Bill Clinton fought terrorism, to the extent he fought it at all, as a crime problem. He promised to prosecute the perpetrators when they were caught. Well, the bombing of the USS Cole occurred on his watch and his methods were used. The result ? Not very satisfactory.
When the Khobar Towers barracks was blown up by al Qeada in Saudi Arabia, President Clinton promised FBI Director Louis Freeh that he would ask the Saudis to allow FBI agents to witness interrogation of suspects. He didn’t make an effort. Freeh finally got the former President Bush, who had lost the 1992 election to Clinton, for help and he interceded with the Saudis.
John Kerry has said he wants to go back to the criminal model of anti-terrorism action. Presumably, Obama, who wants to meet with every anti-American dictator he can find, has the same opinion. It doesn’t work as even the Washington Post acknowledges.
Tags: Clinton, Louis Freeh, Obama, terrorism, USS Cole, Yemen
Ah, but Dr. K., it OUGHT to work. After all, the terrorists are just like us. In fact, we are just like them.
And feelings are much more important than mere facts.
On second thought, why is it that the Left doesn’t say much about terrorists who saw off the heads of abductees and pass out the videotapes of the event, but march in protests about waterboarding?
Interesting set of blinders.
I remember how the Left (some of them still in Congress) use to rail about how uncultured and bellicose Reagan was—but how the Soviet Premiers were much better educated, and cultural. After all, they liked jazz! And our actions *made* the Soviets do the things they did. And we were no better.
The song remains the same.
Andropov was said to like scotch, as if that made him human. I have since read that the stories were all KGB disinformation.
[…] the Clinton/Obama method does not work Steve Hammons wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptJohn Kerry has said he wants to go […]
And the Russians love their children, too, Dr. K.! They were just like us.
Just ask the literally millions of people lost in the purges.
Probably that is Western disinformation, and besides, look what we did to the Indians.
Sigh.
The poor Indians were about where the Neanderthals were 10,000 years earlier in Europe. Or the Ainu in Japan. Notice the Japanese have not said much about Indians that I have seen. I have read that Aurochs were still found in forests in Poland until World War I. Time does not stand still.
[…] Steve Hammons wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptJohn Kerry has said he wants to go back to the criminal model of anti-terrorism action. Presumably, Obama, who wants to meet with every anti-American dictator he can find, has the same opinion. It doesn’t work as even the Washington … […]
Dr. K., I was just cracking wise at how the academic Left thinks…
Yes; good thing the Bush administration took over the efforts to make sure the Yemeni gov’t brought the Cole bombers to justice.
“Jamal al-Badawi, a Yemeni who helped organize the plot to bomb the Cole as it refueled in this Yemeni port on Oct. 12, 2000, has broken out of prison twice. He was recaptured both times, but then secretly released by the government last fall. Yemeni authorities jailed him again after receiving complaints from Washington. But U.S. officials have so little faith that he’s still in his cell that they have demanded the right to perform random inspections.
Two suspects, described as the key organizers, were captured outside Yemen and are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Many details of their alleged involvement remain classified. It is unclear when — or if — they will be tried by the military.
The collapse of the Cole investigation offers a revealing case study of the U.S. government’s failure to bring al-Qaeda operatives and their leaders to justice for some of the most devastating attacks on American targets over the past decade.
A week after the Cole bombing, President Bill Clinton vowed to hunt down the plotters and promised, “Justice will prevail.” In March 2002, President Bush said his administration was cooperating with Yemen to prevent it from becoming “a haven for terrorists.” He added: “Every terrorist must be made to live as an international fugitive with no place to settle or organize, no place to hide, no governments to hide behind and not even a safe place to sleep.”
Since then, Yemen has refused to extradite Badawi and an accomplice to the United States, where they have been indicted on murder charges. Other Cole conspirators have been freed after short prison terms. At least two went on to commit suicide attacks in Iraq.
“After we worked day and night to bring justice to the victims and prove that these Qaeda operatives were responsible, we’re back to square one,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and a lead investigator into the bombing. “Do they have laws over there or not? It’s really frustrating what’s happening.”
To this day, al-Qaeda trumpets the attack on the Cole as one of its greatest military victories. It remains an improbable story: how two suicide bombers smiled and waved to unsuspecting U.S. sailors in Aden’s harbor as they pulled their tiny fishing boat alongside the $1 billion destroyer and blew a gaping hole in its side.
Despite the initial promises of accountability, only limited public inquiries took place in Washington, unlike the extensive investigations that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Basic questions remain about which individuals and countries played a role in the assault on the Cole.
Some officials acknowledged that pursuing the Cole investigation became less of a political priority with the passage of time. A new administration took power three months after the bombing. Then came Sept. 11.
“During the first part of the Bush administration, no one was willing to take ownership of this,” said Roger W. Cressey, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations who helped oversee the White House’s response to the Cole attack. “It didn’t happen on their watch. It was the forgotten attack.”
My son is welcome to his own opinions (and they rarely coincide with mine) but the point was that the law enforcement method doesn’t work, as illustrated in that article. The Yemeni government is infiltrated with jihadis. The story of the FBI interrogation of the mastermind is interesting, though. An Arabic speaking agent who was a scholar on Islam convinced the terrorist leader that his actions were a violation of Islam and he confessed. Louis Freeh’s book shows how little the Clinton Administration cared about pursuing the terrorists. Note the comment my son is so proud of comes from a former Clinton aide. That same aide mght have prevented the Cole attack if they had pursued the perps of the other attacks that had been ignored by them. They could even have killed OBL in Afghanistan but the White House lawyers got the willies about collateral damage.