http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10351/pub_detail.asp
I must confess that until 9/11 the terrorists that most preoccupied me were the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Fatah and the associated groups with a history of hijacking airlines and wanton murders which targeted institutions, cafes, markets, buses, disabled cruise passengers schools and civilians in Israel. There surely were warnings of a sinister and larger affiliation. However, the words Al Qaeda, jihad, sharia and their association with doctrinal Islam rather than radical politics were unknown to me. I had read everything I could find in support of Israel, but none of the authors mentioned or even hinted at the faith driven nature of the unrelenting Arab/Moslem hatred of Jews and all infidels.
I decided to school myself more thoroughly in the history, the locus, the aims, the nature, and the real intent of “the fringe” not just towards Israel and Jews but also toward all “infidels” in the West. I was appalled and frightened by our lack of reactions to events which might have thwarted the tragedy of 9/11.
Too often terrorists have been excused on the basis of “root causes” and presented as a victimized group with a legitimate grudge against the West. Israel’s leaders, in particular, with rare exceptions, failed to recognize the international Jihad movement toward a caliphate in the Middle East without an inch of room for Israel.
Why were the previous threats and incidents of jihad ignored?
The signs were there during the Clinton administration.
In the magazine Vanity Fair (August 2002) Mansoor Ijaz an American of Pakistani origin and former U.S. ambassador to Sudan Timothy Karney disclosed that the government of Sudan had offered to turn intelligence on Osama bin Laden to the Clinton administration in 1996 which included passport numbers, accounts and communications on terrorists taken to Sudan by Bin Laden. Clinton and Madeleine Albright turned it down.
After an initial denial, Clinton admitted and then again denied this lapse in judgment, however, in 2003 his former National Security Adviser Samuel “stocking stuffer” Berger admitted it and blamed the FBI.
And that, by the way, was after the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by operatives of al Qaeda. The Clinton administration treated it as a law enforcement matter, but fortunately the prosecution was successfully handled by Judge Michael Mukasey and Andrew McCarthy who wrote:
“In 1993, the United States Department of Justice was not merely the point of America’s counterterrorist spear. It was the spear. Period. The enemy was at war. Jihadists made that exquisitely clear, in word as well as deed. Our response was to call not the Marines, but the prosecutors.’ (Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad by Andrew McCarthy)
On November 13, 1995, after a bomb exploded in front of an American military training center in Riyadh, killing five Americans Saudi authorities arrested four Saudi nationals and convicted and beheaded them but U.S. officials were denied permission to investigate. Again, on June 25, 1996, a truck loaded with 5,000 pounds of explosives blew up outside of an apartment complex (Khobar Towers) in Dharan, Saudi Arabia which housed U.S. military personnel, killing nineteen and wounding several hundred American personnel. Once again, the Saudis impeded any U.S. investigation.
Where was Bill Clinton?
Then there were the near simultaneous bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998. Those attacks killed hundreds of personnel and wounded thousands. A former sergeant, Ali A. Mohamed, who served in one of the Army’s most sensitive units at Fort Bragg, N.C., in the 1980s was implicated in that bombing. Apparently the FBI knew about Ali after the first World Trade Center bombing.
Where was Bill Clinton?
On August 21st, he bombed a “paramilitary training camp” in Afghanistan and declared it a beginning salvo in the war on terrorism, and he bombed a pharmaceutical company in Sudan and killed and destroyed a cell of terrorist aspirins in Khartoum.
By the time of the Al Qaeda bombing of the S.S. Cole in October 2000, President Clinton has one foot out the door of the white House.
His successor President Bush in his first magisterial address to the nation, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 took pains to reassure us that Al Qaeda was a fringe group that hijacked a noble religion of peace. They were, we were told again and again, “enemies of peace” and we were assured that they would be brought to justice at a “time and place of our choosing.”
President Bush kept repeating the silly mantra that these terrorists were enemies of freedom. His reassurances grated, particularly, when I learned that his administration engaged the Saudis in meetings with high officials on September 19 and 20 of 2001, and this was followed by talks in Riyadh conducted by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld In October and with Vice President Dick Cheney later that year. What is so risible is the fact that these chummy meetings – ostensibly to gain support in combating terror- were conducted with the Kings of a repressive and brutal Islamic regime that enabled and trained, and funded the 9/11 terror.
