Clinton faces some tough 9-11 questions

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Clinton faces some tough 9-11 questions
95
Wed, 03-17-2004 - 4:26pm
Lisa Myers has an exclusive report on secret CIA footage of OBL, and another missed opportunity to involve the military in combatting terrrorism.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4540958/

Renee

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iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Thu, 03-18-2004 - 8:36pm
What can I say? I should have listened to my grandfather who said there was no such thing as a new Democrat, but I was young & naively foolish & blown away by the crack campaign he ran in '92. The rose colored glasses were off well before the '96 campaign.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2003
Thu, 03-18-2004 - 9:10pm
? on what charge?
iVillage Member
Registered: 05-08-2003
Thu, 03-18-2004 - 9:57pm
From Part 3 of the Lisa Myers report.

"Roger Cressey, a terrorism expert in both Democratic and Republican administrations and now an NBC News analyst.

Now Cressey is speaking out for the first time. He says in the early days of the Bush administration, al-Qaida simply was not a top priority, “There was not this sense of urgency. The ticking clock, if you will, to get it done sooner rather than later.”

Cressey and other witnesses have told the 9/11 commission of long gaps between terrorism meetings and greater time and energy devoted to Russia, China, missile defense and Iraq than al-Qaida.

For example: One document shows a key high-level National Security Council meeting on Iraq on Feb. 1, 2001. Yet, there was no comparable meeting on al-Qaida until September.

Is Cressey saying that some senior members of the Bush administration viewed Saddam Hussein as a greater threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden? “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It was inconceivable to them that al-Qaida could be this talented, this capable without Iraq, in this case, providing them real support."

That spring, President Bush learned bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors. Why was there no retaliation?

“You would think after an attack that almost sank a U.S. destroyer there would have been for some type of action. Yet we never saw that from the Pentagon,” Cressey answered.

Bush administration national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insists that President Bush wanted to avenge the Cole, but not with a pinprick retaliatory strike, ���We were concerned that we didn’t have good military options. That really all we had were options like using cruise missiles to go after training camps that had long since been abandoned.”

Bush was obviously dragging his heels on al Qaeda and concentrating on Iraq.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 03-18-2004 - 11:32pm

>"Why didn't you respond to the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. Cole? The attack occurred on Oct. 12, 2000; 17 American sailors were killed. The Clinton Administration wanted to declare war on al-Qaeda. An aggressive military response was prepared, including special-forces attacks on al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. But Clinton decided that it was inappropriate to take such dramatic action during the transition to the Bush presidency. As first reported in this magazine in 2002, Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and counterterrorism deputy Richard Clarke presented their plan to Condoleezza Rice and her staff in the first week of January 2001.

Berger believed al-Qaeda was the greatest threat facing the U.S. as Clinton left office. Rice thought China was. What were President Bush's priorities? Was he aware of the Berger briefing?"<


Quote from Time mag. article "Bush & 9/11: What We Need to Know" ..............


http://www.time.com/time/election2004/columnist/klein/article/0,18471,600843,00.html


iV post http://messageboards.ivillage.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=iv-elinthenews&msg=6231.1&ctx=128

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 03-19-2004 - 12:01am
Actually, the Bush administration was interested in constructing a pipeline across Afghanistan, and so didn't want to do anything to agreivate the Taliban. Our intelligence people were told to back off of Al Qaeda. (I've posted to you about this before.)
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Fri, 03-19-2004 - 7:34am
<>

Planning the WTC & Cole bombings as well as the two on the US embassies in Africa.


Plan to nab bin Laden stymied

By Rowan Scarborough

THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 3-18

A Pentagon planner drafted a top secret battle plan for pre-emptively attacking Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but his recommendations never reached then-Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, say defense and former Clinton administration officials.

The highly classified plan, drafted in August 1998 after al Qaeda's deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, recently was turned over to the U.S. commission investigating the September 11 attacks.

Commission staffers have begun interviewing current and former Pentagon officials to determine why the battle plan never was forwarded to Mr. Cohen.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has scheduled two days of hearings next week. They will focus on what options the Clinton and Bush administrations considered against al Qaeda from the time of the embassy bombings to September 11, 2001.

It has been reported that the Clinton White House wanted the Pentagon top brass to conceive special operations missions to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan. Gen. Hugh Shelton, then-Joint Chiefs chairman, and other officers objected on the grounds that they lacked sufficient intelligence.

But the 1998 top secret plan is the first indication that a planner actually had drafted a wide-ranging plan for submission to the defense secretary.

"It was unique," said a defense official. "It lays out a strategy for attacking terrorists before they attack us. If Cohen got the memo, what would he have done?"

The plan was drafted by Thomas Kuster, a retired Army Green Beret who in 1998 worked for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

The assistant secretary at the time was H. Allen Holmes, a longtime State Department and Pentagon official.

Mr. Holmes said in a interview with The Washington Times that Bonnie Jenkins, a commission counsel, telephoned him last week to discuss the Kuster memo. He said he had submitted previously to two interviews with commission staffers, who did not bring up the Kuster memo.

Al Felzenberg, the commission's spokesman, said it is the panel's policy not to confirm or deny it has interviewed any witness or obtained certain documents.

The commission apparently obtained the Kuster document a few weeks ago.

"I do remember he did write a memo outlining some measures to basically up the ante, to get more proactive in the aftermath of the twin bombings in East Africa," Mr. Holmes told The Times.

Mr. Holmes confirmed that the memo was passed up the chain of command to the office of the undersecretary of policy with a recommendation it be briefed to Mr. Cohen. But it was not.

"I don't remember anything happening as a result of the memo and the ideas being brought forward," Mr. Holmes said. "Obviously, the memo was intended to go further up the chain."

A spokesman for Mr. Cohen did not return a phone call yesterday seeking comment.

Mr. Holmes said he cannot remember the memo's details.

The memo recommended pre-emptive attacks against al Qaeda and other terrorist leadership with CIA and special operations forces. The military's counterterrorist forces are led by the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C. The command includes the Delta Force and the Navy's Seal Team Six.

In announcing that Mr. Cohen and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, among others, will testify next week, commission chairman Thomas H. Kean said, "A central aspect of our commission's mission is counterterrorism policy. What options senior officials considered before September 11, 2001, and what choices they made. This is clearly one of the most important hearings the commission will hold."

Mr. Holmes said the White House and Pentagon constantly searched for ways to "hurt" al Qaeda. He said he recalls briefing Mr. Cohen after the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, but before the embassy strikes in 1998.

He recalls the defense secretary as saying, "Good defense. I don't see a lot on the offense." Mr. Holmes added, "We didn't disagree with him, and we took that as a charge we would try to find ways to be much more proactive in combating terrorism."

A joint House-Senate intelligence committee investigation completed in 2002 concluded that, "The U.S. military did not support putting U.S. 'boots on the ground' in Afghanistan."

Gen. Shelton told the committee that absent a declaration of war against the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan, he did not think he could send troops into the country.

He also said the CIA lacked "actionable" intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts. The committee concluded that cruise-missile strikes on terrorist training camps after the embassy bombings "were the only use of U.S. military force against bin Laden or his terrorist network in Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001."

Renee

Avatar for goofyfoot
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 03-19-2004 - 8:46am
Of PLEASE! Knock off the smokescreen. Clinton was the major factor is letting Osama

murder almost 3,000 people. You people are in la-la land.
Avatar for goofyfoot
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 03-19-2004 - 8:48am
The Clinton "leadership"- Excuses, excuses, excuses. What a p*ssy, and he will go down in history as such.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 03-19-2004 - 9:30am
<
murder almost 3,000 people. You people are in la-la land.>>

Is this an empty accusation or do you have back-up?

Avatar for goofyfoot
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 03-19-2004 - 9:51am
You just proved my point (nt)

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