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Editor's Note: Soon after September 11, 2001, the finger-pointing began,
and many questions arose about the intelligence-gathering ability of the U.S.
government. But there were many other contributing factors, according to
some of the articles mentioned below. This is a slightly enhanced version of an earlier page. I have placed a subtle emphasis in certain places to make it easier for you to get a clue. It shouldn't take long to get the idea. Bill Clinton's neglect left NSA 'brain dead' as al Qaeda plotted 9/11 attacks. President Clinton left the National Security Agency, the nation's electronic eavesdropper, in shambles at the very moment al Qaeda was in the final planning stages of carrying out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. Retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the NSA director at the time, describes the decline in a memoir, writing an insider's view of an agency that the government at one time refused to acknowledge even existed. One day in January 2000, the NSA's clunky, aging computer network became so overburdened that it crashed. The NSA, he says, was "brain dead." Donald Trump crossed the line twice on 9/11, Iraq war. Donald Trump crossed the line at the last Republican debate — twice: when he blamed President George W. Bush for 9/11, and when he bought into the "Bush lied" lie about the Iraq War. "The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush," Trump said, because the president "didn't listen to the advice of his CIA." Sorry: The CIA missed it coming, as did the rest of the US intelligence community. The feds failed to connect the dots and ferret out the terrorists before they struck. But al Qaeda actually grew — and planned the attack — on President Bill Clinton's watch. And Clinton-era restrictions on, for example, what the CIA could tell the FBI, helped keep those dots unconnected. Donald Trump Is No Revolutionary, He's Just a Democrat. [Scroll down] Not only is Trump ignorant of the thousands of chemical weapons found in Iraq, he's spouting talking points you likely won't even hear from Hillary Clinton. But he wasn't done. Not by a long shot. Regarding the horror of 9/11, only a committed leftist would pin the undeniable failure of America's security apparatus on George Bush and George Bush only, but that's what Trump did. George W. Bush inherited 'crumbling' intel community from Bill Clinton: Tenet. As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hammers away at former President George W. Bush for not stopping the September 11 attacks, another factor could be added to the debate: Mr. Bush inherited from Bill Clinton an intelligence community in terrible shape. This fact comes not from a Republican partisan but from George Tenet, President Clinton's CIA director, a post that at the time made him the country's top intelligence officer. Code Trump: The Gallop Leftward Continues. Apparently Mr. Trump is not intellectually very curious about history. If he were, he would know that 9/11 was dreamed up, contemplated, financed, planned, and practiced on Bill Clinton's watch. This planning and practicing continued during the days of the hanging chads in Florida. This is not to defend George W. Bush and his neocon nation-building fantasies and his capitulation to unions regarding the TSA and so on. I've been critical of Bush and Karl Rove since 2001 on these and many other issues. But the truth matters. And the truth is that the single biggest failure by the American intelligence community was foisted onto the CIA and the FBI by Clinton appointee Jamie Gorelick with her infamous "wall of separation" between the two agencies. They had their hands tied behind their backs — thanks to a Clinton appointee. Declassified CIA memo shows Bill Clinton crippled anti-terrorism efforts in lead-up to 9/11. In a classic Friday-afternoon document dump, a CIA memo written by then-agency head George Tenet in 2005 has been released, incriminating the Bill Clinton administration in crippling anti-terror efforts. Former director: Clinton administration bankrupted CIA ahead of 9/11. The Clinton administration had bankrupted the intelligence community and refused to let the CIA prioritize anti-terrorism over other major priorities in the late 1990s, leaving the agency stretched too thin in the days ahead of the 2001 terrorist attacks, former Director George J. Tenet said in a 2005 document declassified Friday [6/12/2015]. Mr. Tenet, who was head of the agency at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks and has taken severe criticism for not anticipating and heading them off, said in the document that he took the threat of Osama bin Laden very seriously, and put major effort into trying to penetrate al Qaeda, beginning as far back as 1998. Clinton White House ignored 9/11 warnings. It took 11 years, but Judicial Watch recently received a response to a 2002 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that revealed another major missed opportunity by the Clinton administration to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, which is part of perhaps the most catastrophic failure in the history of U.S. intelligence. Activist says ...Disney CEO buries inconvenient facts about 9/11. "The Path to 9/11," first aired on ABC in 2006, portrayed President Bill Clinton's administration as ignoring warnings and signs that Osama bin Laden and al Qaida were planning a major attack on the United States — a finding supported by The 9/11 Commission Report. But since 2006 Disney CEO Bob Iger has repeatedly refused to rebroadcast it, or to sell the rights to other broadcasters. The KGB, Kennedy, and Carter. What is not generally known is that Kennedy collaborated with the Soviets well before Reagan was elected, and had a direct hand in crafting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As a result of his efforts — which appear in retrospect to have been crafted to prevent detection of his seditious activities — the FBI was prevented from accessing critical intelligence that could have warned of 9-11. The Anti-American President. Pre-Obama, Jimmy Carter has long been reviled as the worst president in American history. Carter's bungling of the presidency was more than his manifest inadequacy. Carter brazenly supported America's most dangerous enemies; enabling the rise of the Islamofacist thugocracy in Iran. Islamic terrorism, including 9/11, can be tracked back in a straight line back to Carter. Bush Destroyed a Dictator -- Clinton Installed One. As President George W. Bush prepares to leave office amid a media chorus of reproach and derision, there is at least one comparison with his predecessor that speaks greatly in his favor. Mr. Bush removed the most ruthless dictator of his day, Saddam Hussein, thereby offering Iraqi citizens the possibility of self-rule. Bill Clinton's analogous achievement in the Middle East was to help install Yasser Arafat, the greatest terrorist of his day, as head of a proto-Palestinian state. Bill Clinton Weakened America. It's puzzling to see the media ignore the disastrous cutbacks in our armed services that took place under Bill Clinton, and the extraordinary efforts of the Bush administration and [Rep. Duncan] Hunter's committee to beef up our military. Under Clinton, for example, the number of armored Humvees available to the military was a pitiful 1,300. Under President Bush it's over 26,000. Consequences Of An "American Idol" Presidency. Few among the general public noticed during the 1990s as America's intelligence apparatus was methodically undermined and dismantled by such officials of the Bill Clinton Administration as Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. During the same period, Clinton Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary was busy obliterating color-coded security badges at the Los Alamos nuclear lab in New Mexico, and taking other outrageous measures that compromised America's vital technology for the sake of "political correctness." Consequently, America's missile and nuclear technology hemorrhaged to the Communist Chinese. Mistress of Disaster: Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick, an appointee of Bill Clinton, is the one who constructed the wall of separation that kept the CIA and the FBI from comparing notes and therefore invading the privacy of nice young men like, say, Muhammed Atta and Zacarius Moussaoui. While countless problems were uncovered in our intelligence operations in the wake of 9-11, no single factor comes close to in importance to Jamie Gorelick's wall. In fact, it was Gorelick's wall, perhaps more than any other single factor, that induces some people to blame Clinton himself for 9-11 since he appointed her and she acted consistent with his philosophy of "crime fighting." She put the wall into place as Deputy Attorney General in 1995. Clinton Official Embroiled in 9/11 Controversy and Subprime Crisis Reportedly Shortlisted to Run FBI. Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton administration official who reportedly has made the Obama administration's short list to become the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was paid more than $26 million in total compensation as a top executive at Fannie Mae — before taxpayers had to bail out the mortgage giant. Anybody but Jamie Gorelick for FBI director. [Scroll down] Finally, and most seriously, there is the matter of "Gorelick's Wall" and 9/11. Gorelick was a member of the 9/11 Commission and became a focus of critical attention during its hearings when it became known that during her DOJ tenure she imposed a policy of radical separation between the FBI and the nation's intelligence agencies in terrorism investigations. According to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "Gorelick's Wall" was a key reason why "we did not know an attack was coming." ... After such a checkered career, we find it incredible that Gorelick would be on anybody's list for appointment to any federal position, much less to head the FBI. How To Ruin The FBI: A lieutenant of Attorney General Janet Reno in the Clinton administration, it was [Jamie] Gorelick who created "the wall" preventing the CIA from sharing espionage information with the FBI — this owing to her preposterously fastidious resistance to anything hinting of "domestic spying." Such bureaucratic "stovepiping" blocked agents from knowing of 9/11 jihadists' activity. Scandalously, Gorelick was appointed to the 9/11 Commission, whose publicized probe highlighted the stovepipe issue. Her conflict was clear, but she refused to remove herself from the panel. The Continuing Censorship of 'The Path to 9/11': In 2006, exactly five years after the attacks, ABC attempted to broadcast "The Path to 9/11." The extraordinary mini-series was a $40 million, five-hour-plus production that aired, commercial-free, over two nights, in prime time. However, prior to broadcast, Bill Clinton and members of his former administration went ballistic after discovering that one scene in the film dealt with the many opportunities during his presidency to kill or capture Usama bin Laden. A two-week firestorm erupted and the film had several key scenes edited out of the completed and legally vetted version before finally airing with numerous disclaimers. New Democrats' Near-Sighted Gaze. Obama may not recall that the last Democratic president rebuffed an offer by the Sudanese government to deliver bin Laden into our hands in 1996. And even rejected a second offer by the government of Qatar when bin Laden's plane stopped to refuel. The senator may not recall that the last Democratic president delayed an air strike against bin Laden's desert camp in 1998, missing him by several hours. The senator does not question why the last Democratic president downsized the U.S. military and intelligence establishment throughout the 1990's — helping to create the dilemmas we have faced with an overstretched army. Frankenstein Endorses Obama. Let's remember Bill Clinton's insistence, in his interview with Chris Wallace, that he spent four years trying to get Bin Laden. Yet between 1996 and 1999 Bin Laden was a public figure. He granted interviews to author Robert Risk, to Peter Arnett of CNN, to John Miller of ABC News, to a freelancer for Time magazine, and to the Pakistani journalist Abdel Bari Atwan. He even held a press conference near Khost. So how come all these journalists could find Bin Laden but not the Clinton administration? We are forced to conclude that Clinton simply wasn't serious about going after the guy who not only declared war on us but engineered massive strikes against our embassies in Africa and against the U.S.S. Cole. The Clintons' Terror Pardons: While the pardon scandals that marked Bill and Hillary Clinton's final days in office are remembered as transactions involving cronies, criminals and campaign contributors, the FALN clemencies of 1999 should be remembered in the context of the increasing threat of domestic and transnational terrorism that was ramping up during the Clinton years of alleged peace and prosperity. To wit, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Tokyo subway Sarin attack, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1995 "Bojinka" conspiracy to hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, the 1996 Summer Olympics bombing, Osama bin Laden's 1996 and 1998 "Declarations of War" on America, the 1998 East African embassy bombings, the 2000 USS Sullivans bombing attempt, the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and the 2000 Millennium bombing plot. Probe of USS Cole Bombing Unravels. Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials. Jamal al-Badawi, a Yemeni who helped organize the plot to bomb the Cole as it refueled in this Yemeni port on Oct. 12, 2000, has broken out of prison twice. He was recaptured both times, but then secretly released by the government last fall. Obama's America Is September 10th America. While the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many also escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution. … But let's assume incorrectly, for argument's sake, that everyone was brought to justice in that case. What about Khobar Towers, Sen. Obama? After Iran and Hezbollah, perhaps with al-Qaeda's assistance, killed 19 members of the United States Air Force, the Clinton administration responded with ... a criminal investigation. The result? No arrests — in fact, no indictment was even filed until 2001. Say Anything. If Hillary wants to take credit for her husband's foreign policy successes, moreover, then she must assume part of the blame for her husband's mistakes, including his negligence in allowing Al Qaeda to grow into a global threat and attack the USS Cole and our embassies in Africa without any serious retaliation. Bill Clinton failed to capture or kill bin Laden on any of the eight to 10 chances afforded by CIA reporting. Is this the kind of inaction that Hillary learned in preparing to be commander-in-chief? Enemy At Home. Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza sat down with Townhall.com to discuss his recently released book, The Enemy At Home — The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, where he shows the connection between the cultural left's attack on traditional American values and the growing hostility by Muslim extremists towards the United States. How the FBI Let 9/11 Happen: Anyone paying attention to the Zacarias Moussaoui trial gets it now. All the 9/11 blanks are filled in, and the picture is complete. … The [biggest] story is the definitive proof Moussaoui's case provides that the U.S. government — pre-PATRIOT Act, pre-NSA wiretaps and all — had and missed clear opportunities to stop 9/11. The FBI uniquely and repeatedly punted carefully gathered evidence of an attack in favor of adherence to bureaucratic hierarchies and power trips. The CIA'S Holiday: The Agency's Still Asleep. George Tenet … made the Peter Principle work for him not just by advancing to his level of incompetence, but by benefiting from it handsomely. Congressional Democrats pushed for the release of the scathing IG report, completed back in June 2005, to embarrass the Bush administration. But most of the failures identified in the report took place during the Clinton administration, which set the CIA's skewed priorities and selected Tenet in the first place. The CIA Examines Itself. Who is to blame for the intelligence disaster of September 11? The sixth anniversary of the attacks is upon us, and the finger-pointing continues unabated. Last month the CIA reluctantly made public a summary of a 2005 report prepared by its Office of Inspector General (OIG) undertaken to determine if any agency employees "should be held accountable" for failing to forestall the worst attack on our homeland in our history. If only bin Laden had a stained blue dress. In 1995 and 1996, various branches of the Religion of Peace — al-Qaida, Hezbollah and the Iranian "Party of God" — staged car bomb attacks on American servicemen in Saudi Arabia, killing 24 members of our military in all. Each time, the Clinton administration came up with an excuse to do nothing. Despite the Democrats' current claim that only the capture of Osama bin Laden will magically end terrorism forever, Clinton turned down Sudan's offer to hand us bin Laden in 1996. That year, Mohammed Atta proposed the 9/11 attack to bin Laden. The Clinton legacy Hillary wants you to forget: President Clinton took no action after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. There was proof-positive of a third terrorist with definitive connections to Middle Eastern Terrorists in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, that was never fully investigated and hidden by the media. No action was taken after the 1996 attacks on Kohbar towers is Saudia Arabia, nor the bombing of a U.S. embassy in Peru in 1998. The Power Elite's Use of War and Debt. It was one thing to reduce Saddam's military strength in the first Gulf War, but it was quite another thing to persuade people to support an occupation of that nation. That would take a pretext or incident like 9/11, which Bush administration officials immediately tried to blame on Saddam. Federal Office Space. This condition was a recipe for disaster and my associates in the national security arena predicted something terrible would happen if we continued to ignore national security. Something terrible did: September 11, 2001. But none of these security outrages could occur without plenty of agency enablers. How the left led us into 9/11. Pundits on the left say that 9/11 was the result of a "blowback" of resistance from the Islamic world against U.S. foreign policy. At first glance, this seems to make no sense. … But in a sense the liberal pundits are right. The U.S. made two gigantic foreign policy blunders in recent decades that did sow the seeds of 9/11. What the liberals haven't recognized is that these blunders were the direct result of their policies and actions, and were carried out by Democratic presidents — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. DOJ-Media-Intel Election Interference Predates Trump. The [Sandy] Berger case is the deep state's Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering its mysteries. In 2004, while reviewing files at the National Archives in preparation for the 9-11 Commission hearing, Berger, Bill Clinton's national security advisor, stole highly classified documents, stored them under a construction trailer during a break, retrieved them at day's end, admittedly cut them up, and threw the pieces away. On April 1, 2005, the DOJ announced its extraordinary plea deal with Berger — a $10,000 fine and a three-year suspension of his top-level security clearance. Long before Trump's emergence, Democrats were playing by a radically different set of rules. At least three of the DOJ attorneys mishandling the Berger case were Democrat donors. What did Berger destroy? What sorts of things would have impelled Berger to take the very serious risk of stealing those documents from the National Archives and cutting them to bits? Needles to say, Berger has never uttered a word on the subject. Today, his lawyer says Berger considers the matter closed and is seeking to move on. Naturally! But it is as plain as a pikestaff that Berger was concealing, and is still concealing, evidence of grave derelictions by Clinton or his aides in connection with terrorist activities in the United States prior to 9/11.Bug 'em and bag 'em! Bin Laden's actions were largely unabated by the Clinton administration, which was more interested in sending thousands of federal agents to search for a lone abortion-clinic bomber in the mountains of North Carolina than killing or capturing Osama. Eric Rudolph was a much more politically attractive target than Bin Laden back in 1998. Unfortunately, Rudolph evaded capture during that two-year manhunt. In the same time period, the CIA and military had several opportunities to take clear shots at Osama — but Clinton declined. The one unexpendable man: The Clinton administration had at least seven years to do something about Islamofascism. The WTC wreckage tells us Clinton & Co. did nothing. … President Bush is aware Islamofascism cannot be appeased. Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress allied to the Liberal Left would rather defeat Mr. Bush than Islamofascism. Righting Clinton administration's wrongs won't be easy. Clinton ignored the percolating mess in the Mideast and refused to extradite Bin Laden to the U.S. when he was captured after the first World Trade Center bombing. Yet, no one complains about U.S. troops still in Bosnia, the horrific slaughter in Somalia, or the debacle in Haiti. 97 Reasons Democrats Are Weak On Defense And Can't Be Trusted To Govern In Wartime. Today's Democrats are nothing like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, who with courage and decisive action kept on top of their jobs and aggressively confronted one national defense crisis after another. Jimmy Carter, elected during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and (1) believing Americans had an inordinate fear of communism, (2) lifted U.S. citizens' travel bans to Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia and (3) pardoned draft evaders. President Carter (4) also stopped B-1 bomber production, (5) gave away our strategically located Panama Canal and (6) made human rights the central focus of his foreign policy. [Reasons 66 through 84 point to Bill Clinton.] 9/11: The FAA Should Have Known. The information coming out of the 9/11 hearings — about the failures of our intelligence community to provide national leaders and the public with information sufficient to warn the nation — is disheartening. In order to prepare for the foreseeable risks of terrorism, as with crime in all of its forms, you must know your enemies, understand their intent, and evaluate the security in place to protect against the threats presented against you. We have learned that we as a nation did not really know our enemies, but rather knew of them. Bill Clinton and the Decline of the Military: After Bush was elected and the country had suffered the 9/11 attacks, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said Clinton had cut back the military so much that we might not be able to fight a war on terrorism on several fronts. He listed the problems brought on during the Clinton years: lost air and sea lift capacity, two or three years during which nothing was procured for the military, and cuts in R&D. Now, in the waning days of his presidency, Bush is ready to rebuild. It's not the economy, stupid, and there is no peace dividend. The world's remaining superpower cannot run its military on the cheap. Supervisor: I Never Read Moussaoui Memo. The headquarters supervisor of the FBI's international terrorism operations section testified Tuesday [3/20/2006] he had never read an Aug. 18, 2001, memo in which an agent proposed a full criminal investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui as a possible terrorist airplane hijacker. INS In Denial: Had the State Department properly applied its own rules … not one of the fifteen Sept. 11 hijackers whose visa forms he inspected could have legally entered the United States. Those applicants failed almost all the tests required for admission (information about addresses, means of support) but nonetheless were allowed in. Agent who dealt with terror suspect calls his superiors "criminally negligent": The Liberty Coalition, a transpartisan network dedicated to defending Americans' liberties, today [3/23/2006] called for a full investigation into allegations by a FBI agent Harry Samit that he repeatedly warned his superior officers about evidence that could have prevented the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Samit, who interrogated indicted terrorist suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, testified yesterday that he warned his supervisors more than 70 times about suspicions that the al-Qaida operative was plotting to hijack an airplane. 9/11 hijackers were 'inept pilots'. The September 11 hijackers were inept pilots who came to the attention of aviation authorities but still managed to pull off the brazen attacks, a sentencing trial for al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui has been told. OKC Bombing: Precursor to 9-11? Evidence links the OKC bombing to Middle Eastern terrorists, and the failure of officials to examine this evidence in 1995 may have set the stage for the September 11th attacks. More information about the Oklahoma City bombing can he found here. Congressman says Officials Monitored Hijackers Before 9/11 Attacks. U.S. law enforcement never received information on Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and his possible connections to Al Qaeda, even though that information was known more than a year before the attacks that left more than 3,000 people dead, Rep. Curt Weldon said Tuesday [8/9/2005]. Would the FBI Have Heeded "Able Danger"? I really don't think the FBI would have acted on the information. Instead, today, we'd be sweeping under the rug yet more ineptitude by the, unfortunately, "lead agency" in the War on Terror. Let's look at what the FBI has done with other similar information they received before and, even worse, after 9/11. America is in Deep Trouble. Despite a variety of unparalleled challenges to American life and liberty, the direct result of eight years of irresponsible gross mismanagement under the panty-raid administration of the 90s, the Bush Administration has managed to prevent 911 follow-up attacks…. Caution: This article includes thinly redacted vulgarity. Why The Clintons Belong in Prison: An interview with Melrose Larry Green. The Clinton Administration was soft on terrorism — under Clinton's watch the World Trade Center was hit the first time (in 1993), the Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, two embassies in Africa were bombed — and Bill Clinton did virtually nothing. Furthermore, Bill Clinton had several opportunities to take out Osama Bin Laden, and he blew it. Democrat magicians: Not only did the Clinton administration do nothing decisive about these attacks that cost hundreds of U.S. casualties; it even refused Sudanese President Bashir's offer to arrest and hand Osama bin Laden over to the United States. That's the magician's gift; he creates the illusion that events which happened really didn't happen and those which didn't happen happened. As President and Autobiographer, Clinton's Focus Was Not Terrorism. Caught up in his life — his relationships, his ambitions, his appetites, his feuds — Clinton appears never to have understood, or even seriously thought about, the world-historic changes that were taking place during his watch. 'Able Danger' Identified 9/11 Hijacker 13 times. The top-secret, military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger" identified Mohammed Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, 13 times before the 2001 attacks, according to new information released Tuesday by U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees. Navy Officer Affirms Assertions About Pre-9/11 Data on Atta. An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forward publicly to say that a secret defense intelligence program tagged the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a possible terrorist more than a year before the attacks. Getting to the bottom of Able Danger: Depending on whom you talk to, this story is either proof that the Clinton administration was asleep at the switch while terrorists were planning their attacks during their tenure, or it's a case of false memory syndrome. FOIA Exposes Clinton Anti-Terror Blunders. On Wednesday [8/17/2005], Judicial Watch hit the front page of The New York Times with shocking new revelations based on documents obtained under FOIA about Clinton's inept response to Osama Bin Laden and international terrorism. It took Judicial Watch four years of hard work, persistence and legal wit to outsmart the bureaucrats who opposed making the documents public. Atta Intelligence Omitted From Report. The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday [8/11/2005]. "Able Danger" Intel Could Rewrite 9/11 History. The federal commission that probed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks was told twice about "Able Danger," a military intelligence unit that had identified Mohamed Atta and other hijackers a year before the attacks, a congressman close to the investigation said Wednesday [8/10/2005]. A Deadly Tale of Incompetence: For a year before the 9/11 attacks, the Wayne Inn was home to Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaida mastermind behind the hijacking plot that killed almost 3,000 people. In those horrific weeks after the attacks, the official story line was that U.S. counterterror officials had no idea who Atta was before that murderous plot unfolded – or where he was before 9/11. Only after the attacks could authorities track Atta's movements. Now that story seems to be false. The Omission Commission: The 9/11 Commission Report failed to make any mention of Iraqi operations in Germany that might have been connected to al Qaeda. Able Danger and the jiggered timeline. Of course, the very idea of considering INS entry records dispositive is itself a howler to anyone who pays attention. Aside from the sloppiness of the controls at our borders and the inadequacy of the INS' record keeping, we know that Atta's April 2001 entry upon which the Commission apparently relies, is itself mysterious. He is recorded as having entered twice on the same day at the same entry point under two different visa numbers. Mugged by reality? With hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier. Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea. The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. 9/11 Revisionism, Revisited: No one doubts that the nineteen hijackers, and the Al Qaeda organization, financed, organized, and carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But there is growing doubt that they did it without at least the passive collaboration of a silent partner, one who wielded considerable influence on our government — and had ready access to its secrets. Was the 9/11 Commission a Whitewash? Regrettably, the commission's public hearings devolved into a political circus instead of a fact-finding exercise. Instead of solving the numerous riddles of how 19 terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, apologists for the Clinton Administration used the hearings to deflect blame — and point to the culpability of the Bush Administration. Failures of intelligence: Three weeks before the London bombings of July 7, Britain's Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that "at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK." Where was the big media before 9/11? In its well-written report, the 9/11 commission noted that it had become "conventional wisdom" prior to 9/11 that terrorism was not as big a threat to Americans as it would soon prove to be. Terror Networks in the U.S.: CBS News Senior Foreign Correspondent Tom Fenton and his colleagues had been tracking stories about Al-Qaeda and its allied networks for more than a decade, but they rarely reported what they knew on network news — "because much of the time, our bosses didn't consider such developments newsworthy." Fenton notes that in the three months leading up to 9/11 Al-Qaeda was never mentioned in any of the three evening news broadcasts. Jayna Davis dot com: Evidence continues to mount of how effectively the former US Administration of President William Clinton misdirected key elements of the US intelligence community (IC) for political purposes. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is the fact that this distortion of the IC for such purposes left a legacy which contributed directly to the environment which allowed the successful terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and to subsequent failures by the IC in effectively assessing ongoing terrorist threats. OKC and WTC Bombers Met in the Philippines. Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols met with World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef in the Philippines before he and Timothy McVeigh carried out their plot, investigative reporter Jayna Davis said Wednesday [5/26/2004]. Here's How "Concerned" Democrats Have Been About Our National Security: • On April 7, 1995, President Clinton declassified all nuclear information that was 25 years old or older and, in the rush to take this action, gave away a great deal of information that should not have been released. • On July 31, 1995, it was found that the Clinton Administration had leaked classified information on the W-87 warhead to the media. • The Administration overturned DOE security decisions, including by reinstating staff who had lost security clearances for compromising classified material. • It repeatedly harassed whistle-blowers who tried to prevent security breaches. • It barred the use of color-coded security badges, claiming that they are demeaning because they are discriminatory. The Responsible Use Of Terrorism Intelligence. Information about possible attacks is important even if the intelligence was received years ago. It is becoming increasingly clear that we can neither predict with much accuracy what sector of American society will be the target of a terrorist attack, or when such an attack will occur. FBI, Please Protect Us from Terrorists and the ACLU. This is, of course, the same agency that refused to authorize a criminal investigation of two of the 9/11 hijackers weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center, and which, around the same time, denied a search warrant to Minneapolis agents who sought to search the computer and other possessions of "twentieth hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui, who had caught their attention when he showed up to flight school, thousands of dollars on hand, apparently incompetent at flying but eager to learn how to fly a 747 (but not how to land it) along with details about its doors and control panel, and vocally interested in the likely amount of damage it would cause upon crashing. Whistle Stop: Coleen Rowley, the celebrated "FBI whistle-blower," is back. She first came to public attention last summer, when she wrote a memo complaining that the FBI had ignored her pre-9/11 request for a warrant to search the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, who has since been indicted as a 9/11 conspirator. Agents Challenge 9/11 Commission. Agents on the front lines of the war on terror have risked their careers to warn America about the corruption and culpable negligence that continue to put our nation in peril. How 9-11 happened: We don't need a "commission" to find out how How Newt Gingrich Caused 9/11: Osama bin Laden knew Clinton was weak long before impeachment. When terrorists exploded a bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993 and Clinton, advised by "whistleblower" Dick Clarke, did nothing, bin Laden naturally formulated an idea about Clinton's willingness to fight. Kallstrom's quest for redemption: September 11 had to be a day of agony for James Kallstrom. He had spent more than 20 years of his FBI career in the New York City office, the last four of those years as bureau chief. … As the FBI agent in charge of the TWA 800 investigation starting five years prior, he had had the opportunity to prevent an event like this from happening. But he did not. Making intelligent errors. Since intelligence is always less than perfect, we're forced to decide which error is least costly. Leading up to our war with Iraq, the potential errors confronting us were: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and we incorrectly assumed he didn't. Or, he didn't have weapons of mass destruction and we incorrectly assumed he did. Both errors are costly, but which is more costly? It's my guess that it would have been more costly for us to make the first error: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and we incorrectly assumed he didn't. Immigration taboos: There are thousands of Americans who might still be alive if we had banned immigration from Saudi Arabia — and perhaps that might be more important than the rhetoric of the intelligentsia. In that rhetoric, all differences between peoples are magically transformed into mere "stereotypes" and "perceptions." This blithely ignores hard data showing, for example, that people who come here from some countries are ten times more likely to go on welfare as people from some other countries. Author Says 9/11 Resulted from Clinton's Failures — Not Bush's. A conservative activist hopes his new book will set the record straight about how it was Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, who could have headed off the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. One Politicized Nation: Clinton gets credit for balancing the budget, but he did it by gutting defense and intelligence spending, which we later paid for on September 11th, 2001, and continue paying for with our young men and women in combat equipped with less than ideal resources to complete their missions. Is it safe? Most of us are realistic enough to realize that these are the bad old days. So far, September 11, 2001, was the worst of the bad old days, and many mistakes leading up to that date were made by employees who were hired, and oftentimes promoted, for all the wrong reasons. Thank you for choosing United, Mr. bin Laden. Last week, All eyes (should be) on the FBI. As the 9-11 commission shines its too-often-partisan beam on our intelligence agencies, most Americans will come to the view, if they haven't already, that the FBI completely dropped the ball in the month before the terrorist attacks. Clinton to blame for intelligence failures. This blame game stuff is counterproductive and dangerous when Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq. But if that's the game we're stuck with, it's an indisputable scandal that the Clinton Administration is getting off Did Clinton set the stage for 9-11? President Clinton desperately wanted a legacy built around an achievement of Middle East peace. But his efforts achieved just the opposite, says a new book by terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky. Instead, his policies set the stage for the most dramatic and devastating terrorist attacks the world has ever seen. Clinton and 9/11: Despite recent evidence that Bill Clinton knew by 1996 that al-Qaida terrorists who had tried to topple the World Trade Center in 1993 had plans to hijack commercial planes and crash them into buildings on American soil, this evidence was ignored by the recent Congressional report on the causes of the September 11, 2001 aerial attack on the WTC. AP: FBI Sent Hamas Money in Late 1990's. While President Clinton was trying to broker an elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the FBI was secretly funneling money to suspected Hamas figures to see if the militant group would use it for terrorist attacks, according to interviews and court documents. How Clinton Kept Bin Laden Free: As early as 1996 — five years before the September 11 attacks — the CIA and other senior policymakers knew about bin Laden-related intelligence failures. When it came to rectifying the cause of these failures, however, little was done. Why the FBI Didn't Stop 9/11: 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. INS In Denial: At a time when Americans are watching corrupt business executives being hauled off in handcuffs, should anything less await an INS staff responsible for allowing into the country the murderers of their fellow citizens? The liberals who cried "didn't do enough!" In an editorial this week that embodies the Left's unmitigated gall, the New York Times castigated President Bush for not doing enough after receiving an Aug. 6, 2001, briefing memo warning vaguely of bin Laden-planned domestic terrorism. Mouse-less FBI: On September 11, 2001, the FBI was still using computers that could not interface with a mouse, and that provided limited access to e-mail and the Internet. According to the Wall Street Journal, photos of the 19 September 11 hijackers were rushed to the bureau's 56 field offices shortly after the attacks by overnight mail, because the FBI network couldn't transmit photos Did Our Ignoring Clinton's Character Flaws Lead to 9-11? "An incompetent and dishonest Clinton …failed to recognize the scope of danger bin Laden posed to our national security". Did the U.S. Ignore Warning of 9-11 Attack? In July, 2001 a U.S. State Department official was told by an aide to a top Taliban government minister that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil and that the attack was imminent. The warning was never passed on to Washington, Britain's Independent newspaper reports. Feds Shred Visa Applications: No lessons learned here: The perpetually wishy-washy State Department intentionally shreds millions of unsuccessful immigration applications containing information that some officials say could fight terrorism. "Diversity Visa Lottery" Brings Immigrants From Terrorist Nations: One of the U.S. government's more obscure yet curious programs received some unwanted publicity on Independence Day. Clinton White House axed terror-fund probe: The Clinton administration shut down a 1995 investigation of Islamic charities, concerned that a public probe would expose Saudi Arabia's suspected ties to a global money-laundering operation that raised millions for anti-Israel terrorists, federal officials told The Washington Times. How Democrats Undermined America's Security: Some say Clinton's failure in Somalia encouraged bin Laden. House Probers: Clinton Officials Expected 9-11 Attack: Three years before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, senior Clinton administration intelligence managers predicted that a 9/11-style attack would take place, but neither the White House nor any of the agencies charged with guarding America's security acted on the information. Why 9-11? The Clinton administration chose to focus its intelligence-gathering forces on white, "right-wing," Christian militia groups — at the expense of analyzing data about Islamic terrorism. This dramatic change in emphasis took place even while Arab nationals were flocking to U.S. flight schools in anticipation of the dramatic hijackings of September 11. U.S. Knew of Suicide Hijack Threat in 1995: U.S. law-enforcement authorities knew as early as 1995 that Middle Eastern men were training at American flight schools and had discussed crashing planes into federal buildings, but did not follow up on the information, according to documents and interviews with American and Filipino authorities. Why hasn't anybody been fired? Now we are told, belatedly, that the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center could have been detected beforehand. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has admitted that mistakes were made, the "dots should have been connected," situations should have been handled differently, and "different actions should have been taken." Why airline security failed: The Gore commission produced what most observers considered to be a tough preliminary report unveiled Sept. 9, 1996 — one that included extensive counter-terrorism procedures. But within days, according to Victoria Cummock, a whistleblower commission member, the airline industry jumped all over Gore with concerns about costs. As a result, 10 days later, Gore sent a letter to airline lobbyist Carol Hallett promising that the commission's findings would not result in any loss of revenue. Gore's Inconvenient 9/11 Truth. The Gore Commission [the "White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security"] addressed the issue of terrorism and commercial aviation. … According to the 911 Commission Report (page 344): "The Gore Commission's Report, having thoroughly canvassed available expertise in and outside of government, did not mention suicide hijackings or the use of aircraft as weapons." PC shield for terrorists: After the FBI, CIA, Immigration Service and State Department fiascos that alone made the events of September 11 possible, why does any sane person think a "Homeland Security" department will provide any protection against terrorist acts? Why assume that putting all the fools under one roof will reduce the foolery? Congressman says FBI Ignored Repeated Warnings: Congressman Oberstar recently revealed that a Minnesota flight instructor gave the FBI several warnings that an Arab man in his flight school might be planning to turn a jumbo jet into a flying "bomb." Despite the instructor's frantic calls, the FBI decided not to pursue the matter.Most air travelers regard "airport security" as a bad joke. It is worse. It is an insult. The refusal to focus on the group to which Muslim terrorists are known to belong treats native-born citizens as the enemy and ensures the lack of security. Pointless searches of grandmothers, young children, U.S. representatives, presidential appointees, pilots and Marine generals divert resources from security and send the message that the government has no idea whatsoever who terrorists might be. Has FBI promoted 9-11 ball-dropper?: The FBI supervisor who allegedly hamstrung the pre-September 11 Minneapolis investigation into the alleged 20th hijacker has been transferred to a position where bureau sources say he'll actually have more authority. FBI Ignored Warnings of Fanatical Student Pilot: The FBI apparently ignored warnings from French security sources that a French-Algerian with an avid interest in flight training was a known extremist linked to Osama bin Laden, France's Europe 1 radio reported, citing French security sources. Fun and Games With Anthrax: Eight years of Clinton appointments seem to have packed our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the sort of people who believe the "right wing" constitutes a greater threat to our nation than Al Qaeda. Paying the Price for Clinton: How can a former president justify, even partially, the mass murder of his own people? Could We Have Prevented the Attacks?: During the 1990s, the FBI uncovered clues indicating that bin Laden was planning to attack America with hijacked airliners. This information was never shared with local police. Trulock: Security Lapses Are Clinton's Fault: The former highest-ranking intelligence officer in the Energy Department says you can blame the Clinton administration's pervasive inattention to security throughout government leading to [the September 11] terrorist attacks. FBI Blocked Agents' Request to Probe Terrorist: Top officials of the FBI stopped local agents from an in-depth investigation of a suspected terrorist, now believed to have been slated to be one of the hijackers. Had the agents been allowed to investigate the terrorist, it may have given them advance warning of the September 11 disasters in New York and Washington, the New York Times reported. CIA Leak to NewsMax: Report says that under Clinton, CIA spy satellite imagery was used to write special environmental assessments for Gore on sand turtles, dolphin schools, and volcano eruptions, instead of counterterrorism. The Damage Clinton Did: Bill Clinton, "whose inattention to military and security matters now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter." More CIA Revelations — Political Correctness Kills: I am not so sure the commissars of political correctness, who so dominates our media, our government bureaucracies and other institutions, are willing to unshackle the will of the American people and allow us to destroy the terrorists and the nations that back them. Powell Blames Clinton for Mideast Violence: Secretary of State Colin Powell stunned those present at a closed-door Capitol Hill briefing this week when he blamed ex-President Clinton for being too anxious to force concessions from Israel in negotiations with Yasser Arafat. During Clinton's eight years in office, Arafat was the most frequent foreign visitor to the Oval Office. Our Incredible Intelligence Blunder: Project Bojinka, which was disclosed by Accuracy in Media on September 13, made the front page of The Washington Post ten days later. The Post's story, written by four of its reporters in Manila, reported that in 1995, Philippine police discovered a plan "that gave a chilling preview of the attack in New York and Washington on September 11." It said that they found "a clandestine terrorist cell allied with Osama bin Laden" that was plotting to plant bombs in a dozen American airliners and fly an airplane into the CIA headquarters." Catastrophic Intelligence Failure: In 1995, the CIA and the FBI learned that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as bombs to attack important targets in the U.S. Project Bojinka called for planting bombs on eleven U.S. airliners and hijacking others and crashing them into targets like the CIA building. Digital moles in White House?: Terrorists had top-secret presidential codes. Greens have undermined US military for years: As America begins to mobilize to win the war against terrorism, the quality and capability of our Armed Forces is going to become an important priority. For the years of the Clinton-Gore administration, following the Gulf War, the destruction of our military was the priority. Helping in that process were the faceless bureaucrats, many still in place, pledged to environmentalism at any cost. Letting The Cat Out Of The Bag: The devastating terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 exposed serious chinks in America's armor. It had more in common with that other day of infamy, December 7, 1941, than just the surprise and devastation. In both cases, there was a failure to act on intelligence information that was available. Hanssen May Have Revealed Survival Plans: A CIA-led damage control assessment team will begin extensive probes into allegations that accused FBI spy Robert Hanssen revealed secret plans for protecting the U.S. president and his successors in the event of a nuclear attack, according to senior CIA sources. Fifty Years of Appeasement Led to Black Tuesday: Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the Mideast have led to fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world for the U.S. The inevitable climax was the tens of thousands of deaths on U.S. equipped terror sponsors: Clinton exported NSA-ducking phone, high-tech encryption devices to Syria. The dozen or so Islamic terrorists who pulled off the plot to strike at America's nerve centers in New York and Washington spent months, if not years, researching, planning and coordinating the surprise attacks, U.S. security officials say. And they did it completely in secret, using the world's most sophisticated telecommunications equipment, some secured by advanced encryption technology that most armies don't have. [Thanks a lot, Bill.] Pentagon suspects Osama bin Laden: Officials anxious to take terrorist out, after Clinton let him 'grow in strength'. [Thanks again, Bill.] Why the Pentagon was so vulnerable: Official says plane attack was considered, but defense plans were ruled out. Special subsection about a recent ABC-TV documentary: Clinton And 9-11: An ABC miniseries finally pays as much attention to Bill Clinton's eight years before 9-11 as the Democrats have to President Bush's eight months. Critics who blame Bush for missing Osama bin Laden are missing the point. It's understandable the Clintonistas and President Clinton are upset about the two-part ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11" ... The film strips bare the Democratic talking points, exposing them for the fraud they are, accurately depicting the chances the Clinton White House missed to kill or capture bin Laden and the barriers they put up to connecting all the information. Sex scandal kept Clinton's eye off bin Laden threat, TV drama says. Bill Clinton responded furiously yesterday to an American television mini-series about the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, which portrays him as so distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal that he failed to focus on the emerging threat of Osama bin Laden. Bill Clinton too Busy With Diana? Osama bin Laden is still terrorizing the world these days, largely because of the outright refusal of former President Bill Clinton to take the murderous Jihadist into custody while Clinton was still in power. Clintonistas will argue that there was no legal basis for taking OBL into custody. These are the same policy wonks, by the way, that insist that sending the United States military into Haiti, Bosnia, and other areas not vital to American interests made perfect sense. Pathetic liberal sissies. Something that particularly irked them was the implication that the Clinton administration allowed Osama bin-Laden to escape. But this was no implication — it is fact. On at least two occasions OBL was within our grasp but it was our lack of initiative that let him slip through our fingers. While Clinton was being serviced by an intern, and Hillary was busy letting him, he bombed an aspirin factory in response to terrorist actions taken against us. Clinton's Artless Equivocation on 'The Path to 9/11'. If the worst criticism of President Bush is that he lied to us about Iraq, then we just got a whopping reminder of Bill Clinton's extraordinary talents for deception. Why the Clintonistas did not want you to see "The Path to 9/11": What about when Clinton himself, speaking to the Long Island Association in February 2002, admitted that he declined at least one chance to get bin Laden? … Did the former president forget that prosecutors, two years after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, named Osama bin Laden as an unindicted co-conspirator? Or that our government suspected bin Laden of aiding, financing, training and arming terrorists for several years? Democrats wrong in pressuring ABC-TV. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) sent a petition with 200,000 signatures urging ABC to cancel the show. Former President Clinton personally called the CEO and sent a letter. Most of these people have never seen the video. A limited number were invited to the screening and a limited number of people were provided with a copy of it. It seems that anything that occurred concerning terrorists or terrorist attacks before the inauguration of President Bush is totally irrelevant and merely Clinton bashing. Accordingly, nothing should even be considered. Did Clinton cause 9/11? Ask Sandy Berger. There is a lot of water under that bridge, and obsessive hatred of Bill Clinton bores me. And yet the hissy fit Bill Clinton and his former colleagues threw calling for ABC to pull this TV movie is also deeply repellent. Clinton and Reagan and TV Movies. The Clinton campaign kicked into high gear in the days before it aired, with the ex-president and his lawyering aides and Democrats in Congress all pressuring ABC to dump the film. It's important to understand that Team Clinton didn't demand the film be edited for accuracy. They wanted everything — including all the accurate criticisms and findings — thrown in the garbage. The Path to 9/11 — A Postmortem. Americans who watched ABC's The Path to 9/11 saw a well-crafted dramatic interpretation of what rendered the United States, both under the Clinton and Bush administrations, vulnerable to terrorist attack. Perhaps the producers were conservative, but no more so than most of their Hollywood counterparts are liberal — and not to the degree that their politics slanted the presentation of the narrative. But why, then, the hysteria? The Trials of Bill Clinton: Despite what you saw on Fox News, Bill Clinton knows he failed the most important test of his presidency, the challenge of terrorism. It is instructive that Clinton's answer to the Osama question includes what appears to be an admission of failure: "I tried, and I failed." But, in classic Clinton style, he follows it up with a tirade designed to make sure nobody believes what he just said. Clinton's Kosovo Whopper: Of all the whoppers told by former President Clinton in his Chris Wallace interview, perhaps the most outrageous was his claim that he was involved in "trying to stop a genocide in Kosovo…" In fact, Clinton's bombing of the former Yugoslavia killed more people than died in this "genocide." And his policy benefited Osama bin Laden and the global Jihad. The Hidden Anger Of Bill Clinton: While asking Bill Clinton a legitimate question about his terror-fighting record, "Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace brought out the belligerent bully in the former president, a side rarely seen in public but always simmering just beneath that aw-shucks persona. Clinton never approved a plan to kill bin Laden. Amid rumors of Osama bin Laden's death from illness, former President Bill Clinton and the Bush administration argued this week over who did more to kill the al Qaeda leader before the September 11 attacks. CNN's Tony Harris spoke with former FBI agent Dan Coleman about the finger-pointing between the two administrations. Poor, ol' Clinton. Sooner or later, former President Clinton was going to be asked about his record on terrorism — by someone other than Richard Clarke for his book, or the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors. Surely, someone on television — where our hearts and minds are, uh, programmed — would pull back that curtain and afford Clinton the spotlight. Don't think for a minute he wasn't prepared. Back to The War With No Name Back to the Home page 
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