Tuesday, September 11, 2001
By Paul Sperry

© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – Counterterrorism experts in the Pentagon suspect Pakistan and Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden is behind the deadly attacks on America's nerve centers, WorldNetDaily has learned.

And they say they are looking at targets to take him out once and for all, something that they say the Clinton administration never seriously considered.

"No one seriously went after him," one Pentagon official told WorldNetDaily. "You go after him, he's dead. People like that shouldn't be allowed to play at the periphery."

"I hope we get some good targets," the official added, "and I hope I'm busy responding to them."

On Aug. 20, 1998, three days after half-confessing to lying about Monica Lewinsky and the day she testified before a federal grand jury, former President Clinton declared bin Laden the world's most dangerous terrorist and retaliated against him for blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa months earlier.

Three years later he's still at large.

Clinton ordered the military to pump as many as 20 Tomahawk missiles into what he said was a chemical-weapons plant in Sudan financed by bin Laden. It turned out to be a pill plant owned by a Saudi businessman to whom the administration later had to pay $1 million in interest for seizing his plant.

Intelligence officials at the time expressed reservations about including the plant on the target list. Clinton picked the target himself.

Clinton ordered another 60 or so Tomahawks launched against six camps near Khost, Afghanistan, where bin Laden operated with the blessing of the ruling Taliban militia.

None of them came close to hitting bin Laden.

The mission, which used some 80 missiles at a price of about $750,000 apiece, was seen as a very expensive failure – if, that is, Clinton's mission was in fact to knock out bin Laden, and not to distract attention from his impeachment scandal.

"Clinton knew it wouldn't work in Afghanistan. It was a public-affairs move," the Pentagon official said, arguing that bombing is an extremely unreliable way to destroy a terrorist cell or assassinate its leader. "If he hit him [bin Laden], he would have been lucky."

"All he did was give him confidence that he could prick at the giant and win, and we wouldn't do anything about it," the official said. "We knew about bin Laden, and we knew about others who have been playing with us. We've got intelligence on the countries that have been supporting them. And we just talk at them and slap them with sanctions."

Tellingly, Clinton refrained from a military response in 1996, when 19 U.S. airmen were killed in the terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia. He also took no military action against terrorists last year for blowing a hole in the USS Cole in Yemen. The blast killed 17 sailors.

In those cases, the Clinton administration "wanted court-quality evidence before they'd go forward" and retaliate, said a Pentagon anti-terrorism official.

"Frankly, they just let guys like bin Laden grow in strength to the point where they felt they could pull off things like they pulled off today," he said.

The U.S. accuses the Taliban of sheltering bin Laden, and supports United Nations sanctions against Afghanistan.

The Islamic militia recently jailed two American women in Afghanistan on charges of preaching Christianity, which makes some officials wonder if the latest American attacks aren't part of a new holy war.

The Taliban, which wants the U.S. to recognize it as Afghanistan's government and to ease sanctions against it, may be using the American prisoners as a bargaining chip.

U.S. consuls met with Taliban officials last week to negotiate the release of the women, who may face execution. The consuls' visas expired today. They've sought an extension on the two-week visas.

"We have bad guys there that we know wish us harm, and we have not gone after them," the Pentagon official said. "We've done this reasonable retaliation, yes, but it doesn't work."

"We should have done like the Soviets did it along time ago," he said. "They didn't stomach this kind of crap. Anybody who played with them, they got evidence or strong suspects and they didn't live very long."

"We need to go back to the days when the national security of our citizenry was the most important piece of government," the official added.

Before devastating military cutbacks were implemented under the Clinton administration, New York City had air defenses that could have prevented the second of two attacks on the World Trade Center last week, New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate Bret Schundler charged Saturday.

"Up until a few years ago we had an F-16 fighter wing here in New Jersey that would be capable of intercepting one of those planes that crashed into the World Trade Center," he told WABC Radio's John Gambling.

"They decreased the number of wings that were available to do that. So the result was that the closest fighter wing that had the capability to intercept one of those planes was in Massachusetts."

Two F-16s had scrambled out of Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod after World Trade Center Tower 1 was hit, but they didn't arrive in New York airspace until 15 minutes after United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into WTC Tower 2.

"They couldn't get here in time," Schundler said. "And that's why the second plane flew into the World Trade Center."

The unexpected collapse of Tower 2, the first to do down, was likely responsible for the majority of deaths at the scene - catching hundreds of police and fireman, as well as thousands of office workers who had been told to stay put and wait for evacuation orders, completely unaware.

Schundler pinned the blame for eliminating the air defenses that could have saved Tower 2 squarely on the Clinton administration.

"The federal government in the last eight years cut down the resources," he told WABC. "That's just a statement of fact."

Schundler was responding to a report in Saturday's New York Times, which he said distorted his earlier comments to make it appear as if he was blaming his own state for the military cutbacks.

Monday, September 24, 2001
By Joseph Farah

© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

The country is united politically right now, so I'm sure I'll be accused of divisiveness, partisan sniping, maybe even being unpatriotic by raising this issue.

But, heck, I've been accused of worse. Last week the Wall Street Journal called me a "purveyor of obscenity." I'll let you be the judge of whether that description suits me.

I never let those criticisms bother me – especially not from uptight, corporate media establishment mouthpieces and spoiled, little, ivory-tower reactionaries.

So, today I'm going to tell you how Al Gore may have contributed, in his own politically ambitious, selfish way, to the deaths of some of the victims of the terrorist attacks Sept. 11.

Following the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, Gore was entrusted by President Clinton to investigate airline safety. He was named chairman of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety.

The Gore commission produced what most observers considered to be a tough preliminary report unveiled Sept. 9 of that year – one that included tough counter-terrorism procedures.

But within days, according to an insider on the commission, the airline industry jumped all over Gore. 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.

In what can only be seen as a pure political payoff, the Democratic National Committee received $40,000 from TWA the next day. Within two weeks, Northwest, United and American Airlines ponied up another $55,000 for the 1996 campaign.

But the money trail didn't stop there. In the next two months leading up to the November elections, American Airlines donated $250,000 to the Democrats. United donated $100,000 to the DNC. Northwestern put $53,000 more into the kitty.

Following the election, in January, Gore floated a draft final report that eliminated all security measures from the commission's findings, according to the insider. Two commission members balked, as did CIA Director John Deutch.

Fearing more political heat, Gore pulled back the draft report. A month later, the final report was issued – one that included requirements that would cost the airlines some money, but, perhaps, save some lives in the future.

The report's requirements included:

high-tech bomb detectors;

more training for airport security;
criminal background checks for security personnel;
increased canine patrols.
Only one thing was lacking from the report, said the whistleblower – there was no deadline by which those requirements would have to be met. It was open-ended. In other words, it wasn't worth the paper on which it was written.

In a meeting with other commission members Feb. 12, 1997, Gore said he would leave room for a dissent by those who opposed the report. But within minutes, Gore was announcing to the president and the public that the report was the work of a unanimous commission. In other words, he lied – again.

In Washington, that might have been the end of the story. Scandals like this often go unnoticed. But one courageous lady, the dissenting member of the commission, Victoria Cummock, filed suit to gain access to files she was denied and for the right to file her dissent.

Who is Mrs. Cummock? She was appointed to the commission by Clinton because her husband was killed in the terrorist downing of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland. She's the insider. She's the whistleblower. She's the heroine of this story.

All this was chronicled in a Tony Blankley column a year ago – a year and five days before the latest terrorist attack that killed all passengers and all the crew on four airliners as well as thousands on the ground at the World Trade Center and Pentagon Sept. 11.

Would any of that death and destruction have been prevented had Gore not crawled into bed with the airline industry thinking only in the short term about potential financial losses, not realizing it might be saving itself from much bigger losses in the future?

I guess we'll never know for sure. But remember this story the next time Al Gore rears his opportunistic political head on the national scene.

September 24, 2001 10:00 a.m.

In recent days, as it has become increasingly clear that Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden is behind the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, former president Bill Clinton has made a series of public statements claiming his administration came close to killing bin Laden during a cruise-missile raid in 1998.

Touring the rubble of lower Manhattan on September 13, Clinton said, "The best shot we had at him was when I bombed his training camps in 1998. We just missed him by a matter of hours, maybe even less than an hour."

A few days later, on NBC, Clinton said, "We had quite good intelligence that he and his top lieutenants would be in his training camp. So I ordered the cruise-missile attacks, and we didn't tell anybody, including the Pakistanis, whose airspace we had to travel over, until the last minute. And unfortunately we missed them, apparently not by very long....We never had another chance where the intelligence was as reliable to justify military action."

The former president's statements left the impression that he was hot on the trail of bin Laden and came excruciatingly close to killing him. But one of Clinton's top military commanders, who was deeply involved in the Afghanistan operation, has a different recollection. In an interview with National Review Online, retired general Anthony Zinni, commander of U.S. forces in the region at the time, described the 1998 cruise-missile raid as a "million-to-one-shot."

"There was a possibility [bin Laden] could have been there," Zinni recalls. "My intelligence people did not put a lot of faith in that....As I was given this mission to do, I did not see that anyone had any degree of assurance or reliability that that was going to happen."

Still, Zinni defends the decision to strike. "In weighing that out, without great intelligence, it's a million-to-one shot," he says. "Should you take it? Yes. You might get something, but in the absence of that, you can send [bin Laden] a message, maybe cause him to go off balance and set him back a little bit."

In the past, Clinton's critics assailed the Afghanistan raid — plus another attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan — as ineffective maneuvers whose main value was as a "Wag the Dog" diversion from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Clinton ordered the attacks at the height of the scandal, three days after testifying before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury.) Now, whatever Clinton's motivation, George W. Bush has made it clear he sees the action as a model of how not to strike back at terrorism. "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt," Bush reportedly told a group of senators. "It's going to be decisive."

Dude, How do you post so much with no responses??

Seriously, I would like someone to hijack this thread and tell us why Clinton was so great. The stinkin LA Times had the gall last Sunday to say that clinton did more to further conservatism than Reagan. Wah??

clinton was so great because ...( you fill in the blanks ):rolleyes:

"dumb luck"!? .. ...that's not a very nice label for the 94 Republican congress. :cool: