"How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism", Part 2 of 4

So far, we've looked at Hannity's contention that the Democrats were afraid an inquiry into 9/11 would lead to details of Clinton's failures in fighting terrorism coming to light and that they "showed little interest in an investigation" until "they smelled political advantage". That charge proved to be without merit.

Now we're going to start looking at the other charge Hannity levels in this section: Clinton refused to see the terrorist threat for what it was and this helped make the 9/11 attacks possible. Like the section's title, Hannity going to show "How Clinton and Gore Turned a Blind Eye to Terrorism".

Let's review Hannity's evidence. Here's "Exhibit 1":

On December 20, 2001, New York Times reporters Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth, and Don Van Natta, Jr., wrote a 7,237-word story titled "Planning for Terror But Failing to Act." The story detailed how the Clinton-Gore administration did little or nothing to crack down on terrorism in the wake of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

The Times story revealed that "in 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. But Clinton chose not to act." The Times reported that "in 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the country with explosives, a secret White House review recommended a crackdown on 'potential sleeper cells in the United States.' That review warned that 'the threat of attack remains high' and laid out a plan for fighting terrorism. But most of that plan remained undone."

The Times even quoted former Clinton senior advisor George Stephanopolous admitting that the Clinton-Gore administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk, despite the growing number of deaths of innocent Americans at the hands of al Qaeda operatives.

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" said Stephanopolous.

To which I ask: Why not?

Why were issues like gays in the military and global warming and promoting race-based set-asides more important to the Clinton-Gore administration that waging a war against terrorism? ("Let Freedom Ring" pages 13-14)

I'm assuming Hannity made a point of mentioning that the article was 7,237 words in order to leave the reader with the impression that there were lots of examples of Clinton's negligence in it. To find out, I read the New York Times article for myself. Let's take a look at some of what it said:

1.) Here's an interesting quote from the article:

[U]ntil Sept. 11, the people at the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything, have been less preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.

Hmm. That sounds a lot like the Bush Administration wasn't making terrorism its top priority either, rather it was even lower on the list than it had been with the Clinton Administration. By the way, that quote came from the section titled "The New Team, Seeing the Threat But Moving Slowly". Here's the quote in context:

As he prepared to leave office last January, [Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy] Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning.

According to both of them, he said that terrorism -- and particularly Mr. bin Laden's brand of it -- would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined.

A month later, with the administration still getting organized, Mr. Tenet, whom President Bush had asked to stay on at the C.I.A., warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda remained "the most immediate and serious threat" to security. But until Sept. 11, the people at the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything, have been less preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.

So the article isn't just about Clinton. It covers Bush, too. Hannity never mentions that.

2.) Probably worse than neglecting to mention the fact that Bush is also the subject of the article, is the fact that there is an entire section titled "The Battle Intensifies, Struggling to Track 'Enemy No. 1'" (that being bin Laden) that never gets mentioned either. Why is that so bad? Read some of it for yourself:

In the years after the [African] embassy bombings, the Clinton administration significantly stepped up its efforts to destroy Al Qaeda, tracking its finances, plotting military strikes to wipe out its leadership and prosecuting its members for the bombings and other crimes. "From August 1998, bin Laden was Enemy No. 1," [National Security Advisor] Mr. Berger said.

The campaign had the support of President Clinton and his senior aides. But former administration officials acknowledge that it never became the government's top priority.

When it came to Pakistan, for example, American diplomats continued to weigh the war on terrorism against other pressing issues, including the need to enlist Islamabad's help in averting a nuclear exchange with India.

Similarly, a proposal to vastly enhance the Treasury Department's ability to track global flows of terrorist money languished until after Sept. 11. And American officials were reluctant to press the oil-rich Saudis to crack down on charities linked to radical causes.

Still, the fight against Al Qaeda gained new, high-level attention after the embassy attacks, present and former officials say. Between 1998 and 2000, the "Small Group" of the Cabinet-rank principals involved in national security met almost every week on terrorism, and the Counterterrorism Security Group, led by Mr. [Richard] Clarke, met two or three times a week, officials said.

The United States disrupted some Qaeda cells, and persuaded friendly intelligence services to arrange the arrest and transfer of Al Qaeda members without formal extradition or legal proceedings. Dozens were quietly sent to Egypt and other countries to stand trial.

President Clinton also ordered a more aggressive program of covert action, signing an intelligence order that allowed him to use lethal force against Mr. bin Laden. Later, this was expanded to include as many as a dozen of his top lieutenants, officials said.

On at least four occasions, Mr. Clinton sent the C.I.A. a secret "memorandum of notification," authorizing the government to kill or capture Mr. bin Laden and, later, other senior operatives. The C.I.A. then briefed members of Congress about those plans.

The C.I.A. redoubled its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden's movements, stationing submarines in the Indian Ocean to await the president's launch order. To hit Mr. bin Laden, the military said it needed to know where he would be 6 to 10 hours later -- enough time to review the decision in Washington and program the cruise missiles.

That search proved frustrating. Officials said the C.I.A. did have some spies within Afghanistan. On at least three occasions between 1998 and 2000, the C.I.A. told the White House it had learned where Mr. bin Laden was and where he might soon be.

Each time, Mr. Clinton approved the strike. Each time, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, called the president to say that the information was not reliable enough to be used in an attack, a former senior Clinton administration official said.

...Officials said the White House pushed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop plans for a commando raid to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. But the chairman, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and other senior Pentagon officers told Mr. Clinton's top national security aides that they would need to know Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts 12 to 24 hours in advance.

Pentagon planners also considered a White House request to send a hunter team of commandos, small enough to avoid detection, the officer said. General Shelton discounted this option as naïve, the officer said.

White House officials were frustrated that the Pentagon could not produce plans that involved a modest number of troops. Military planners insisted that an attack on Al Qaeda required thousands of troops invading Afghanistan. "When you said this is what it would take, no one was interested," a senior officer said.

A former administration official recently defended the decision not to employ a commando strike. "It would have been an assault without the kind of war we've seen over the last three months to support it," the official said. "And it would have been very unlikely to succeed."

Clinton administration officials also began trying to choke off Al Qaeda's financial network. Shortly after the embassy bombings, the United States began threatening states and financial institutions with sanctions if they failed to cut off assistance to those who did business with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In 1999 and early 2000, some $255 million of Taliban-controlled assets was blocked in United States accounts, according to William F. Wechsler, a former White House official.

Mr. Wechsler said the search for Al Qaeda's assets was often stymied by poor cooperation from Middle Eastern and South Asian states.

The United States, too, he added, had problems. "Few intelligence officials who understand the nuances of the global banking system" were fluent in Arabic. While the C.I.A. had done a "reasonably good job" analyzing Al Qaeda, he wrote, it was "poor" at developing sources within Mr. bin Laden's financial network. The F.B.I., he argued, had similar shortcomings.

Senior officials were frustrated by the C.I.A.'s inability to find hard facts about Al Qaeda's financial operations.

Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had amassed considerable detail about the group's finances, and that information was used in the broad efforts to freeze its accounts after Sept. 11.

Sounds like Clinton was taking the terror threat pretty seriously. Whether he was doing enough or not I'll leave for others to decide, but he was most definitely not turning a blind eye to the problem. If Hannity read the article, surely he must have realized this.

3.) Here's another interesting quote from the article:

When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies.

Those "predecessors" would be Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan. So the policy of treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem did not originate with Clinton. That's significant because it has become a talking point for many in the GOP.

4.) In today's excerpt, Hannity says:

The Times story revealed that "in 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. But Clinton chose not to act."

But, when I read the article, here's what I found:

In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. And President Bill Clinton's own pollster[(I'm assuming this was Dick Morris)] told him the public would rally behind a war on terrorism. But none was declared.

That's a misquote.

5.) Hannity concludes today's excerpt with the question "Why were issues like gays in the military and global warming and promoting race-based set-asides more important to the Clinton-Gore administration that waging a war against terrorism?"

Hannity was most likely just finishing with a rhetorical flourish but, as luck would have it, the priorities of the Clinton-Gore administration are, in fact, listed in the Times article. So let's have a look and see what they were:

Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman who was budget director and later chief of staff during Mr. Clinton's first term, said senior aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Mr. Panetta said. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

While gays in the military could be construed as a human rights issue, I think Panetta was talking about countries' treatment of their citizenry. Global warming was definitely never mentioned. So terrorism was higher on the list.

6.) Hannity said:

The Times even quoted former Clinton senior advisor George Stephanopolous admitting that the Clinton-Gore administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk, despite the growing number of deaths of innocent Americans at the hands of al Qaeda operatives.

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" said Stephanopolous.

To which I ask: Why not?

Now doesn't that leave you with the impression that Stephanopolous was talking about terrorism in general? Here's the Stephanopolous quote again, only this time it's in context, as it appeared in the New York Times article:

Looking back, George Stephanopoulos, the president's adviser for policy and strategy in his first term, said he believed the 1993 [World Trade Center] attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

He added: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"

Two years later, however, terrorism moved to the forefront of the national agenda when a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

So Stephanopolous was actually talking about was one incident (albeit a significant one) and explaining the administration's reaction to it. It hardly justifies Hannity's line that Stephanopolous was "admitting that the Clinton-Gore administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk."

* * *

Hannity was very selective in his use of quotes in this article and, I feel, distorts the overall point its authors were trying to make.

Let's play the same game. I'll take today's excerpt and substitute in different quotes from the same article Hannity cited, change the names from Clinton to Bush officials and "prove" the opposite argument; that Bush turned a blind eye to terrorism before 9/11. Here's the re-worded excerpt:

On December 20, 2001, New York Times reporters Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth, and Don Van Natta, Jr., wrote a 7,237-word story titled "Planning for Terror But Failing to Act." The story detailed how the Bush-Cheney administration did little or nothing to crack down on terrorism despite warnings from the outgoing Clinton Administration.

The Times story revealed that "Mr. Bush's principals did not formally meet to discuss terrorism in late spring when intercepts from Afghanistan warned that Al Qaeda was planning to attack an American target in late June or perhaps over the July 4 holiday." The Times reported that "They did not meet even after intelligence analysts overheard conversations from a Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that Mr. bin Laden's agents might be plotting to kill Mr. Bush at the European summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, in late July."

The Times even quoted former Bush director of counterterrorism Richard Clarke admitting that the Bush-Cheney administration never gave much attention to protecting the American people from bin Laden and his ilk, despite the growing number of deaths of innocent Americans at the hands of al Qaeda operatives.

"Democracies don't prepare well for things that have never happened before", said Clarke.

To which I ask: Why not?

Why were issues like faith-based initiatives and privatizing Social Security more important to the Bush-Cheney administration that waging a war against terrorism?

Hopefully, this little exercise shows that cherry-picking an article for quotes that back your pre-ordained conclusion, to the exclusion of any contrary information, is intellectually dishonest. Today's excerpt is a complete sham.

So far, Hannity has not only failed to prove the idea that the Clinton Administration turned a blind eye to terrorism, his own source material has provided the information to prove the opposite. But Hannity has one more arrow in his quiver. He continues along the line of argument that Clinton's advisors have admitted to the Administration neglecting the terror issue. After mentioning Stephanopolous, Hannity continues on to Dick Morris. We'll take a look at "Exhibit 2" next time.