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Foiling the Next Attack
This past week in Washington, the administration has been forced to devote far too much
time defending itself against the attacks of the Democrats and their media minions over the charge that somehow,
someway, Bush "failed to do something" before 9/11. Faced with fresh polling data showing that the public
saw through their mendacity, the attack dogs began to retreat, their snarls turned to whimpers. Still, as formulated
by columnist Ann Coulter, we know that Muslim men are planning another terrorist attack on America right now. What
do the Dems and their buddies propose to do about it?
Since folks mostly do again what they have done before, we ought to be able to discern a broad path of what the
Dems might do by seeing what they did previously. As the articulate and astute Bibbi Netanyahu reminds us, the
historical perspective of the left often extends clear back to breakfast. Their common practice of appease until
you can capitulate has been producing failure and suffering for a century, not just since breakfast. So, lest we
forget, here is the record.
The first World Trade Center bombing was on February 26, 1993. According to the chronology assembled by columnist
David Horowitz, the one-month old Democrat administration of Bill Clinton did nothing. The President did not even
visit the site. He allowed the attack to be characterized as the criminal act of individuals even though the mastermind
of the Egyptian and Palestinian gang was an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ramzi Youssef. The plan, the most ambitious
ever at the time, was to blow a hole six stories deep beneath the North Tower with the purpose of toppling it into
the South Tower and kill 250,000 people.
At the end of 1993, American military forces that were in the country on a humanitarian mission to feed the starving
were attacked in Mogadishu, Somalia. As told in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down," some 18 American
soldiers were killed and one body was dragged through the streets as a symbol of American humiliation. The Democratic
administration ordered a hasty retreat and set in Osama Bin Laden's mind the thought that America was too soft
and weak to resist when U.S. lives were lost.
In 1995, the agent Ramzi Youssef was captured in the Philippines and his plans to use commercial airliners to blow
up the CIA and other government buildings was discovered. The plan was called "Operation Bojinka" (the
big bang) and Vice President Al Gore was named to head a task force to tightened airport security. The task force
made a key recommendation that was rejected by the White House on the grounds that the security procedures could
be considered "racial profiling." It was also 1995 when the Clinton administration issues the CIA guidelines
prohibiting the agency from recruiting spies who had a propensity to violence.
The next year, 1996, 19 U.S. servicemen were killed when the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia was blown up
by Iranian and Palestinian terrorists. The Saudis refused to cooperate in the following investigation and the Democratic
administration did nothing.
In 1997, a plan by two Hamas members to blow up New York subway lines was foiled but no further action by the government
was taken.
In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up killing 245 and injuring about 6,000. As Monica
Lewinski came to the attention of the media, President Clinton sprayed a bunch of missiles across the empty spaces
of Afghanistan and blew up a Sudanese aspirin factory.
In 1999, a plan to blow up New York bridges and tunnels on New Year's Eve was prevented but no further action taken.
The only attention paid to the military, said columnist Julia Gorin was "gays and berets."
In October of 2000, 17 servicemen were killed when the U.S.S. Cole, an American warship, was attacked by a suicide
rubber boat. The Democrat administration did nothing.
According to Representative Weldon (R-PA) in his last year in office, President Clinton was presented with a battle
plan from Central Command in Tampa which identified all the major players in al Qaeda and proposed a way to deal
with them. General Hugh Sheldon, a Clinton appointee, rejected the plan. It was not until the passage of the USA
Patriot Act of 2001 that it was legal for the FBI to provide material to the CIA in domestic terrorism investigations.
The part the Democrats and the media seem to have left out is this: If you assume that there was specific and actionable
information available before 9/11, what would you have done? What could any President have done that would not
have sent liberals howling about ethnic profiling of foreign guests? Analyst Ken Timmerman asks "If anyone
had written prior to September 11 that Osama bin Laden was planning to send multiple teams of terrorists to the
United States, train them at flight schools, hijack four aircraft simultaneously and crash them into the World
Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House their bosses would have slapped them into a straitjacket on the
spot."
In his testimony, the Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams reported that he marked his memo "routine."
It takes a routine memo 60 days to clear. The report was authored on July 10, 63 days before 9/11.
As former-CIA Director James Woolsey said this week, it is long past time to stop the partisan finger-pointing.
There is work to do. If the Democrats were serious about the nation they would take some time away from their week-long
celebration of Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT) defection. Second-guessing an administration in wartime is not a valid
political strategy but it is a sure payoff for terrorist activity and will encourage more.
If Congress were, in fact, serious, it would make the Homeland Security office a cabinet post and give Tom Ridge
the budget authority that represents real clout in Washington. As things stand now, the participating federal departments
don't do wholehearted work because they figure the blame will fall on Ridge and he can't do anything to hurt them.
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