Is Bill Clinton Responsible for September 11?

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from lucianne http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/columnists/perazzo/jp09-20-01.htm

FrontPageMagazine.com | September 20, 2001

IN ORDER THAT the daunting task of eradicating terrorism from the earth might at last begin in earnest, most Americans justifiably support our nation’s impending military response to the horrors of September 11. I have watched, with tearful awe, my fellow countrymen eagerly rush to help the stricken in every conceivable way. But in a larger sense, we have all been stricken -- by devils brave enough to willingly lose their lives in fiery conflagration, but too craven to identify themselves.

Make Comments View Comments Printable Article Email Article Thus we must clearly direct our vision toward the future, toward the task of together finding a way to root out and destroy the amorphous, unfamiliar foe we face. That being said, however, we ought also take a moment to cast a backward glance toward the policies of recent years that made our country vulnerable not only to tragedies like the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters, but to even greater potential calamities. Failure to understand what led us to this point will doom us to sufferings yet more unspeakable.

I refer specifically to the policies of Bill Clinton, the president whose endless parade of lies on matters far graver than his sexual dalliances literally set the stage for potential national disaster. This analysis of his failings is not intended to deflect responsibility away from the loathsome individuals who planned and executed last Tuesday’s deeds, but rather to alert readers to the fact that the seeds of those terrorists’ evil intentions were left utterly undisturbed by a president who spent eight years turning a blind eye to even the most blatant national security threats.

You might recall how throughout the Lewinsky ordeal, Mr. Clinton repeatedly intoned the mantra that he was committed to doing "the people’s work" – a commitment that purportedly left him no time to comment upon such trivialities as the perjury that he had both committed and suborned. Apparently, however, the "people’s work" did not entail protecting our nation’s safety. As David Horowitz has pointed out, the Clinton Administration actually gave away the very technology that allowed the terrorists to encrypt their communications and thereby go undetected. Moreover, the "sensitivity" guidelines Clinton instituted in 1995 have greatly hindered vital U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities in foreign countries.

But Clinton’s unforgivable neglect of national security matters extended far beyond the realm of last week’s suicide hijackings and the lapses that allowed them to happen. Consider former Defense Secretary William Cohen’s 1997 observation that Iraq already may have "produced as much as 200 tons of VX [nerve gas], theoretically enough to kill every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth." Notwithstanding this alarming possibility, Clinton assented to a U.N.-brokered deal that greatly restricted U.N. inspectors' access to Iraq’s "sensitive presidential locations" suspected of housing nuclear and biological weapons-production plants.

In addition, he intervened numerous times to dissuade inspectors from making surprise visits to still other suspected weapons sites – simply to avoid an embarrassing public standoff with Saddam Hussein. By 1998 Scott Ritter, the longest serving American weapons-inspector in Iraq, angrily resigned in protest to what he called Clinton’s "surrender to Iraqi leadership." Ritter candidly explained that the Clinton Administration had "made a farce" of U.N. inspection efforts by reining in investigators who were literally "on the doorstep" of uncovering Iraq's hidden weapons programs. In short, our president placed his preoccupation with his own public image above the safety of the entire world, and was content to saddle future administrations with the disastrous outgrowths of his own self-absorbed gutlessness.

Recognizing that well-told fairy tales punctuated by sunny smiles are good for presidential poll ratings, Clinton frequently boasted of having improved U.S. relations with North Korea, whose military had already amassed enough plutonium to build nuclear weapons as early as 1994. When Korean leaders denied outside inspectors access to suspected weapons-production sites, Clinton happily negotiated a plan giving them fully ten years to dismantle their weapons program. In so doing, he once again shifted to subsequent administrations the burden of eventually dealing with the potentially dreadful consequences of a Korean buildup.

Moreover, Clinton withheld from the public any mention of the 1997 U.S. intelligence satellite photographs showing some 15,000 North Korean workers building an immense underground nuclear facility in an area called Kumchangni. That construction project, of course, exposed the nuclear weapons freeze to which North Korea had pledged, and which Clinton had hailed as a major arms control achievement, as nothing more than yet another colossal sham. Remarkably, Clinton waited for more than a year, until July 1998, before informing even the Congress about the Kumchangni construction.

Though he often made mention of the safer world in which we purportedly lived, Clinton said little, if anything, about the findings of a 1997 commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld, which ominously concluded that nuclear threats to the American mainland from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq were so grave that no time should be wasted in developing an effective missile defense system. But Clinton opposed such a system, preferring instead to trust his powers of diplomacy and the solemn pledges of the proven liars heading those countries.

How many Americans realize that on January 25, 1995, our country actually came within a hairsbreadth of sustaining a Russian-launched nuclear attack – when Russian military forces temporarily mistook a Norwegian scientific rocket for an American ballistic missile headed for Russia? Indeed President Boris Yeltsin, for the first time in Russian history, went so far as to activate his Cheget, the display screen showing attack assessment data and containing the infamous button which, when pressed, authorizes the Russian military to initiate nuclear retaliation. As Representative Curt Weldon observed at the time, Yeltsin was "one decision point away – less than several minutes away – from launching an all-out nuclear attack on the United States." Ah, but who enjoys thinking about such unpleasantness? Public fear of annihilation isn’t very good for a president’s approval ratings – particularly when the economy is humming along so splendidly.

So instead Clinton trumpeted the great relationship he was purportedly building with our newfound Russian "ally," and demonstrated his trust by dismantling the Energy Department's Russian Fission monitoring program which had kept tabs on Russia's nuclear arsenal. Keep in mind, this was at a time when CIA reports showed that Russia's alarmingly poor control over its 21,900 nuclear warheads made it more possible than ever that an accidental Russian strike could occur. Consider the ominous words of Colonel Robert Bykov, a career strategic missile officer and member of the Russian parliament, who candidly lamented that Russia "could launch an accidental nuclear strike on the United States in the matter of seconds it takes you to read these lines."

Instead of addressing this weighty matter, Clinton boasted that he had skillfully persuaded the Russian military to de-target its intercontinental missiles away from American sites – ostensibly the crowning achievement of his 1994 summit with President Yeltsin. Notably, Clinton did not mention that de-targeting is an unverifiable, purely symbolic gesture that can easily be undone in a few minutes.

When CIA Director George Tenet testified in 1998 that Russia was illegally giving enormous assistance to Iran's missile program, Clinton never batted an eye. Preferring to pretend that all was right with the world, he actually vetoed Congress' 1998 legislation mandating retaliatory sanctions against Russia. Not even July 22, 1998 – the day Iran stunned the world by conducting the first test flight of its new Shahab-3 medium-range missile capable of carrying nuclear or biological weapons – could awaken in our president a sense of duty to strengthen U.S. defense capabilities.

He continued to oppose the development of a missile-defense system even when our country's National Security Agency learned in 1999 that Chinese scientists were aiding North Korea's satellite program for the guidance of long-range missiles. Reassuring us at the time that all we really needed was a bit more constructive "bilateral dialogue" with Beijing, Clinton actually expanded American business ties with China.

He loosened our country's longstanding export controls on supercomputers and other high-technology products that have dramatically improved the potential accuracy of Chinese intercontinental missiles. And by what we are presumably to interpret as a remarkable coincidence, one of the prime American beneficiaries of this policy was Loral Space & Communications chairman Bernard Schwartz, the single largest contributor to Clinton’s political campaign and the Democratic Party. Even more remarkably, Clinton’s supporters were, by and large, undisturbed by the 1998 Senate Governmental Affairs Committee’s conclusion that the foreign campaign contributions Clinton had received two years earlier "were facilitated by individuals with extensive ties to China."

In 1996 it was discovered that Chinese spies had stolen nuclear design secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the most damaging security breach in American history – giving China the ability to produce and deliver nuclear warheads via submarines, mobile missiles, and long-range missiles. Nevertheless, Clinton actually stymied Energy Department efforts to address security problems at the nuclear labs, and postponed, for more than a year, a previously approved counter-intelligence program.

A July 1997 Energy Department report detailed even more comprehensively China's ongoing spying. When this report came to light on the eve of Clinton’s scheduled summit with the Chinese president – a meeting designed to dramatize his supposedly unprecedented success in improving relations with Beijing – he did precisely what any gutless, self-absorbed coward would have done in similar circumstances: he ordered the Energy Department to conceal from Congress its findings about Chinese espionage, lest those nasty Republicans use the revelations to tarnish his sterling reputation. Trying to cast a positive light on U.S.-China relations, he cheerfully informed us that, thanks to his skillful diplomacy, "there are no more nuclear missiles pointed at any children in the United States. I'm proud of that." But this was yet another lie, as evidenced by the CIA's April 1998 revelation that 13 of China's 18 intercontinental ballistic missiles were in fact targeted on the United States.

Not wishing to appear shaken by a possible threat, Clinton casually dismissed Chinese General Xiong Guangkai's 1995 warning that Beijing was prepared to respond to any American interference in Chinese-Taiwanese conflicts by actually bombing the city of Los Angeles. He turned a blind eye to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s revelation that China was trying to buy advanced ICBM technology from Russia – in direct violation of U.S.-Russian agreements. He said nothing upon learning that Beijing was not only negotiating the purchase of colossal ten-warhead missiles from Ukraine, but was continuing its illegal transfer of missile technology and equipment to Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and Turkey.

Instead, Clinton reminded us of our "strategic partnership" with China, even while U.S. intelligence reports warned of Beijing’s rapid progress in developing missiles capable of hitting targets 7,500 miles away. His only "policy" concerning this matter was to mandate that no official White House spokesmen tell the public about the menacing Chinese buildup. Indeed he never openly addressed the issue until a Heritage Foundation military analyst eventually discovered and went public with the information.

With regard to the condition of our own armed forces during the Clinton Administration, the story is just as distasteful. Between 1993 and 2000, the U.S. Army's ranks were reduced from 18 divisions to 9, the Navy's fleet from 600 ships to 300, and the Air Force’s capabilities similarly diminished by half. Now we must rely on that military more heavily than at any time in six decades. The very fate of civilization rests upon its shoulders.

This is the legacy Bill Clinton left us. We can only be thankful that we now have capable, dedicated people working feverishly to clean up the unbelievable mess that this living, breathing abomination left behind. Clinton has spent the past few months traveling the world, collecting huge fees as a public speaker, and waving delightedly to throngs of worshippers who are utterly unaware of the aforementioned facts. Perhaps most offensive is that he will continue to collect a presidential pension for the rest of his life.

Let us take full notice of what this man has wrought, and conclusively resolve, "Never again." John Perazzo is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click here. E-mail him at wsbooks25@hotmail.com

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

Answers

This pisses me off so much.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

Yep, by golly, he was just too busy "doing the people's work" . Is that a new term for "getting a blow job"? I'm so out of the loop!

And to think my middle finger had almost recovered from the repetitive injuries it sustained during the previous 8 years. . .

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001


Don't hold back, dear! ROTFLMAO!

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

Here, Git...you can borrow my little man!

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

The last line of this article says it best . . .

Let us take full notice of what this man has wrought, and conclusively resolve, "Never again."

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001



...tarnish his sterling reputation.

Huh? Whose? Wha?

Pity George didn't pin anything on that clown during his speech.

Maybe we should have Hilary removed before she can get a pension. Doesn't it scare you to think what she can screw up while she is there?

-- Anonymous, September 21, 2001


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