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Message: [QUOTE="EM rider, post: 175401, member: 22910"] [b]part #2[/b] 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. [/QUOTE]

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