Mr. Tenet in the Dock
Richard Clarke, former NSC staffer to President Clinton (and disgruntled former Bush Administration Employee) offered a startling insight in his book: “Time was running out on the Clinton administration. There was going to be one last major national-security initiative and it was going to be a final try to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. I would like to have tried both, Camp David and blowing up the al Qaeda camps.”
Richard Clarke, former NSC staffer to President Clinton (and disgruntled former Bush Administration Employee) offered a startling insight in his book: “Time was running out on the Clinton administration. There was going to be one last major national-security initiative and it was going to be a final try to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. I would like to have tried both, Camp David and blowing up the al Qaeda camps.”
By Mr. Clarke’s logic, Mr. Clinton couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time – he had to choose between military pursuit of the enemy that had blown up a U.S. Navy ship in Yemen, killing and wounding scores of American sailors, and the chimera of “Middle East peace.” He chose badly, but not surprisingly.
Israel-Palestinian “peace” is a periodic obsession of presidents and the Clinton people spent an inordinate amount of time currying favor with Yasser Arafat (the most often received foreign “leader” in the White House. And we’ll never forget the sight of Dr. Albright chasing Yasser down the driveway of the U.S. embassy in Paris in high heels). Only after the failure at Camp David and the opening of the PA war against Israel in October 2000 did President Clinton acknowledge that Arafat didn’t want peace at all.
That may be historically interesting, but why bring it up now?
Because now is when the Washington illuminati are dissecting who knew what when as regards both September 11, 2001 and the al-Qaeda threats that preceded it, and because Clarke is not the only holdover employee. George Tenet has been CIA Director since 1995, and during a crucial period in the Clinton Administration, was supervising the creation of a PLO army under the terms of the Wye River agreement, and later pursuing the “Tenet Plan” for peace in our time.
We complained then that the job was political and the CIA should not arbitrate Israeli-PA differences. We didn’t want the CIA training PA “police” at all because it was clear that they were involved in attacks on Israelis. We believed the political guidance the CIA would get would be to avoid finding problems that couldn’t be resolved. We said:
The CIA’s job is to gather and assess intelligence information. That’s all. They are supposed to pass information along to the political authorities that make political policy for the U.S. – the Department of Defense, the President, the Congress. But the CIA doesn’t even do that limited job all that well – this is the same CIA, after all, that was surprised by the Indian nuclear explosion in May and said of the three-stage North Korean ballistic missile shot over the Japanese mainland in August, ‘We didn’t know they could do a third stage!’
We would now add that the CIA was then and remained – and maybe still remains – unable to coordinate disparate threads of information to make a clear picture of the al-Qaeda threat the U.S. faced right up to September 11th.
Mr. Tenet has a great deal to answer for, both in what he did and what he failed to do.