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Date Posted: 16:15:42 06/21/03 Sat
Author: Sage
Author Host/IP: qam1c-sif-39.monroeaccess.net / 12.27.215.40
Subject: Looking elsewhere for truth Part 1

We all know Hillary's book is nothing more than a lie-filled damage control PR campaign. Vote.com sent me a complimentary chapter from Dick Morris's new book. I don't expect the full truth from anyone, however his views may shed a little more light on murky subjects. This is long, but I thought you might "enjoy" the free read.

Off With Their Heads - Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists In American Politics, Media, Business by Dick Morris

Après Moi, Le Deluge:
How Clinton Left Ticking Terror Time Bombs For Bush To Discover

As King Louis XV lay dying, he ruminated about the state of the pre-revolutionary French kingdom his son would soon inherit. Every-where he looked, he saw peril-the anger of the peasants, the arrogance of the nobility, the unfairness of the tax system. Sadly, he reflected that the young man who would become Louis XVI faced tough times. Old King Louis may not have known that his son and his daughter-in-law, Marie Antoinette, would lose their heads to the guillotine, but he must have had some sense of looming catastrophe. "Après moi, le deluge," he said. After me, the disaster.

As Bill Clinton left office in January 2001, America was outraged by his final insult to the integrity of his office-the pardons he granted to the rich, corrupt, and underserving. But only months later we learned of his final, horrific insult to us-that he had bequeathed to George W. Bush three ticking time bombs that would shortly explode: al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea.

President Calvin Coolidge's name was forever blackened after the apparently prosperous economy he left his successor, Herbert Hoover, imploded in a stock market crash seven months later. If history is just, President Bill Clinton's will likewise be blamed for leaving George W. Bush a nation unaware of, and unprotected from, the deadly peril that hit seven months later.

How much did he know? Everything he needed to. Al Qaeda was no unknown force to Bill Clinton: The terrorist group had struck the United States repeatedly on his watch, bombing the World Trade Center, the U.S.S. Cole, two U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and our embassies in Africa. Iraq had kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors, and it was diverting most of the $2 billion per year it was getting in oil money to buy and develop arms. And American intelligence had found that North Korea was secretly building nuclear weapons in vast, under-ground caverns, violating a commitment it made to Clinton in 1994.

Clinton knew where all three time bombs lay. His national security people even briefed Bush's incoming administration on the dangers of al Qaeda as they left office. But Clinton had done little to catch al Qaeda; he'd done nothing to rein in Iraq; and he had actively covered for North Korea as it violated its treaty commitments.

As he left the White House, he could well have said: Après moi, le deluge.

To understand how to deal with the enemies we now face, we must look hard at the Clinton administration's failures to face them down during his eight years at the helm. This inquiry is not an exercise in partisan recrimination. Nor is it merely an opening salvo in the historical debate about Clinton's role in fighting terror. Rather, it represents an urgent attempt to pin down how we got into trouble, to help us in get-ting out of it. We need to grasp the causes of our current predicaments before we can grapple with the solutions.

But one thing we do know: For years, Bill Clinton swept these three problems under the White House rug as they grew more dangerous and more immediate. And so, lest he reach too early for the role of Democratic spokesman, I call upon us all to look at his record on terrorism and join me in calling: OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Back in 1996, in one of my last days in the Clinton White House, the president and I discussed how history would view him.

"I think your place in history will rest on three big things," I said. The president grunted, a cue to proceed. "First, I think you have to make welfare reform work. I think you have to implement the balanced budget plans you've laid out. And finally, I think you have to break the back of international terrorism, by economic and military action against the terrorist states."

President Clinton was in a philosophical mood as we chatted by phone that Sunday morning, August 4, 1996. He had just signed the welfare reform bill; now, poised for a big reelection victory in the fall, he wanted to talk about presidents, history, and his own administration. We discussed each of the forty men who had held the office before him, dividing the eighteen we liked the best into three tiers. That left twenty-two out in the cold.

"Where do I fit in?" he asked.
"Right now, to be honest, I think you're borderline third tier," I said, choosing my words carefully. "It's too early to rank you yet, but you're right on the cusp of making third tier."
"I think that's about right," he replied, to my relief. Clinton never liked sycophancy. Unless you criticized him as harshly as he usually did himself, he didn't take you seriously. "What do you think I need to do to become first tier?" he asked.
"You can't be first tier"-I broke the bad news gently-"unless unanticipated historical forces put you there."
"Like a war," he agreed. "Okay, second tier?"
I replied by reciting my list-welfare reform, balancing the budget, and fighting terrorism. "You had hoped to do it [break terrorism] with the peace process, but [Israeli Prime Minister Shimon] Peres's defeat closed that door. Now you have to smash it militarily, and through sanctions."

Clinton's welfare reform legislation has proven more successful than even its most ardent supporters had dreamed. Reducing welfare rolls by more than half, it has simultaneously led to an almost one-third reduction in poverty. He not only balanced the budget but generated huge surpluses. Even after he left office, the United States was well on its way to paying off the national debt when the double whammy of the 9/11 attacks and the usual Bush family economic slump sent us back into red ink. But once the economy regains its footing and the terrorism crisis passes, the sound fiscal course on which Clinton helped to put the nation will likely continue where it left off in 2001.

But on the war on terror, Clinton was an utter and total failure. His record of inaction is bad enough, but his inability to grasp the dimensions of the issue, as I witnessed it in our conversations, was worse. In our time this may have become a trite phrase, but there's simply no other way to put it: He just didn't get it.

Clinton knew every statistic, argument, and nuance of the issues he had made his own-welfare reform, deficit reduction, student performance, Head Start availability, crime, export promotion, and so on. But on terrorism, during his first term-the period I witnessed firsthand-he knew little and cared less.

All our terrorist problems were born during the Clinton years.

It was during his eight years in office that al Qaeda began its campaign of bombing and destruction aimed at the United States. It was then that the terrorist group orchestrated its first attack on the World Trade Center; hatched a plan to destroy New York's bridges and tunnels and the U.N. building; conceived an effort to destroy eleven U.S. passenger jetliners; twice bombed U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, killing nine-teen Americans; bombed American embassies in Africa; and attacked the U.S.S. Cole. Bill Clinton and his advisers were alerted to the group's power and intentions by these attacks. But they did nothing to stop al Qaeda from building up its resources for the big blow on 9/11.

Iraq was a subjugated nation when Clinton took office. Recently defeated in the Gulf War, its military infrastructure was largely destroyed. But under Clinton's intermittent and easily distracted gaze, Saddam Hussein took the opportunity to rebuild his military, expel U.N. arms inspectors, and open a spigot to get the money he needed to rearm under the so-called "oil for food" program. Moreover, on Clinton's watch the Iraqi dictator was able to rekindle his efforts to build nuclear weapons and further develop other arms of mass destruction.

North Korea first signaled its interest in developing nuclear weapons in 1994, when the issue was whether or not it would permit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor the disposition of spent nuclear fuel rods from its electric plant at Yongbyon, North Korea. The international crisis that followed reportedly led even President Clinton to contemplate a preemptive strike to destroy the fuel rods before they could be turned into fission-able material for nuclear bombs.

To defuse the crisis, former President Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang to meet with North Korean leaders and see if a compromise could be reached. The agreement Clinton ultimately negotiated required North Korea to refrain from using the spent fuel rods to produce bomb-grade material and obliged them to accept IAEA inspection of the site. In return, the United States, Japan, and South Korea agreed to join in financing nonnuclear power plants in North Korea and to ship fuel and food to that beleaguered nation.

But Clinton was so eager to declare victory that he failed to monitor the enforcement of the deal as he should have. Americans were shocked in October 2002 when North Korea admitted it hadn't kept its end of the bargain-and was manufacturing fissionable material at a secret underground location.

All three critical situations America faces today-al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea-were either incubated or exacerbated on Bill Clinton's watch.

As I first became aware of this situation, I believed Bill Clinton was guilty of negligence and oversight. As I read the evidence, however, the picture darkened significantly. Clinton's attitude probably started as neglect of global terrorism-a field alien to the Arkansas governor's experience and worldview. But as his administration evolved and entered its second term, its failure to deal with these three looming threats began to seem more and more conscious, even deliberate.

Sapped by the effort to resist impeachment, focused on burnishing his legacy through his phantom deal with North Korea, anxious to avoid the political risk of major military action on the ground against al Qaeda, and eager to avoid stirring up things in Iraq, Bill Clinton deliberately postponed dealing with this trio of threats so he could leave office under a seemingly sunny sky.

That Sunday in August 1996, as we chatted by phone, Clinton mused that he needed to win a war if he were ever to join the first tier of presidents. He seemed to lament that none was available. But there was: the war on terror. He just chose not to fight it.

Should he have seen the threat of terrorism coming? From the very start of his administration, he had a series of clues about how serious the terrorist threat would become-starting when a bomb exploded in the World Trade Center in New York City.

The World Trade Center Bombing: First Shot Across the Bow

President Bill Clinton's uneasy history with terrorism began thirty-six days after he swore to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." On February 26, 1993, a terrorist bomb exploded in the B-2 parking garage under One World Trade Center. The blast was triggered by twelve hundred pounds of urea nitrate, found in fertilizer, and three tanks of compressed hydrogen. This attack, the first foreign terrorist bombing on U.S. soil in modern times, ripped a five-floor hole in the building, instantly killing six people and injuring a thousand others.

In later years, in subsequent attacks, we became accustomed to seeing President Clinton at the site of such tragedies, seemingly struggling to control his emotions, biting his lower lip and fighting back tears. But New Yorkers were spared that piece of theater as they tried to cope with the impact of the bombing. The president never visited the site of the attack; he did not attend any of the funerals of its victims. What he did was go about his public routine.

The day after the attack, Clinton used his regularly scheduled weekly national radio address to console New Yorkers. Promising "the full measure of federal law-enforcement resources" in apprehending those responsible for the bombing, Clinton vowed that "working together, we'll find out who was involved and why this happened. Americans should know we'll do everything in our power to keep them safe in their streets, their offices, and their homes."

Touring New Jersey four days after the blast, Clinton did not detour from his preplanned schedule in order to visit the World Trade Center site across the Hudson River. The New York Times reported that "although Clinton spent much of the day in northern New Jersey, he did not visit the site of Friday's bombing. Such a visit had apparently been discussed among White House aides, but officials in New York urged them to avoid it." An anonymous "senior administration official" told the Boston Globe that "Clinton had a full schedule in New Jersey, with no opening for a visit to the site in Manhattan."

Though he said he was "heartbroken" for the families of those killed in the blast, while in New Jersey Clinton assured citizens that "we've been very blessed in this country to have been free of the kind of terrorist activity that has gripped other countries. But I think it's important that we not overreact to it." He called on New Yorkers "to keep your courage up and go about your lives."

The Globe noted that "while security was noticeably tight during Clinton's visit to New Brunswick and Piscataway, he did leave his limousine at one point to ride from the airport in Newark with some children going to a learning center." First things first.

Why didn't Clinton visit the site? The emphasis in his public statements and in the demeanor of New York officials in the aftermath of the attack was to avoid an "overreaction." Worried about public panic, and perhaps concerned that a presidential visit would get in the way of rescue and investigative efforts, New York officials told Clinton to stay away.

Okay, but what about afterward? President Bush let the smoke clear at Ground Zero for a few days after 9/11, but less than a week went by before he went and memorably addressed the rescue workers through a bullhorn, rallying them and reinvigorating America's sagging spirits. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, never visited the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the 1993 bombing.

He didn't go because he chose to treat the attack as an isolated criminal act, devoid of serious foreign policy or military implications. The fact that this was the first foreign terrorist attack on American soil seems to have set off no alarm bells at the young Clinton White House. The president treated it as a crime rather than as a foreign policy emergency. He defined terrorism as a law enforcement problem, not as a matter of national security. To Bill Clinton, it was not unlike any other homicide.

Commenting on the former president's approach to fighting terror, Bill Gertz, in his best-selling book Breakdown, underscores how the administration saw terrorism in the context of law enforcement: "The Administration's primary goal here [in response to terrorism], as always was to identify terrorists, capture them, and return them for prosecution in a court of law. It was a reactive strategy that did nothing to deter attacks."

Clinton wasn't the first to make this mistake. In his book The Right Man, Bush speechwriter David Frum notes, "In the thirty-three years before September 2001, close to one thousand Americans had been killed by Arab and Islamic terrorists. . . . Only once in all those thirty-three years did an American president interpret a terrorist atrocity as an act of war, demanding a proportionately warlike response: in April 1986 when Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Tripoli after Libyan agents detonated a bomb in a Berlin discotheque, killing two American servicemen."

Frum points out that "all the rest of the time, the United States chose to treat terrorism as a crime to be investigated by the police, or a clandestine threat to be dealt with by covert means, or an irritant to be negotiated by diplomats."

So dismissive was the White House of the 1993 attack that even after the same terrorist group-al Qaeda-had attacked the same tar-get-the World Trade Center-a decade later, former White House adviser George Stephanopoulos minimized the 1993 assault, saying on December 30, 2001, that "looking back, it wasn't a successful bombing." He described the White House reaction at the time: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"

Obviously, they should have.

But there was no effort to mobilize the nation, to sound the alarm, to reequip the military and intelligence apparatus to cope with the new threat. The government did nothing. Indeed, the director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, later said he had not had a single private meeting with President Clinton through all of 1993 and 1994. Incredible.

Had Clinton zeroed in on the terrorist threat, he would have certainly made time for the director of the CIA. To fail to see him one-on-one during a period of terrorism would be as ludicrous as to deny the head of the Office of Management and Budget a hearing during the government shutdown budget crisis of 1995.

Clinton's Twin Allergies: Foreign Policy in General, Military Action in Particular

President Clinton rarely had his mind on terrorism in the opening years of his White House tenure. In early 1993, upon taking office, he and the first lady were focused on how to balance the competing needs of stimulating the economy and reducing the budget deficit. What scant time there was to discuss military policy in those first days was devoted to how to keep President Clinton's campaign promise to allow homosexuals to serve in the military, a commitment he fulfilled in an executive order issued right after he took office. The military was sent into an uproar by the move; then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell was reluctant to allow gays in the military without pre-cautions to prevent a breakdown in discipline. Soon the debate was swirling throughout the nation.

Abroad, the administration was largely preoccupied by the need to extricate American forces from a poorly planned and ultimately futile mission in Somalia. As he was leaving office, President George H. W. Bush had ordered twenty-five thousand troops to that east African nation to check a massive famine, deliberately exacerbated by local warlords.

"His parting gift to us," First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton called the involvement. She pushed the subject with her husband: "I keep telling him to pull them [the troops] out," she told me in a phone conversation in early February 1993, "but I have limited influence on foreign policy."

In fact, President Clinton himself felt he had similarly limited power over foreign affairs. Constitutionally empowered with virtual czarlike authority over international relations-in a way he never could be in domestic policy-Bill Clinton chose nevertheless to delegate most of his power to his two top advisers in the area: Secretary of State Warren Christopher and National Security Advisor Tony Lake. Concerned about his own lack of experience in foreign policy, Clinton began his first term by ruling over international affairs in name only, delegating any real power to the Christopher-Lake team.

Christopher is a lawyer; Lake is a liberal. The former was constantly ensnared in legalisms, the latter easily manipulated by the liberal foreign-policy establishment. Indeed, Lake had been given the office of National Security Advisor, in part, because the Post required no Senate confirmation. When Clinton later nominated him to be director of the CIA, at the start of his second term, the Senate's investigation of Lake's liberal record eventually persuaded Lake to withdraw his nomination.

In any case, neither Lake nor Christopher was president of the United States. While they could exercise strong influence, neither could commit the American people to the kind of mobilization that would have been needed for an all-out war on terror. Only the president could do that, and he was extremely reluctant to act, given his limited grasp of the subject.

When I signed up as his adviser, two years into Clinton's first term, I teased the president about his reliance on the Christopher-Lake regime in foreign affairs. "I think I'm beginning to see how Lake runs foreign policy around here," I said in March 1995. "There's a regency," I observed, referring to the way European monarchies appointed adult ministers to guide underage kings. "You're too young now to run your own foreign policy, so Lake and Christopher have to do it. But when you turn twenty-one they'll let you take it over."

The president stiffened slightly at my characterization. But he said only, "I never get other options; I never get other information."

Clinton saw foreign affairs as a subset of economic policy, rejecting the cold war view that it was related to global diplomatic and military manifestations of power. Deconstructing von Clausewitz's famous dictum that "war is diplomacy by other means," Clinton saw diplomacy as economics by other means.

As governor of Arkansas, Clinton was accustomed to dealing with issues of world trade and he felt at home stimulating the domestic American economy by manipulating global commerce. But he had no experience in foreign affairs, and political fallout from his Vietnam draft-dodging experience had left him with an allergy to military action.

The draft issue had first surfaced early in 1992, as Clinton sought to win the New Hampshire primary. He was hit simultaneously by two scandals, a combination that threatened to deck his candidacy in the early rounds: his adultery with Jennifer Flowers and his avoidance of military service. Together, the issues swiftly erased his early lead in the nation's first primary.

As the New Hampshire campaign approached its apogee, Clinton called me in a panic while I was on vacation in France. With his typical charm, he apologized for calling me at seven A.M., Paris time: "It's one o'clock here," Clinton explained. "I stayed up as late as I could so I wouldn't wake you up too early."

Then he got to the point. "I'm getting killed by the draft thing."

"And Flowers," I added.

"No," he interjected. "Our polls show Flowers isn't really hurting, but the draft is killing me, killing me," he repeated. "How should I answer it?"

He proceeded to give me a detailed and tedious account of how he had, he said, used only legal means to avoid service, stopping well short of the "string pulling" of which his opponents were accusing him.

"I don't think you can win on the draft," I answered. "I wouldn't try. Anything you do to talk about it just makes it a bigger issue. You took the lead in New Hampshire because you ran substantive commercials with real programs and new ideas about welfare, the economy, and other topics. Just go back to that. Put out a positive, exciting message, and I think you can come in second," I said.

"You think that'll work?" he asked doubtfully.

I wondered myself, so I took another tack: "Look," I said, "you're getting hit with two charges-the draft and adultery. The draft is hurting you, but the Flowers stuff isn't. Answer the Flowers stuff and use it to drown out the draft issue. It's sexier anyway-and that way everyone will pay attention to the disease that's not fatal and ignore the one that could be."

He did just that, finishing second in the primary and promptly declaring himself the "Comeback Kid."

But the scar of his near defeat over the draft lingered, a silent inhibition that consistently held him back from aggressive military commitment. No matter how often his soldiers and generals snapped to attention as he passed, giving him crisp salutes, the reality remained-having ducked the draft, Clinton never felt comfortable with the prospect of sending young men and women to face death when he had refused to risk it himself.

The Emerging Terrorist Threat, 1993-1996

It is never fair to assess a president's conduct entirely in the light of 20/20 hindsight. The question for future historians is: How well did the chief executive act, given the information available to him at the time? So, in assessing Clinton's performance in preparing us for the war on terror, we must ask: What did the president know and when did he know it?

The story of the investigation that followed the 1993 World Trade Center attack is instructive. At first, the bombing seemed the work of a Laurel and Hardy band of incompetent terrorists. Having sought to topple the Twin Towers, they had succeeded only in making a big hole in its lower floors. Investigators quickly determined that the bomb had been planted in a Ford 350 Econoline van rented across the Hudson River in Jersey City. When detectives staked out the location, they had trouble concealing their shock when, two days after the bombing, Mohammed A. Salameh showed up to collect his $400 deposit on the van. (Terrorists on a budget!) Soon the other conspirators were identified and arrested, with the exception of mastermind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who had fled to Pakistan.

Yousef had entered the United States six months before the bombing, disguising his evil mission by pretending to seek political asylum. According to Steven Emerson's meticulously researched American Jihad, Yousef "soon emerged as an international link between the assailants and a network of supporters."

As Emerson recounts, Yousef had arrived in the United States "in the company of Ahmad M. Ajaj, a pizza deliveryman in Houston. Ajaj was detained at the airport for carrying three fake passports and other false identification." Ajaj was also found to be carrying "a letter of introduction recommending him for training in guerrilla warfare in Pakistan or Afghanistan." How, in the name of God, was he passed through to enter the United States?

Nevertheless, he was. And it is clear that, in the weeks after the bombing, this and other clues alerted the administration to the fact that the World Trade Center bombers were no isolated fanatics-but rather a group of conspirators with close ties to foreign terrorist groups. That alone should have put the White House on alert. As Richard Bernstein, who covered the bombers' trial for The New York Times, asked: "Who wrote Mr. Ajaj's letter of introduction? Why would he have to travel to the Middle East to obtain it? Whom did he see in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia? Where did Mr. Salameh, who was certainly not a wealthy man, get the $8,400 that he deposited into a bank account he opened jointly with Mr. Ayyad (another conspirator) and that prosecutors say was the bankroll for the operation? Did it come from abroad?"

An alert White House would have been all over these questions, weighing their implications for America and its future, and acting accordingly. The failure to heed these and other warning signs, and to mobilize fully our nation's resources to protect us against further acts of terrorism, are reason enough for a stinging indictment of the Clinton administration.

Clinton should also have known that the New York bureau of the FBI had been investigating Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who came to this country after facing charges of attempting to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (a charge of which he was acquitted). According to Emerson, the FBI was able to infiltrate an informer, Emad Salem, into the Jersey City group that surrounded Rah-man. "Salem carried hidden microphones and helped the FBI in planting a small video camera, recording the group as it made plans for a Day of Terror."

Emerson relates how these terrorists planned nothing less than "simultaneous strikes at the United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the federal office building" in lower Manhattan. These bombs would have dam-aged or destroyed the only links that connect midtown and downtown New York with New Jersey-tunnels and bridges used by millions of people each day.

In June 1993, when the FBI arrested Sheikh Rahman and nine of his followers, President Clinton must have been told that the terrorist groups in and around New York City were actively plotting massive destruction of high-profile targets. The World Trade Center had already been bombed, the United Nations and bridges and tunnels had been targeted. What else did the president need to grasp the gravity of the situation? Yet he never ordered any major shakeup of the antiterror apparatus. No extra tools were given to the FBI. No massive mobilization was declared. The government simply shrugged its shoulders; the bank robbers had been caught, after all; why make a fuss?

The most important link in the chain of evidence that should have alerted Clinton to the growing threat came in January 1995, when Yousef himself was finally arrested in Pakistan, two years after orchestrating the World Trade Center bombing. Under interrogation, Emerson writes, the terrorist leader said he had "hoped [WTC] Tower One would fall sideways into Tower Two" as a result of the bombing, "knocking over both and killing 250,000 people."

More important, an examination of Yousef's laptop computer revealed that he had "also participated in a plan to blow up eleven American jetliners within 48 hours-a disaster that was only barely avoided by chance."

One would have imagined that, at the very least, the president would have responded to the evidence of such a plan with a major air-safety initiative. Even if he wanted to avoid alarming the traveling public and jeopardizing airline revenues, one would think he would still have moved vigorously to tighten security, concealing the reason for his actions if necessary.

Instead, there was nothing. No action, no proposals, no initiatives, no direction. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had been unearthed by the FBI. Why not?

Beyond Clinton's reluctance to engage the military, another factor was at play here: Bill Clinton was a one-thing-at-a-time president. In his White House, there was no back burner. Either an issue was in the forefront, occupying his undivided attention, or you couldn't expect to find it on his radar screen at all. Indeed, so far was the issue off the presidential priority list that the index to Bob Woodward's chronicle of the early Clinton presidency, The Agenda, contains not a single reference to terrorism or the World Trade Center.

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