webnarc Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by Ghost of Nibbs McPimpin Actually, I'm continuing to counter the claims of two people who've shown nothing but deception in how they portray themselves to the board. I'm going to do it at every opportunity because a man without the honor to be truthful about where he stands and what he is doesn't deserve respect, not even on an internet forum. Post-count throttling? Please. If I posted something ABOUT aRedskin or Jb or Art rather than about two of your ideological compatriots, you'd not have uttered one word in protest. Indeed, I don't see you going around to the myriad posts on every thread that don't "contribute." When you start doing that, you can talk to me, otherwise shove off. You said: "but remember aRedskin, thew and chomerics are right-wing." and I contest that it was pointless to the thread. I maintain that it is thread throttling because chomerics stated that Bush was NOT 100% responsible for what happened and that others share some of the responsibility but he was the leader at the time. I also maintain, while not stated above, that you do not demonstrate complete comprehension of the post that evokes the rage / responses that you post. There are points that each of the above mentioned *enemies* raise that offer some common ground from which you can establish a joined understanding, but you do that thing you do (the not listening mind reading thing) and ignore them. It is fine to do, just remember that when you strive to post 12.43 posts per day, the quality of some of them will be weaker because you didn't take the time to think it out completely. Shove off? Okay matie. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
got2u Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/meyer200404080954.asp----just a link to an interesting article----sort of sheds some light on the "intelligence" aspect of all this----IMHO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by Ghost of Nibbs McPimpin Burgold One problem in that analysis(which I agree with, by the way) is that I knew of the AQ threat before 9/11. I even recall that there was a plan to bring down many of our planes. To me, TWA 800's full story has not yet been told. I'll leave it at that. So, we come to this idea that we knew of the threat, we knew that terrorists WOULD hit the US in time. We were hit(Embassies are US territory) time and again and very little was done. My problem is, how the hell can a man like Clarke who actually campaigned AGAINST military action as an option(real action, not just some missiles) be critical? Clinton had the occasion after the embassy attacks to launch a full scale war against AQ or at least the international effort to cut off funding, round up suspects and the like. Neither Clarke nor Clinton seemed much interested in this. By the time Bush took office, that moment of anger and determination had been lost. Who didn't think that terrorists would attempt to hit the US? I mean, I remember watching the Siege years ago, and I was pretty confident that something like that would happen here(though unlike the film, rounding people up after several terrorists attacks would not be an issue for me) Operation Bojinka was known to at least many in the intelligence community. Ramzi Yousef had even theorized that planes could be used to crash into buildings. But perhaps we should look to Greg Easterbrook, a known liberal, for his "alternate timeline" to see what the reaction to Bush acting as many of his critics are saying he should have acted would have been: http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml Nice find on the Easterbrook article. I was suprised to find you quoting a tnr article, I figured you wouldn't be reading that garbage, although I love TMQ, it ruins two hours every Tuesday at work. I agree with your post, and I've never said Clinton doesn't deserve SOME of the blame. There's plenty enough to go around, but the FBI really dropped the ball too. It's the utter disassociation with any intel which builds my frustration with Bush. If Bush had come out and said "We screwed up pre 9-11 and we were caught with our pants down. We regretably allowed this to happen in this country, but we will do everything in our power to insure this never happens again." I would back him 100%. Instead he claims anything that states intel pre 9-11 as history and takes no blame for his lack of actions. He passes blame around to everyone who has quit his administration, yet takes none of it himself. The same could be said for Iraq and the WMDs/Hussen 9-11 connection, yet all he does in emphatically deny he ever said there was a connection. This is not what I want in a leader, and I feel that he has failed the American public miserably in that matter. Also, didn't the CIA plane scenario come from Bjoinka? I know it contained a supposed mass airline hijacking and wuold result in 10-12 planes blowing up simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean, but I also remember something with the hijacking of a plane and crashing into the CIA building. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by got2u http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/meyer200404080954.asp----just a link to an interesting article----sort of sheds some light on the "intelligence" aspect of all this----IMHO A very good article, espically considering the source. It outlines some of the problems with intel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
got2u Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 April 08, 2004, 9:54 a.m. Connecting the Dots Our intelligence community needs pattern-spotters, not career bureaucrats. By Herbert E. Meyer As the 9/11 Commission's hearings play out on television, and as the new presidential commission to investigate intelligence failures relating to Iraq and weapons of mass destruction gets going, the coming weeks are sure to bring more revelations about what went wrong in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks and in the subsequent run-up to our war with Iraq. Good: We need to understand what went wrong with our intelligence on the 9/11 attacks and Iraq's WMD, and if these commissions can find some answers, we will owe them our gratitude. But enough information has already surfaced to make clear that behind the CIA's failures surrounding 9/11 and Iraq's WMD lies an intelligence failure about the war on terrorism that runs even deeper — and is of an order of magnitude that neither commission may consider within its charter to investigate. To understand this deeper failure, you need to understand something about intelligence itself that, to my knowledge, no one has ever disclosed before. For several years, during the Reagan administration, I had access to many of our intelligence services' most closely held secrets. And what I learned is this: The most vital, most actionable pieces of intelligence aren't "secret" at all. They are visible to anyone with a reasonable grasp of politics and economics — and, above all, anyone with a willingness to see the obvious and then articulate it clearly enough, and forcefully enough, so that policymakers cannot possibly ignore it. Before turning to the CIA's failure in the war on terrorism, let me explain this point by outlining the CIA's deep failure in the Cold War. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the CIA produced a stream of intelligence assessments whose key judgment was that the Soviet economy was growing at an annual rate of more than 3 percent. The implication of this steady growth was that the Soviet Union had the economic wherewithal to continue fighting the Cold War for as long as anyone could foresee. There was just one problem with the agency's key judgment: It couldn't possibly be right. If you understood how an economy works — or if you just put on a pair of comfortable shoes and walked the streets of Moscow, or Leningrad, or Minsk with your eyes open — it was obvious that the Soviet economy wasn't growing at 3 percent. It wasn't growing at all: It was starting to implode. THE VALUE OF INSIGHT This wasn't a secret, but rather something much more valuable in the intelligence business: It was an insight. And if true, the implication of this insight was extraordinary: it meant the Soviet Union could not continue to wage the Cold War; that it needed to win quickly, before its economy collapsed, which meant in turn that the Soviet Union was likely to become even more aggressive in the years ahead precisely because it was starting to collapse. Armed with this insight — which was developed by a group of "outsiders" appointed to key CIA jobs by President Reagan's remarkable director of central intelligence, William J. Casey — we ordered our clandestine service, and our analysts, to shift their focus from Soviet strengths to Soviet weaknesses; in other words, to see if they could uncover "secret" intelligence either to support the insight or prove it false. What flowed in was a stunning torrent of reports, intercepts, and photographs — about factories shutting down for lack of raw materials, about workers rioting to protest the lack of meat and soap, about Moscow planners frantically shifting allocations of steel from tanks to locomotives, the text of brutal memos from the Politburo putting more and more pressure on the various bureaucracies to find new ways of generating hard currency — all of which showed conclusively not only that the Soviet economy was imploding, but that Soviet leaders knew it. Indeed, the one "secret" that Soviet leaders were most determined to keep us from learning — the one piece of intelligence whose discovery would be for them an utter catastrophe — is that they were sitting atop an imploding economy. They were right. Armed with the intelligence that the Soviet economy was in deep trouble, President Reagan set a course to force that economy off a cliff. We launched an arms buildup the Soviets couldn't possibly match, including SDI. We got rough with our so-called allies in the Mideast and forced down the price of oil, not merely to boost our own economy, but to cripple the Soviet economy by cutting their hard-currency earnings from oil exports. And when they scrambled to build a natural-gas pipeline into Western Europe to generate the hard currency that oil exports weren't providing, we played diplomatic hardball with our European allies and got that project stopped. There was more to it, of course — including CIA operations that even now must remain secret — but the point here is that President Reagan found a way to use this intelligence to end the Cold War with a victory for the free world. Now let's fast-forward into the 1990s. The World Trade Center was nearly blown up in 1993. American soldiers were killed in Saudi Arabia when truck bombs took out the Khobar Towers barracks in 1996. In Iran the mullahs were providing more and more support to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. In Iraq Saddam Hussein tried to kill President George H.W. Bush and established at least a working relationship with al Qaeda. The Taliban took power in Afghanistan, and gave al Qaeda a secure base of operations. Al Qaeda itself began to operate beyond the Mideast, and in 1998 hit our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 2000, al Qaeda wrecked the Navy's most advanced destroyer, the USS Cole. And through all this, literally month after month, Osama bin Laden issued one statement after another calling for the destruction of Western Civilization itself. WE WERE AT WAR Put all this together (and, in my mind, we need to take a hard look at the Oklahoma City bombing and the explosion that brought down TWA flight 800), and the not-so-secret insight hits you right between the eyes: War has been declared on the United States. It has been declared by al Qaeda, which has the support of other terrorist groups and also of rogue states including Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Attacks to date make clear that this anti-U.S. coalition of groups and states has the capacity to plan and carry out sophisticated attacks on high-value targets, and has a global reach. Most worrisome, our enemies' objective is neither political nor territorial in the traditional sense. Rather, their objective is our utter physical destruction. The implication is that attacks on U.S. targets, both overseas and in the U.S. itself, inevitably will increase both in frequency and magnitude. Of course analysts will have honest differences of opinion over which terrorist group or country carried out which attack. (Hint to all you terrorism analysts: Laurie Mylroie is right; Laurie is always right.) But push beyond these differences and you would have to be blind not to see that our country was at war, and had been for several years at least. It was the intelligence community's responsibility — probably by the mid-1990s, but surely by the late 1990s — to reach this key judgment and grasp its horrifying implications. And the community's leader, the director of central intelligence, should have made sure that both the judgment and its implications were delivered and absorbed. After all, intelligence isn't like journalism; you don't just write your piece, send it off for publication, and then keep your fingers crossed hoping someone will notice your brilliant insight. In the intelligence business, you send your judgment and explain its implications to the policymakers, then wait a reasonable amount of time — about five minutes — before jumping in a car, heading for the White House, or the State Department, or the Pentagon, pushing your way past all the secretaries and confronting your good friends and colleagues head-on. In the intelligence business you need to market your product. You need to confront the policymakers, force them to pay attention, make them "get it." And if charm and courtesy don't work — and they rarely do, because policymakers are busy, distracted by other problems, and they, like all human beings, hate to be confronted with bad news — you need to shove the intelligence down their throats. All this is part of the job — which is why intelligence officials who are described as "well liked by policymakers" are worthless. And if nothing you say or do gets the policymakers to pay attention, you get back in your car, drive to Capitol Hill, and talk privately with some of the more serious members of Congress. And if you still can't get anyone to face the intelligence, you resign and slam the door so hard on your way out that the whole country hears it and asks why. But none of this happened. The CIA and the other parts of our intelligence community didn't "get it." They didn't connect the dots. They didn't understand that, by the mid-1990s, the old way of declaring war had ended — think of Neville Chamberlain's mournful BBC broadcast in September 1939, telling the British that "...as Herr Hitler has not responded to our ultimatum, a state of war therefore exists between our two countries" — and that from now on wars just start without the traditional formalities. THE FAILURE OF FAILURES This is the deep intelligence failure of the war on terrorism. It was a failure of insight, and it was from this failure that all the others flowed. Had our intelligence community made clear back in the 1990s that the country was at war, and under attack, the post-9/11 national focus on terrorism and on radical Islam would have started years before. The questions of how best to confront our enemies, and perhaps of whether to form a Department of Homeland Security, might have become issues in the 2000 presidential elections. The intelligence-sharing between the CIA and FBI that is only now beginning might have been working smoothly long before those 19 9/11 hijackers ever entered the U.S. It's possible, of course, that none of this would have sufficed to stop the 9/11 attacks. And it's possible that, in the late 1990s, we Americans were having so much fun — a booming dot-com economy, a president whose sexual antics kept us amused and revolted, all sorts of neat new electronic toys to play with — that nothing our intelligence community reported could have made us end our holiday from history and get serious in time. But we will never know for sure, because our intelligence community failed to sound the alarm early enough, clearly enough — and loudly enough — to give us a chance. To their great credit, both Republican and Democratic members of the two intelligence commissions have made clear that they are more interested in making needed changes to help prevent future failures than in assigning blame for past failures. This means they will need to push beyond "secret" intelligence of intercepts and satellite photos — and beyond the headline-grabbing disputes over who said what to whom, or whose recollection of some off-hand comment by the president is more accurate — and reach to the core of how intelligence works. The real value of intelligence isn't merely to provide a last-minute warning so you can dodge a bullet or a bomb — or a hijacked 757. Rather, it is to see the future clearly enough, and early enough, so that you can change the future before it happens. To do this you need insight even more than you need secrets; this means that, to prevent the next failure, we will need to do more than merely re-organize the intelligence community, or even name a director of national intelligence to oversee the whole alphabet soup of agencies and offices. As I have said before, intelligence isn't org charts: It's people. And this means that unless we put at the upper echelons of the CIA the best analysts and pattern-spotters our country can provide — the kinds of men and women who aren't likely to be career government officials — we won't be ready for whatever the next history-making cataclysm turns out to be. — Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of central intelligence and as vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. His new video is The Siege of Western Civilization. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 got2u, I remember the whole colapse of the Soviet Union presage in the early to mid 80s. I had a family member who was on the Soviet Briefing team for a branch of the service during that period. He was able to travel to the USSR during the height of the coldwar and report on their progress/failures. I still remember the toilet paper lines and the eggs line. It really showed the repression of the Soviet individual just with pictures. I wasn't wawre of the CIAs report of the USSR having a 3% GDP increase every year, you just had to look at the pictures to see that wasn't true. Afghanistan really sped thing up for them as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
got2u Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 chom---true on Afganistan---a weight the Soviets did not need---maybe that is why we suppported the taliban then--- Carter---US embassy is siezed in Iran by radical islamists---Americans held hostage for 444 days----a rescue mission fails badly-----US response----cut and run Reagan---241 marines die in a suicide bombing in Beirut---(Marines at the guard station aren't allowed to have loaded weapons at the ready)---US response---cut and run Bush 41---Defeats Saddam in Kuwaite----incourages resurrection on the part of kurds in Iraq---Saddam meets the challege of the Kurds with leathal force-------US response---cut and run Clinton---Mogidishu----(18 US Rangers killed)---Kobar towers---USS Cole--(17 US Saliors killed)---1993 World Trade Center bombing (six US citizens die)---US response----little if any We are at war people I am willing to make a prediction---if Bush is elected or Kerry is elected we will be attacked again and it will be horrific----bet on it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
got2u Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 hhahhahahhahahaha---INsurrection ---(we would be the last supporting a REsurrection) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbooma Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by chomerics According to who? Arfe you saying that various services, the FBI, CIA and intel looked at Al Qaeda as "just your normal criminal robbing 7-11"??? We didn't have the powers like we do know to tract people down. Do you think every Al Qaeda member just wears a badge and says, "Hey look at me I am a terrorist". This isn't James Bond we don't know who all the terrorists are. Our government had put a hamper on what intelligence agencies can do regarding personal and money. Only recenty have we been able to recoup of some of what we lost. Let me ask you a question. If your work is destaffed 50% don't you think it will be hard to keep up what you have been doing. The public is so in the dark about what the past presidents have done to our budget and operating money. OK, so you need intel stating the terrorists are going to crash airplanes into buildings into NYcity on Sept. 11 for it to have any relevance. So what's your reasoning for the war on Iraq then? Do you work for the Bush administration??? Nobody said anything about shutting down some city or area, all I'm saying is SOMETHING shouold have been done. It should NOT have been ignored. When you recieve a memo like this, should you just ignore it then??? Is that what you're saying? It sounds soulds like it, can you please elaborate what you mean. We get memos like this all the time. We get over 100 threats per hour, if we act on every single one it would be useless. All the threat said is we were acting on 70 different al queda fronts, it doesn't say how specific or what this is. It could be something from a company giving money etc... You make it sound like the answer is right there, man you are off it is scary. Trust me we wish it was that way, but it isn't. This terror organization is very intelligent. You seem to think we know everything about them. So, now only intel officers are allowed to debate this? The ordinary couldn't possibly fathom the steps required to use intel? This is a general statement, elaborate on it, and let us know why or don't bother putting this in. Do you want my honest opinion? Because you can't handle what we know. The public would $hit their pants if we told them some of the stuff we know. You also seem to over react on any piece of information you get. For anyone to think our government would just let the terrorists attack and us not to try to prevent anything then you are truly one sad individual. Now to warn the citizens we do have that coded alert system. Don't take it lightly if we move the color up that means we have something credible we are closely watching. What we do first is alarm the local governments and then let them decide how or if they want to alarm the citizens. This is working better thanks to homeland security. This is one of the most important actions our President has taken to help with the communication between the agencies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghost of Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by got2u chom---true on Afganistan---a weight the Soviets did not need---maybe that is why we suppported the taliban then--- One note, we did not support the Taliban, they are a relatively recent development and were assisted by the Pakistani ISI. Almost none of the Taliban were involved at all in the war against the Soviets which is in contrast to the Northern Alliance who are the descendants(if you will) of the mujahid we helped supply. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by jbooma We didn't have the powers like we do know to tract people down. Do you think every Al Qaeda member just wears a badge and says, "Hey look at me I am a terrorist". This isn't James Bond we don't know who all the terrorists are. Our government had put a hamper on what intelligence agencies can do regarding personal and money. Only recenty have we been able to recoup of some of what we lost. Let me ask you a question. If your work is destaffed 50% don't you think it will be hard to keep up what you have been doing. The public is so in the dark about what the past presidents have done to our budget and operating money. The problem I have isn't that we didn't know who they were, but what we did to find out who they were. I would also argue it wasn't the president that had a direct relationship to where the money was spent, but the heirachy of the military. Lets face it, the emphasis on intel wasn't a proprity for anyone, the military included. The budget for the military in 93' was 311.1 Billion dollars, the budget in 01' was $305 million dollars. That's not a 50% decrease even with inflation accounted for, but the intel sector was 50% understaffed. If your going to blame people, your military generals, the ones who decide where the money goes, deserve just as much if not more of the blame for intel being understaffed. We get memos like this all the time. We get over 100 threats per hour, if we act on every single one it would be useless. All the threat said is we were acting on 70 different al queda fronts, it doesn't say how specific or what this is. It could be something from a company giving money etc... You make it sound like the answer is right there, man you are off it is scary. Trust me we wish it was that way, but it isn't. This terror organization is very intelligent. You seem to think we know everything about them. The problem is that this memo made it to the President's desk and he did nothing. He asked for an update on all the chatter going around the intel community about Al Qaeda, he recieved the memo stating what some of the posibilities could be and he decided not to act on it. For this he deserves some of the blame, to go off and label him as blamless is wrong. If he sent the word out to all the operatives and "shook the trees" He would at least have done something, instead he did nothing. I can't fathom why nobody sees this as a problem. I get accused of being partisian, yet I've not heard one neo-con hit Bush with at least his portion of the blame (OK ghost, you did, but you're a libertarian.) Do you want my honest opinion? Because you can't handle what we know. The public would $hit their pants if we told them some of the stuff we know. You also seem to over react on any piece of information you get. I've heard a lot of the intel spread around, such as briefcase nuclear bombs buried in a city. I do have relatives who work for intel, as I stated before, so I know SOME of the information passed through your desk and I agree, the public would $hit if they say some of it. For anyone to think our government would just let the terrorists attack and us not to try to prevent anything then you are truly one sad individual. I don't think that at all, I just think it wasn't part of their agenda, and they fail to at least take partial blame for it. According to them, they did everything correct, yet ignoring intel isn't really the correct thing to do. Now to warn the citizens we do have that coded alert system. Don't take it lightly if we move the color up that means we have something credible we are closely watching. What we do first is alarm the local governments and then let them decide how or if they want to alarm the citizens. This is working better thanks to homeland security. This is one of the most important actions our President has taken to help with the communication between the agencies. [/b] I don't know how to respond to this one, I don't agree with the public warning system but I guess it's a necessary evil. The main problem I have with it is it causes undue panic and can also create a "boy who cried wolf" syndrome. As for the intel memo, the one problem I have is the fact that it crossed the president's desk and nothing was done. He and his staff have repeatedly stated they had no evidence saying that Al Qaeda was going to attack inside the US and they had no idea they were going to use planes. Now, this memo surfaces and they say there was nothing pertanent in it. Well, after reading it, I tend to differ and I think the majority of Americans will find something very disturbing in the last 2 paragraphs. The fact that they released the memo on Easter eve, after dinner says something doesn't it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by Ghost of Nibbs McPimpin One note, we did not support the Taliban, they are a relatively recent development and were assisted by the Pakistani ISI. Almost none of the Taliban were involved at all in the war against the Soviets which is in contrast to the Northern Alliance who are the descendants(if you will) of the mujahid we helped supply. Just a side note, didn't we give the Taliban money when they were going to run the pipeline through Afghanistan? We also were on their side becuase of our war on drugs and gave them $43 million in aide before 9-11 because of the "war on drugs" and their ruining of the opium crop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thew Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 didn't we give the Taliban money when they were going to run the pipeline through Afghanistan? I don't think that was America. I think that was a consortium of America Oil companies with including Dick Cheney as one of their representatives.... I'm not faulting Cheney for anything here cause at the time the Taliban wasn't considered a problem. When the taliban first came into power they weren't considered bad guys. They decreased the opium output, they quieted the rioting, looting and cooruption which was rampant after the Mahajadin took power... Also one Mahajadin leader who did recieve American support, training and weapons was Osama Bin Laudin. And as we now know did become an alli of the Taliban. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghost of Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by chomerics Just a side note, didn't we give the Taliban money when they were going to run the pipeline through Afghanistan? We also were on their side becuase of our war on drugs and gave them $43 million in aide before 9-11 because of the "war on drugs" and their ruining of the opium crop. For a "right-winger" you don't seem to have availed yourself of the facts. The 43 million was in food and humanitarian aid, dude. Not direct financial aid to the Taliban. The pipeline has nothing to do with any of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MichaelM Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by chomerics The problem I have isn't that we didn't know who they were, but what we did to find out who they were. I would also argue it wasn't the president that had a direct relationship to where the money was spent, but the heirachy of the military. Lets face it, the emphasis on intel wasn't a proprity for anyone, the military included. The budget for the military in 93' was 311.1 Billion dollars, the budget in 01' was $305 million dollars. That's not a 50% decrease even with inflation accounted for, but the intel sector was 50% understaffed. If your going to blame people, your military generals, the ones who decide where the money goes, deserve just as much if not more of the blame for intel being understaffed. So you are saying military intelligence should be the ones finding Al Qaeda in the US and tracking down terrorists in the country? Would you like for these "military generals" to hunt down serial killers too? Originally posted by chomerics The problem is that this memo made it to the President's desk and he did nothing. He asked for an update on all the chatter going around the intel community about Al Qaeda, he recieved the memo stating what some of the posibilities could be and he decided not to act on it. For this he deserves some of the blame, to go off and label him as blamless is wrong. If he sent the word out to all the operatives and "shook the trees" He would at least have done something, instead he did nothing. I can't fathom why nobody sees this as a problem. I get accused of being partisian, yet I've not heard one neo-con hit Bush with at least his portion of the blame (OK ghost, you did, but you're a libertarian.) How would you have acted on this memo to prevent an attack? Are you shocked to know Al Qaeda was in the US planning an attack on the US? Maybe you fail to remember the WTC bombing in '93 and who was behind that? These terrorist plans do not happen overnight, but are in the planning stages for years. If Bush is to blame so much, why didn't the previous administration do something to stop this while they were planning the attack? Al Qaeda was already here and had already attacked us, but nothing was done. Originally posted by chomerics As for the intel memo, the one problem I have is the fact that it crossed the president's desk and nothing was done. He and his staff have repeatedly stated they had no evidence saying that Al Qaeda was going to attack inside the US and they had no idea they were going to use planes. Now, this memo surfaces and they say there was nothing pertanent in it. Well, after reading it, I tend to differ and I think the majority of Americans will find something very disturbing in the last 2 paragraphs. The fact that they released the memo on Easter eve, after dinner says something doesn't it? This isn't a legal issue that is released after courts close on Friday. The news networks and loud mouthed politicians do not close for the weekends. Al Qaeda had already attacked the US inside the US eight years earlier, so don't come with this attitude of how this memo had all the answers. How many other memos after 1993 do you think said Al Qaeda wanted to attack the US again? There is nothing in here that anyone could have acted on. I posted an earlier post saying Al Qaeda is in the US and wants to attack the US within the US; they may use explosives, aircraft, or trucks; power/nuclear plants, economic centers, or public transportation may be targeted. The main areas of concern are New York, Wash DC, LA, or Las Vegas. Here is you info, now what are you going to do to prevent another attack? You have all the info you need, so call the FBI, CIA, and White House with your grand plan so there is not another attack on the US. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aREDSKIN Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by chomerics I want to know the facts surrounding this administration and the decisions that were made pre and post 9-11. I know that in your mind everything evolves around the VRWC and the Bushes but read this. It's a very long article. http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_why_the_fbi.html%20City%20Journal,%20Autumn%202002 Why the FBI Didn't Stop 9/11 Heather Mac Donald The greatest obstacle to domestic security in the war on terror is the worldview of the liberal elites. No sooner had the Twin Towers fallen than the press and an army of advocacy groups were on the hunt for victims—not of Muslim fanaticism but of American bigotry. The liberal commentariat has denounced every commonsensical measure to protect the country the Bush administration has proposed as an eruption of racism or tyranny. But the elite ideology began its corrosive work long before 9/11. For three decades, the liberal establishment, fixated on preventing a highly unlikely repeat of Watergate-era abuses, has encumbered America’s intelligence and national security capacities with increasingly crippling procedural inhibitions, culminating in domestic intelligence restrictions promulgated by the Clinton administration in 1995. As long as the elites continue to act as if America’s biggest enemy is not al-Qaida but the country’s own allegedly repressive and bigoted instincts, the nation’s defense against terror at home will proceed at half throttle. In August 2001, mere weeks before the greatest mass murder of civilians in U.S. history, the Justice Department squelched two prescient efforts to avert the attacks. In Minneapolis, FBI agents frantically sought permission to search the possessions of one Zacarias Moussaoui, a bumbling, suspicious flight student and a colleague of Islamic fundamentalists. In New York, another FBI agent no less frantically sought clearance to throw his squad into an 11th-hour search for Khalid Almihdar, an al-Qaida operative at large in the country. Justice Department bureaucrats refused both requests on absurd grounds. In the case of the New York agent, for example, they argued that because he was a criminal investigator, not an intelligence investigator, his participation in the manhunt for Almihdar could violate Almihdar’s rights: the al-Qaida agent was wanted not as an ordinary felon but as a terrorist. The refusals may have had enormous consequences. Had the Minneapolis agents searched Moussaoui’s effects, they would have found leads to two of the 9/11 terrorists and to the Hamburg al-Qaida cell that planned the attack. Had the FBI been able to find Almihdar, it would have apprehended the pilot who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Instead, the plot hurtled on undisturbed to its gruesome climax. The media have portrayed both episodes as “intelligence failures,” “communication failures,” or the failings of individual managers to “connect the dots.” They were not. Each of these lost opportunities was the foreseeable outcome of senseless terror-fighting restrictions put into place by Attorney General Janet Reno in 1995. Good luck finding any hint of the decisive role of the Clinton Justice Department in press accounts of the Moussaoui and Almihdar affairs, however. The 1995 Reno guidelines, though the craziest development in intelligence law to date, are not unprecedented. They are the culmination of three decades of liberal grandstanding around intelligence-gathering and use. For most of the twentieth century, Congress, courts, and legal scholars agreed that the president had plenary authority to investigate and disarm threats to the national security. If the FBI suspected a Russian attach?eacute; in Washington of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, for example, the Bureau could tap his phone without needing permission from a judge. Judges were not competent to make national security decisions, as an unusually self-effacing court explained in 1980, because they lacked “mastery of diplomacy and military affairs.” The Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, legal opinion held, was intended to protect citizens against unreasonable government intrusion in domestic crime investigations, not where the survival of the nation itself was at stake. In the 1970s, however, the courts and Congress changed their minds, signaling a new adversarial attitude toward executive power, born of 1960s anti-war protests and the Watergate revelations. Congressional hearings on a rash of excessively zealous FBI and CIA domestic investigations sent a clear message: the American government, not its enemies, was the real threat to the American people. In response, Congress saddled the investigation of foreign threats with complex procedural and judicial restraints for the first time in history. Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the president (acting through the FBI) would need a judicial warrant to surveil foreign spies and terrorists and their American collaborators on American soil. The new law defined who could be surveilled and under what circumstances, and it created two new Justice Department bodies to monitor that surveillance: the FISA court, composed of sitting federal judges, which issues surveillance warrants (needing renewal every 90 days); and the gatekeeper Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), which screens surveillance requests from FBI field offices and then argues them before the court. Problems surfaced immediately. FBI agents complained that FISA created a Catch-22 situation: in order to meet the statutory requirements for obtaining a surveillance order, you needed to show that your target was a probable spy with anti-American designs—part of the information that the wiretap was intended to obtain. In 1982, a Senate Select Committee reported that FISA had “enmeshed intelligence in procedures wholly inappropriate to it.” They hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet. Per the infallible rule of bureaucratic accumulation, FISA would trigger an explosion of obtuse procedural distinctions that would harm America’s ability to obtain, and act swiftly upon, intelligence information. One of the most vexing consequences of FISA was the requirement, imposed over time by federal courts and Justice Department officials themselves, that FBI agents continuously evaluate what their “purpose” was in conducting foreign intelligence surveillance. As long as their purpose remained gathering information on suspected spies and terrorists for its own sake—to learn about the extent of a terror cell, say, or to use in covert operations like infiltration—the FISA wiretap could continue. But if the agents concluded that the suspects had committed a crime that the government should prosecute, they had to shut down the FISA wiretap, often prematurely. In the late 1980s, for example, agents working for Oliver Revell, the FBI’s Associate Deputy Director of Investigations, were monitoring followers of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. A microphone installed in the home of a cell member in St. Louis recorded the parents’ murder of their daughter for becoming too Americanized. In order to prosecute the murder case, the Bureau had to close down the FISA surveillance, before agents had figured out the extent of the Abu Nidal cell. Civil libertarian zealots sparked this nonsensical practice. They argued that because the probable-cause standards for a FISA wiretap were in some cases lower than the requirements for an ordinary criminal wiretap, power-mad prosecutors would gin up specious FISA requests in order to obtain criminal evidence in violation of constitutional standards. Therefore, they said, the Justice Department must draw a bright line between the gathering of foreign intelligence information for intelligence purposes, on the one hand, and for criminal investigation and prosecutorial purposes, on the other. These arguments don’t withstand scrutiny. A FISA wiretap order is essentially a judicial warrant within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As Kenneth Bass III, the first director of the OIPR, argued recently before the Senate Judiciary Committee, if the FISA court has issued the surveillance order properly—to obtain information about the agents of a foreign power—the fruits of that order should be available for any national security use, including prosecution. Since acts of terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism are themselves crimes, the distinction between a “pure” foreign intelligence wiretap and a “criminal” wiretap, where terrorism is concerned, is nonsensical. Moreover, contrary to civil libertarian hyperventilating, FISA’s probable-cause standards for surveilling U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens are almost indistinguishable from traditional criminal wiretap standards. To get a FISA order for a citizen or resident alien suspected of terrorism, the government must establish that he is an agent of a foreign power and is knowingly engaged in international terrorism or spying—in other words, committing a felony, just as for an ordinary criminal wiretap. But absurdity is no bar to realization in the airless world of civil libertarian absolutism. To prevent the wholly fantastical abuse of FISA power by criminal investigators and prosecutors, a set of inhibitions gradually developed to regulate contacts among FBI agents who were gathering intelligence under a FISA order, FBI agents who may be investigating an already committed terrorist crime, and federal prosecutors. Those inhibitions reached their peak destructiveness with Attorney General Reno’s “Procedures for Contacts Between the FBI and the Criminal Division Concerning Foreign Intelligence and Foreign Counterintelligence Investigations,” issued in July 1995. Immediately dubbed “the Wall,” the 1995 guidelines erected a mind-boggling and ultimately lethal set of impediments to cooperation among all relevant anti-terrorist personnel. Let’s say—and this is a purely hypothetical example—that David Dell, an agent in the New York FBI office, has a FISA wiretap on Abdul Muhammad, an Islamic fundamentalist Yemeni affiliated with a suspected al-Qaida support cell in Brooklyn. Muhammad is not yet tied to any crime or criminal conspiracy; Dell is surveilling him to determine the extent of al-Qaida strength in New York. In a phone conversation with a fellow Yemeni in Pakistan, Muhammad mentions a dying swan and several Muslim names that Dell does not recognize. Several desks away in the FBI’s downtown office, Sam Simpson is investigating the al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. Simpson also worked on the al-Qaida bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, for which he traveled to Yemen and Kenya to execute warrants. In a sane system, Dell and Simpson would be able to talk to each other about their cases, for although Dell doesn’t recognize the names and swan references in Abdul’s recent conversation, Simpson came across some of the named men while he was in Kenya and recognizes the code that Abdul is using. The content of the Abdul intercept would help Simpson’s criminal case, and Simpson’s knowledge of the code and identities of the men would help Dell map out the extent and possible goals of the Brooklyn cell. And if Dell interviews Muhammad, in a sane world Simpson would be in on the interview, since he might recognize the significance of some of Muhammad’s replies in a way that Dell could not, and he would then be able to press Muhammad immediately for further information. Simpson might even suggest to Dell that he expand his surveillance to a grocer in Brooklyn, suspected of running an informal credit scheme, or hawallah, that may have sent money to the USS Cole conspirators. That reasonable (and, to repeat, entirely hypothetical) scenario is not the world of the Wall. Under the Wall, Dell and Simpson may not talk to each other, because Dell is receiving FISA information, and Simpson is working on a criminal case against terrorists. If Dell wants to pass any information to Simpson “over the Wall,” he first has to get permission from FBI headquarters in Washington, which then notifies the OIPR. If permission is granted, which is by no means certain, someone from the OIPR has either to come from Washington to New York or monitor all further communications between Dell and Simpson over the phone. This bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine radically chills communication, of course; but the deeper problem is that without Simpson’s expertise, Dell may not even recognize the significance of the information he is receiving, and so it may not even occur to him to request a Wall bypass. And as far as Simpson’s offering suggestions to Dell about other targets that would strengthen both their investigations, forget about it. The insanities of the Wall don’t end here. Even if Dell and Simpson are working on the same case, they cannot review raw intelligence intercepts—recorded phone conversations among terrorists, for example—in their entirety, lest Simpson start suggesting better avenues of investigation. Instead, a high-ranking FBI official reviews the intercept and segregates the bits that are appropriate for each to see. But no third-party bureaucrat can possibly have the ground-level knowledge necessary to understand the potential significance to each investigator of the various bits. Nevertheless, in a climax of perverse logic, the more important the terror case, the more stringently policed is the segregation of intelligence intercepts. Analogous to the Wall between FBI agents working in intelligence and those working on criminal cases was another wall, between the FBI and prosecutors, who also are barred from bringing their accumulated knowledge to bear on all intelligence information. According to Kenneth Bass, who helped draft FISA for the Carter administration, none of these Reno-mandated restrictions reflects the law’s original intent. “The Wall is absolutely ludicrous,” he says. “It is not in the national interest.” No sooner had the ink dried on the Wall guidelines than America’s anti-terror operations suffered a nervous breakdown. Collaboration broke down almost completely. Says Mary Jo White, former New York U.S. attorney and the most seasoned al-Qaida prosecutor before 9/11: “The walls are the single greatest danger we have blocking our ability to obtain and act on [terrorist] information.” Although the Wall only governs information-sharing, every other FISA-regulated procedure became entangled in red tape after the Reno edict. In 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism reported that the OIPR was imposing impossibly high and statutorily unjustified probable-cause standards. For example, to surveil someone who is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident alien, FISA requires showing that he is a member of a foreign terrorist organization. This is tough enough. But the OIPR started requiring evidence of a crime or specific knowledge of a group’s homicidal intentions before taking the request to the FISA court, and ignored the target’s past activities in determining probable cause. A worried Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported in 2000 that the OIPR was taking months scrutinizing FISA applications from the field, even though the nation’s safety depended on swift action against terrorist threats. The practical effect? “We absolutely were unable to check people out,” reports James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office, in anger. “How can you have a proactive agency that protects citizens, if, in order to even start an investigation, you have to show that someone is a member of a known terrorist organization, with the wherewithal to carry out an attack and the intention to do so?” Intelligence agents thought that things could not get much worse. They were wrong. In November 2000, the chief judge of the FISA court, Royce Lamberth, blasted the Bureau and one of its most respected agents for trivial violations of the Wall. The Reno Justice Department, it had turned out, was unable to abide by the Reno Wall. In September 2000, the Clinton administration had notified the FISA court that there had been over 75 breaches of the Wall since its inception. These included such violations as: disseminations of FISA intelligence to terrorist criminal squads in the FBI’s New York field office and to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York without court permission; a claim in a wiretap application that the target was not under criminal investigation for terrorism when in fact he was; and misstatements about the existence of a Wall in one particular FBI office between intelligence and criminal squads, when actually all the agents were on the same squad, and a supervisor overseeing both investigations screened the raw intelligence intercepts. The reasonable response to such revelations is: Big deal. None of these Wall breaches violated anyone’s rights; they represent the most technical of infractions. But the FISA court went berserk at these supposed insults to its authority. It excoriated the FBI’s lead Hamas investigator, Michael Resnick, for innocuous omissions in his FISA requests and forbade him from ever appearing before it again. It ruled that from then on, every last communication between intelligence agents and law-enforcement officials required its approval. In recoil, the FBI and Justice Department hunkered down completely. FBI headquarters and the OIPR, already a crippling drag on terrorist investigations, became paralyzing weights. Recalls Mary Jo White: “The walls went higher. Nothing could have been worse.” It was as if the Wall had become covered with concertina wire and broken glass, says Kallstrom. Morale plummeted. Agents in the New York bureau put signs on their desks saying: “You may not talk to me.” Fast-forward to August 2001. Coleen Rowley and other FBI agents in her Minneapolis office were furiously banging their fists against the Wall. A Minneapolis agent had flagged Zacarias Moussaoui as a possible terrorist threat, after a local flight school disclosed that Moussaoui had been acting strangely and had paid cash (nearly $7,000) for simulator training. The Minneapolis office learned from the French Intelligence Service that Moussaoui, now in custody on an INS violation, had connections to radical Islamic groups. Desperate to search Moussaoui’s computer and possessions, the agents sought permission from FBI central headquarters to ask the OIPR to seek a warrant, as per Wall procedures. They met only resistance. Finally, on August 28, 2001, the FBI’s National Security Law Unit (NSLU)—incredibly, yet another bureaucratic gatekeeper that stymies counterintelligence operations—pronounced that there was insufficient evidence of Moussaoui’s connection specifically to al-Qaida to justify a FISA search. FISA required no such showing: the French Intelligence Services’ linking of Moussaoui to Islamic radical groups in general was sufficient. The NSLU had imported a new, non-mandated roadblock into the act in the mania of risk-aversion that had gripped the agency after the Lamberth outburst. The investigation was over—until September 11, when FBI headquarters decided that maybe it ought to look into that computer after all. Astoundingly, on August 29, 2001, the day after the National Security Law Unit killed the Moussaoui investigation that would have led to two 9/11 hijackers and to the Hamburg cell that planned the attack, it cited the Wall to rebuff as well a New York agent’s urgent pleas to let him and his subordinates help track down al-Qaida member Khalid Almihdar. According to the Bureau’s paranoid Wall interpretation, because the New York agent was working criminal cases against terrorists, and Almihdar had not been indicted for a crime, the agent and his men could not cooperate with the intell agents searching for Almihdar. Immediately after the NSLU’s prohibition, the agent sent an angry e-mail to FBI headquarters: “Someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not . . . throwing every resource” at terrorists. On September 11, when his office received the passenger manifests of the four hijacked flights, the agent shouted: “This is the same Almihdar we’ve been talking about for three months.” In a parody of bureaucratic buck-passing, his supervisor responded: “We did everything by the book.” One cannot understand America’s failure to prevent 9/11 without understanding the history of the Wall. But rather than exposing the truth, America’s opinion elites have failed even to grasp it. In place of relentless investigation and tough-minded analysis, they have adopted a series of mutually contradictory attitudes about intelligence law determined by one goal only: discrediting the current Republican administration. In May 2002, Minneapolis agent Coleen Rowley released a memo she had written to FBI director Robert Mueller, complaining of the Wall and its role in blocking her office’s attempts to search Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer and possessions. Had a search request been granted, Rowley speculated, some part of the 9/11 plot might have been foiled. The media and anti-law-enforcement lobby could not have leaped quicker to turn Rowley into a feminist heroine who had the guts to expose the Bush administration’s failures. “Courageous whistleblower” was the—quite accurate—epithet of choice. But against whom did Rowley blow her whistle? Columnist Maureen Dowd, the New York Times’s most knee-jerk feminist and reliable Republican baiter, didn’t need to do any hard reporting to know. Calling Rowley a “woman of ingenuity and integrity in [a] macho organization,” Dowd contrasts her to the lazy and dull-witted FBI men, who were too “inept, obstructionist, arrogant, antiquated, bloated and turf-conscious—and timid about racial profiling” (no, that last phrase is not a typo) to prevent the 9/11 attacks. None of these newly minted aggressive law-enforcement types bothered to explicate the all-controlling role of the Clinton Wall in producing the Bureau’s ingrained risk-aversion. Too onerous, no doubt, to read through the mountains of reports necessary to uncover its existence and trace its tragic legacy. Instead, the suddenly gung ho press portrayed the Moussaoui struggle in an ahistorical vacuum, as the product of incomprehensible Republican foot-dragging on national security. But look what happens next. In August 2002, the news breaks that Attorney General John Ashcroft has submitted a request to the FISA court to rescind the 1995 Wall guidelines. Having just lionized Rowley for her assault on the Wall, the media turn around and demonize Ashcroft for his assault on the Wall. This latest gyration—impelled by a mixture of ignorance and hypocrisy—proceeded as follows: Last March, the Justice Department asked the FISA court to approve new FISA guidelines that would tear down the Wall, allowing full cooperation between criminal investigators, prosecutors, and intelligence agents in international terrorism cases. The department forcefully argued that such cooperation was mandated by the USA Patriot Act, which Congress passed in the wake of 9/11 to improve the nation’s intelligence capacity. That meant, if the department was right, that both the executive and the legislative branches demanded the rescinding of guidelines promulgated by Janet Reno’s edict. In May, the FISA court starchily rejected the Justice Department’s proposed new guidelines. This result is not surprising: a leading Clinton administration architect of the Wall, Allen Kornblum, now advises the court on legal matters, and the new guidelines would strip the court of its fearsome power. Ordinarily, all FISA proceedings are secret. The court broke with tradition, however, and grandiosely released its May 2002 opinion in August. The anti-Ashcroft media machine ramped into high gear. According to opinion makers, the country had just narrowly avoided becoming a police state, deterring at the last minute the megalomaniacal efforts of Attorney General Ashcroft to crush American freedom under his jackboots. Coleen Rowley was out of sight and out of mind. The media howled over the 75 Wall violations, criticized in the Court’s opinion, while only sporadically pointing out, and then only sotto voce, that those violations had all occurred on Clinton’s watch. In a typical display of liberal self-righteousness, Jeffrey Rosen, legal-affairs editor of The New Republic and professor at George Washington Law School, warned in the Washington Post that the proposed new FISA guidelines would “resurrect the specter of domestic surveillance by the FBI that Congress specifically ruled out in the 1970s.” This is nonsense. FISA’s strict probable-cause standards for U.S. citizens and the act’s exacting procedural requirements for obtaining a surveillance order are, for better or worse, light years from the pre-FISA era, when the executive could conduct warrantless national security surveillance. As in the Rowley affair, none of the reinvigorated defenders of American liberty bothered actually to explain the Wall and its fatal consequences. This silence guaranteed that the public could have absolutely no understanding of what was at stake in Ashcroft’s proposal, leaving the commentariat free to mischaracterize it at will. But criticizing the Wall revisions without disclosing the specific problems that those revisions aimed to correct is like criticizing America’s recent war on the Taliban without mentioning 9/11. If 1960s-vintage paranoia about the imminent American police state created the intelligence paralysis leading up to 9/11, another key component of the elite worldview has dragged down every commonsensical effort to improve national security since the attacks. That is the belief that America stands ever ready to oppress people of color. Scarcely a homeland security proposal has emerged from the Bush administration that the opinion elites have not portrayed as an eruption of bigotry or tyranny. After 9/11, the FBI investigated hundreds of thousands of terrorist tips and ultimately picked up a mere 1,200 men, mostly illegal immigrants, for questioning. The government detained some for weeks or sometimes months, checking out their backgrounds, before deporting or releasing them. The vast majority of the men were Muslim. And any investigation of Islamic terror cells worth its salt will turn up . . . Muslims! But so charged and distorted has the debate about policing and race become over the last decade that it is now professional suicide to say that, in hunting Islamic terrorists, one is going to look for and find Muslims. It is a misnomer to call such an inevitable practice “racial profiling,” as the term is commonly used. “Racial profiling,” as the elites imagine it, takes place when police play the odds about crimes that all groups commit, but at different rates. Looking for Muslims for participation in Muslim jihad is not playing the odds; it is following an ironclad tautology—Usama bin Ladin’s very definition of what it means to be a warrior for jihad. Nevertheless, anti-police and Arab advocates have co-opted the poisonous discourse about racial profiling to tar all rational law-enforcement efforts against Islamic terrorism as an outgrowth of blind prejudice. Thus, the New York Times reported ominously that the post-9/11 detentions showed signs of “profiling.” According to this stupendous illogic, a non-biased investigation of Islamic terrorism would detain proportionate samples of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Hindus. If the FBI and police have to defend themselves against charges of bigotry whenever they investigate or arrest Muslims on suspicion of Islamic terrorism, it’s going to be quite difficult, to say the least, to fight Islamic terrorism. But that is precisely what investigators are up against. When three of the 1,200 detainees were indicted in Detroit this August for operating a terrorist support cell that was infiltrating the Detroit International Airport, local Muslim leaders denounced the indictments as just another instance of racist stereotyping. “There is a feeling in our community of being a victim, which is a painful experience after September 11,” complained Mohamad Elahi, imam of the Dearborn Heights mosque. Complaints of bias also greeted the arrest of members of another alleged terrorist cell in upstate New York, indicted this September. “This is a crime of terror by the FBI on the people of Lackawanna,” explained a protester outside the courthouse where the six men were being charged. Cracking down on the crimes that make terrorism possible, above all identity fraud, also risks charges of discrimination. This August, the government charged 14 Detroit-area men, including six physicians, with providing phony documents to immigrants. “Is the government only targeting Arab-American doctors?” asked Imad Hamad of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “We truly wonder about the timing of it.” In the strange logic of these advocates, the defendants, arrested and indicted for serious crimes, were more sinned against than sinning. This inflamed sense of grievance now leads Muslim spokesmen to equate minor inconveniences—such as being questioned at an airport—with major rights abuses. Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini, imam of the Irvine, California, chapter of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, exemplifies the disjuncture between the actual Muslim experience in America after 9/11 and the rhetoric used to describe it. A courteous, round-faced man, with a short dark beard and rimless glasses, who casually drops the names of Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush, al-Qazwini has flown 20 times since September 2001, both domestically and abroad, and he has been searched only once. Yet of that one time, he asks heatedly: “Why did they turn me into an animal and deal with me in a disgraceful manner, just because my passport was Iraqi?” The “disgrace” consisted in being interrogated for half an hour about his mosque and whether the congregation was Sunni or Shia. Al-Qazwini is not willing to cut security personnel any slack. “They should have common sense that not all Iraqis are terrorists,” he asserts. But in 95 percent of his flights, they assumed just that. To expect to fly search-free 100 percent of the time is ludicrous, given the enemy status of Iraq. Nor were the questions asked of him inappropriate, given the role of imams in breeding jihad. If occasional interrogation before flying is now the equivalent of being “turned into an animal,” it’s hard to see how America can go forward with any rational security measures. But such hyperbole is now standard. A cartoon in Islamic Discourse magazine, a publication of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, shows two doors at an airline gate. The word “White” has been crossed out and “American” written in its stead on one; the word “Colored” has been replaced with “Arab-American” on the other. By no stretch of the imagination are post-9/11 security measures remotely close to Jim Crow laws, but Arab advocacy groups have masterfully usurped the mantle of black victimhood to put anti-terror efforts on the constant defensive. It would be refreshing (if unprecedented in contemporary American culture) if Arab-Americans and other Muslims stepped outside their sense of grievance to grasp the larger interests of the country. But al-Qazwini, for one, continues to see the security issue only in personal terms: it’s okay if other people get searched for no reason at all, but he or his family shouldn’t be. He was happy that a blond woman was searched on his last flight. “I now know that the security agents are open-minded,” he says. But he is incensed that his own parents were searched before a flight to London. “This has nothing to do with security,” he fumes, “but it’s because some Mexican guy has been brainwashed by the media telling him: ‘When you find these people, search them, regardless of age or stature.’ Let’s have some standards!” Most Americans would agree. One can’t blame al-Qazwini for his views. When our national leaders are unwilling even to name the enemy correctly, it’s no wonder that the advocates and the media have stepped into the breach with victimology. In speech after speech, President Bush refuses to identify our nemesis as “Islamic terrorism,” preferring instead the vaguer “terrorism,” a generality that won’t offend any religious or ethnic group. Not giving offense now seems equal in importance to protecting the nation. Following the president’s lead, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, in his now-infamous 60 Minutes interview, said he would “hope” that a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida, and a young Muslim male from Jersey City would receive the same level of scrutiny when boarding an airplane. And, alas, they do. Such security procedures have a strong symbolic purpose: to show that our hearts are pure and that we have never ever drawn any inferences from the fact that every anti-American terrorist since 1987—with the exception of Timothy McVeigh—has been Islamic. President Bush could have put an end to such charades had he explained to the nation that, because Usama bin Ladin has called on all Muslims, not all Protestants or Jews, to kill Americans wherever they find them, we would have to give a little more scrutiny to people from certain parts of the world who seek to enter the country or assume high-security positions. These are minor inconveniences compared with the catastrophe that we are trying to avert, he could have said, and we ask for the patience and understanding of people subjected to greater inquiries about their purposes. Of course such measures do not imply that we think that all Middle Easterners, North Africans, or Muslims are terrorists, but until someone comes up with a method of identifying to a man each individual terrorist, a method that is neither over- nor under-inclusive, we will have to use cruder screening mechanisms. In the absence of such a public explanation, the elites and the advocates continue to turn every reasonable security measure into another cause for grievance. Last fall, the Justice Department sought to interview about 5,000 young men from Middle Eastern and other terror-breeding countries who had entered the U.S. on short-term visas over the last two years, as had all the 9/11 hijackers. The interviews were voluntary, innocuous, and could be refused without consequence. Every civil liberties and Arab advocacy group rose up against the plan, portraying it, in the words of Islamic Discourse magazine, as “another wave of threats to our civil liberties.” The message: Every Muslim in America should feel offended. Why not an alternative message: This is not a problem. If you can help out the government in any way to prevent further attacks, please do so. The fear of giving offense also hampers needed changes in immigration policy. American and foreign intelligence still cannot identify Islamic terrorists very well, or understand fully how they communicate with one another, activate sleeper cells, or channel funding for operations. If we were serious about preventing more terrorists coming to our soil, we would impose a moratorium on immigration and visitor visas from the countries most likely to export terrorism, until our intelligence services were capable of detecting our enemies. We would suspend the student-visa program until we had a foolproof system in place for tracking foreign students. Instead, we have taken half-measures that do not provide any assurance of safety. But those half-measures have generated just as much outcry as real measures would have. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have bemoaned the fact that the State Department is taking longer than usual to process student visas from Middle Eastern and other terror-sponsoring countries. The resulting delays, warns the Times, are “generating widespread hostility” among Muslim men. Perhaps the Times has forgotten a far more lethal “hostility” among Muslim men that killed 3,000 people on 9/11. The Justice Department has proposed putting the names of visa violators who have absconded following a deportation order into national criminal databases, so that if a police officer comes across an absconder in the course of a routine stop, he can arrest him. Yet even this baby step toward border enforcement—in a reasonable world, all visa violators, not just deportation evaders, would be listed—has produced the usual denunciations. National Public Radio even broadcast a comparison of the absconder program to the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But what do you know—the opinion elites are just as hypocritically opportunistic when it comes to charges of profiling as they are regarding intelligence issues. Having worked themselves into a lather after 9/11 over the possibility that the Justice Department might use Middle Eastern or Muslim heritage as a factor in anti-terrorism investigations, they turned on a dime when doing so offered them a chance to beat up on the Bush Justice Department. In May 2001, Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams wrote his supervisors that al-Qaida members might be training in U.S. flight schools. He had been observing several Islamists enrolled in an Arizona aviation academy, one of whom had told him that he considered the U.S. government and military legitimate targets of Islam. Another man who attracted Williams’s suspicion, it was later discovered, had associated with 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour and may have screened other al-Qaida pilots. In his memo, Agent Williams requested that the Bureau check out other Middle Eastern flight students for al-Qaida ties. It is not hard to guess why the FBI ignored Williams’s request. Had word leaked out that the Bureau was investigating Muslim aviation trainees, the nation’s newspapers, networks, and advocates would have burst forth in one mighty roar of “Racism!” For the previous five years, the only law-enforcement topic that had consistently interested the press was the charge that the police were bigots. So when the Williams memo surfaced in May 2002, the media, the victims’ lobby, and the legal professoriat berated Williams for his prejudices, right? Wrong: they lionized him for his prescience. Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU, the organization that has done more than any other to make “racial profiling” the equivalent of “genocide,” wins the prize for the most blatant hypocrisy. “It surprises me that the FBI was worried about racial profiling criticism,” she cooed on National Public Radio. “The Phoenix flight-school memo was good policing.” The ACLU should have fired her on the spot for betraying everything it has argued for the last five years. The New York Times nearly equals Strossen in shameless self-contradiction. It editorialized that the FBI’s “fumbling” of the Arizona terrorist warning constituted an “egregious failure.” Never mind that before May 2001, and continuing to this day, the Times has been the nation’s most powerful voice berating the police for what it charged was their use of race and ethnicity in investigatory stops. Such little moments of clarity, even if motivated by bad faith, have been rare since 9/11. The time is past for preening fantasies aimed at boosting the elites’ self-image as a bulwark against imagined American injustice. Yet the guardians of politically correct opinion have held on to their fondest fictions, despite their destructive effects on national security. The power of the elites’ nonsensical ideology should never be underestimated. In the field of counterterrorism, the elites crippled intelligence-gathering not only by the legal restrictions that they sponsored. They accomplished something subtler but equally dangerous: they broke the agencies’ zeal to protect the country. The fuel for people who work in national security is not money but morale, observes James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office. “When you destroy that, people give up,” he says. “The notion that people who come to work every day to protect the country are raked over the coals because they shared terrorist information with criminal investigators is mind-boggling,” Kallstrom observes wearily. “We’ve been frozen in our tracks for decades by extremely vocal people who represent less than 0.01 percent of the country, but who have created totally risk-averse bureaucracies in the FBI, CIA, and the military.” Here’s a modest proposal that would improve our domestic security by 100 percent: if the elite war on the war on terror continues, we should all just stop listening. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashback Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 How would you have acted on this memo to prevent an attack? I would have taken the dog for a walk, and then cleared some brush away from the side of the house. Oh, I'm sorry, did you mean how would I have acted on it IF I WAS PRESIDENT?!?! Well, in that case, think I would have returned to the White House. I think I would have requested that Louis Freeh and George Tenet and that terrorism guy meet me there. I think I might have invited Rice, Rumsfeld and the veep, too. I might have even asked someone to remind me to ask Dick about that counter-terrorism strategy I tasked him with 5 or 6 months ago. If I found out he'd never even scheduled a meeting to discuss it with anyone yet, I might then have called my dad and asked him to have a little chat with Mr. Cheney. That there's what we called 'dereliction of duty' back in the Alabama Air National Guard. I've said in other threads, the Democrats didn't do this, the Republicans didn't do this, terrorists did this. But I look at Bush's policies and actions and rhetoric before and after 9/11, and I'm really, really not impressed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aREDSKIN Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by flashback I've said in other threads, the Democrats didn't do this, the Republicans didn't do this, terrorists did this. But I look at Bush's policies and actions and rhetoric before and after 9/11, and I'm really, really not impressed. Given that Sheik Mohammed Kahlid (captured in Pakistan) and the verified 911 operation head- has stated that the 911 operation had been in planning for years. Now expand on you statement and tell me how you feel about the Clinton policies, and actions and rhetoric before 911. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by MichaelM So you are saying military intelligence should be the ones finding Al Qaeda in the US and tracking down terrorists in the country? Would you like for these "military generals" to hunt down serial killers too? If you actually read the quote above my post you would understand my response. Blaiming the president for lack of funding, when the dollar values don't show it, points toward another direction. So you tell me then, if there was $311billion spent in 93' and $305 billion spent in 01' how was it the presidents fault military intel was cut 50%, or was understaffed 50%? Look at where the money was being spent and who was spending it before you lay blame. And read my posts before you start throwing around wild acusations. How would you have acted on this memo to prevent an attack? Are you shocked to know Al Qaeda was in the US planning an attack on the US? Maybe you fail to remember the WTC bombing in '93 and who was behind that? These terrorist plans do not happen overnight, but are in the planning stages for years. If Bush is to blame so much, why didn't the previous administration do something to stop this while they were planning the attack? Al Qaeda was already here and had already attacked us, but nothing was done. And your defense is that staying on vacation is the way to combat terrorism??? Well, first, I would call a meeting WITH the FBI & CIA, military intel, and any other relevant agency to find out all the information on the supposed suspects and cells in the US. I would make sure survalence was put on them to moniter their movements. I would notify the FAA about possible terror threats and have a contingency plan in effect just in case the worst was true. I wouldn't have stayed on vacation ignoring the threat and using the memo as toilet paper. You see, the information was out there, we just failed to put two and two together. We knew there were Al Qaeda in the country. We knew Al Qaeda were training in flight schools. We knew there was increased chatter concerning an attack, yet we failed to act. This information contained in the memo says the who, where and how on the attacks, yet you still want the when to make it justified. If you add in all the additional intel, you could make a strong case for the prevention of 9-11. Now, I'm not saying it could have been stoped, but we didn't even try to. We chose to bury our head in the sand and ignore the intel because it wasn't on this administrations agenda. Now, you tell me, If Bush rangled the feathers of the FBI and the CIA could this have been prevented? Are you aware of the Kenneth Williams memo? It's a memo passed around the FBI, but never made it up to top level officials until after 9-11. You see, if you start getting on the FBIs case and start getting on the CIAs case, some of this information makes it to the top. You "shake the tree" in a matter of speak. Staying with the status quo and doing nothing is absolutely shameful. I never once have said Bush was solely to blame for Sept. 11 and I find myself typing this after almost every thread, but it's your utter foolheardy deification of this administration and lack of blame concerning their blunders which makes you bitter partisains. You see, I believe there's enough blame to go around to everyone, yet you, and other neocons have such a disdain for Clinton, you place all the blame on him. Now, when information comes out that directly refutes the testimony of Rice and corroberates the testimony of Clarke, you dismiss it off as nothing. Do you see where your blind hatred for Clinton is getting in the way of unbiased judgemtnt? This isn't a legal issue that is released after courts close on Friday. The news networks and loud mouthed politicians do not close for the weekends. Al Qaeda had already attacked the US inside the US eight years earlier, so don't come with this attitude of how this memo had all the answers. How many other memos after 1993 do you think said Al Qaeda wanted to attack the US again? There is nothing in here that anyone could have acted on. I posted an earlier post saying Al Qaeda is in the US and wants to attack the US within the US; they may use explosives, aircraft, or trucks; power/nuclear plants, economic centers, or public transportation may be targeted. The main areas of concern are New York, Wash DC, LA, or Las Vegas. Here is you info, now what are you going to do to prevent another attack? You have all the info you need, so call the FBI, CIA, and White House with your grand plan so there is not another attack on the US. As for the timing of the release of the memo, your an ignorant fool if you believe Easter had nothing to do with it. It was released on Easter eve, when most families are coloring eggs and talking about the easter bunny. Come Sunday, most families will truck off to church and meet with their families. they won't be watching the news as they would be on a normal weeknight. They won't be up to snuff on current affairs because of the Holiday. For you to blindly ignore the timing of the release in conjunction with Easter just proves your either ignorant, or a bitter partisain neocon. I have to completely disagree with you on the rest of your post as well (suprise). Now, imagine it was Clinton or Gore at the helm and this memo came across their desk. Do you think you would still feel the same way? You see, that's the difference between you and me. I have no political party affiliation, so I can seperate myself from the partisain rhetoric, where you can't. Form articles and books I've read, Clinton DID have this stuff pass across his desk and he DID take action. He held sometimes daily, but at least weekley meetings on terrorism. Did he do enough? No. I never said he did and he deserves some of the blame, BUT, he at least did something. All Bush did was stay on vacation and ignore the memo!!! A memo I mind you, he asked his intel people to prepare concerning the recient chatter on Al Qaeda. A memo I mind you which contains the who, where and how of the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor and he chose to ignore it. Your defense is "do you know how many of these cross the Presidents desk every day?" as the reasoning for doing nothing. That's not a valid reason at all. First, we are talking pre 9-11, not post 9-11. I would venture a guess this is the first memo passed across his desk on Al Qaeda in a while. He wasn't requesting the information, so he wasn't going to get it. That's like asking how many memos on Albanian nationalists studying solar extremes of the sun passed across his desk. It wasn't important to this administration because it wasn't part of their agenda. Show me ONE instance where they took terrorism seriously before Sept. 01', just one. Maybe then I'll believe you when you post undocumented drivle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by Ghost of Nibbs McPimpin For a "right-winger" you don't seem to have availed yourself of the facts. The 43 million was in food and humanitarian aid, dude. Not direct financial aid to the Taliban. The pipeline has nothing to do with any of it. I never said it wasn't $43 million in food and humanitarian aid. I didn't say we gave the $43 million in weapons did I? I also believe it was direct consequence of the "war on drugs" and the Taliban destroying the opium crop. If you look closely, you'll also notice that I posed it as a question, hence I didn't look up the answer. Well, here it is. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A7907-2001Sep22¬Found=true But by 1997, the Helmand Valley had instead become the world's greatest producer of opium poppies for heroin. The poppies were grown openly on land made fertile through American largess, and I was told the crop was taxed by Taliban officials. Farmers said they grew poppies because it was the only crop they could make a living on. Some trained Afghan irrigation specialists remained in the area -- idle, heartbroken and dreaming of an American return. (In May, the United States released $43 million in drought aid to Afghanistan after the Taliban began a campaign against poppy growers.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashback Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Now expand on you statement and tell me how you feel about the Clinton policies, and actions and rhetoric before 911. I believe that Clinton sincerely tried to do something about OBL and al-Qaida, but failed. Part of the reason he failed was the stuff Condi Rice was talking about, the system of collecting and processing intelligence was flawed. Another reason he failed was he didn't have political capital to embark on a truly aggressive interdiction strategy with regard to OBL, al-Qaida, or Afghanistan. Anytime he did anything that made headlines, he was accused of trying to distract the public from his legal troubles. Maybe he failed because he was low-life, shifty, skirt-chasing, rat ****. What's Dubya's excuse? Clinton failed to deal with the threat effectively. So did Bush. One of them is running for re-election, and front and center in his bid for re-election is his record on National Security and the War on Terror. Talk about Clinton all you want. I don't think anybody cares. I only addressed that question because it was an easy one, and no matter how badly Clinton did, it cannot be construed as less or worse than Bush. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chomerics Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by aREDSKIN Given that Sheik Mohammed Kahlid (captured in Pakistan) and the verified 911 operation head- has stated that the 911 operation had been in planning for years. Now expand on you statement and tell me how you feel about the Clinton policies, and actions and rhetoric before 911. Can't speak for him, but Clinton should have done a lot more against Bin Laden during his tenure as President. i don't think anybody is arguing that point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burgold Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 I think Flashback's point is well taken concerning Clinton. Without 9/11, Clinton did not have the political capital or will to go into Afghanistan in a full out millitary manner. The people would revolt (they'd accuse him of wagging the dog, as they did when he did launch missile strikes previously). The Congress would balk and talk about the necessity, imminence and fiscal sanity of attacking Afghanistan... a country that had defied USSR attempts for a decade. However, I think all the Clinton stuff is a side issue. The REAL issue is what did they know, when did they know it, what did they do, why did they do it or why didn't (couldn't) they do more, and how did they miss the importance of a) chatter terrorist taking flight lessons c) warnings of hijackings with explosives d) Al Qeada operating in the US e) Al Qeada studying New York and Federal buildings for the purpose of attack. f) warning of an iminent attack against the US coming in late Summer. g) a terrorist commenting that they didn't get it this time after being arrested and referring to the World Trade Center I still believe this logic path is built by hindsight, but the fact that it can be so easily constructed is disconcerting and makes me want to know... what was done and why more wasn't being done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aREDSKIN Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Originally posted by flashback Clinton failed to deal with the threat effectively. So did Bush. One of them is running for re-election, and front and center in his bid for re-election is his record on National Security and the War on Terror. Talk about Clinton all you want. I don't think anybody cares. I only addressed that question because it was an easy one, and no matter how badly Clinton did, it cannot be construed as less or worse than Bush. Thanks for that. Your perspective IMO is certainly skewed towards "liberally" construed. To be so easily dismissive of the Clinton failures and so captious in your percieved Bush faultfindings is quite telling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burgold Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 aredskin, If you decide to whole heartedly condemn Clinton for his failings or forgive him for his failings... his direct damage is pretty much done. If you decide to whole heartedly condemn Bush for his failings or forgive him for his failings... his direct damage can still be alterred. Bush is now president making decisions and policy. Policy and structure that they have said deserve to criticized and looked at carefully. It is the present we can impact to create a better future. The past we can only learn from, not change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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