Johnny Rotten

That turns out not to be the case.

Starting in 1993, Clinton's storied obsession against terrorism led to thwarted plots to assassinate the Pope, blow up twelve jetliners, the United Nations, the FBI building, the Isreali embassy in Washington. LAX and the Boston airport, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the GW Bridge. And CIA headquarters in 1996, which was supposed to have been executed with a commerical jetliner.

Let me explain how he was involved in this, rather than his administration merely being in office at the time of these events.

He tripled the FBI counterterrorism budget. Specifically counterterrorism. He also doubled overall counterrorism funding. Two anti-crime bills with specific and detailed attention to terrorism. A national stockpile of drugs and vaccines, his idea. Creation of a top-level security post to coordinate federal counterterrorist activity.

And the Republican legislature fought him every inch of the way, because they thought he was throwing money away. Isn't that ironic?

After the African embassy bombings in 1998, Clinton issued an executive order authorizing the assassination of bin Laden.

Richard Clarke was to be the man who would take the charge to the Bush administration and administer the holy terror of vengeance in repsonse to the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. He worked furiously. He worked ambitiously. A strategy paper outlining systematic freezing of assets, breaking up al Qaeda cells, cutting off fake charities, and dramatically increasing covert ops in Afghanistan.

This was the hallmark of the Clinton administration. To quote John DiIulio, the former head of Bush's Office of Faith-Based Inititatives, "Every domestic [issue] drew multiple policy analyses that certainly weighed politics, media messages, legislative strategy, et cetera, but also strongly weighted policy-relevant information, simulated substantive policy debate, and put a premium on policy knowledge. That is simply not Bush's style."

They took Clarke's initiative and wiped their asses with it. They dragged on with meeting after pointless meeting, until September 10th, 2001, when Ashcroft sent him a note telling him his initiative was not going to be accepted. That day, he also sent his Justice Dept. budget request to Bush. None of the 68 items dealt with terrorism.

During this time, CIA Director George Tenet issued a paper to Bush entitled, cryptically, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S." Former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman issued three security reports which championed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, a castrated version of which exists today. The Hard-Rudman Commission decided unanimously that "the security of the American homeland from the threats of the new century should be the primary national security mission of the U.S. government."

In July of 2001, let's not forget Kenneth Williams, the FBI agent who reported concerns about some Middle Eastern students at an aviation school in Phoenix (a matter of which it can be arguably said at this point would never had been explored without Clinton's dominating influence). The concern was that the students had no interest in learning how to land or take off.

When the INS arrested Zacharias Moussaoui on August 16, 2001, the arresting agent said with chilling prescience, "he was the type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Center."


...Now imagine if Gore, Clinton's right- hand man, had been in office this whole time, busily continuing his former boss's tireless war against terrorism.