AliEnvy said:
Since you've made the comparison, are you willing to accept that the Bush administration allowed 911 to happen because they felt they needed to rally American support to remove Saddam?
The whole argument is grainy from top to bottom. It would be as if you were arguing that Clinton wanted 9/11 to happen by letting Mohamed Atta in the country while he was in office (January 10, 2001).
Clinton did not ignore of the US embassy bombings because he had an agenda, either. He was however warned, and obviously wasn't able to stop the attacks.
Paragraph #623 on page 130
Final Report of the 9/11 Commission
On December 17, the day after the United States and Britain began their Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq, the Small Group convened to discuss intelligence suggesting imminent Bin Ladin attacks on the U.S. embassies in Qatar and Ethiopia.The next day, Director Tenet sent a memo to the President, the cabinet, and senior officials throughout the government describing reports that Bin Ladin planned to attack U.S. targets very soon, possibly over the next few days, before Ramadan celebrations began. Tenet said he was “greatly concerned.”114 With alarms sounding, members of the Small Group considered ideas about how to respond to or prevent such attacks. Generals Shelton and Zinni came up with military options. Special Operations Forces were later told that they might be ordered to attempt very high-risk in-and-out raids either in Khartoum, to capture a senior Bin Ladin operative known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian—who appeared to be engineering some of the plots—or in Kandahar, to capture Bin Ladin himself. Shelton told us that such operations are not risk free, invoking the memory of the 1993 “Black Hawk down” fiasco in Mogadishu.
Nobody wanted it to happen - yet nobody took terrorism seriously enough until 9/11 happened. I can't flat out say that FDR
wanted Pearl Harbor to happen, nor did Winston Churchill, but both of them saw it coming.
Churchill Knew of Pearl Harbour Attack
There is also evidence that indicates that Roosevelt had inside information on the first attack on Pearl Harbor (there were actually two - one in 1941, the other in 1945 - for those of you who don't watch The History Channel).
Pre-9/11 - The Bush Administration was spending too much time playing watchdog to Iraq and ignoring Al Qaida - when in reality they should have been watchdogs to both. The Clinton-era Republican Party was wasting its time attacking Clinton for going after Bin Laden as to somehow shift public interests away from the Lewinsky scandal.
Here are some of the findings behind what allowed 9/11 to happen:
from THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT
After releasing the report, Commission Chair Thomas Kean declared that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had been "not well served" by the FBI and CIA [2].
In addition to identifying intelligence failures occurring before the attacks, the report claimed to provide evidence of the following:
* Airport security footage of the hijackers as they passed through airport security
* Cockpit voice recordings of the terrorists as they hijacked and sabotaged the airliners
* Eyewitness testimony of passengers as they described their own final moments to family members and authorities on airphones and cellphones from the cabins of doomed airliners
There is valid counter-criticism for the 9/11 attacks - whereas the bureaucracy for the CIA, the FBI, the NYPD, and the Air Force that stumbled the ability for them to communicate with each other. Bush was forewarned, yes, but the targets were not disclosed in the threat, nor was the date or time of the attack.
Bush & Co. learned a valuable lesson on 9/11 however, and completely revised counter-terrorism in order to pluck out the root of Islamic Jihad, by going after both Osama bin Laden and those who have funded unrelated attacks against democratic societies.
I do have to wonder why Clinton waited until 1998 to go after Al Qaida - they have an extensive history of killing innocent people. Clinton made little effort to secure the borders, the airports, or any other way to prevent Jihadists from committing more ruthless acts of violence after the first WTC bombing.
Even as early as 1997, Dick Morris - who was key to Clinton's the presidential electoral victory in 1996 - spoke out against Clinton's inability to fight terrorism in his book,
Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties. He is NOT a conservative, especially on domestic issues. He is however disassociated with Clinton & Co. when it comes to terrorism.
Today, he is outspoken about what could have been done in order to prevent further terrorist attacks. He even co-wrote
FahrenHype 9/11 with actor Ron Silver to defend such policies as The Patriot Act and to debunk falsehoods of Michael Moore.
We now know of many terror cells exposed inside the United States, thanks to Steven Emerson, who was given a death threat from a South African Muslim group in response of his expose of
Jihad in America, which he received from the FBI. He now lives undercover.
Even under such a death threat, he went on to appear in
Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, and is a contributor for the
Counterterrorism Blog, which provides information to policymakers.