04-12-2004, 05:11 AM
Quote:what did Clinton DOWell for starters, there was the thwarting of al-Qaeda's Millennium Plot. From Juan Cole
Quote:More on the Clarke conroversy: The pundits and politicians who keep saying that Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and Bush's are the same are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The policy outline was the same, but the implementation was very different.
Hint: The key piece of evidence is the Millennium Plot. This was an al-Qaeda operation timed for late December 1999. Forestalling this plot was the biggest counter-terrorism success the US has ever had against al-Qaeda.
the plot involved several key elements:
*Los Angelese International Airport would be blown up.
*(Possibly: The Needle in Seattle would be blown up).
* The Radisson Hotel in Amman Jordan, a favorite of American and Israeli tourists, would be blown up. A lot of the tourism for the millennium was Christian evangelicals wanting to be in the holy land.
* Bombs would go off at Mt. Nebo, a tourist site in Jordan associated with Moses.
* The USS The Sullivans would be targeted by a dinghy bomb off Yemen.
The story of how the LAX bombing was stopped on December 14 has been told in an important series in the Seattle Times. Extra security measures were implemented by US customs agents, leading to the apprehension of an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, with a trunk full of nitroglycerin, heading for LAX (he wanted to start his journey by ferry from Port Angeles, Washington).
Ressam grew up fishing in the Mediterranean and going to discos. But like many Algerians, he was radicalized in 1991. The government had allowed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamist party, to contest elections. FIS unexpectedly won, however. The military feared that they would never allow another election, and would declare an Islamic state. They cancelled elections. FIS went into opposition, and the most radical members formed the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which got money from Usama Bin Laden, then in the Sudan. Ressam seems to have been GIA.
Ressam fought in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Then he settled in France and became part of the terrorist Groupe Roubaix, which carried out attacks in that city (pop. 98,000, near Lille in the north). In spring of 1998 he flew to Afghanistan and was trained in two camps under the direction of Palestinian-Saudi Abu Zubaida. Abu Zubaida recruited Ressam into an Algerian al-Qaeda cell headed from London by Abu Doha al-Mukhalif. Ressam was assigned to form a forward cell in Montreal, from which he and several other Algerians plotted the attack on LAX.
What Clarke's book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather, Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority to call other key cabinet members and security officials to "battle stations," involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton's approval in December of 1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi's cell in Amman.
Early in 2001, in contrast, Bush demoted Clarke from being a cabinet member, and much reduced his authority. Clarke wanted the high Bush officials or "principals" to meet on terrorism regularly. He couldn't get them to do it. Rice knew what al-Qaeda was, but she, like other administration officials, was disconcerted by Clarke's focus on it as an independent actor. The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes from the states that allegedly harbor them. That funny look she gave Clarke wasn't unfamiliarity, it was puzzlement that someone so high in the system should be so wrongly focused.
In summer of 2001 the chatter was much greater and more ominous than in fall of 1999. Clarke wanted to go to battle stations and have daily meetings with the "principals" (i.e. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet). He wanted to repeat the procedures that had foiled the Millennium Plot. He could not convince anyone to let him do that.
More info here.
I also covered Clinton's anti-terrorism record in this post last September, but I guess it's been forgotten by now. To reiterate a few points from that post:
In 1996, Bill Clinton supported an anti-terrorism bill which increased "multi-tapping" wire-tapping authority of suspected terrorists so that individuals could be monitored even if they switched cell-phones. This proposed measure was dropped by Republicans in Congress:
Quote:The Republicans also dropped the additional wire-tap authority the Clinton administration wanted. U.S. Attorney general Janet Reno had asked for "multi-point" tapping of suspected terrorists, who may be using advanced technology to outpace authorities.
Rep. Charles Schumer, D-New York, said technology is giving criminals an advantage.
"What the terrorists do is they take one cellular phone, use the number for a few days, throw it out and use a different phone with a different number," he said. "All we are saying is tap the person, not the phone number." (282K AIFF sound or 282K WAV sound)
Also, there were great increases in FBI Counter-terrorism Spending under Clinton:
1994: 79.3 million
1995: $171 million
1996: $287 million
1997: $393 million
[source: Combating Terrorism: Spending on Governmentwide Programs Requires Better Management and Coordination (Letter Report, 12/01/97, GAO/NSIAD-98-39).]
And as I said then, the CIA budget is harder to pin down, but the declassified portions of it indicate that counter-terrorism funding increased 250%.
Then there's the Hart-Rudman Report and the recommendation to the incoming Bush administration to establish a Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Cole bombing. L. Paul Bremer III, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism under Bill Clinton and currently Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for post-war Iraq, said that no action was taken on any of his commission's recommendations — until the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: "Interestingly, since Sept. 11 almost every one of our recommendations has either been enacted by the executive branch or been put into law by Congress, which suggests that we probably had a pretty good menu of things to do before Sept. 11."
Of course there's more, but the point is, Clinton was extremely vigilant in fighting terrorism. He wasn't perfect, but he was effective.