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Originally Posted by NCB
OK, so the Clinton Admin sends a memo to the transition committee. They warn of this, the need to do that, ect....
Has anyone stopped and asked themselves, "Well, if the Clinton Admin knew this and that and claim to have had a plan, why didn't they act?"
Look, I know it's part of the Clinton legacy to make him look like he was tough on terror, but he still has that 8 year track record of doing nothing about it! Issuing memos does not absolve the Clinton Admin of whatever responsibility they may have. Are they criminally negligent? No, and neither is the Bush Admin.
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NCB, how do your comments and question match the facts,
referenced below? Does your belief system limit your ability
to look deeper and longer at all of this ?
The facts are that Clarke was kept on after the transition from Clinton to
Bush. He still held a position of authority high enough on 9/11 to go to
the white house and take control of coordinating the response to the 9/11
attacks.
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<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22231-2004Mar24.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22231-2004Mar24.html</a>
Clarke told the commission in testimony yesterday afternoon that whereas the Clinton administration treated terrorism as its highest priority, the Bush administration did not consider it to be an urgent issue before the attacks.
"I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue," Clarke told the 10-member panel. ". . . There was a process underway to address al Qaeda. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way."
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<a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=44811">Against All Enemies Excerpts From The First Chapter by Richard A. Clarke</a>
I realized then that until today I had not ever briefed the President on terrorism, only Cheney, Rice, and Powell. We had finally had our first Principals meeting on terrorism only a week earlier. The next step was to have been a briefing to walk the President through our proposed National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). The Washington Post later reported (January 20, 2002) that the NSPD had as its goal to "eliminate al Qaeda." The plan called for arming the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to go on the offensive against the Taliban, pressing CIA to use the lethal authorities it had been given to go after bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership. Bush had never seen the plan, the pieces of which had first been briefed to Cheney, Rice, Powell, and others on his team in January. I had not been allowed to brief the President on terrorism in January or since, not until today, September 11. It had taken since January to get the Cabinet-level meeting that I had requested "urgently" within days of the inauguration to approve an aggressive plan to go after al Qaeda. The meeting had finally happened exactly one week earlier, on September 4.
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