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The dumbest commission ever
Over the last few weeks we have had to endure
the unfortunate and absurd machinations of the blatantly partisan
9/11 commission, whose members seem to have either forgotten
or disregarded the obvious: The attacks were planned and set
in motion during the eight years of the Clinton administration,
not the eight months of the Bush administration.
Yet lead Democrat on the commission and shameless
vice presidential hopeful Richard Ben-Veniste has treated a
recently declassified Aug. 6, 2001, memo entitled, "Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," as though it were
a startling new revelation no one had ever considered. In fact,
Osama bin Laden's plans to strike the United States and kill
as many Americans as possible were known years before, in the
early 1990s, when he issued his famous fatwa against the United
States for its role in the Gulf War and the stationing of U.S.
troops in Saudi Arabia.
And then throughout the years of the Clinton
administration, there were known terrorist plots to strike the
United States (one terrorist was even caught with plastic explosives).
The 9/11 commission has heard the testimony of Clinton's National
Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, that there had been several
al-Qaida plots to carry out domestic attacks during the millennial
celebrations of 2000. But even more obvious, there were actual
al-Qaida attacks on U.S. targets in the years leading up to
9/11: car-bombs at the U.S Embassy in Kenya, a boat-torpedo
that hit the USS Cole in Yemen, and, oh yeah, the World Trade
Center in New York was bombed by Islamic terrorists in 1993.
Still, despite these historical facts, could
9/11 have been prevented? Could the Clinton administration have
known what was coming? Could the Bush administration have taken
steps to foil a plot that had been years in the making? The
answer is no.
There is perhaps a too-simple reason for this:
Nothing like the attacks of 9/11 had ever happened in the history
of the world. No one could have anticipated it; no one could
have stopped it. Just as was the case in the attacks on Pearl
Harbor, the national will to actually do something about al-Qaida
did not exist until after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The members of the 9/11 commission should
understand this. In fact, they probably do, which makes their
unabashed partisanship all the more insulting, wasteful and
divisive at a time when we ought to be focusing on current terrorist
threats and the job of rebuilding Iraq. Calling the commission
was a stupid idea to begin with, and the sooner these ridiculous
proceedings conclude, the better it will be for our country.
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