The 2nd night of The Path to 9/11 focused on the end of Bill Clinton’s term, the USS Cole bombing, Bush’s election and weak US anti-terror policy just before, during and after 9/11. Since I talked about Clinton’s blame in my post about the first night, I’ll start this post with the failures of the Bush Administration. Although I could go on and on about all the failures during Clinton’s term, given he had plenty of time to do more. Clinton had years, Bush had months.

The Bush Administration?s Blame

President Bush did not have a serious anger towards Islamic radicals before being elected. And after being elected he did nothing when first entering office to take out Osama bin Laden. Although he became President just months after the USS Cole attack. He did start stepping up to the plate days before 9/11/2001, but unfortunately that was too late. Just look at this 2000 Presidential debate transcript from a debate that took place just days after the USS Cole bombing. Neither candidate mentions going after sponsors of terrorism. I was not fully aware of the depth of the enemy then, but even I and many people I knew wanted to see more done to take down the sponsors of the USS Cole attack. We knew it was not just a few guys with a boat and explosives. But notice, a debate just after the USS Cole attack left me wondering who really cared about going after the enemy at his source. Seems to me nobody wanted to ruffle and Muslim feathers.

As a candidate, Bush knew nothing about the intelligence Gore probably had access to. And Gore offered no indication that he planed to do anything. It was like the issue of terrorism really did not matter as much as debating about whatever they practiced for. The moderator and audience did not seem to have terrorism related questions either. Americans bear some blame too, for obviously not taking the USS Cole bombing (and others) more seriously. I did and could not find that our government was going to do much of anything about hitting terrorists in their own back yard.

After 9/11 Bush really did start taking some of the fight directly to the enemy. I don’t think Gore would have performed as well as Bush after 9/11. It’s a shame it took so much for America to finally wake up.

Red Tape and Racial Profiling

Of course the 2nd night of the show featured more of the political red tape. It also covered how people feared “racial profiling” and offending people from some Muslim nations. Amazingly, even now after 9/11 there are still cries against considering the fact our enemy endorses a certain brand of faith, not to mention having ties to certain parts of the world. While it is true, that sometimes people not fitting the expected “profile” help the enemy too, we should leverage all the knowledge at our disposal. The crying over “racial profiling” inhibits efforts to possibly identify a terrorists. So what if 5 Muslims in a row are stopped for extra checks at the airport. If the screeners feel they need to check 5 or 20 Muslims in a row, or 5 or 20 people in a row of whatever possible grouping, so what. They should be able to use the information known about prior attacks when considering who might be a terrorist.

CAPPS

Al Gore, although he’s a real nutcase now, does get credit for his work with things like the CAPPS system and other airline defense efforts. If those identified by CAPPS were more thoroughly checked, 9/11 could have been averted. Of course there was not much “extra” checking that could have been done before 9/11, but some opportunities to try and do even a little more were missed.

Intelligence is Never Perfect

One thing that caught my attention, is that during the Clinton Administration information from intelligence sources was never “perfect”. For example, they really did not know anything about the USS Cole attack prior to it happening. And often information they received, they never felt it was not reliable “enough”. This showed a marked difference between the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Clinton and his Administration never wanted to move on an enemy unless they had what they felt was “perfect” intelligence, which you usually never get. Bush on the other hand, moved on Iraq with the information available. Now everyone complains, because that intelligence might not have been as “perfect” as everyone hoped, but it’s entirely possible that WMDs were moved and it’s good Bush decided to make that additional effort to take the fight to our enemies.

There was some information about the 9/11 attacks prior their occurrence. The Bush Administration failed to act on that information well. They could have sent alerts to the airlines and the media, but failed to do so. Just the publicity of us knowing their plans might have caused the enemy to scrap the “planes operation”. With that, the Bush Administration acted just like Clinton’s.

Conclusion

We are in times where we won’t get “perfect” information or a “perfect shot”. But we must still be determined to engage the enemy and assume the associated risks, else again suffer the fate of doing nothing at all.

5 years, no new attacks on US soil. We need to close that southern border, but our guys are doing something right. Still a lot more to be done.