...and we know they know we know.
No matter how mightily the media twists and turns to put blame on the Bush Adminstration, Neocons (them Joos again), Rummy and the two house slaves...it won't wash. Americans are not stupid and though we may be partisans, we recognise a rat when we smell it.
Is SecState Albright kidding?
"FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT I can say with confidence that President Clinton and his team did everything we could, everything that we could think of, based on the knowledge we had, to protect our people and disrupt and defeat Al Qaeda. We certainly recognized the threat posed by the terrorist groups. . . .But I also do know that many of the policy issues that we had developed were not followed up.
And I have to say with great sadness to watch an incoming administration kind of take apart a lot of the policies that we did have, whether it had to do with North Korea or the Balkans, was difficult. So I think you have to ask people that were in the Bush administration as to how they saw things on this particular issue. But I do think, in all fairness, that 9/11 was a cataclysmic event that changed things and that they must have had similar reactions. But clearly there are many issues and many questions now about how they were responding to the terrorist threat and how seriously they took it.
Albright and the Clinton administration were roundly duped by Nth Korea, and the wheels are still coming off the Balkans.
Then there was this admission by SecDef Wiliam Cohen:
Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen defended the administration, noting that Clinton and his top advisers turned aside more aggressive action, such as an invasion of Afghanistan, because they believed the president would be pilloried domestically and overseas in a pre-Sept. 11 climate in which he was accused of pumping up the terrorist threat to deflect attention from the scandals that plagued his administration.
Clinton foolishly indulged his personal weaknesses and was forced to spend his political capital and public good will protecting his ass, not ours. Had he not been embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal he may have acted more forcibly.
The Clinton Administration was warned repeatedly that the airlines were vulnerable, yet he chose to appoint Linda Daschle, an airline lobbyist, as deputy administrator of the FAA, putting her in charge of regulating her once-and-future clients; and she wound up running the agency as acting administrator.
When the FAA was pondering making mandatory a criminal-background check for all airport employees, Linda, who was then running the agency, vigorously opposed this common-sense move — echoing the position of the airline-industry lobby that had previously employed her.Before 9/11, Senator Daschle pushed through the sleazy deal in the backrooms of Capitol Hill that forced the FAA to buy defective baggage scanners from one of Linda’s other clients, L-3 International (from which Linda’s firm raked in $440,000 in the ’97–’01 period). Under a provision Linda’s husband had slipped into the 2000 budget for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the FAA was required to buy one of L-3’s scanners for every one it purchased from the company’s competitors. The L-3 scanners were found to be substandard by DOT’s inspector general; FAA tests of the scanners showed high failure rates; and most have not yet been installed because of their defects (the one at the Dallas–Fort Worth airport — another of Linda’s clients — leaked radiation), which is a major reason DOT says it won’t be able to screen all luggage for explosives for years to come.
It was no coincidence that Inspector General for the Transportation Dept. Mary Schiavo was fired and publicly pilloried by the Clintonistas when she would not back down on her scathing critique of airline safety issues.
Stuart Taylor has written repeatedly on this issue:
In 1996, President Clinton put Vice President Al Gore in charge of a White House commission to recommend improvements in airliner security. But from the start, according to The Boston Globe, "debate over the program focused on civil liberties, not effectiveness." The Gore commission declared, "No profile should contain or be based on ... race, religion, or national origin." Accordingly, the Federal Aviation Administration, in unveiling its Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening program, stressed that the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division—an ultraliberal bastion—had certified that the CAPS criteria "do not consider passengers' race, color, national or ethnic origin, religion, or gender," or even "names or modes of dress." That left few criteria for flagging possible terrorists other than reservation histories—as any competent terrorist would have known.
So tell me again how the Neocons are responsible?