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Quote by: Logjam Clinton did nothing to combat terrorism |
Not exactly...
...Clinton had to get busy right away, with the first attack on the World Trade Center occuring about a month after Clinton took office. So the first order of business was to capture, try and convict the perpetrators, Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim and Wali Amin Shah, all now behind bars. You can visit them.
Clinton's administration went on to stop terrorist plots to: kill the Pope, blow up 12 U.S. airliners, the UN headquarters, the FBI building, the Israeli embassy in Washington, the LA and Boston airports, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington bridge and an attack on the U.S. embassy in Tanzania.
Clinton was able to do this after he tripled the counter-terrorism budget for the FBI and doubling counter-terrorism funding overall, along with creating a national security office to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts.
Now of course you'd think the Republicans in Congress would be right there, helping our president fight the evils of terrorism. Well, not exactly. When Clinton proposed
increasing our intellegence agencies wiretap authority, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich shot it down. His reasoning? ''When you have an agency that turns nine hundred personal files over to people like Craig Livingstone... it's very hard to justify giving that agency more power.'' That would be a reference to 'Filegate', remember? Yet another Clinton 'Scandal' that congressional investigation proved groundless. We can see where the Republican priorities were.
When
Clinton asked Congress for more funds for anti-terrorism efforts, Orrin Hatch said, ''The administration would be wise to utilize the resources Congress has already provided before it requests additional funding.''
When Clinton backed legislation to
expand access to banking records, in order to follow illegal money trails, it was killed, on behalf of big banks, by Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. George Bush will later call for identical legislation.
When Clinton appointed the Gore Commission to
review and make recommendations regarding terrorist threats to our airlines, the airline industry vigorously lobbied against it through the GOP run committees as 'too expense'.
And when Clinton supported
legislation to make it easier to trace Internet traffic and fight cyber-terrorism, the Republican congress howled. To be fair, so did the far left, who saw the bill as a "plan to strengthen the repressive powers of the federal government".
(Kindly note that since 9/11, Bush and John Ashcroft have pushed legislation for each of these issues.)
Gingrich, however, was more supportive when Clinton hit Sudan and Afghanistan with Tomahawks in 1998. ''The President did exactly the right thing,'' he said. ''By doing this we're sending the signal there are no sanctuaries for terrorists.''
After the embassy bombings in Africa, Clinton issued a directive authorizing the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Alas, the Republicans didn't like that. Seems it conflicted with Saint Ronald's executive order 12333 prohibiting the assassination of heads of state. The fact that Osama bin Laden was not a head of state apparently went right past them.
Then, after the Cole bombing, instead of funding the terrorists like Reagan or ignoring them like Dubya (pre-9/11, of course) Clinton appointed Richard Clarke as the first national anti-terrorism coordinator, tasked with creating a plan to take out al-Queda. He came up with a plan to break up al-Queda cells, arrest their personnel, attack their financial support, freeze their assests, give aid to countries fighting terrorists, and increase covert activity in Afghanistan to wipe out training camps and capture bin Laden. As a Bush official said, Clarke's plan amounted to ''
everything we've done since 9/11.''
Then a horrible thing happened. George Dubya Bush took office. From the moment he took office, his administration completely ignored efforts to combat terrorism, prefering to focus on... here it comes... missile defense. Star Wars.
During the transition, NSA Sandy Berger arranged 10 briefings with Bush's new NSA, Condoleeza Rice, assuming they'd realize the threat of terrorist attacks and want to continue Clinton's work.
Nope. In fact, when TIME magazine asked Rice, she ''declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present''. Unfortunately, the New York Times did a story at the time. Quote: ''As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his successor, Condoleeza Rice, and gave her a warning. ACCORDING TO BOTH OF THEM, he said that terrorism -- and particularly Mr. bin Laden's brand of it--would consumme for more of her time than she had ever imagined.''
The final ingominy came in February of 2001, when the Hart-Rudman commission issued their final report. In it, they warned that ''mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland was of serious and growing concern.'' Their advice? Create a new federal agency, ''A National Homeland Security Agency with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security.''
Bush's response? Zip! Zilch! Nada! Nicht!
Nope, Bush was busy spending 42% of his first seven months in office either at Camp David, Kennebunkport or Crawford, Texas, spending important quality time with his wife and his dog. Not until after 9/11 did Bush decide to put in action everything that Clinton's team had tried so hard to get past Republicans.
Ironical, huh!"
.