Unbelievable. Did Clinton protect the USS cole? Did he even retaliate? Did he go after bin Laden after the embassy bombings? Whatever action Clinton took it was ineffective for the most part.
Your quest to prove Bush knew is getting ridiculous. You're starting to sound a little sammi jo-esque.
IIRC I believe he did in fact retaliate in at least one of those cases . . .
But then again Clinton is not the question . . . I am not saying he knew what and when but as the clips indicate he knew enough that he should have been, at least, on high alert.
And, at least the 'task-force' on Counter-Terrorism should have met to discuss the information
But, at least they had a cooolo sounding name . . . kind of like jet-ranger-force or something \
and re: the results of those terrorist bombings you mentioned and Clinton's retaliatory bombings . . . I'll snip from a link provided by Giant:
Quote:
....Our response to two deadly terroist attacks [B} [by Clinton][/B] was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.
in clinton's eight years how many americans died in the the United States from foreign terrorist attacks on our soil? you can call it what you will: weak on terror, focusing on other things, maybe even just bad luck that the largest foreign terrorist attack happened when bushie was president...i still don't want a president with bad luck like that...did clinton just have good luck that no foreign terror attacks happened in the US during his 8 years?? maybe so, but then i like my presidents to be that kind of lucky...and i don't see how a president can run on how good he is against terror when 3000 people died on american soil within a year of his presidency when 0 died in the how many years before??
sure he can shift the blame around all he likes (and boy they are trying aren't they), but if i buy a house and it has no smoke detectors and (even though the house is 200 years old and has never had a fire) 9 months later my house burns to the ground...some of the fault is mine for not buying the freakin 12 dollar smoke alarm (that i was told by my advisor i might need...ie...you might want to protect against house fires/you might want to protect against terrorist using planes as weapons)...and i sure won't go bragging about how smart i am and how good i am at fighting house fires just because i have smoke detectors in my new house (ie...boy am i good and tough on terror now...nobody had died since that attack)...
US citizens and troops are attacked mutiple times across the globe and US while nothing really significant happens to the attackers as a result. this emboldems them to keep attacking higher yeild targets, leading up to the twin towers (the 2nd time).
in this case the blame would lie on those who let this just slid by until the problem was so big you couldn't ignore it.
and I.....um....didn't post anything today and there was...this stuff on my desk.......and.......I took a look at it.....and then I found out it was work........and then I did it........and then it got done.
in this case the blame would lie on those who let this just slid by until the problem was so big you couldn't ignore it.
As Kevin Drum said in his discussion of Clarke's book:
Quote:
During the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship, but he felt that at least everyone took it seriously and helped to push. Then in January 2001 he suddenly found himself working for an administration that didn't take terrorism seriously, didn't execute well even when they did acknowledge the problem, and then after 9/11 remained so stubbornly ignorant of al-Qaeda's aims that they played directly into its hands.
and re: the results of those terrorist bombings you mentioned and Clinton's retaliatory bombings . . . I'll snip from a link provided by Giant:
That is totally unsupported. Though, it is consistent with the "finger in the wind" approach Clinton had to governing. Whose approval does he need? The President can deploy troops w/o approval, at least initially. Clinton's response was pathetic.
gelding:
Quote:
in clinton's eight years how many americans died in the the United States from foreign terrorist attacks on our soil? you can call it what you will: weak on terror, focusing on other things, maybe even just bad luck that the largest foreign terrorist attack happened when bushie was president...i still don't want a president with bad luck like that...did clinton just have good luck that no foreign terror attacks happened in the US during his 8 years?? maybe so, but then i like my presidents to be that kind of lucky...and i don't see how a president can run on how good he is against terror when 3000 people died on american soil within a year of his presidency when 0 died in the how many years before??
Wow....just, wow. That kind of logic just blows me away. It really does. You also don't have the facts. The 1993 WTC bombing was on Clinton's watch. The embassy bombings were on his watch. The USS Cole was on his watch. What action did he take? He launched some cruise missiles, which missed Al-Qaeda leadership targets. His weak actions emboldened Al-Qaeda to attempt more daring attacks.
And here you come, with your "bad luck" theory. That's just amazing.
That is totally unsupported. Though, it is consistent with the "finger in the wind" approach Clinton had to governing. Whose approval does he need? The President can deploy troops w/o approval, at least initially. Clinton's response was pathetic.
.
Now what in high heaven does what I posted have anything to do with Clinton caring about approval?!?
The point is is that while the Conservatives, who now are harping on about how great Bush's aggressive stance in Iraq has been for the WOT , they couldn't help themselves when Clinton was in office and slammed him for doing what they now say is laudable . . .and, generally just dogging him non-stop, on every issue imaginable until he was unable to follow through with further bombings
And before you say that that is what 'the Liberals' are doing, just let me point out that what Clinton's penis did is not as important as even one wasted life in Iraq, nor is it as important as the tragic obsession with the Pax Americana ideology has been . . . and so our attacks have merit while the Conserrvative attacks during the Clinton years, attacks which limited his ability to follow through, were baseless, false, trite, and purely political.
His weak actions emboldened Al-Qaeda to attempt more daring attacks.
This 'emboldened' argument is crap. Islamic terrorism was and is growing. Bush's brute force certainly hasn't done anything to stop it. We've seen multiple MAJOR terrorist attacks since 9.11, in Bali, Saudi Arabia and most recently in Madrid.
It also wasn't until the mid-90's that the intelligence community really started to have a full idea of what we were dealing with. As Kevin Drum pointed out "during the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship." That statement, no matter what you think of Clinton, is simply fact. In the wake of 9.11 we had fundamental changes in government structure and are still trying to figure out how to deal with it.
However, in that search for the solution, the Bush admin has made a series of major mistakes, most notably the war in Iraq, where each of their beliefs were shattered one after the other (state sponsor=Iraq, WMD, etc). Before the 9.11, they clearly cut back on counter-terrorism efforts no matter how you look at it. Clarke was taken out of the cabinet meetings (and there was not a single cabinet meeting on afghanistan and al-qaeda until a week before 9.11) and Cheney created a 'task-force' that never met. The neo-cons have long tried to say Iraq was behind every major terrorist strike, and it has been demonstrated that this base assumption is wrong.
Simply put, the team in place is not equipped to deal with the task at hand, and have we have seen that over and over again. Clinton made mistakes, but Clinton is not President right now. If this Bush admin was a democratic administration I want them out every bit as badly as I want Bush out. End of story.
This has nothing to do with partisan politics (which is for losers who have no personality or character), this is about this administration unable to do its job, and more interested in promoting the interests, fantasies and wacko beliefs of the senior people that make it up and fanatics they pander to.
But did inaction embolden islamic terrorism? There's no evidence to support it. There have been enough major attacks, all of which were much bigger than the Cole bombing, that have occurred since we started invading the world. I think it's also pretty clear that if the recent US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had taken place before 9.11, we would have little or no international backing and likely have pissed off even the most moderate of islamic fundamentalists to the point where even passive citizens in arab countries would be strapping on bombs.
It's pretty remarkable that no one is willing to admit that EVERYONE --Bush, Clinton, Clarke, whoever -- before 9/11 FAILED. They failed to prevent it, they failed to convince others of the danger, they failed to to enact long-term plans to deal with the threat, they failed to estimate the threat with any accuracy and warn Americans of the threat, failed all over, up and down. This is the one important fact out of all of this. We failed and now we have to live with that failure. The rest is political posturing, no more, no less.
When people refuse to hold Clinton to his fair share of the blame, it's just denial and defensive posturing. When people don't hold Bush accountable, likewise. To argue anything else is only detrimental to attacking the real problem. We point fingers at one another and no one is looking at the core problem: the terrorists!
Your quest to prove Bush knew is getting ridiculous. You're starting to sound a little sammi jo-esque. [/B]
Just like those 'crazy claims' you (and others) referred to some 14 months back, when I posted information, easily available to the public who reads other souces of news than Fox and CNN etc, that Saddam Hussein/Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after 1991.
SDW, these things will eventually come out in the wash: they always do. How long it will take though is anybody's call. 9-11 was an extremely sophisticated operation, well beyond the organizational capabilities and wildest dreams of some islamic terrorist leader/fundamentalist crackpot holed up in a system of caves on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. For 9-11 to have succeeded/happened as it did entailed the simultaneous failure of so many security systems, the mathematical odds of such being overwhelmingly unlikely, without some kind of "inside knowledge" or "aid".
I understand that it's very easy to lump such conjecture as 'paranoid conspiracy ranting' etc. Looking at the 9-11 picture in a cold objective light, the extraordinary quantity of information (mostly presented by regular corporate media sources and even the White House itself) makes an absolute mockery of the official version of what happened on that day...especially when all that information is presented as a package unto itself.
Take me to task on this, call me a lunatic, a crackpot or whatever: I really dont care....but I predict that within 5 years, the American people will be informed of the real deal behind 9-11, who plotted it, who eventually carried it out, and who allowed it to happen: those details will be shocking to the core. If the relevant information remains secret or the official version as it stands today remains the accepted truth, then I will eat crow for you.
but there is something different about the way in which Bush failed!
He failed becaue he had an obsession with Iraq
Iraq that had no ties to AQ, was a secular, proto-stalinist regime, and who's system was failing a little more every day
Bush's failure was avoidable, or at least might have been had there been any visible and concerted interest . . . and, from what all the indications are saying, and even Bush to Woodward said, that interest was not there
. . . but the interest in Iraq was
This all ties in neatly to that other little horribleness: the apparent willfull misleading of the American people for the purposes of gaining support for the invasion of a sovereign nation.
an invasion, which then it turns out, goes full circle to complete the fiasco, and seems to both encourage more terrorism and to justify the Islamists in the eyes of right-of-moderate Muslims . . Thus back to the original problem and the fact that the obsession and the actions which resulted from it have been terrible for the WOT
A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
But since Saddam Hussein's government was deposed, weapons inspectors in Iraq appear to have found little evidence of such labs, though they did find two trucks that some experts believe were used for producing hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. As recently as January, Vice President Cheney cited the discovery of the trucks as "conclusive" evidence of the mobile labs described by Powell. But CIA Director George J. Tenet later told Congress he warned the vice president not to be so categorical about the discovery.
I especially like the last line of the quote which goes to the administration's credibility. Cheney knew the statement was wrong yet he trudged on with it anyway. Tenet said the same (about his warning Cheney) during his 911 commission testimony
The Independent, where the original article appeared, is quite centrist. Think we can get some journalists to investigate these claims to prove or disprove them?? She does seem pretty confident:
Quote:
She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."
Comments
Originally posted by SDW2001
Unbelievable. Did Clinton protect the USS cole? Did he even retaliate? Did he go after bin Laden after the embassy bombings? Whatever action Clinton took it was ineffective for the most part.
Your quest to prove Bush knew is getting ridiculous. You're starting to sound a little sammi jo-esque.
IIRC I believe he did in fact retaliate in at least one of those cases . . .
But then again Clinton is not the question . . . I am not saying he knew what and when but as the clips indicate he knew enough that he should have been, at least, on high alert.
And, at least the 'task-force' on Counter-Terrorism should have met to discuss the information
But, at least they had a cooolo sounding name . . . kind of like jet-ranger-force or something
....Our response to two deadly terroist attacks [B} [by Clinton][/B] was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.
sure he can shift the blame around all he likes (and boy they are trying aren't they), but if i buy a house and it has no smoke detectors and (even though the house is 200 years old and has never had a fire) 9 months later my house burns to the ground...some of the fault is mine for not buying the freakin 12 dollar smoke alarm (that i was told by my advisor i might need...ie...you might want to protect against house fires/you might want to protect against terrorist using planes as weapons)...and i sure won't go bragging about how smart i am and how good i am at fighting house fires just because i have smoke detectors in my new house (ie...boy am i good and tough on terror now...nobody had died since that attack)...
g
US citizens and troops are attacked mutiple times across the globe and US while nothing really significant happens to the attackers as a result. this emboldems them to keep attacking higher yeild targets, leading up to the twin towers (the 2nd time).
in this case the blame would lie on those who let this just slid by until the problem was so big you couldn't ignore it.
but then it's all just a matter of perspective.
high, I' dmz
[everyone says "HI! DMZ!"]
and I.....um....didn't post anything today and there was...this stuff on my desk.......and.......I took a look at it.....and then I found out it was work........and then I did it........and then it got done.
[applause]
Originally posted by alcimedes
in this case the blame would lie on those who let this just slid by until the problem was so big you couldn't ignore it.
As Kevin Drum said in his discussion of Clarke's book:
During the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship, but he felt that at least everyone took it seriously and helped to push. Then in January 2001 he suddenly found himself working for an administration that didn't take terrorism seriously, didn't execute well even when they did acknowledge the problem, and then after 9/11 remained so stubbornly ignorant of al-Qaeda's aims that they played directly into its hands.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
What I see here are the Bush defenders trying to distort what is being said about the administration's failings.
Originally posted by pfflam
and re: the results of those terrorist bombings you mentioned and Clinton's retaliatory bombings . . . I'll snip from a link provided by Giant:
That is totally unsupported. Though, it is consistent with the "finger in the wind" approach Clinton had to governing. Whose approval does he need? The President can deploy troops w/o approval, at least initially. Clinton's response was pathetic.
gelding:
in clinton's eight years how many americans died in the the United States from foreign terrorist attacks on our soil? you can call it what you will: weak on terror, focusing on other things, maybe even just bad luck that the largest foreign terrorist attack happened when bushie was president...i still don't want a president with bad luck like that...did clinton just have good luck that no foreign terror attacks happened in the US during his 8 years?? maybe so, but then i like my presidents to be that kind of lucky...and i don't see how a president can run on how good he is against terror when 3000 people died on american soil within a year of his presidency when 0 died in the how many years before??
Wow....just, wow. That kind of logic just blows me away. It really does. You also don't have the facts. The 1993 WTC bombing was on Clinton's watch. The embassy bombings were on his watch. The USS Cole was on his watch. What action did he take? He launched some cruise missiles, which missed Al-Qaeda leadership targets. His weak actions emboldened Al-Qaeda to attempt more daring attacks.
And here you come, with your "bad luck" theory. That's just amazing.
Originally posted by thegelding
did clinton just have good luck that no foreign terror attacks happened in the US during his 8 years??
1993?
World Trade Center?
Originally posted by SDW2001
That is totally unsupported. Though, it is consistent with the "finger in the wind" approach Clinton had to governing. Whose approval does he need? The President can deploy troops w/o approval, at least initially. Clinton's response was pathetic.
.
Now what in high heaven does what I posted have anything to do with Clinton caring about approval?!?
The point is is that while the Conservatives, who now are harping on about how great Bush's aggressive stance in Iraq has been for the WOT
And before you say that that is what 'the Liberals' are doing, just let me point out that what Clinton's penis did is not as important as even one wasted life in Iraq, nor is it as important as the tragic obsession with the Pax Americana ideology has been . . . and so our attacks have merit while the Conserrvative attacks during the Clinton years, attacks which limited his ability to follow through, were baseless, false, trite, and purely political.
Originally posted by SDW2001
His weak actions emboldened Al-Qaeda to attempt more daring attacks.
This 'emboldened' argument is crap. Islamic terrorism was and is growing. Bush's brute force certainly hasn't done anything to stop it. We've seen multiple MAJOR terrorist attacks since 9.11, in Bali, Saudi Arabia and most recently in Madrid.
It also wasn't until the mid-90's that the intelligence community really started to have a full idea of what we were dealing with. As Kevin Drum pointed out "during the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship." That statement, no matter what you think of Clinton, is simply fact. In the wake of 9.11 we had fundamental changes in government structure and are still trying to figure out how to deal with it.
However, in that search for the solution, the Bush admin has made a series of major mistakes, most notably the war in Iraq, where each of their beliefs were shattered one after the other (state sponsor=Iraq, WMD, etc). Before the 9.11, they clearly cut back on counter-terrorism efforts no matter how you look at it. Clarke was taken out of the cabinet meetings (and there was not a single cabinet meeting on afghanistan and al-qaeda until a week before 9.11) and Cheney created a 'task-force' that never met. The neo-cons have long tried to say Iraq was behind every major terrorist strike, and it has been demonstrated that this base assumption is wrong.
Simply put, the team in place is not equipped to deal with the task at hand, and have we have seen that over and over again. Clinton made mistakes, but Clinton is not President right now. If this Bush admin was a democratic administration I want them out every bit as badly as I want Bush out. End of story.
This has nothing to do with partisan politics (which is for losers who have no personality or character), this is about this administration unable to do its job, and more interested in promoting the interests, fantasies and wacko beliefs of the senior people that make it up and fanatics they pander to.
But did inaction embolden islamic terrorism? There's no evidence to support it. There have been enough major attacks, all of which were much bigger than the Cole bombing, that have occurred since we started invading the world. I think it's also pretty clear that if the recent US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had taken place before 9.11, we would have little or no international backing and likely have pissed off even the most moderate of islamic fundamentalists to the point where even passive citizens in arab countries would be strapping on bombs.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in609074.shtml
Just to add:
?I didn?t feel a sense of urgency about al Qaeda,? Bush told Bush at War author Bob Woodward. ?It was not my focus; it was not the focus of my team.?
When people refuse to hold Clinton to his fair share of the blame, it's just denial and defensive posturing. When people don't hold Bush accountable, likewise. To argue anything else is only detrimental to attacking the real problem. We point fingers at one another and no one is looking at the core problem: the terrorists!
[i]Originally posted by SDW2001
Your quest to prove Bush knew is getting ridiculous. You're starting to sound a little sammi jo-esque. [/B]
Just like those 'crazy claims' you (and others) referred to some 14 months back, when I posted information, easily available to the public who reads other souces of news than Fox and CNN etc, that Saddam Hussein/Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after 1991.
SDW, these things will eventually come out in the wash: they always do. How long it will take though is anybody's call. 9-11 was an extremely sophisticated operation, well beyond the organizational capabilities and wildest dreams of some islamic terrorist leader/fundamentalist crackpot holed up in a system of caves on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. For 9-11 to have succeeded/happened as it did entailed the simultaneous failure of so many security systems, the mathematical odds of such being overwhelmingly unlikely, without some kind of "inside knowledge" or "aid".
I understand that it's very easy to lump such conjecture as 'paranoid conspiracy ranting' etc. Looking at the 9-11 picture in a cold objective light, the extraordinary quantity of information (mostly presented by regular corporate media sources and even the White House itself) makes an absolute mockery of the official version of what happened on that day...especially when all that information is presented as a package unto itself.
Take me to task on this, call me a lunatic, a crackpot or whatever: I really dont care....but I predict that within 5 years, the American people will be informed of the real deal behind 9-11, who plotted it, who eventually carried it out, and who allowed it to happen: those details will be shocking to the core. If the relevant information remains secret or the official version as it stands today remains the accepted truth, then I will eat crow for you.
I will leave it at that.
Those murderous bastards who killed for greed...
but there is something different about the way in which Bush failed!
He failed becaue he had an obsession with Iraq
Iraq that had no ties to AQ, was a secular, proto-stalinist regime, and who's system was failing a little more every day
Bush's failure was avoidable, or at least might have been had there been any visible and concerted interest . . . and, from what all the indications are saying, and even Bush to Woodward said, that interest was not there
. . . but the interest in Iraq was
This all ties in neatly to that other little horribleness: the apparent willfull misleading of the American people for the purposes of gaining support for the invasion of a sovereign nation.
an invasion, which then it turns out, goes full circle to complete the fiasco, and seems to both encourage more terrorism and to justify the Islamists in the eyes of right-of-moderate Muslims . . Thus back to the original problem and the fact that the obsession and the actions which resulted from it have been terrible for the WOT
A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0402-01.htm
But since Saddam Hussein's government was deposed, weapons inspectors in Iraq appear to have found little evidence of such labs, though they did find two trucks that some experts believe were used for producing hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. As recently as January, Vice President Cheney cited the discovery of the trucks as "conclusive" evidence of the mobile labs described by Powell. But CIA Director George J. Tenet later told Congress he warned the vice president not to be so categorical about the discovery.
I especially like the last line of the quote which goes to the administration's credibility. Cheney knew the statement was wrong yet he trudged on with it anyway. Tenet said the same (about his warning Cheney) during his 911 commission testimony
The above gem came from Powell expresses doubt
Originally posted by giant
She's got more to say:http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0402-01.htm
The Independent, where the original article appeared, is quite centrist. Think we can get some journalists to investigate these claims to prove or disprove them?? She does seem pretty confident:
She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."
Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie."
An outrageous lie. Wow.
Originally posted by Gilsch
The Independent, where the original article appeared,
Actually, I think the Post ran the story first and it has basically appeared everywhere since then.