9/11 Hypocrisy.(Scan)

The public postmortem conducted by the national 9/11 commission has been full of ironic twists. Take the commission's finding that U.S. intelligence assets had Osama bin Laden in their sights on at least three separate occasions during the Clinton Presidency (not to mention an offer from the Sudan to snatch the terror mastermind) but were prevented from acting by higher-ups.

In 1999, U.S. teams were actually ordered to hold their fire because administration officials worried that an Arab dignitary on a hunting trip in the vicinity of bin Laden might be harmed. According to 9/11 Commission staff, CIA officials still call it the "lost opportunity to kill bin Laden before 9/11."

It's odd that the welfare of someone vacationing with terrorists was enough to dissuade the Clintonites from acting. And it's especially odd that Richard Clarke--who now parades himself as a spurned prophet and sanctimoniously blames his successors for not acting more forcefully against bin Laden--was at the very center of that decision. For it was Clarke himself who convinced his bosses to scrub the 1999 attack by warning about the proximity of Arab officials to bin Laden.

Perhaps mindful of his role in squandering that opportunity, Clarke later recommended, after the attack on the USS Cole, that President Clinton "bomb all of the Taliban and al-Qaeda infrastructure." Of course, that didn't happen--until Bill Clinton was out of office. Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained to the commission that "to bomb at random or use military force would have made our lives more difficult inside the Islamic world." Of course, the decision not to bomb made quite an impact inside our own world--not to mention a hole in the Manhattan skyline.

Referring to the refusal to attack bin Laden at his hunting lodge, 9/11 corn missioner Bob Kerrey says, "We had a round in our chamber and we didn't use it." Other commissioners joined Kerrey in questioning why no American officials took the kind of action that might have prevented the September 11 attacks.

Of course, that sounds a lot like preemption--a dirty word in some quarters these days. If preemption would have been appropriate to forestall bin Laden's September 11 massacres, it was also appropriate to prevent Saddam Hussein from trying to top bin Laden somewhere down the road.

"The ...