NP? interesting, re 9-11

[Doug Millison]

http://www.salon.com/news/col/cona/2002/08/05/bush/index.html
[...] The ugly, mendacious campaign to blame Bill Clinton for the national
security disaster of last Sept. 11 should end today, with the publication
of a revealing investigative report in Time magazine.

According to Time's sources in both the Clinton and Bush administrations,
departing national security advisor Sandy Berger and the National Security
Council's counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, who was held over, gave
Berger's replacement, Condoleezza Rice, a series of urgent, extensive
briefings on al-Qaida in January 2001. (Rice reportedly said she doesn't
recall Berger's presence at these meetings.) They delivered a comprehensive
plan to "roll back" Osama bin Laden's terrorist network that included
assaults on its international financial structure, its branches from the
Philippines to Yemen, and, most important, its headquarters in Afghanistan.
The strategy proposed for destroying al-Qaida in Afghanistan was almost
identical to the military action taken after the Sept. 11 attack, with
bombing from the air supporting U.S. special forces units and a
strengthened Northern Alliance. Clarke laid out the same plan for the vice
president a month later.

The new administration's refusal to deal with the Clinton plan
expeditiously represented "a systematic collapse in the ability of
Washington's national security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat."
The supposedly supercompetent national security managers such as Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were too arrogant and too preoccupied with other
matters (such as national missile defense against North Korea) to counter
the most serious threat to this country since the end of the Cold War.

Although the Washington Post has previously reported ongoing covert efforts
by the Clinton administration to neutralize bin Laden and cripple al-Qaida,
Time says this more open and aggressive battle plan was drawn up after the
bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. Rather than initiate a war that
would have to be finished by their successors, the Clinton officials
properly left the final decision to be made by the new president and his
advisors. Unfortunately those hard-charging, tough-talking,
bureaucracy-busting executives did little but shuffle paper until it was
much too late. No wonder Cheney and Bush have argued so strenuously against
an independent investigation of the events leading up to Sept. 11, which
they should no longer be allowed to evade. The White House has issued a
denial of the Time report, but its credibility on this subject is
especially poor. The Senate Intelligence Committee ought to release any
evidence it has gathered of the chronology of procrastination exposed in
Time.

I debated the responsibility of the former president with Andrew Sullivan
on this site months ago. Support for my point of view is unexpected but
welcome from Time, a publication that never hesitated to attack the
Clintons during the Whitewater years. Perhaps it is time for Sullivan, Rush
Limbaugh and all the other conservatives who have smeared Clinton for his
alleged fecklessness regarding terror to withdraw (at least stop repeating)
their baseless accusations. "Feckless" seems like a better description of
those who took over from Clinton and failed to heed the advice he left for
them.[...]