9/11 was planned long before Bush ever took office and was in motion long before he became President. What you must have meant is if Clinton had taken the Middle East seriously.
Or are you claiming the 9/11 terrorists did not start planning until Bush was elected and did not start assembling training and intel gathering till he was in office?
Ohh and be specific what policy or policies did Bush implement between Jan 2001 and September 11 2001 that caused the attack?
Ah the old blame it on clinton routine.......
Following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the new president sent stringent anti-terrorism legislation to Congress as part of his first crime bill, including new deportation powers and a federal death penalty for terrorists. The passage of portions of that legislation many months later was the last time he would enjoy real cooperation against terrorism from congressional conservatives. When he sought to expand those protections in 1995 after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, he was frustrated by a coalition of civil libertarians and anti-government conservatives, who argued that his overreaction posed a threat to constitutional rights.
No anti-terrorism legislation reached Clintons desk until more than a year later. Thanks to an increasingly obstreperous Republican majority on both sides of the Capitol, law enforcement officials were denied new authority for roving wiretaps and new powers to monitor money laundering that Clinton had requested. All that would have to wait until after Sept. 11.
Back then, Sullivan was among those who accused Clinton of having shredded civil liberties in the war on terrorism, a concern that no longer seems to disturb him. His memory of the actual legislation is pretty dim, anyway. He wrongly claims that the administrations 1996 bill focused on domestic terrorism rather than dealing with the real threat from al-Qaida. Among that bills most controversial provisions were new powers to turn away suspect immigrants, swifter deportation procedures and a new deportation court that can view secret evidence.
Recalcitrant Republicans, led by then-Senator John Ashcroft, later defeated another potentially crucial White House initiative. Along with computer-industry lobbyists, they rejected proposals to tighten controls on encryption software and to ensure that law enforcement officials could crack the kind of coded messages found on the laptop owned by Ramzi Yusef, the man who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Intelligence experts believe that encrypted computer links were probably used by the Sept. 11 plotters and their masters in al-Qaida. Some Democrats, no doubt swayed like their GOP colleagues by the generosity of industry lobbyists, joined the Republicans to deny this important tool to law enforcement.
The Clinton administrations attempts to improve airport security were similarly obstructed in Congress. The Gore commission urged U.S. air carriers to screen all passengers with computerized profiling systems, to upgrade poorly trained private security personnel and to install high-tech baggage-screening equipment. But action on key measures was stalled by lawmakers at the behest of airline lobbyists, and ultimately by the sluggish bureaucracy at the Federal Aviation Administration. Key senators on the Senate Aviation Subcommittee shot down mandated changes recommended by the White House and instead urged further study. (Eight of the nine Republicans on the subcommittee had received contributions from the major airlines.)
While Clinton and Gore certainly share responsibility for failing to push Congress and their own bureaucrats harder, the aviation industry could rely on conservative ideologues and PAC contributions to stymie burdensome reforms.
Among those attacking the Gore Commission recommendations, incidentally, was the New Republic, which noted that two billion dollars a year to guard against terrorism and sabotage would amount to a cost per life saved of well over $300 million. The cost of such libertarian dogma must now be measured in thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even before the Gore Commission report, the Clinton administration had moved to place bomb-detection equipment in major airports and to upgrade background checks on airport personnel. Unfortunately, as Samuel Skinner, former transportation secretary in the first Bush administration, told an interviewer in 1996: [T]he airlines decided it was not in their short-term best interest to pay for these services from their own pocket, so they made a concerted effort to make sure that [they] didnt have to pay for this and didnt have to charge passengers for it. Also unfortunately, congressional Republicans had repealed a tax on airline tickets that would have financed high-tech improvements in baggage screening and passenger security.
If corporate lobbyists pursued their own narrow interests at the expense of national security, so did Clintons adversaries on Capitol Hill.
Among the most egregious was Senator Phil Gramm, who blocked an administration bill to close loopholes that let terrorist groups launder money through offshore banks. The Texas Republican denounced that legislation, now belatedly endorsed by the Bush White House as necessary to dismantle al-Qaida, as totalitarian.
Dont blame Clinton - Salon.com
