Looking elsewhere for truth Part 4 -- Lafcadio T. Lion and Strawberry Sage and Friends Fun Forum

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Date Posted: 16:27:24 06/21/03 Sat
Author: Sage
Author Host/IP: qam1c-sif-39.monroeaccess.net / 12.27.215.40
Subject: Looking elsewhere for truth Part 4
In reply to: Sage 's message, "Looking elsewhere for truth Part 3" on 16:24:00 06/21/03 Sat

The Pseudo-Sanctions Against Iran

If the Republicans were loath to approve antiterrorism measures at home that might annoy their more extreme right-wing supporters, they were determined to force Clinton's hand and make him take bold action against terrorists in the Middle East. Senator Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) took the lead in 1995 by introducing legislation extending the U.S. oil embargo against Iran to limit the ability of foreign companies to assist Teheran in developing its oil and gas industry.

Clinton had imposed the embargo blocking U.S. companies from helping Iran's petroleum industry in the spring of 1995, after Secretary of State Warren Christopher was enraged by the decision of Conoco, a Du Pont company, to make a deal with Iran. The New York Times reported the Christopher "argued that the United States should take the lead in depriving Iran, an outlaw country, of the financial resources it needed to develop nuclear weapons or sponsor terrorist activities."

Before the embargo, U.S. companies had been investing more than $4 billion annually in Iran's oil industry. The American embargo, of course, cut off these deals, but European companies continued to do business with Iran. Senator D'Amato was anxious to stop foreign companies, whose nations did not honor the embargo, from taking up the slack and helping Iran earn more from its oil reserves. Spurred by the decision of Total S.A., a French oil refiner, to take over the Conoco deal, D'Amato's legislative proposals imposed sanctions against any foreign company that aided Iran's oil and gas industry. The penalties included a ban on the importation of their products into the United States, and a prohibition against loans to the company by any U.S. bank. The Federal Reserve Board would also be directed to bar any financial institution from becoming a primary dealer in bonds of U.S. origin if they had aided energy projects in Iran.

At first the administration dismissed the D'Amato bill as just partisan posturing, introduced to allow the New York senator to strut in front of his large, domestic Jewish community. But soon the legislation gained momentum, and Clinton was forced to take it seriously.

Angered at American attempts to block European companies from involvement in lucrative deals with Iran, the European Union (EU) blasted the legislation, insisting, as the Times reported, that the United States had "no basis in international law to claim the right to impose sanctions on any foreign person or foreign-owned company who sup-plies Iran with oil development equipment."

Clinton felt whipsawed by the conflicting pressures on the D'Amato bill. It was gaining momentum in the Senate, spurred by fear of Iranian terrorism, but the European Union was threatening to appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) if the bill passed. Clinton partially solved the problem by getting the Republicans to water down the legislation, dropping the crucial provision banning imports of all products made by companies doing business with Iran. The president hoped that this would cool European anger at the bill. The Senate passed the legislation in December 1995.

But Europe was still unhappy. Within the administration, Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger urged Clinton to oppose the legislation unless it included a provision permitting the president to waive the sanctions when he considered it in the "national interest." But the Republicans pressed hard for passage to impose broader sanctions against Iran.

Responding to European concerns and the cautious advice of his own National Security team, Clinton insisted on the national security waiver as the price for his signature on the bill. Complying with White House pressure, the House passed the watered-down legislation on June 20, 1996.

Europe still went ballistic, however, threatening retaliation if the sanctions were ever imposed on their companies. Germany was particularly sensitive. Anxious to assure Iranian repayment of its $8.6 billion debt, Berlin had been alarmed by the drop in its exports to Iran from $5.2 billion in 1992 to only $1.6 billion in 1995. Claiming that Clinton was only grandstanding before a domestic political audience, German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel said that it was "better to continue the dialogue with Iran rather than break off all contacts, introduce sanctions, and further radicalize Iran by isolating the country."

The Germans were right about one thing. Clinton was grandstanding when he signed the Iranian sanctions bill on August 6, 1996, days before the Republican National Convention nominated Bob Dole as his opponent. Piously, the president told our allies, "you cannot do business with countries that practice commerce with you by day while funding or protecting the terrorists who kill you and your innocent civilians by night."

But what Clinton didn't say when he signed the bill was that he never planned to enforce it. For the rest of his presidency, whenever a European company tripped the wire that should have led to sanctions, Clinton demurred, invoking the national security waiver. Hypocritical in the extreme, he had made a show of his toughness by signing a bill he never intended to use and by approving sanctions he never planned to impose.

Clinton may not have used the new law to stop Iran's oil industry from bankrolling terror, but the legislation certainly helped enliven his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention on August 29, 1996. In a speech that was breathtaking in its hypocrisy (in light of Clinton's subsequent willingness to waive sanctions against companies trading with Iran), the president told the convention: ". . . We are working to rally a world coalition with zero tolerance for terrorism. Just this month I signed a law imposing harsh sanctions on foreign companies that invest in key sectors of the Iranian and Libyan economies.

As long as Iran trains, supports, and protects terrorists, as long as Libya refuses to give up the people who blew up Pan Am 103, they will pay a price from the United States." (Applause)

Some price! Not a single company lost a single dollar, euro, franc, mark, pound, lira, peso, or yen as a result of U.S. sanctions against its investments in Iranian oil or gas fields. Not one.

If Americans were deceived by Clinton's posturing, Europeans weren't. As Clinton was signing the sanctions law, USA Today reported that "France, Germany and Britain, as well as the European Union, are among those who have threatened retaliation. But the hope in Europe is that 'after the elections, this law will be shelved or watered down,' says Steven Englander, economist with the Paris office of Smith Barney brokerage."

The Europeans had that right. The first real test of the new sanctions came in the fall of 1997, when The Washington Post reported that "French, Russian, and Malaysian oil companies . . . triggered a State Department investigation of whether they should be penalized under U.S. law for . . . developing a major offshore natural gas field in Iran."

Iran had been after capital to develop the gas field. the Post reported that "the Iranians scored their first major success last summer when Total S.A. of France, the giant Russian natural gas company Gazprom and the state-owned Petronas of Malaysia signed a contract to invest $2 billion in developing a gas field known as South Pars."

Six months later, the newspaper related how "Clinton's senior foreign policy advisers met late into the night . . . grappling with what might have seemed a straightforward decision: whether to impose legally mandated sanctions. . . . The administration appears paralyzed by the myriad arguments for and against sanctions."

The arguments were familiar. The supporters of sanctions said that the money from the gas field would go right into funding terrorism, while opponents worried that imposing them would injure NATO and hurt reformist forces in Iran. the Post reported that "according to some officials, the administration is basically content to postpone a decision because delay avoids potential negative consequences of a decision either way, while leaving the deterrent effect of U.S. sanctions hanging over other foreign companies."

Al D'Amato, the sponsor of the sanctions, warned Clinton that "if the United States does not take swift, decisive action to apply these available sanctions, we will have undercut our long-standing policy against Iranian terrorism."

In May 1998, Clinton caved in and waived the sanctions against foreign oil companies over the Iranian gas fields deal. All the president's strong words when he signed the sanctions bill in August 1996, which he repeated later that month at the Democratic National Convention, went up in smoke. When the challenge finally surfaced, Clinton ran for cover. Despite congressional action and his own commitments, sanctions were dead.

Bill Safire said it best in The New York Times: Dual containment against Iraq and Iran had been replaced by a "dual doormat" theory.

The Terror Summer of 1996

Sometimes, defenders of Clinton's record on terrorism plead that the national mood during his presidency was not sufficiently alert to the danger of attacks on our shores to permit him to take bold action. Certainly, there was never any real understanding of the magnitude of what could happen. Only a very few of the farsighted (such as former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) could envision an attack of the severity of the 9/11 assault. But the national thermometer rose fairly high in the summer of 1996, as the focus on terrorism reached its greatest intensity. Three attacks, coming in close succession, attracted national attention and opened the political possibility of bold military action against foreign terrorists:

� On June 25, 1996, a bomb ripped through the Khobar Towers bar-racks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that housed hundreds of U.S. airman. The explosion left an eighty-foot crater; nineteen died and hundreds were injured.

� Three weeks later, on July 18, 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded in midair and crashed into the Atlantic about sixty miles east of New York City, thirty minutes after taking off from Kennedy Airport. All 230 passengers died.

� On July 27, 1996, just ten days after the TWA crash, a bomb exploded in Centennial Park, the center of the Olympic Games under way in Atlanta, Georgia. The blast killed 2 people and injured 111 others. It shocked a nation that had been following the games avidly on television.

Hindsight has dulled the memories of that difficult summer of 1996. The Khobar Towers barracks bombing was, of course, the work of al Qaeda. The Atlanta bombing was seen, at the time and since, as the likely work of domestic terrorists. While the cause of the TWA crash has never been finally determined, at the time it was widely believed to have been a terrorist incident. On July 19, 1996, the Boston Globe reported that terrorism was "the operating theory behind the FBI's investigation of the crash of TWA flight 800."

But the nation drew no distinctions among the three attacks, lumping them together under one broad heading: terrorism. Americans demanded action. But all they got from Clinton were speeches.

In this atmosphere, there began to assemble a critical mass of public opinion for a truly aggressive strategy, lifting antiterrorism to the top of the nation's political agenda. Had Clinton responded more vigorously, and used the national mood for more aggressive action against terror, 9/11 might never have happened.

Inaction on the Khobar Towers Bombing

When a truck carrying the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of TNT exploded outside the Khobar Towers barracks in June 1996, President Clinton had his usual stern words for the attackers: "The explosion appears to be the work of terrorists, and if that is the case, like all Americans, I am outraged by it. The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished."

And yet, when the Saudi Arabian government discouraged FBI director Louis Freeh's efforts to investigate the attack, Clinton acquiesced.

The Khobar Towers bombing was bin Laden's second attack in eight months in Saudi Arabia. On November 12, 1995, he had orchestrated a bombing of the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The U.S. military had used he building to train Saudi troops; five Americans were killed in the bombing. The Saudi government promptly arrested and quickly executed four men blamed for the attack. U.S. officials were never permitted to interrogate the suspects.

After the Khobar Towers attack, The Washington Post reported that "U.S. officials . . . suspect a link between the two bomb blasts." It mentioned that the Saudi government had "undermined" American efforts to "gauge the full scope of the threat to American military forces in Saudi Arabia" by its "reluctance to cooperate fully with U.S. investigators and intelligence analysts."

The dead men who the Saudis executed after the Riyadh attack told no tales.

For their part, the Saudis, according to the Post, "denied any friction between U.S. and Saudi investigators and said there was 'total cooperation' in the Riyadh bombing probe." the Post article, however, told a very different story. "Saudi security officials held one of those eventually convicted of the Riyadh bombing for three months, and the other three for one month, before they informed any officials at the U.S. Embassy there. The Saudi government was 'adamant about not letting us in there' to interview the suspects before they were executed, the official said."

The newspaper quoted a senior U.S. law-enforcement official as saying: "They [the Saudis] didn't let the FBI interview these guys and then they killed them." The official speculated that the Saudis did not want the United States to interview the bombers because it was "fearful of what we might find out once the United States gets a complete picture of those connected to the Riyadh bombing or to dissident movements."

As we now know, that trail would have led straight to Osama bin Laden.

Understandably, U.S. law-enforcement officials were worried that their leads in the Khobar barracks bombing would be cut short by the Saudi's busy executioner. They were right.

The Washington Post reported that FBI director Louis J. Freeh traveled three times to the kingdom to "seek U.S. access to several individuals who have been detained by the Saudi government on suspicion of involvement in the Dhahran bombing." Chafing at the lack of Saudi cooperation, the paper quoted U.S. defense secretary William J. Perry as saying: "We cannot accept the problems we had the last time."

Despite U.S. entreaties, Assistant FBI Director Robert Brant told a congressional committee that "the Saudi Arabian government has pre-vented FBI investigators from interviewing any civilians who witnessed or may have been involved in the bombing."

His boss, Louis Freeh, was more diplomatic in his testimony: "We have not gotten everything we have asked for and this has affected our ability to make findings or conclusions or to channel the investigation in different directions. There is a great deal of information we have not seen."

It was not until June 21, 2001-five years after the bombing, and well into the Bush administration, that the United States indicated thirteen Saudis and one Lebanese for the bombing of Khobar Towers.

Why did Clinton permit the Saudis to drag their feet in cooperating with the investigation? Why was not more pressure put on our so-called allies to be forthcoming with their witnesses and evidence? The former president's failure to be more aggressive in pushing the Saudis ranks as a key intelligence failure.

A glimmer of what we might have learned had Clinton pursued the issue came in a 1997 CNN story headlined "Wealthy Saudi May Have Had Role in Khobar Bombing; An Investigation Is Under Way." Introducing bin Laden to the American public as an "elusive Saudi dissident," the network noted that "a criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. attorney in New York City turned up two bin Ladin statements to newspapers and to CNN calling for a holy war against U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia."

We will never know what Bill Clinton might have learned, had he put finding the terrorists who killed nineteen American servicemen ahead of smoothing Saudi Arabia's diplomatic feathers as a diplomatic priority.

More of Same: Olympic Bombing of 1996

At one point, as the summer began, it seemed as if President Clinton had gotten the point. Traveling to the fourteenth-century French town of P�rouges to meet with the G-7 world leaders, Clinton moved terror-ism to the top of the agenda. Calling the need to fight terror "one of the great burdens of the modern world," Clinton got the leaders to declare, "We consider the fight against terrorism to be our absolute priority."

The Boston Globe of June 28, 1996, rhapsodized that "by success-fully pushing his terrorism proposals, Clinton dominated the early agenda of the three-day summit, relegating many of the anticipated complaints over U.S. trade policies to secondary status."

After the Olympic bombing, Clinton seemed determined to take action. "We will spare no efforts to find out who was responsible for this murderous act," he said. "We will track them down, we will bring them to justice, we will see that they are punished."

But, in fact, Clinton did almost nothing to give effect to his words. He just dusted off his old proposals for taggants and wiretap authority and sent them to Congress.

It wasn't for lack of national consensus that Clinton acted so timidly after the terrorist attacks of the summer of 1996. His polling reflected a tremendous national focus on terrorism and its dangers. In a survey conducted for the president on June 6, 1995, before any of the three terrorist attacks, voters rated the battle against terrorism as our top foreign-policy issue, with 92 percent saying it was very important.

But after the trio of terrorist tragedy had struck in the summer of 1996, the national outcry grew. The president's poll of August 1 reflected the mood of tension and the desire for bold action. Asked if they would approve of "military action against suspected terrorist installations in nations that harbor terrorists or assist terrorists even if they didn't explicitly sponsor a terrorist act"? Voters backed action by 77-21.

By 84-14, they supported expanded wiretap powers, and by 77-19, they wanted the military to be involved "domestically and abroad to pursue terrorists."

The mandate for action was clear. The administration response was not.

The Air-Safety Debacle

Particularly in the area of air safety-after the TWA 800 crash-the public clamored for effective action. The history of attacks on passenger aircraft was prolific to anyone who sought to examine it.

� A year and a half before, in December 1994, Iraqi national Ramzi Yousef had admitted to detonating a bomb aboard Philippine Air-lines Flight 434, ripping a two-foot-square hole in the fuselage while the plane was flying from Manila to Tokyo. After an emergency landing, one passenger died, and ten were injured.

� In December 1988, a Pan Am flight crashed over Lockerbie, Scot-land, killing all 259 on board. Two Libyan terrorists have been convicted of the attack.

� On November 29, 1987, a North Korean agent planted a bomb on a Korean Airlines flight from Baghdad to Bangkok, killing all 115 on board.

� On April 2, 1986, a woman carrying a Lebanese passport, acting on behalf of a Palestinian terrorist, brought a bomb onto a TWA flight from Rome to Athens, killing four Americans, who were sucked through the aperture, and injuring nine others.

� On June 22, 1985, an Air India plane flying from Toronto to Bombay blew up near Ireland, killing all 329 passengers. The bomb that brought down the flight had been planted by Sikh extremists. With so ghastly a history of air terrorism, public demand for greater protection in the skies escalated rapidly after the TWA crash. A survey I conducted for the president on July 24, 1996, indicated strong public support for dramatic measures to counter aircraft hijacking and bombing.

By 90-7, voters backed "modern X-ray machines at airports to examine all checked luggage."

By 92-6, they supported federalizing security personnel who worked at American airports.

By 92-6, they backed requiring photo identification for all air passengers.

Does this list of measures sound familiar? None were implemented by the Clinton administration, despite such broad public support. But each became public policy in the wake of the 9/11 hijackings. Unfortunately, none were in effect early enough to have prevented the attacks in the first place.

Instead of taking the bold actions suggested by some of his advisers, though, the president simply punted. He appointed a Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, to be headed by Vice President Al Gore, to report on steps to improve air safety (after the election, and after the furor had died down). Clinton raised high hopes for the commission in his acceptance speech to the Democratic Convention, loudly proclaiming: "We will improve airport and air travel safety. I have asked the vice president to establish a commission to report back to me on ways to do this. But now we will install the most sophisticated bomb-detection equipment in all our major airports. We will search every airplane flying to or from America from another nation-every flight, every cargo hold, every cabin, every time." (Applause)

What really happened after these far-reaching promises? Not much. After receiving Gore's report, on September 10, 1996, Clinton proposed to spend $429 million to improve security at U.S. airports as part of a $1.1 billion plan to fight terrorism worldwide.

USA Today reported, "The plan includes provisions to increase the number of federal agents guarding against terrorism, equip the nation's airports with high-tech bomb detection devices and track by computer passengers with suspicious travel patterns." Clinton also ordered immediate implementation of a requirement that all bags be matched to passengers on an airplane as a precondition of takeoff, a measure that reflected the happy assumption that no terrorist would ever choose to commit suicide. Clinton also ordered criminal background checks of airline workers and the deployment of bomb-sniffing dogs at key airports.

Based on these totally inadequate measures, Clinton predicted that "not only will the American people feel safer, they will be safer." Nowhere in Gore's recommendations or in Clinton's proposals were the key measures his advisers had recommended and polls indicated voters approved: federalization of air-safety workers, photo identification for air travelers, and X-ray examination of all checked baggage.

In fact, Clinton immediately ran into trouble on the only really important part of his air-safety program. Buried in its text was a recommendation to spend $10 million on "automated passenger profiling." The administration said the program would be "based on information that is already in computer data bases." It would separate "passengers who present little or no risk and a small minority who merit additional attention."

The New York Daily News noted, "The commission was intention-ally vague on which passengers would get extra eyeballing, but said that travel histories spun out by the computers might trigger alarms if the passenger showed frequent flier miles to Iran or Libya." The left was outraged. "Rounding up the usual suspects may have been okay in Casablanca, but it's not okay in America," said Gregory Nojeim, legislative counsel for the ACLU.

The ACLU might have spared themselves the trouble of issuing the statement. Gore's recommendations for profiling didn't amount to much. Ultimately, the airlines voluntarily implemented their own system to decide who was a risk and who should get extra attention. The FBI and other law-enforcement agencies objected that the system wouldn't work and that it was based on far too limited data to be effective.

The Gore commission's final report, published in February 1997, was timid, its recommendations quite limited. USA Today commented that "Vice President Gore's Aviation Safety and Security Commission had the opportunity to effect dramatic reforms making U.S. flying safer. Unfortunately, the commission opted for a slow flight and an uncertain landing."

Forever addicted to hyperbole, Clinton said he would use "all the tools of modern science" to make air travel safe. Unfortunately, he failed to use even basic political science to get even the limited recommendations of the Gore commission approved. The commission's pre-diction- that its proposals would cut aviation disasters by 80 percent over the next ten years-is laughable in the aftermath of 9/11.

USA Today noted the holes in the commission report: "The com-mission instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to mandate security upgrades such as installing more explosive detection devices at airports, but it didn't say when. The commission recognized the critical need for criminal background and FBI fingerprint checks for airport and airline employees with access to secure areas. Yet it gave the airlines until mid-1999 to do so."

The commission recommended a similarly leisurely schedule for implementing the requirement that checked bags be matched with passengers on the plane. In its preelection-day report, Gore had recommended bag match testing within sixty days. Now he approved a delay until the end of 1997 before starting the plan and set no deadline for total compliance.

Gore's stress on bag matching was a good example of entering a new challenge perfectly prepared to meet the old one. The 1988 explosion that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland had been traced to an extra passenger-less bag, with explosives.

But the idea that bag matching would be effective, in a world of suicide/ homicide bombers, is itself ridiculous, indicative of the stultified thinking of the Clinton/Gore era. Gore did not even recommend fire suppression or smoke detection systems in the cargo holds of passenger airlines, the shortcoming that contributed to the death of 110 people aboard ValuJet Flight 592, which crashed in Florida in May 1996.

But even the limited steps recommended in the Gore report were watered down in Congress. Mark Green, in his book Selling Out, documents the efforts of the Air Transport Association, the lobbying arm of the airlines, to dilute, delay, or dismember the Gore recommendations.

The ATA has used extensive lobbying and contributing to delay Congress from enacting the suggested requirements. In 2000, it lobbied to weaken legislation that would have mandated background checks for all airport screeners. That year, the top nine airlines plus the ATA spent $16.6 million on lobbyists, ten of them former members of Congress, two of them former secretaries of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, and another three former senior officers at the FAA. There were 210 lobbyists in all, and with their help the industry was successful in curbing new regulations.

When these same airlines now plead for help in the face of declining air travel after 9/11, they should be ashamed of their opposition to safety and antiterrorism measures in the 1990s, and realize how shortsighted and self-destructive their positions were.

The magnitude of the missed opportunities during the summer of 1996 cannot be exaggerated. The critical mass of public opinion and outrage was there to permit real action on air safety and terrorism. But Clinton and Gore-and the airlines themselves-blew it.

As a result, even if Bush and Cheney had realized the magnitude of the threat America faced in the months before 9/11, there was no way they could have acted effectively to keep the hijackers off the airplanes. With no system in place to check the identity of those traveling, no special training for security screeners, and no requirement for early boarding to allow time for thorough body searches, there was nothing they could have done to stop the hijackings. That fight was lost in 1996, when Clinton and Gore failed to act.

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Looking elsewhere for truth Part 5 -- Sage, 16:29:24 06/21/03 Sat