Some have inquired in the comments to a previous post if there was a ouija board operating in my house the other day. Hard to say. I didn’t see one with my own eyes. One time when I went into my kitchen to make coffee, however, I heard some of the following coming from the living room. I think it was a someone named Angleton (?) talking in a distant voice about security matters with my guest who apparently believes in ghosts:
JJA: It wasn’t illegal, first of all. How could it have been? The “information” wasn’t proprietary, and it wasn’t secret. The data came from newspapers and magazines, they just analyzed it, and apparently they analyzed it quite well. There was no legality that prevented them from pointing out the significance of the data to anyone – law enforcement or Army cook. It’s just nonsense. Some prissy lawyer in the JAG undoubtedly lectured these guys about spreading sensitive information, but at the end of the day, that wasn’t decisive. Their superiors blocked the analysis for a much more important reason: It didn’t fit with what the policymakers wanted to believe.
ML: I think I understand. You’re saying that Clinton, Berger, and the others didn’t want to have to act against terrorist groups inside the United States, so the system didn’t send them information…
JJA: That would have compelled them to take action. It’s very bad for your career to tell the policymakers things they don’t want to hear. But don’t personalize this: It wasn’t just Clinton, Berger, and the others around them; it went on for decades. Even Reagan basically didn’t want to do anything about terrorism. It goes back a long time.
ìEven Reagan basically didn’t want to do anything about terrorism. It goes back a long time.î
President Reagan and naive idiots like myself grossly underestimated the rage of the Muslim world. We assumed the problem would eventually go away. In the back of our minds, we thought that economic improvement in the region would resolve the troubles. Few of us ever read Bernard Lewis. I never heard of this great scholar until after 9/11. At the very most, I viewed Steve Emersonís PBS special regarding Islamic terrorism on American soil. I essentially forgot about the program a week later.
Iím convinced, though, that after the first bombing of the World trade Center—Ronald Reagan would have made terrorism the number one issue of his administration. Bill Clinton, on a gut level, could never do likewise. He was our ìpeace dividendî leader and his whole presidency revolved around ìItís the economy, Stupid.î President Clinton would have never been reelected had terrorism been taken seriously.
Roger:
The true significance of the ABLE DANGER program is that the politics of 9/11 has forced an unwarranted and dangerous reorganization of the Intelligence Community. Jamie Gorelick’s “wall” is responsible for 9/11 not a failure of intelligence. Had the wall been more porous then the Army could have turned over the information to the FBI. The plot would have been exposed and 9/11 prevented. Because the Commission saw its mission as part IC centralization and reorganization and part protect Commissioner Jamie Gorelick they purposely ignored pertinent evidence that would have led to changes in the legal framework for CT Intelligence sharing and not a new and redundant layer of bureaucracy.
Reagan allowed the Beirut attack to go unanswered – except for the withdrawal of the Marines. I see no reason to believe that he would have done significantly more than Clinton did. The evisceration of our intelligence services occured (for the most part) during the Reagan administration. Allowing the legislative branch to become a coequal client for intelligence was an error that we are still paying for.
Nixon did not adequately respond to the Munich attacks. Ford did not adequality defend Executive branch perogatives wrt the Church committee actions. Carter dropped to his knees in supplication to the Iranian thugs after the seizure of the embassy – which was a legitimate casus belli and should have been treated as such.
We met terrorist’s acts with weak talk until 9/11 and it is very hard to distinguish Clinton’s actions from those of his predescessors. If you want to find the culprit behind the rise in terrorism, look in the mirror. It’s up to ‘We the People’ to put a boot into the government’s backside and keep kicking ’til we’re satisfied with its actions. It’s nobody elses responsibility – just yours and mine.
ìI see no reason to believe that he would have done significantly more than Clinton did.î
You are forgetting a very important point: the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 was on American soil! No longer could we delude ourselves that our people were endangered only in foreign countries. Reagan would have woken up to reality.
ìAllowing the legislative branch to become a coequal client for intelligence was an error that we are still paying for.î
The Republican administrations during this time were paying a horrible price for Watergate. They could only pursue so many goals at any given time. It was regrettably decided to let the Left have a few victories. This is what occurs when you cannot set the national agenda. The liberal establishment decided (and still does) on what the American people were going to worry about—and ìthe exaggerated fearî of terrorism was not going to be on that list.
Is it possible that we are conflating the chronology?
I am not sure that Islamicism had yet really gained traction during the Reagan years. We were in fact allies to the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the Reagan era, correct? And wasn’t Islamicism in its nascent stages during the Russo-Afghanistan conflict? I also do not have any recollection that the Lebanon barracks bombing was tied to Islamicist terrorists–but perhaps I am wrong… I also think its worth mentioning that the Muslim population alone during the Reagan era was probably half what it is today–but I am guessing at that statistic.
I’ve been waiting for Ledeen to chime in. That was pretty good. He took a lot of heat for the Rome meeting (this site has an accurate–as far as I know–recap)–perhaps this is the beginning of vindication.
Their superiors blocked the analysis for a much more important reason: It didn’t fit with what the policymakers wanted to believe.
This is the crux, isn’t it? And it’s an across the board indictment. Now, what do we do about it?
Has anyone here read Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror by Peter Lance?
In it he claims evidence that TWA 800 was one very big dot leading to 911 that “the policymakers”, for whatever reason, did not want connected. I admit to being a Flt 800 conspiracist, but I know nothing about the validity of Lance’s claims.
Hepzi,
Wrt Beirut – here’s a link that lays responsibility with Hezbollah – and Iran. I think “allies” mischaracterizes our relationship with the Afghani mujahadeen. We certainly furnished them with some material help and training but they were surrogates rather than allies. A rather subtle distinction but I don’t think that we shared their broader aims. We just wanted to block the Sov’s.
Salfism/Wahabism predates the ’80′s by about 30 years if you’re looking for recent origins of current acts. That Qutb fellow kicked the bucket in ’66 after doing much of his “theoretical” work in the ’50′s. The Egyptians would tell you that Islamicism started really growing in the ’50′s.
With respect, I don’t agree with Roger’s (and “James Jesus Angleton’s”) view that Reagan “didn’t want to do anything about terrorism”. Granted, he responded to the Lebanon bombings by withdrawing US peacekeeping forces. (Somewhat similar to Clinton’s decision to withdraw from Somalia; I can see it being painted as “If they don’t want us in there peacekeeping, then let’s just leave them to sort out their own mess”. More below)
However, he responded decisively to both the Achille Lauro and the bombing in April 1986 of a Berlin disco targetted against US servicemen that killed 2 and wounded 200.
In the case of the Achille Lauro, the US Navy demonstrated its control over the Med by intercepting the plane flying terrorist murderers to Tunisia. Unfortunately (shades of today), the Italians insisted on jurisdiction, and there were generally effectively light (e.g. 30 year sentence to one, but let out on 12-day furlough from prison, resulting in flight) or no punishments for all concerned. You can see the roots of policies like detention in Guantanamo from incidents such as this where the US could legitimately feel let down by allies.
Operation El Dorado Canyon, while not achieving all objectives (e.g., no decapitation strike) demonstrated the weakness of Libya’s extensive Soviet air defenses (and their crews), and, again, the extent to which the Med was under control of the USN. It didn’t stop all Libyan support for terror (see Pan Am 103, and the UTA bombing), but Libya certainly stopped targetting the US military, and the tempo of Libyan terrorism slowed for a time.
Both of these, particularly the strikes on Libya were heavily criticized by the left and much of the international community.
Plus ca change.
I also agree with the posters above who point out that the ’93 WTC attack was on US soil; Reagan’s response would not have been legalistic.
Incidentally, I do agree that Reagan didn’t do enough against terror; as the first commenter said, he didn’t truly grasp the danger of non-state actors and extremist Islammist fanatics. In my view, both the retreat from Lebanon and Somalia were grave errors. On the other hand, Reagan was significantly more constrained than Clinton and Bush (43) with the Soviet Union to contend with.
Holmwood
The 1993 WTC attack should have been enough to start a full court press. Testimony at the trial of the Islamists responsible for that attack revealed that their intention was to knock one tower over into the other. The expected casualty count was 250,000. Islamic structural engineers partcipated in the planning, where to place charges, etc. so the high expected death count was more than a pipe dream.
You may have never heard this tid bit before because it never received any attention from the MSM and despite the attempt by foreign nationals to cause a staggering 1/4 million casualties in NYC it never got any traction in Clintonia either. For a point of reference – Jamie Gorelick set out to hogtie US intelligence AFTER the WTC I trial testimony was available to anybody interested enough to read a transcript.
Nobody with a voice in Clintonia raised a peep about Gorelick’s memo and it’s devastingly harmful implications for homeland security after the Embassy bombings, the Khobar Tower bombing, or Bin Laden’s declaration of war against the USA in 1998. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought the Al Qaeda threat serious enough for him to create the Able Danger unit even though he kept them restricted to using open source intelligence.
This lack of accountability is bullshit. The Able Danger screw-up is impeachable offense material. Bill Clinton has already dodged that bullet but if there are still leftovers in DOD, State or the CIA from the Clinton Administration, especially anybody with ties to Gorelick, they have to be exposed and run out of town now. The members of the 911 Commission have to be hauled before Congress to explain under oath and in public why Able Danger was left out of the Report.
I consider myself a pretty good weather vane of public mood and I sense that there are lots of really angry people out there who will not let this go. The MSM and the Good Old Boys can ignore Able Danger but it ain’t going away and the longer it’s ignored the greater will be the shitstorm from the inevitable eruption.
Peter
I consider myself a pretty good weather vane of public mood and I sense that there are lots of really angry people out there who will not let this go. The MSM and the Good Old Boys can ignore Able Danger but it ain’t going away and the longer it’s ignored the greater will be the shitstorm from the inevitable eruption.
Man, I pray you’re right.
Jamie Irons
Able Danger was set up as a test unit. The idea was to use off the self software to see if patterns in operations would pop up. We needed this kind of data analysis if we were going to do ops in urban areas. Since police departments did the same thing(broken windows)it was felt there would be no problem. The work of the AD team led to new ways in which the MI, and CIA handles infomation, which has saved many, many, lives on the battlefield today. Something that we should all remember.
Roger:
As a collective nation we slept and ignored the cancer growing in the Middle East. Reagan did ignore it but at least he had the excuse of ending Soviet rule in the world as a partial excuse. Bush I responded well to the Kuwait invasion but bungled when he made coalition unity more important then removing Saddam. And when I say that I need to confess,even though I was a Democrat at the time, I defended the post Kuwait plan of the President on every point. Even the current prez was talking about a less aggressive foreign policy before 9-11. The difference is that President Bush didn’t try to trot out the same old negotiation and police tactic after 9-11.
If Blair had begun his correct policy of kicking out the radical imams before 7-7 how far would he have got? He would have been booted out of 10 Downing street and branded as a racist. With 9-11 a distant memory for many Americans some of us are slipping back into denial and wishful thinking. We want the government to protect us but we do not want anything in our life to be disturbed. As terrible as every soldiers death is we are slipping back to the insane thought that this battle can be fought with no casualties. Briteweiser was on FOX the other day and she said something along the lines of “I know we are losing the war because soldiers are dying” That is not a direct qoute but it is close and the fact that she trotted out that lame logic and was not asked for the victorius war that did not include death is beyond me. There are plenty of valid reasons to attack Bush’s war plans but asking for no fault war is not one of them.
As much as Clinton is trying to say otherwise he did not go after Al Queda in a serious fashion because he was afraid it would upset the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a fools errand because he was depending on Arafat as a serious partner for peace.
“we still believe there is a non-confrontational way forward if Iran wants to take it”- A statement from the British Foreign Office yesterday. guess what, they don’t want to take it! He is not talking about war. He is refusing to be confrontational in the negotiating process by attempting to put U.N sanctions on Iran. Why? because he knows China will veto it. And if they do that then the negotiators will be out of a job for a while. So they do anything to continue them and because Iran knows this they have no incentive to give up their arms program. Parts of the west are so in love with negotiations that they do not care if they produce any results. As long as they talk and do nothing they can pretend that Iran doesn’t want to stop developing nukes and has no intention of stopping. The europeans are fighting the U.S. effort to bring it to the U.N. harder then they are in trying to get Iran to back down. Because they know that when it goes to the U.N. their well meaning but futile efforts will be exposed. So we do this pretend dance that action is being taken when nothing is being done. And because that feels better then the hard truth many in the west swallow it whole. We still have our heads in the sand and we won’t do anything till our rear ends are blown off.
Kevin Peters
One other thing. I fear Jerry has understated the damage done to the IC as a whole. We have not begun to see the butcher’s bill for this one yet.