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ELVIS
04-30-2004, 03:35 PM
Debi Brand (http://sierratimes.com/04/03/30/debi_brand.htm)

http://www.unu.edu/uthant_lectures/lec3/cl-peter.jpg

Is it fair to blame The Clinton administration for all the warnings they ignored during their eight years in the white house concerning the need to take decisive action against Iraq for their complicities in terrorist strikes against us?

When shortly after the first World Trade Center attack, when Clinton’s adviser on Iraq for his 1992 campaign, Dr. Laurie Mylorie, brought a grave "What if" to the administrations attention, can anyone truly fault them for not recognizing the danger and resolving to address it?

Born of what Dr. Mylorie deemed signs negligent to ignore, her "what if" was in reference to the strong probability that there was Iraqi involvement in the first World Trade Center terrorist hit as well as in other strikes.

After investigating, writing, and commenting on her concerns for a number of years, June of 2001 found her authoring in the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, "Iraqi Complicity in the World Trade Center Bombing and Beyond. In this article, while she elucidates the indications that lead her to conclude thus, in one of the closing paragraphs she states, "It is highly probable that Iraqi intelligence is working with bin Ladin."

Dr. Laurie's concerns of Iraqi involvement in the WTC bombing were first heightened in 1993 by reporting found in, New York Times, by Thomas Friedman suggesting as much. As her investigative efforts since then indicate, that report galvanized her into an in-depth painstaking combing-through of the case transcripts, documentation, and evidence, which included telephone records, passports, airline tickets and other raw data, once it became available to the public.

In so doing, Iraq surfaced, too many times for her to turn a blind eye to.

The bomb-builder of the WTC 1993 attack, "Ramsey Yousef, a.k.a. Abdul Basit Karim, entered our country traveling on an Iraqi passport. Was known amongst his New York fundamentalist friends as "Rashid, the Iraqi".

Court documentation revealed over four thousand dollars worth of phone calls placed from the bombers New Jersey apartment during the bomb planning time, the majority of the calls to one of the defendants PLO terrorist uncle living in Baghdad.

Shortly after the 1993 WTC attack, Abdul Rahman Yasin-- co-builder of the WTC bomb-- led the FBI to the bombers vacated apartment. Then while they sought to attain a search warrant, Abdul fled the country. To Jordan, to the Iraqi Embassy, and later on home to Baghdad.

Still, is it fair to fault the Clinton administration for refusing to confront these indications decisively? When one considers, the attack was, even back then, known to have failed to succeed in it's intended extent of destruction. Only six killed in that attack. Not the tens of thousands marked for destruction that day. Albeit, about 1000 were wounded.

Although there was a letter that was found shortly after the bombing in which the attackers claimed they would strike the WTC again and the next time do so with improved accuracy; when Dr. Mylorie and others warned of "the train wreck to come" if Saddam Hussein was behind the first attack and not found and held accountable for it, can we truly blame the then in-office Democratic administration for not taking these warnings with a greater measure of gravity?

Further information, one could reason, that would have been needed resoluteness to pursue such an investigation was that which proceeded the 1995 arrest of Ramsey Yousef, stating he was planning yet more attacks against us.

Those plans—The Bojinka Plot--were found in "Yousef's'" Manila apartment-cum-bomb-brewing-laboratory, on his personal computer. The Bojinka Plot delineated plans to use airplanes as weapons. Bear in mind, the plotter of those plans, "Ramsey Yousef-- the holder of an Iraqi passport-- said to be the mastermind behind the 1993 WTC attack.

Mull all the above with statements made in a February 2003 csmonitor.com article "Iraq to outsource counterattacks". This article states that many Iraq Embassies abroad were now again doing as they had done back during the first Gulf War: Organizing and aiding in "terrorist-type attacks on American and allied targets."

The Manila embassy amongst them.

The goal was to fulfill Saddam Hussein's threat "to bring the war to Americans where ever they lived."

This CSM article reported one such plot occurred in Manila in 1991. An Iraqi met an unfortunate end when he and his co-bombing Iraqi partner were attempting to plant a bomb at the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center in Manila.

According to Philippine government reports on the accident that the Monitor states they have seen, it was an Iraqi embassy car that dropped off the two intended-bombers at the TJCC.

When not all went according to plan and the bomb blew prematurely, killing one of perpetrators, found in one of the pockets of the surviving would-be killers was the calling card of, Muwafak al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat in Manila.

When one does considering all these indications of Iraqi involvement with terrorist strikes against the US, one can understand the disinclination of the last-in-office- Democratic administration to heed the compelling from Dr. Mylorie and others to address the problem with forthright resolve.

Now, in view of the tough-sledding decisive action against Iraq has proven to be—just as it was forecasted to.

It promised to be tough.



:elvis:

ELVIS
04-30-2004, 03:41 PM
The goal was to fulfill Saddam Hussein's threat "to bring the war to Americans where ever they lived."

tobinentinc
05-22-2004, 11:23 PM
The Clinton Adm. screwed this country more than many will ever know. The reason there are so many Bush haters is because Clinton couldn't get anything done against terriorism. It's a damn shame.