yammers a lot about Reagan's Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the assassina¬tion of foreign heads of state. Watch Hannity on TV, or listen to him on radio. He'll bring it up. It's one of the eleven things he knows.'
The fact that Osama isn't actually a foreign head of state and that Clinton issued his presidential directive to assassinate him didn't stop Hannity from writing in his book about a February 2001 episode of Hannity and Colmes on the topic. Guest racist David Horowitz is quoted as saying: "We can protect ourselves from ter¬rorist threats like Osama bin Laden. It would be nice if the CIA were able to assassinate him."
Hannity writes about his own reaction: "Amen, I thought." What is his deal, anyway?
The final al Qaeda attack of the Clinton Era came on October 12, 2000. Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the USS Cole, killing seventeen of our sailors. Clinton decided to take the fight against al Qaeda to the highest level possible. Instead of funding and arming them like Reagan, or ignoring them like Bush, Clinton decided to destroy them. He put Richard Clarke, the legendary bulldog whom he had appointed as the first national antiterrorism coordinator, in charge of coming up with a comprehensive plan to take out al Qaeda.
'The other ten are: 1) Cutting taxes doubles revenues. 2) Democrats who oppose tax cuts for the rich are waging "class warfare." 3) Reagan won the Cold War by putting the Pershing II Missiles into Europe. 4) Democrats are on the wrong side of history. 5) Democrats, not Republicans, are the party of "race baiting," be-cause Democrats accuse racists of racism. 6) A higher percentage of Republican than of Democratic senators voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which means that the Republicans are the party of civil rights. 7) All education problems will be solved by vouchers. 8) Clinton gutted the military. 9) He's not going to sit here and listen to your talking points. 10) Clinton had a chance to get Osama bin Laden from the Sudan in 1996, but blew it. (See box.)
Reliable Sources
In Let Freedom Ring, Hannity outlines a charge that he frequently makes both on television and on the radio: that Clinton let bin Laden slip from his grasp. He writes,
It's truly astonishing. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and their liberal al-lies on Capitol Hill were offered Osama bin Laden by the Su¬danese government, and they turned the offer down. They could have taken him into custody and begun unraveling his terrorist network almost six years ago. But they didn't. And now more than three thousand innocent Americans have paid with their blood.
That is astonishing. Hard to think of a more serious charge. You want to be damned sure you have that one locked down pretty tight before you put it in print.
But knowing what we already know about Sean Hannity and the stan¬dards to which he holds himself, what are the chances that this whole charge is just baloney?
His entire case comes from a guy named Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American who claims to have transmitted the offer as a middleman be¬tween the U.S. and Sudan. I got the story on Ijaz from former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and from Daniel Benjamin, past director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and now senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Berger only had to meet once with Ijaz to determine that he was an un¬reliable freelancer, pursuing his own financial interests. Ijaz was an in-vestment banker with a huge stake in Sudanese oil.
Ijaz had urged Berger to lift sanctions against Sudan. Why the sanc¬tions? Because Sudan was and remains a notorious sponsor of terrorism, harboring Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda. Also, the Sudanese regime is the leading state sponsor of slavery and is considered by many to be genocidal. And totally untrustworthy. Ijaz, however, was arguing their case. As Benjamin said of Ijaz, "Either he allowed himself to be manipu¬lated, or he's in bed with a bunch of genocidal terrorists."
Ijaz said that Sudan was ready to hand over bin Laden. The U.S. does not conduct diplomacy through self-appointed private individuals. When the U.S. talked to Sudan, there was no such offer. The U.S. pursued every lead and tried to negotiate. Nothing.
The story does have a happy ending. Ijaz now has a job as foreign af¬fairs analyst for the Fox News Channel.
What unfolded became the subject of a shocking cover story in the August 12, 2002, Time magazine, which I will now take credit for having read.
Working furiously, Clarke produced a strategy paper that he presented to Sandy Berger and other national security principals on December 20, 2000. The plan was an ambitious one: break up al Qaeda cells and arrest their personnel; systematically attack finan¬cial support for its terrorist activities; freeze its assets; stop its fund¬ing through fake charities; give aid to governments having trouble with al Qaeda (Uzbekistan, the Phillipines, and Yemen); and, most significantly, scale up covert action in Afghanistan to eliminate the training camps and reach bin Laden himself. Clarke proposed bulking up support for the Northern Alliance and putting Special Forces troops on the ground in Afghanistan. As a senior Bush ad-ministration official told Time, Clarke's plan amounted to "every-thing we've done since 9/11."
Remember how I mentioned that the National Review's Byron York wrote that Clinton's "record is a richly detailed manual on how not to combat terrorism"? Well, if you take out the word "not," you get a pretty good description of the plan: "a richly de-tailed manual on how to combat terrorism." So Byron was just one word away from understanding the Clinton antiterror legacy.
But the plan was never carried out. In its place Clinton's suc¬cessor, George W. Bush, and his national security team would con¬ceive and execute a different plan entirely. A plan called Operation Ignore.