Text 22646, 416 rader
Skriven 2006-09-23 17:02:20 av Bob Sakowski (1:275/311)
     Kommentar till en text av John Hull
Ärende: Re: Next Sunday
=======================
John Hull wrote:

> Stan Hardegree -> Bob Sakowski wrote:
>  CW>> Clinton: Let's talk about it. I will answer all those
>  things on CW>> the merits, but first I want to talk about the
>  context in which CW>> this arises. I'm being asked this on the
>  FOX network. ABC just CW>> had a right-wing conservative
>  running their little pathway to CW>> 9/11, falsely claiming it
>  was based on the 9/11 commission report
> 
>  SH> This son of a bitch is classless.  This is the former
>  leader of the free SH> world bitching about a goddam television
>  program.
> 
> The context... Do you believe the brass of this asshole?  The
> context indeed. The context is that he sat on his ass in the
> Oval Office playing hide the
> salami with Monica while bin Laden was planning ways to kill
> Americans.  The Sudanese offered him up twice, and we had intel
> that could have taken him out if acted upon on several other
> occasions, and this prick is worrying about how his legacy
> appears in a TV movie.
> 
> I hope God has a special place reserved for bastards like him,
> and all those
> who supported him then, and support him now.  The proper
> settings should be OVEN and ROAST with the timer set on
> INFINITY!

We know who sat on their ass John.

A Strategy's Cautious Evolution
Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly Ambition

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 20, 2002; Page A01

On a closed patch of desert in the first week of June, the U.S.
government built a house for Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden would have recognized the four-room villa. He lived in
one just like it outside Kandahar, Afghanistan, whenever he spent
a night among the recruits at his Tarnak Qila training camp. The
stone-for-stone replica, in Nevada, was a prop in the rehearsal
of his death.

From a Predator drone flying two miles high and four miles away,
Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency ground controllers
loosed a missile. It carried true with a prototype warhead, one
of about 100 made, for killing men inside buildings. According to
people briefed on the experiment, careful analysis after the
missile pierced the villa wall showed blast effects that would
have slain anyone in the target room.

The Bush administration now had in its hands what one participant
called "the holy grail" of a three-year quest by the U.S.
government ? a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of
finding him. The CIA planned and practiced the operation. But for
the next three months, before the catastrophe of Sept. 11,
President Bush and his advisers held back.

The new national security team awaited results of a broad policy
review toward the al Qaeda network and Afghanistan's Taliban
regime, still underway in a working group two and three levels
below the president. Bush and his top aides had higher priorities
? above all, ballistic missile defense. As they turned their
attention to terrorism, they were moving toward more far-reaching
goals than the death of bin Laden alone.

Bush's engagement with terrorism in the first eight months of his
term, described in interviews with advisers and contemporary
records, tells a story of burgeoning ambition without the
commitment of comparably ambitious means. In deliberations and
successive drafts of a National Security Presidential Directive
approved by Bush's second-ranking advisers on Aug. 13, the
declared objective evolved from "rolling back" to "permanently
eroding" and eventually to "eliminating" bin Laden's al Qaeda
organization.

Cabinet-rank policymakers, or principals, took up the new strategy
for the first time on Sept. 4. It called for phased escalation of
pressure against Taliban leaders to present them with an
unavoidable choice ? disgorge al Qaeda or face removal from
power.

The directive asked the CIA and the Pentagon to produce options
involving force ? covert and overt ? but it deferred decisions on
their use. It had not reached Bush's desk by Sept. 11, and on
that day its multiyear plan of single steps became a race to
start the war on every front at once.

Had hijackers not killed more than 3,000 people, senior advisers
said, there is no way to predict how far Bush would have chosen
to follow the path they were mapping.

"We won't really know, because the strategy doesn't unfold" before
Sept. 11, said a central participant in developing it, who
declined to be quoted by name. "It's a phased strategy that we
lay out. And in some sense, whether you have to use the military
option is going to depend [on] whether the first part of your
strategy fails or succeeds. I can tell you the strategy we had,
the sequencing we had in mind. I guess I can't prove to you that
we would have done it."

Privately, as the strategy took form in spring and summer, the
Bush team expressed disdain for the counterterrorist policies it
had inherited from President Bill Clinton. Speaking of national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice, a colleague said that "what
she characterized as the Clinton administration approach was
'empty rhetoric that made us look feckless.'?"

Yet a careful review of the Bush administration's early record on
terrorism finds more continuity than change from the Clinton
years, measured in actions taken and decisions made. Where the
new team shifted direction, it did not always choose a more
aggressive path:

    *

      The administration did not resume its predecessor's covert
deployment of cruise missile submarines and gunships, on six-hour
alert near Afghanistan's borders. The standby force gave Clinton
the option, never used, of an immediate strike against targets in
al Qaeda's top leadership. The Bush administration put no such
capability in place before Sept. 11.
    *

      At least twice, Bush conveyed the message to the Taliban
that the United States would hold the regime responsible for an
al Qaeda attack. But after concluding that bin Laden's group had
carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole ? a
conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice
President Cheney ? the new administration did not choose to order
armed forces into action.
    *

      In the spring, CIA officers traveled into northern
Afghanistan to assess rebel forces commanded by Ahmed Shah
Massoud. They found him worse than he had appeared the autumn
before. The agency gave Massoud cash and supplies in small
amounts in exchange for intelligence on al Qaeda but did not have
the authority to build back his fighting strength against the
Taliban.
    *

      In his first budget, Bush spent $13.6 billion on
counterterrorist programs across 40 departments and agencies.
That compares with $12 billion in the previous fiscal year,
according to the Office of Management and Budget. There were also
somewhat higher gaps this year, however, between what military
commanders said they needed to combat terrorists and what they
got. When the Senate Armed Services Committee tried to fill those
gaps with $600 million diverted from ballistic missile defense,
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he would recommend a
veto. That threat came Sept. 9.
    *

      On May 8, Bush announced a new Office of National
Preparedness for terrorism at the Federal Emergency Management
Agency. At the same time, he proposed to cut FEMA's budget by
$200 million. Bush said that day that Cheney would direct a
government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic
attack, and "I will periodically chair a meeting of the National
Security Council to review these efforts." Neither Cheney's
review nor Bush's took place.
    *

      Bush did not speak again publicly of the dangers of
terrorism before Sept. 11, except to promote a missile shield
that had been his top military priority from the start. At least
three times he mentioned "terrorist threats that face us" to
explain the need to discard the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
    *

      The Treasury Department created a new deputy assistant
secretary's post last summer to coordinate anti-terrorist efforts
among its five enforcement arms, and it took the first steps
toward hosting a Foreign Terrorist Assets Tracking Center. It
also spent months fending off the new laws and old global
institutions that are central to the war against al Qaeda's
financing. Unresolved interagency disputes left the
administration without a position on legislative initiatives to
combat money laundering. And until the summer, Treasury Secretary
Paul H. O'Neill suspended U.S. participation in allied efforts to
penetrate offshore banking havens, whose secrecy protects the
cash flows of drug traffickers, tax evaders and terrorists.

At the nexus of law enforcement and intelligence, where the United
States has concentrated its work against al Qaeda since 1998, a
longtime senior participant said he observed no essential change
after the White House passed to new occupants.

"Ninety-nine point-something percent of the work going on and the
decisions being made would have continued to be made whether or
not we had an election," the career officer said. "I have a real
difficult time pointing to anything from January 20th to
September 10th that can be said to be a Bush initiative, or
something that wouldn't have happened anyway."
'What Are You Going to Do About It?'

At 1:30 on a Wednesday afternoon, two weeks after receiving the
nod as Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice walked
into a room whose maps and charts only partly obscured the
peeling of pale yellow paint. Room 302 of the Old Executive
Office Building had become the unlikely seat of a bureaucratic
empire built by Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey, his chief of
staff.

Clarke's white crew cut imparts a military demeanor, but he
actually came to government by way of Boston Latin School and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Under Clinton, he had
combined modest authority with immodest infighting skills to
become the government's main engine of policy on terrorism. In
this first meeting with Rice, on Jan. 3, he won a prompt
invitation to keep the job.

"The focus was on al Qaeda ? who is al Qaeda, what is al Qaeda and
why is it an existential threat?" Clarke recalled in an
interview.

Rice told him first, he said, that the dangers appeared to be
greater than she had known.

"Her second reaction was 'What are you going to do about it?'?"
Clarke said. "I don't think we actually got a tasking at that
meeting, but it was clear that she wanted an organized strategy
review. She didn't just passively take this information."

Soon afterward, Rice had lunch with the man she would replace in
the northwest corner office of the White House. Sitting face to
face in blue wingback chairs, Rice and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger
traversed the policy horizon from Russia, China and the Middle
East to the spread of nuclear weapons. Berger made what he
thought might be an unexpected claim.

"I said to Condi, 'You're going to spend more time during your
four years on terrorism generally and al Qaeda specifically than
any other issue,' " he said. Bush administration officials gave a
similar account.

In the Situation Room on Jan. 10, a CIA briefer showed Rice a
video clip of bin Laden filmed by a Predator drone ? then unarmed
? some months before. The live-action image tracked him out the
door of a villa and across the road. The same villa, in another
five months, would rise and fall on the Nevada desert test range.

Across the Potomac River, outgoing defense secretary William S.
Cohen and his chief of staff, Robert Tyrer, prepared what may
stand as the shortest memo of consequence in Pentagon lore.

"There's a period in the transition where the building gets its
hooks into you and you get 'death by briefing' by each component
in every service," Tyrer recalled. Before that started, he said,
"we wanted to lay out, from the perspective only the top guy has,
what are some of the issues that may not occur to you that you
need to be prepared for."

One of those came in a handwritten note, covering less than a
page. The lined paper had nothing on it but three names and three
telephone numbers ? the Pentagon's top career specialists on
terrorism. Cohen had found out the hard way that a defense
secretary might need them fast.

"Literally, it was 'Here's a piece of paper, here are the names of
your experts who you haven't met, here are their home phone
numbers,' " said another top Cohen aide, who had prepared the
list. "We tried to make it clear that you can wake up on the
morning of your inauguration and have something very big in your
face."

At a Jan. 10 meeting in the Tank, the secure conference room of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President-elect Bush and his defense
team took their first briefing from Gen. Henry H. Shelton, the
chairman, and the four service chiefs. Participants said neither
side, then or later, raised the subject of a six-hour alert force
near Afghanistan.

Shelton had no interest in returning Los Angeles-class submarines,
which carry cruise missiles, or AC-130 gunships, which fire
computer-directed cannon, to their previous Afghan stations. The
intelligence community had yet to give him a target for bin Laden
that he thought he could strike in time.

Those on Bush's team had different reasons. They had already begun
discussions, one adviser said, of whether bin Laden's death would
be enough. And they were convinced that "this wasn't about [bin
Laden], this was about al Qaeda, and that's why we had to go
after the network as a whole."

Personalizing the struggle to one man, he said, was "one of the
fallacies" of the Clinton team's approach.
'There Must Be a Consequence'

In his first week on the job, deputy national security adviser
Stephen J. Hadley instructed NSC team leaders to propose subjects
for high-level review. Much of the incoming staff was still
finding its way around the 553 rooms and two miles of corridors
in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, once the world's
largest.

Clarke did not need a map, or a second invitation. He had a
three-page proposal on Hadley's desk that day.

The Jan. 25 memorandum spoke starkly. Clarke and Cressey had just
navigated through the most intensive period of counterterrorist
activity in American history. The millennium year marked its
start with al Qaeda plots ? stopped by improbable good fortune ?
to mount synchronized strikes on airports in Boston and Los
Angeles, and on American tourists in Jordan. It ended with a
suicide attack that killed 17 sailors and crippled the USS Cole
in Yemen three weeks before the presidential election.

More attacks had almost certainly been set in motion, Clarke and
Cressey wrote. American intelligence believed there were al Qaeda
"sleeper cells" in America ? not a potential problem but "a major
threat in being," according to people who read their proposal.

Clarke had pressed superiors since the Cole bombing on Oct. 12,
2000, to mount a military attack on al Qaeda's Afghan training
camps. Clinton left the question for his successor, and what
little public record there was hinted that Bush might choose to
act.

"I hope that we can gather enough intelligence to figure out who
did the act and take the necessary action," candidate Bush said
the morning after the explosion. "There must be a consequence."

Clarke argued that the camps were can't-miss targets, and they
mattered. The facilities amounted to conveyor belts for al
Qaeda's human capital, with raw recruits arriving and trained
fighters departing ? either for front lines against the Northern
Alliance, the Afghan rebel coalition, or against American
interests somewhere else. The U.S. government had whole libraries
of images filmed over Tarnak Qila and its sister camp, Garmabat
Ghar, 19 miles farther west. Why watch al Qaeda train several
thousand men a year and then chase them around the world when
they left?

Clarke asked Rice to let him begin an interagency review. As it
began, he recommended five immediate steps.

Massoud's Northern Alliance fighters, in danger of defeat by the
Taliban, needed enough aid "to keep them alive until we figured
out what our overall strategy would be," as a new Bush appointee
put it. In neighboring Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov needed
more help for an American-trained battalion he sent against
fundamentalist rebels allied with al Qaeda. Treasury had to get
moving on a terrorist assets tracking center, months overdue. The
CIA's Counterterrorism Center could buy a lot more cooperation
from foreign intelligence services if it had more cash ? the
center's whole budget, sources said, did not exceed $50 million.
And the Voice of America had to start answering bin Laden ? in
local languages ? to counter his appeal in the Islamic world.

Not much came of Clarke's immediate requests. It would be months
before the new team's appointees arrived in force. But Rice and
Hadley liked his zeal. The inherited strategy of battling al
Qaeda cell by cell, they believed, could not work.

"The premise was, you either had to get the Taliban to give up al
Qaeda, or you were going to have to go after both the Taliban and
al Qaeda, together," Hadley said in an interview. "As long as al
Qaeda is in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban . . .
you're going to have to treat it as a system and either break
them apart, or go after them together."

Work began in the Counterterrorism Strategy Group, or CSG, by the
first week of February. There it stayed for months.

"The U.S. government can only manage at the highest level a
certain number of issues at one time ? two or three," said
Michael Sheehan, the State Department's former coordinator for
counterterrorism. "You can't get to the principals on any other
issue. That's in any administration."

Before Sept. 11, terrorism did not make that cut.

Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, who had come from top posts on the
Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency to manage
Clinton's National Security Council staff, remained at the NSC
nearly four months after Bush took office.

He noticed a difference on terrorism. Clinton's Cabinet advisers,
burning with the urgency of their losses to bin Laden in the
African embassy bombings in 1998 and the Cole attack in 2000, had
met "nearly weekly" to direct the fight, Kerrick said. Among
Bush's first-line advisers, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect"
that kind of focus, he said. "That's not being derogatory. It's
just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what Dick Clarke
and the CSG were doing."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company


Bush was too f*cking interested in Star Wars, with no time for
terrorists...  9/11 was the result.  After 9/11 he wasn't
interested in bin Laden and now there is the quagmire in Iraq
that is threatening to break the f*cking army.  Oh yes,
Afghanistan is also heating up with a resurgent Taliban.

All thanks to the most incompetent motherf*cker ever to sit in the
oval office.

And you still kiss the cowardly bastard's ass.  Simply f*cking
amazing.


-- 

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or
that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only
unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt
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