September 8, 2006
Try as they may to whitewash history, the last vestiges of the Clinton administration failed. ABC-TV's The Path to 9/11 aired, albeit edited, but still damning and still truthful. The Clinton White House had several chances to take out Osama bin Laden and simply didn't have the stomach to do it. Even their response to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania failed to get bin Laden. Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had tipped off diplomats in Pakistan who, it's believed, got word to bin Laden just minutes before air strikes arrived that were designed to kill him.
In one scene, CIA agents on the ground in Afghanistan assisted enemies of bin Laden as they had him cornered in 1998. The operation, which had been cleared by the Clinton administration, sat waiting for orders to attack. The timid and faint-hearted national security team of the administration couldn't pull the trigger because of the outside chance that innocent people might be hurt or killed. The leader of the anti-Taliban forces could only sit and watch as their only opportunity slipped through their fingers. “Are there no men in Washington , or are they all cowards?” he asked in disgust. The head of the CIA team hung his head and closed his eyes in frustrated agreement.
The following year, opportunity knocked on Clinton 's door once again. Osama and his entourage had been located in the desert south of Kandar. Air strikes were planned. Then it was learned that Osama was keeping company with several members of the United Arab Emirates ' royal family. The strike was called off. What's worse, Clinton official Richard Clarke reportedly telephoned the UAE without permission to discuss their relationship with bin Laden. Osama and his henchmen quickly struck camp and disappeared, destroying any chance of getting him.
This conjures up an image of a president who was totally disconnected from the terror threat, an image confirmed in the ABC miniseries. Clinton officials and Bill Clinton himself have vehemently tried to revamp that perception but the evidence is overwhelmingly against them. As author David Horowitz pointed out in an online article for Front Page Magazine, Bill Clinton, by his own admission, allowed Monica Lewinsky to visit him privately in the Oval Office more than a dozen times yet the head of the CIA could not get a private meeting with the president. This despite the first World Trade Center attack, the Black Hawk Down incident and the CIA's desperate attempts to stop bin Laden before he struck again.
But that's not to say that Bill Clinton is the only president to blame for what happened on 9/11. Although it's difficult to shift the blame to the next administration, given the short time they were in office before the attacks, there is blame to be laid. The key component that everyone seems to be missing is how easily the hijackers were able to board our airplanes.
One ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta that fateful morning described how he thought Atta was the personification of a terrorist. Then he had to give himself a “mental slap” because profiling was a no-no. Why? Because President Bush's choice for transportation secretary was a politically correct liberal with a chip on his shoulder. Norman Mineta was still hacked off about his family being placed in the internment camps during World War II. He vowed never to profile again . . . for any reason. Because of Mineta's decision, that ticket agent – and perhaps others who encountered the other terrorists – were powerless to act on their gut feelings. And 3,000 people died because of it.