July 23, 2004

The Boldness of the President

[...]
Well, look now to what the 9/11 report has to say about the man to whom President Clinton, under attack by an independent counsel,delegated so much in respect of national security, Samuel “Sandy” Berger. The report cites a 1998 meeting between Mr. Berger and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, at which Mr. Tenet presented a plan to capture Osama bin Laden.
[In actual fact, the NYSun gives Clinton too much of a pass because he was "under attack by an independent counsel;" truth was, from the minute he took office, Clinton couldn't be bothered with meeting with the CIA chief or hear about threats to our national security.--Jen]
   
 “In his meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with Bin Ladin if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence against Bin Ladin was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted,” the report says, citing a May 1, 1998, Central Intelligence Agency memo summarizing the weekly meeting between Messrs. Berger and Tenet.
[This, of course, is typical of the Clinton Administration's approach to the AQ terrorism problem and the barrier of the Gorelick "wall" where terrorism was to be treated as a legal matter to be tried in a US court of law and not acts of war against the nation attacked.--J.T.]

 In June of 1999, another plan for action against Mr. bin Laden was on the table. The potential target was a Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan known as Tarnak Farms. The commission report released yesterday cites Mr. Berger’s “handwritten notes on the meeting paper” referring to “the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties.”According to the Berger notes, “if he responds, we’re blamed.”
[Blamed for what? Taking out 65 killers and enemies? What about the hundreds of innocents killed in AQ's first attack on the WTC in '93, the attack on the USS Cole and those killed and wounded in the African embassy bombings?]
    
On December 4, 1999, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Mr. Berger a memo suggesting a strike in the last week of 1999 against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Reports the commission: “In the margin next to Clarke’s suggestion to attack Al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote, ‘no.’ ”
[This is what Bergler was out to destroy when he stuffed classified, pass-word restricted docs into his socks and pants at the National Archives.]
    
In August of 2000, Mr. Berger was presented with another possible plan for attacking Mr. bin Laden.This time, the plan would be based on aerial surveillance from a “Predator” drone. Reports the commission: “In the memo’s margin,Berger wrote that before considering action, ‘I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place.’ ”

In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times — Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.
    
It really doesn’t matter now what was in the documents from the National Archives that Mr. Berger says he inadvertently misplaced. The evidence in the commission’s report yesterday is more than enough to embarrass him thoroughly.He is a hardworking, warm man with a wonderful family,
[No doubt, but why bring that up here and now?--Jen]
but his background as a trade lawyer and his dovish, legalistic and political instincts made him, in retrospect, the tragically wrong man to be making national security decisions for America in wartime.
[What the NYSun fails to point out is that Ken Starr or not, why wasn't President Clinton the one who made these decisions? Or was he?--J.T.]
That Senator Kerry had Mr. Berger as a campaign foreign policy adviser even before the archives scandal is enough to raise doubts about the senator’s judgment.
[Well, DUH but it bears saying in print!]

Neither Mr.Berger nor any other American is to blame for the deaths of Americans on September 11, 2001. The moral fault lies only with the terrorists, not with the victims.With the war still on,one can’t help but to ponder who might best defend the country going forward, and how.
   
 The commission’s report contains plenty of other valuable information. Many of the recommendations — to move operations functions to the Department of Defense from the CIA, to speed the transition between administrations so that key defense positions are not left vacant, to stress “widespread political participation”in the Arab and Muslim world,to declassify the intelligence budget, to provide a written national security transition handover memo when administrations change — make sense.
[Note that these recommendations were based on what happened to Team Bush during the Florida Recount mess; Bill Clinton refused to let the Bush people have access to their transition offices and the process of getting the Bush Administration in place and staffing all key positions was put off by months.]

Other aspects of the report, including the absence of serious recommendations for dealing with the terrorist threats from Syria or Iran, are harder to understand. The report is being taken seriously for its political ramifications for the Bush administration and for its policy recommendations. But perhaps its greatest value is
as a history — more, a sad epitaph — of the Clinton-Berger administration.
    
Why was it Mr. Berger rather than President Clinton himself making all these judgment calls? As the report puts it, these decisions “were made by the Clinton administration under extremely difficult domestic political circumstances.Opponents were seeking the president’s impeachment.”
[This doesn't pass the smell test for me as an excuse! There are men out there now who keep trying to impeach President Bush and he is under attack daily from Dimocrat Senators and Congresspersons and from the Leftist media, but it doesn't impair his ability to function as a wartime president!--Jen]

    One can blame the special prosecutor law or Mr. Clinton for agreeing to name a special prosecutor, or one can blame the underlying reckless behavior by Mr. Clinton that got him into the “difficult domestic political circumstances.” Or one can blame the Republican Congress. No matter what one’s view of the underlying merits, it is hard to deny that one of the costs to the country was a preoccupied president.
[I maintain that Clinton was just preoccupied. Period. This is evident in his recent memoirs and in the non-accomplishments of his 8 years in office.
The man just plain couldn't focus.]
There’s no guarantee that, in the absence of the scandal and the prosecutor, Mr. Clinton would have acted against Mr. bin Laden. But the chances would have been at least somewhat increased, and it would have been Mr. Clinton rather than Mr. Berger making the call.
[I'm not so very sure that from the way I understand the Clintoon Administration "worked," Bubba was even "bothered" with making these "unimportant" decisions.
Check out Monsoor Ijaz's story about how his negotiations as a "Clinton ambassador" with the Sudanese government to get OBL in American custody were thwarted by not being able to get access to Clinton.
And then there's the officer who carried the football and who wrote Dereliction of Duty about Clinton being "too busy" with golf tournaments to give the orders for a strike on Osama if Berger, Clarke, Lake and others were successful in recommending one.]

The boldness of the president, in Justice Scalia’s phrase,had been lost,and the man left in charge, Mr. Berger, was not up to it. When we think of the repairs that need to be made in the coming months, it is of this: The need to carry on our national politics with an eye to protecting the boldness of our leaders and particularly in a time of war. It is something to think about amid one of the bitterest, most adhominem political seasons in the history of the Republic.

So Berger didn't have the guts to back a strike on Bin Laden or to recommend that we get him from the Sudanese, but he did have the nerve to break all kinds of laws and to jeopardize our national security by stealing and destroying classified documents from the National Archives?
IMHO, Bergler's burglary was nothing less than a coverup for Clinton, to destroy notes and reports which showed that Clinton and his Administration knew OBL was a real threat to the American homeland, but they did nothing with that knowledge.
IOW, Clinton knew and people died.
The Left keeps harping on the timing of the news that Bergler was being investigated for these crimes, as if that really mattered.
When would have been a good time for the news to break that once again, a member of the "most ethical administration in history" had committed an unethical act?
The news broke this week just 3 days before the report of the 9/11 Commission went on sale to the American public.
This report lets Clinton, Richard Clarke and Bergler off the hook for any culpability for the 9/11 attacks and that's what matters to these people.
I be willing to bet that the Clinton/Bergler/Clarke people leaked the news this week to Lanny Davis's favorite reporter for leaks because they were at last "in the clear."
As the NYSun notes, the 9/11 attacks were the "sad epitaph" for the corrupt Clinton people; they are a group of politicos who will take responsibility for nothing and even here, in this news story exposing yet more of their sleaziness, they can get their enablers in the media to blame someone else for their mistakes like Ken Starr.
I refuse to believe that Clinton couldn't deal with the real threat to this country that Al Queda presented because he was thinking of new ways to lie about his affair with Monica!
The man was unsuited for the Oval Office and should never have been there!
How we got through the 8 years of his "rule" I will never know, except that God really must bless America.
What we should wonder at is not that the 9/11 attacks happened and 3,000 civilians were killed in peacetime but that we weren't hit by far worse attacks killing many thousands, if not millions.
Thank you, Lord, for watching over us.
And America, please don't elect another power-hungry idiot to be Commander-in-Chief like John Kerry.