EM rider

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Apr 27, 2001
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I always suspected that Clinton's legacy would become more tarnished with the passage of time. This (long) editorial from the Sunday Times (of London) highlights how the shortcomings of his administration have come back to bite us in ways few could have imagined.

========================================
The Fruits of Negligence

The Clinton Administration's Security Legacy

In the initial shock of the September 11 Massacre, one small notion lodged itself into the mass psyche. It's perhaps best summed up by the phrase, "Who could have seen that coming?" Because of the sheer audacity of the attack, its novel use of kamikaze-style airplanes, its uniquely horrendous death-toll, most of us tended to exculpate the leaders of the United States for any responsibility for the lax security and failure of intelligence and foreign policy it represented. We put the blame - rightly - on the terrorists who bear sole responsibility for the massacre. But more than two weeks later, as the sheer extent of America's unpreparedness and vulnerability comes into better focus, one other conclusion is inescapable. The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face, and if we are to be successful in rectifying the errors, it's essential we acknowledge as plainly as possible what went wrong.

Two questions come to mind: How was it that the Osama bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the American government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly for good reasons. There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. No good is accomplished by playing a blame game now. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness on September 11 is already slowing our capacity to bring Osama bin Laden to justice and constricting some of the military and diplomatic options in front of us. And with a president only a few months yet in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus and is now trying to repair the damage. Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries - say, the invasion of the Falkland Islands - ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled?

The most plausible answer is that no-one has been fired and no fingers pointed because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in our security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Osama bin Laden already attacked the United States, its embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been more than completely frank about his war with the United States. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993! Same guy, same building. To say that this attack came out of the blue is simply belied by any rudimentary examination of the facts. And to say that we couldn't have anticipated this type of attack is simply to say that our intelligence wasn't good enough to have found it out.

How prominent were the warnings of the danger of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s? Here's one: "The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these [Islamic] extremists can be." This was written by Salman Rushdie in the New York Times in 1993. Did the Clinton administration overhaul its intelligence and defense priorities in response to the 1993 warning? The answer is clearly no. No effort was made to coordinate the various mess of agencies designed to counter terrorism - the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the airlines, local law enforcement, the Coast Guard. No effort was made to recruit more spies who could speak Arabic or go effectively undercover to preempt such terrorist attacks. Under the Clinton administration, a law was passed actually making it more difficult for the U.S. to use spies who had sleazy or criminal pasts - exactly the kind needed to infiltrate bin Laden's tight terrorist cells. The debacle of the Somalia expedition in 1992 and 1993 - which led to Delta Force units being humiliated - dramatically chilled the military's willingness to use such units in action again. This occurred despite the fact that aggressive use of those units - as we are seeing today - was critical to any successful effort to regain the initiative against terrorism.

In a remarkably revealing and over-looked article in last week's New Yorker, Joe Klein argues that "there seems to be near-unanimous agreement among experts: in the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost every aspect of American national-security policy-from military operations to intelligence gathering, from border control to political leadership-has been marked by ... institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance." The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: the clueless, stately secretary of state Warren Christopher; the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council, Anthony Lake; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but above all president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to foreign affairs, especially when it meant military and security matters, now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter earlier this month.

Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other President in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than it was in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was severely constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks." It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that.

Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after bin Laden struck again at U.S. embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly serious. He responded with a couple of fitful missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which killed or seriously impacted Osama bin Laden. Clinton's own former Defense Secretary, John Deutch, wrote in the New York Times that August: "We must insist on superior intelligence that will warn of potential terrorist actions. We must insist on tough and prompt responses to such acts and on developing an effective capability to manage the consequences of these acts when they occur. These are major challenges and, in general, public and private experts have concluded that our country is not fully prepared to act effectively on these matters." Clinton largely ignored the warning. The Post's Jim Hoagland warned in the same month: "There are troubling signs that this president could once again stage a pinprick raid, announce the problem solved and turn back to his own domestic and personal preoccupations. A single night of missile strikes against remote desert sites will not leave America's self-declared enemies off balance for long." Give that man a medal for foresight.

Again in the Washington Post that August, the following prescient words were written by L. Paul Bremer III, former anti-terrorism chief in the Reagan administration: "The ideology of such groups [as bin Laden's] makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures. They hate America, its values and its culture and proudly declare themselves to be at war with us. We cannot seek a "political solution" with them." Bremer then set out a list of what the U.S. should do: "Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad, especially "softer" targets such as American businesses overseas. Attack the enemy. Keep the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Ladin's operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government should order further military strikes against the remaining terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive. This might work and at the least would exacerbate the paranoia common to all terrorists." Sound familiar? It's exactly what we're doing now, three years too late, with no element of surprise, and with far from adequate human intelligence.

This brings Bremer to the most critical point in his recommendations: "Improve our intelligence operations. Effective counterterrorism depends on good intelligence... We must preempt and disrupt attacks before they happen. This requires improved coordination of intelligence collection against terrorist groups. While it is difficult, we should expand the use of deep cover agents on the ground to infiltrate terrorist organizations." None of this happened. Agencies bickered, the president was too concerned with sexual harassment lawsuits, the C.I.A.'s feckless record went uncorrected.

Perhaps the most farsighted critic was a man called Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and the author, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, of "Know thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran." In the Atlantic Monthly this past summer, he emphasized the extreme need for trained spies to go underground in the Muslim world of Afghanistan and Pakistan if the West were ever to get adequate intelligence on bin Laden's operation. But as late as 1999, not a single such "non-official-cover" spy had been trained or used for such a purpose. A former senior Near East Division operative told Gerecht, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with ****ty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer summed up the policy to Gerecht thus: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."

(to be continued....)
 

EM rider

Member
Apr 27, 2001
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part #2

The Fruits of Negligence (continued...)

Gerecht also reported the following devastating fact: "Robert Baer, one of the most talented Middle East case officers of the past twenty years (and the only operative in the 1980s to collect consistently first-rate intelligence on the Lebanese Hizbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad), suggested to headquarters in the early 1990s that the CIA might want to collect intelligence on Afghanistan from the neighboring Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Headquarters' reply: Too dangerous, and why bother? The Cold War there was over with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Afghanistan was too far away, internecine warfare was seen as endemic, and radical Islam was an abstract idea. Afghanistan has since become the brain center and training ground for Islamic terrorism against the United States, yet the CIA's clandestine service still usually keeps officers on the Afghan account no more than two or three years." If you want to know why it seems unlikely that the United States knows enough about bin Laden's whereabouts to mount an immediate attack today, then re-read those sentences. This is an intelligence failure of colossal proportions. What happened to the man who presided over that massive failure? George Tenet, director of the CIA since 1997, is still in his job.

Not everyone in Washington was asleep at the switch. In response to the African embassy bombings, a National Commission on Terrorism was set up to propose changes. It was headed by a top-notch group of former officials and got plenty of press attention. The panel argued that the United States was extremely vulnerable to a massive attack by a group like al Quaeda and recommended better espionage, more Arabic-speaking spies, better intelligence sharing between the FBI and the CIA, wider wiretapping, and much of what is now on the table. The report was even prescient enough to have a picture of the World Trade Center on its cover, as Franklin Foer reports in the current New Republic.

The report died the death of a thousand quibbles. Civil liberties advocates complained about a threat to individual freedom. The Arab American Institute's James Zogby said the proposals were like "the darkest days of the McCarthy era." A writer in the liberal online magazine Salon described the warnings of a domestic attack as "a con job with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel." As Foer details, the CIA opposed lowering its squeaky clean standards for spies, and the FBI was desperate, under Clinton, to avoid any Reagan-like dirty tricks in its operation. When the report came to the Congress, it was attacked by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy who distrusted the CIA and wanted to avoid what he called "risks to important civil liberties we hold dear." The proposal picked up momentum after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, but was so watered down by the end of the legislative process that it was virtually useless. Its supporters let it die. The Clinton administration did next to nothing to rescue it. The president was busy preparing pardons for multi-millionaire criminals on the lam.

Former Clinton National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, defended Clinton's record to Joe Klein in the New Yorker. He argued that after the embassy bombings there was a concerted effort to find and kill bin Laden and that the cruise missile in Afghanistan missed its target by an hour, after which bin Laden disappeared from view. Anonymous Clinton officials also blame former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for resisting measures to cut off bin Laden's financing and to use cyber warfare to crack down generally on the terrorists' money network. Others blame the FBI: "[The FBI's] standard line was that Osama bin Laden wasn't a serious domestic-security threat," one source told Klein. "They said that bin Laden had about two hundred guys on the ground and they had drawn a bead on them." But whatever the nuances of blame here, it's clear that no-one from the top intervened, imposed order and reorganization, and took the terrorist threat seriously enough to defeat it, or even put it on the defensive.

Earlier this year, yet another report, chaired by respected former Senators Hart and Rudman, came to yet another definitive conclusion that the United States was vulnerable. They made exactly the same recommendations that are now finally being implemented; the report was well advertized and disseminated in the press - and still nothing was done.

Hindsight is easy of course. In the halcyon and feckless climate of the 1990s, it would have required real political leadership to dragoon various, stubborn government agencies into a difficult reorganization to counter terrorism. It would have been extremely hard to persuade a sceptical public and a prickly civil liberties lobby that vast new government powers were necessary to prevent catastrophe. This much is true. But it's also true that there were several clear, loud, unmistakable attacks on the U.S. by the very forces that have now launched a war. It is also true that many, many people recognized this and were brave enough to warn about it. In August 1998, Milton Bearden, the former C.I.A. chief in Pakistan and the Sudan, wrote in the New York Times: "The case against Osama bin Laden, who occupies a stronghold in Afghanistan, is clear-cut. Through his self-proclaimed sponsorship of terrorism against the United States, he has, in effect, declared war on us." In July of 1999, William Cohen, Clinton's own Defense Secretary, wrote in the Washington Post, that, "In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes. Someday, one will be real." Whatever excuses the Clinton administration may have for its failure, they cannot trot out of the excuse of not having been warned. We were all warned. We just preferred to look the other way.

If we look today as Michael Foot did after the outbreak of the Second World War, it is clear that there are many in the United States government who, while not being "guilty men," in sympathizing with and appeasing the enemy threatening their country, were nevertheless at the very least "negligent men." They deserve some sympathy. They were imperfect human beings in a world where September 11 was still an abstraction. But we pay our politicians to see through abstractions and assess the possibility of an actual threat. That's what they are there for. And on that critical task, they failed. If the security manager of a nuclear power plant presides over a massive external attack on it, then it's only right that he should be held responsible in part for what happened. Over 6000 people are now living with the deadly consequences of the negligence of the government of the United States. There is no greater duty for such a government than the maintenance of national security, and the physical protection of its own citizens from harm. When a senior Clinton official can say of his own president that he "spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other President in recent memory," and when this presidency is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting.

Clinton is not alone. The list of people who resisted or thwarted the measures needed to have avoided this catastrophe are many. They reach back to president George H.W. Bush, who balked at removing Saddam Hussein from power at the end of the Gulf War, thus leaving the single most dangerous abettor of international terrorism at large on the world stage. They include Bush and Clinton officials who failed to see the danger in the vacuum left in Afghanistan after the successful insurgency against the Soviets. They include Colin Powell, who crafted the Gulf campaign, and who followed it with the Somalia debacle that helped neuter the military's anti-terrorism campaign thereafter. They include senators and congressmen and lobbyists and civil liberties advocates and journalists - all of whom failed to see the danger staring us in the face. Very few of us are free from blame, but the most blame must surely be attributed to the top.

We thought for a long time that the Clinton years would be seen in retrospect as a mixed blessing. He was sleazy and unprincipled, we surmised, but he was also competent, he led an economic recovery, and he conducted a foreign policy of multilateral distinction. But the further we get away from the Clinton years, the more damning they seem. The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of an America absent without leave in the world was fomented from the top. The boom at the end of the decade turned out to include a dangerous bubble which the administration did little to prevent. The "peace-making" in the Middle East and Ireland merely intensified the conflicts. The sex and money scandals were not just debilitating in themselves. They meant that even the minimal attention that the Clinton presidency paid to strategic military and intelligence work was skimped on. We were warned. But we were coasting. We were deluding ourselves. And the main person primarily tasked with correcting that delusion, with ensuring our national security - the president himself - was part of the problem. Through the dust clouds of September 11 and during the difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage - and that's Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker and darker with each passing day.

Additional research by Reihan Salam.

end.
 

berm buster

~SPONSOR~
Apr 17, 2001
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clintons fault

Hey EM Rider,
What a great post!

I couldnt agree more, clinton and everything he touched has turned to S***
He and his administration, have been an unmitigated disaster!!!
He has sold out our national security, and, he could not give a DAMN less.

You can tell clinton is really concerned w/ the bad press he has been getting
about not doing Anything substantial regarding that pile of S*** bin laden!
In his own way he is trying to "revise" what really happened.
A more sorry, worthless, son-of- a -b****, I have yet to see!!!!

Thank the good Lord above he is out of office.
 

nephron

Dr. Feel Good
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Jun 15, 2001
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Great reading. I must agree. Billy is a sick P.O.S. that wasn't fit to run a daycare, let alone a country. Speeches were impressive, but there was nothing inside. He has the lowest quality character I think I have EVER seen. :silly:
 

lawman

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Sep 20, 1999
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interesting read, thx for posting. i don't want to reopen the pro/anti-clinton debate, so i'll offer no comment on the author's blame of bill clinton personally. i'll just add this to the list of warning signs: a few years ago, right here in good ole memphis, tennennessee, sombody attempted to do just what these hijackers ended up pulling off. a disgruntled fed ex pilot named auburn calloway flew "jump seat" on a fed ex cargo plane, as he was entitled to do. shortly after the jet took off, full of fuel, he pulled out a claw hammer & attacked the crew. fortunately, they won the ensuing fight. testimony at his trial revealed that he planned to take over the jet & use it as a bomb by crashing it into the fed ex headquarters building. he is now in prison. so set aside the difficulties of penetrating the taliban or al quaeda; maybe somebdy should have foreseen the prospect of ANYbody trying this. for example, what do you think would have happened had timothy mcveigh known how to fly?
 

stormer94

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May 30, 2001
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The real problem is that you can't guard against the insane. How could we have known what the fed-ex guy would do? Or others that we have witnessed. Remember Jeffrey Dahmer... Guy killed an ate like 30-40 people, and in hindsight there are those that say it was preventable, "warning signs everywhere"... I don't feel the same. And if we had rousted him and there was nothing wrong, lawsuit city.

You could (in theory) hi-jack a semi truck with a sharp screwdriver. I've often thought those stupid kids that shoot up schools are doing it all wrong. Wouldn't it be better to tint the windows on your car, report it stolen and drive it at about 60mph through the local high school football game. Be much more effective and you'd be IN the getaway vehicle.

You can protect yourself from anything you like, but anything, ANYTHING in your house can be used as weapon, even a pillow. Where do you draw the line, where do you quit being paranoid and get on with living?

Nearly everything we come in contact with throughout the day can be used for evil if so chosen.

20/20 hindsight... Nostradamous said this or that... We should have seen the handwriting on the walls. Bin Laden said he was gonna do something big...AND? He's been saying that for years. What's serious, what's not, what's a smoke screen to divert our attention so he (or others like him) can sneak in something another way?

20/20 hindsight. If we had started rousting those of muslim belief from flight schools 2 years ago, we'd have 1000 law suits on our hands for billions of dollars. It's easy to say that we should have seen it coming and the signs were there. I don't agree. If we had increased airline security BEFORE there was a real reason, we would have had TOTAL pandamonium with bitching passengers. You really can't win.

Sorry if I got off on a tangent.
 

EM rider

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Apr 27, 2001
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Though I think Clinton was a disgrace, it IS unfair to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say "it's all his administration's fault." It is partially the Clinton administration's fault, but the CIA, NSC and military all share some responsibility for our lack of preparedness. The value of this editorial is that is provides a lot of factual support for something I "knew" was happening but could not really prove at the time. Namely, that Clinton's superficiality, personal moral shortcomings and obsession with "focus-group" domestic politics literally poisoned the ability of people around him to get important work done.....like preparing a serious defense against terrorism. Clinton and his staff were too busy covering his a**. It also highlights how much work needs to be done to repair the damage. Very sad.

That said, I don't feel that any responsible parties should be let off the hook. People should be fired because they screwed up. The goal of any security (and especially anti-terrorist) policy is to anticipate what "insane" people will do and find ways to stop them before they do any damage. Yes, this is difficult. But so what? That is why we give them a lot of resources to work with. It may be impossible to succeed 100% of the time, but when it comes to safety, anything less than perfect is not good enough.
 

stormer94

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May 30, 2001
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EMrider,
The goal of any security (and especially anti-terrorist) policy is to anticipate what "insane" people will do and find ways to stop them before they do any damage

Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to look at it.

Let's say we knew these terrorists were here. Let's say we knew that 20 of them were known to be ready to commit 'something'. Let's say we watched them take flight lessons and have jobs and live quietly in neighborhoods. You can't stop them until they do something wrong. None of those things are wrong or illegal. Boarding and flying on a plane is not against the law. Until they physically threaten somebody or attack and break into the cockpit of the plane, they haven't done anything wrong.

Do you suppose they could bitch and file police harrassment reports while they were being stalked by us? Yep. Trust me, I'm not on their side (and can not wait for some devastating retaliation), I'm just dissapointed at how our laws that are designed to protect us, ALSO protect them. And they do it right up unitl they stick a knife in a pilot. Up until that EXACT point, nothing they have done was illegal.
 
Mar 29, 2001
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I like the fact that the laws that are there to protect you only come into affect after you've been injured or killed. And also I like how in conjuction with those wonderful laws there are those that tie your hands when it comes to defending yourself. What a cruel world.
 

HiG4s

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Mar 7, 2001
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Osama bin Laden was once an ally of the CIA in the war against the Soviet army in Afghanistan.
FROM NBC NEWS
"U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden began to turn against the United States in the mid-1980s — a time when he still took aid and training from the CIA, which was then helping bin Laden and other Islamic groups fight the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. The CIA funneled its aid through the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, to various cells in Afghanistan, one of them known as the MAK. In 1984, bin Laden broke with the MAK and formed a separate, more radical splinter group that espoused a harsh, fundamentalist version of Islam that was dedicated to the liberation of Islamic nations from any foreign influences, from Israel to the United States to the Soviet Union."

Regan was pres, and Bush sr. was vice pres during this, perhaps they should share some of the blame?
And perhaps the US should be more careful as to who we buddy up to. Like Grandma use to say, "if you sleep with pigs, you're going to get dirty".
 

EM rider

Member
Apr 27, 2001
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Stormer,
Your points are absolutely correct. But I don't conclude from them that it is futile to try and stop terrorism (not saying that you do either). Because of the freedoms we enjoy in the US it is very very difficult to fight terrorism, but certainly not impossible. The problem today is that our systems to gather and share info on potential terrorists are very weak and as a result we did not see this one coming even though various bits of key evidence were lying around in plain view for months or maybe even years. The police, FBI, CIA, etc.....confront people every day that have not yet done anything wrong just because they fit a certain profile or are acting suspicious. We'll never know, but I'm pretty sure that they have prevented many bad things from happening in the past. The same thing happens in Isreal, but a lot more aggressively, and even there they can't stop all the suicidal nut cases from setting off bombs. One of the only safe assumptions about what comes next is that the dividing line between individual freedom and social responsibility is about to shift big time. It's about time too.
 

JeffK

Member
Sep 9, 2001
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America is the land of the free and the home of some ridiculous expectations on that freedom... when you go to an airport and someone wants to look in your bag and it takes an extra hour.. it's not because he want to look at your panties - he's looking for clues. This is a good thing people! If the bag checkers and security people in airports were properly trained (and pilots behind inpenatrable walls in the cockpit) we wouldn't be talking about this right now. There are other ways to committ acts of terrorism but at least we could have done something about the obvious!

Who's fault is it? Who cares - lets fix the damn problem.
 

stormer94

~SPONSOR~
May 30, 2001
597
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JeffK

Yea, but the real problem is this. IF we had tighter airport security before all this happened, it would have been total pandemonium with people bitching.

The airplane thing is just one way of literally MILLIONS that can be used as a weapon against us. As sad as it is, we just can't safe gaurd against all of them. All it takes is for some clown at a pillow factory that has figured a way to incubate and conceal a deadly virous, in your new pillow, to wipe out literally millions of people.

I guess we have to do what we can, but we are fooling ourselves if we really think we can stop it. Can't gaurd against the insane. Even our own non Islamic citizens have managed to terrorize our country on occaision. Una-bomber ring any bells? Look at Timothy Mcveigh and Terry Nichols. McVeigh, a nice, lifelong, US citizen with a Michigan drivers licence...

We have been working on nut cases, look at the raid at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and the siege at the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Look at the crap we took because we took action...

Mcveigh went nuts because he thought "the government was becoming somewhat oppressive in certain ways. Overstepping their bounds in certain ways.”

Until somebody kills a bunch of people, being a nut, insane, or out of your mind is not enough to get you in jail.

I want my family and friends to be safe, and will do whatever and comply with whatever laws that become necessary to see to it that it happens. But I think it's a losing battle if the goal is to stop it entirely :(

Sad as that is.
 

stormer94

~SPONSOR~
May 30, 2001
597
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My post above, I have NOTHING against islamic citizens of the US and wish them well. Wanted to make sure that didn't come off wrong. I'm just against terrorists, regardless of race or religion.
 

Jaybird

Apprentice Goon
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Mar 16, 2001
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Regan was pres, and Bush sr. was vice pres during this, perhaps they should share some of the blame?
Share the blame for what? Attacks by terrorists associated with bin Laden?
You listen to way too much Peter Jennings, HiG4s...and he has you thinking just what he was implying. But, he can't wait to get a jab in at any right wing gov. official at any opportunity. Arms were supplied to Afghan rebels during their confrontation with (communist)Russia, but that does in no way mean that arms were supplied to Islamic fundamentalist terroist groups.

Who's fault is it? Who cares - lets fix the damn problem.
JeffK,
Fixing the problem means we have to care about whos fault it is. If we don't care enough to call the ones responsible on the carpet, it will happen again and again.
 

HiG4s

~SPONSOR~
Mar 7, 2001
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Originally posted by Jaybird

Share the blame for what? Attacks by terrorists associated with bin Laden?
You listen to way too much Peter Jennings, HiG4s...and he has you thinking just what he was implying. But, he can't wait to get a jab in at any right wing gov. official at any opportunity. Arms were supplied to Afghan rebels during their confrontation with (communist)Russia, but that does in no way mean that arms were supplied to Islamic fundamentalist terroist groups.

You make WAY too many assumptions, I never listen to Peter Jennins. The fact is Bin Laden WAS and rebel IN Afghan and was upset with the US pulling back aid during the Russian occupations and at that time started his personal attacks against the American way of life.
It seems the US has a history of helping rebels that we shouldn't. Castro, Noriga, Hussien, Bin Laden. What other scum have we supplied aid to that we have to be worried about?

My statment stands, "If you sleep with pigs, you're going to get dirty".
 
Mar 29, 2001
84
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Speaking of the U.S. providing help that they shouldn't, I believe I heard that just recently the U.S. has pledged weapons for Oman for in return for their support against terrorism. I don't believe the U.S. should be providing any sort of arms to other countries which could possibly be used against us a few years down the road when they decide they don't like us. Now what does the Taliban have to shoot down our choppers over there. U.S. Stinger missiles. The desert isn't exactly the greatest farmland, give 'em food. Who cares if they through that back at us.
 

HiG4s

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Mar 7, 2001
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Originally posted by Rumpelstiltskin
Speaking of the U.S. providing help that they shouldn't, I believe I heard that just recently the U.S. has pledged weapons for Oman for in return for their support against terrorism. I don't believe the U.S. should be providing any sort of arms to other countries which could possibly be used against us a few years down the road when they decide they don't like us. Now what does the Taliban have to shoot down our choppers over there. U.S. Stinger missiles. The desert isn't exactly the greatest farmland, give 'em food. Who cares if they through that back at us.

There Ya Go!!!!
I think we should air drop food to the whole country.
Wheat and rice to the out lying areas. And bacon on the Taliban!!!

One interesting fact, just before WWII we sold a bunch of surplus Air Force planes to, you gussed it, Japan. They were P35 or P36s and that is what they used to supplment their air squadrons against us until they could get their Zero plants to full production (which I believe were Kawasakis).
 
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JeffK

Member
Sep 9, 2001
209
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Originally posted by Jaybird
Fixing the problem means we have to care about whos fault it is. If we don't care enough to call the ones responsible on the carpet, it will happen again and again.

Originally posted by Stormer94
IF we had tighter airport security before all this happened, it would have been total pandemonium with people bitching.


Maybe we could blame all those bitching passengers!
 

longtime

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Oct 7, 1999
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Originally posted by EM rider
Though I think Clinton was a disgrace, it IS unfair to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say "it's all his administration's fault."

I think it is fair, if you made the criticisms at the time, and made warnings, to subsequently point that out when the failure of the man in charge to heed the warnings or act appropriately bites you in the a$$. Seems like we're not in too much disagreement, though:

Originally posted by EM rider
The value of this editorial is that is provides a lot of factual support for something I "knew" was happening but could not really prove at the time. Namely, that Clinton's superficiality, personal moral shortcomings and obsession with "focus-group" domestic politics literally poisoned the ability of people around him to get important work done.....like preparing a serious defense against terrorism. Clinton and his staff were too busy covering his a**. It also highlights how much work needs to be done to repair the damage.
 

Offroadr

Ready to bang some trees!
Jan 4, 2000
5,227
25
Originally posted by bwalker

I beleive that the Zero was produced by Mitsubishi.

This is true and the facility still biulds cars today
 

CC_RIDER

LIFETIME SPONSOR
May 15, 2001
154
0
Originally posted by stormer94
Until they physically threaten somebody or attack and break into the cockpit of the plane, they haven't done anything wrong. ...And they do it right up unitl they stick a knife in a pilot. Up until that EXACT point, nothing they have done was illegal.

Conspiring to commit such an act is illegal. That is where better intelligence is needed. If the pilot trainer that was offered $10,000 cash to teach one of the hi-jackers to fly (taking off and landing instruction "not needed"), had notified authorities of suspicious behavior, it's possible this entire attack could have been stopped. Looking back, the CIA and FBI have found dozens of instances of suspiscious activities by this group of terrorists. One of them was actually already on a list of "persons to be watched" If these instances had been given the proper and prudent amount of attention, things probably would have turned out different.

There has been a lack in the quality and quantity of intelligence gathering over the past few years, however, we the American public have to bear some of the fault for not having "our" guard up as well.
 
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