Clinton and the Road to 9/11

The Financial Times has a book review of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11. In the light of the upcoming ABC-TV mini-series, New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright's book appears to be one of salutary importance. I myself spent months in Riyadh in the '80s as did author Wright, and the otiose habits of the Saudi government and business communities were legendary. Plenty of free office time for the few ambitious Saudi males not engrossed in making money to become enamoured of getting the hell out of that air-conditioned hellhole and actually do something with one's life.

The review gives a long recitation of Wright's examination of takfir, the specious religious commutation of the punishment of murder as a crime if it is killing anyone who is an "apostate," an interpretation stretched by Al-Qaeda and the GIA in Algeria to include anyone outside their core support groups. We have seen in Iraq how this has been exercised to include ethnic genocide. After examining all the heterodox elements of the takfiri extremist groups, Wright then switches to the feckless victim-to-be:

The other part of Wright’s book describes the history of the few Americans who recognised early the threat posed by al-Qaeda. It is a story of missed opportunities, of bureaucratic and personal infighting, of orders that made it harder to share information among intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Even if everything had worked perfectly, there is no guarantee that 9/11 would have been thwarted. But Wright’s book reinforces the sense that, had things been different, it could have been.

We can thank Clinton and his Reno/Gorelick-led DOJ for "orders that made it harder to share information among intelligence and law enforcement agencies" and hyper-legalistic requirements putting firewalls between various Govt. Departments. Pre-emptive detection such as the Able Danger project faced numerous obstacles in the over-lawyered environment the Clintons engendered.

Fouad Ajami puts the Clintons' persistent insouciance in the face of numerous wake-up calls in context in his book The Foreigner's Gift.

For the full length of a decade, the 1990s, the anti-American subversion---and the incitement feeding it---knew no respite. Appeasement had not worked. The "moderns," with Bill Clinton as their standard bearer, had been sure we would be delivered by the marketplace and the World Wide Web. History has mocked them.....

But what do the ancien regime Democrats want? If we are to believe their "moral" leader, Jimmy Carter, perhaps more appeasement or at least marathon talkfests where another exercise in Camp David magic might ensue?

Meanwhile, in the real world of facts and history, the US faces an implacable enemy, and there is yet no definitive version of how this situation came about. If we are to believe the Democrat line, GWB inherited a tabula rasa in 2001 and within months, blundered somehow into 9/11. Only the Arianna and Kossack edgy left can swallow hokum like that.

So the ABC mini-series, if it withstands the onslaughts of the Clintonista mafia, will demonstrate how the first WTC bombing in '93, the Bojinka plane plot in '95, the twin embassy bombings in '98, and the bombing of the Cole in 2000 all failed to stir the Clinton Administration out of its kumbayeh lethargy vis-a-vis the Al-Qaeda threat. And the huge question remains why in '96 did the Clintonistas pass up the Sudanese offer of delivering Osama to the US on a platter. I believe history written by true historians will show that the over-lawyered Dems didn't want the legal hassles---obviously in hindsight the Clinton priorities were totally parochial---and hoped the Saudis would take care of Bin Laden, who scampered off to Afghanistan as soon as the opportunity arose.

I believe that Clinton's tendency toward self-absorbed infatuation with himself prompted his egomania to give its full attention to some sort of resolution of the Arab/Israeli dispute. This in itself was not at all bad, as it would ratchet down a key incitement to the humiliated Arab World's anger at the USA. Plus Golden Boy Billy Jeff would win a Nobel Prize in the process. But a by-product of Clinton's single-minded focus on Arab/Israel was that this mentality did not like messy confrontations or legal conundrums, such as an arrested Bin Laden in US custody might have engendered.

We'll see if the Clintonista
nomenklatura can scare or persuade the ABC Disney front office into last minute revisions.

But pundits like Glenn Reynolds and Hugh Hewitt are already in possession of the full six-hour final cut and, if last-minute air-brushing does ensue, these folks can make the "objectionable" cutting-room floor clips available to YouTube and other on-line sites.

In the end, however, as Fuad Ajami noted above concerning the Clinton Administration's wishful thinking: "History has mocked them..."