Unlike Clinton, Bush is meeting the threat of terrorism

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 15, 2002 | by Ralph R. Reiland

Like three blind mice, House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Democratic political strategist James Carville are running around saying they want their eyes opened as to what's going on in this country about terrorism.

Gephardt wants an investigation into "what the White House knew about the events leading up to 9/11, when they knew it and, most importantly, what was done about it." Hillary, who watched submissively from the White House as Islamists attacked America in 1993, 1996,1998 and 2000, suggests that President George W. Bush is asleep at the switch. Carville, echoing Gephardt, asks: "What did the president know, when did he know it and what did he do about it?"

Let's start with the crimes and then "what did he do about it."

The two attacks on the World Trade Center came early in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, as sort of Islamic welcome wagons. With Bill Clinton, it was only 37 days after his first inauguration when the 12:18 p.m. explosion rocked the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, a blast that blew a crater five stories deep under Tower One. The 1,500-pound fertilizer-based bomb was intended to topple the taller tower of the World Trade Center into its twin tower, killing upward of 40,000 people while simultaneously releasing a cloud of cyanide gas into the sky over Manhattan. Instead, the tower managed to stand and the heat of the explosion incinerated the gas.

Displacing some 6,800 tons of material, the blast killed six people, injured more than 1,000, forced the evacuation of 50,000 and produced $600 million in property damage. It was, at the time, the largest crime scene in New York Police Department history and the most significant act of international terrorism ever committed on U.S. soil.

Similarly, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists again struck at the World Trade Center, this time when Bush was less than eight months into his presidency. FBI Director Robert Mueller had been in office one week.

In both cases, in 1993 and prior to Sept. 11, mistakes were made by U.S. intelligence. Many signals were missed and a lot of dots, as they're now saying at the FBI and CIA, were left unconnected. No one disputes this.

What's different about the two World Trade Center attacks are the ways Clinton and Bush reacted. Clinton backed off, seeing the attack as an incident that could best be handled in court, like a McDonald's coffee burn. Bush hit back, seeing a war.

Political adviser Dick Morris provides an insider's view of how Clinton reacted to the massive 1993 explosion--an attack, as noted by Kevin Duffy, the U.S. District Court judge who presided over the first World Trade Center-bombing trial, that caused "more hospital casualties than any other event in domestic American history other than the Civil War."

Explains Morris: "Clinton never visited the site. Nothing so illustrates the low priority of terrorism in Clinton's first term than the short shrift he gave the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Several days after the explosion, while speaking in New Jersey, he actually discouraged Americans from `overreacting.'"

Clinton, not "overreacting," downgraded the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism, ordered that the CIA not recruit spies who weren't certified good guys and even argued against offering a reward in the World Trade Center bombing case, maintaining that it was an act of domestic terrorism and, therefore, not eligible for the International Terrorist Information Reward program.

The strategy, with the Clinton Justice Department maintaining that the bombing had no state sponsorship, was to prosecute the individual perpetrators of this terrorism. On March 4, 1994, a jury found Mohammad Salameh, Ahmad Ajaj, Mahmud Abuhalima and Nidel Ayyad guilty--which did nothing, of course, to prevent or even discourage another set of Mohammads and Mahmuds from initiating another attack.

Bush, in contrast, recently told graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point that the only strategy for an American victory against terrorism is to strike first: "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."

And if we're to win, it's offense that's required, he explained, not defense. "The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is action. And this nation will act."

Not everyone, of course, is happy that the United States has decided to stop being a punching bag. Iran's president says Bush is being too "bellicose," North Korea says he has a bad case of "moral leprosy" and Iraq is upset by his "sheer aggression."

And, best of all, Madeleine Albright, Clinton's former secretary of state, says Bush's behavior is causing the "international community" to think that the United States is doing things "in an utterly disorderly way."

Good. It's about time they start worrying about what we're going to do.

RALPH R. REILAND IS THE B. KENNETH SIMON PROFESSOR OF FREE ENTERPRISE AT ROBERT MORRIS UNIVERSITY IN PITTSBURGH.