4 Horsemen Of 9/11

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/11/2006

Politics: Clintonista critics of the ABC film "The Path To 9/11" have their own problems with the truth about their roles before and after the attacks, which were precipitated and planned on their administration's watch.

Among the critics is Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic congressional staffer during the Clinton impeachment proceedings and the 9/11 Commission member who conducted the infamous inquisition of Condoleezza Rice over a presidential daily briefing that allegedly warned President Bush of the attack.

The shabby treatment of Rice, with Ben-Veniste asking loaded questions based on false premises, and then refusing to let Rice answer, hinted that for him the 9/11 Commission was less a search for the cause of 9/11 than an opportunity to blame the Bush administration for it.

As reported in Congressional Quarterly, Ben-Veniste, who saw the film during a private screening at the National Press Club on Aug. 23, said of a since-edited scene depicting Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger nixing the imminent capture of Osama bin Laden: "There was no incident like that in the film we came across."

The New York Times on Wednesday quoted Ben-Veniste as saying of the incident as originally portrayed in the film: "As we were watching, we were trying to think how they could have misinterpreted the 9/11 Commission's findings the way they had."

Maybe the film's producers and directors did the unthinkable — actually read the report.

It says that on Dec. 4, 1999, the National Security Council's counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Berger a memo suggesting a strike against al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in the last week of 1999. "In the margin next to Clarke's suggestion to attack al-Qaida facilities in the week before Jan. 1, 2000, Berger wrote, 'no,' " the commission found.

According to the report, Berger, who claims the film "flagrantly misrepresents my personal actions," was presented with plans to take action against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida four times — the spring of 1998, June 1999, December 1999 and August 2000. Each time, Berger was an obstacle to action.

Like Ben-Veniste, Berger has been an obstacle to finding the truth about the prelude to 9/11. In case you've forgotten, he was the fellow caught at the National Archives stuffing top secret material related to the 9/11 Commission inquiry into his socks and pants. Some of those documents were "mistakenly" destroyed. Could it be that one of the documents Berger was trolling for was the Clarke memo on which he wrote "no" to attacking al-Qaida?

Certainly they included critical assessments of the Clinton administration's handling of the Millennium bomb plot to blow up LAX. The Clintonistas were advertising this as an example of Clinton's success in fighting terrorism rather than, as Attorney General John Ashcroft testified, "sheer luck," thanks to a suspicious border guard.

On the 9/11 Commission with Ben-Veniste was Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton administration deputy attorney general. She said recently that she "had a problem if you make claims that the (TV) program is based on the findings of the 9/11 Commission" because the film was "contradicted by our findings."

Gorelick was a participant in the very events that the 9/11 Commission investigated. She, too, pummeled Rice, not with questions, but with accusations of malfeasance. As she asked Rice, who was then national security adviser, why her office failed to "connect the dots," Gorelick knew that she was the one who issued the memo ordering the FBI to erect a legal wall between itself and the CIA, preventing them from sharing information. Gorelick should have been a 9/11 Commission witness rather than panel member.

Democrats who whined after 9-11 about what Bush knew and when he knew it forgot Gorelick was the architect of the policy that established a wall between intel and law enforcement, making "connecting the dots" before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.

Gorelick was the author of the 1995 memo that helped establish what Ashcroft testified was the "single greatest structural cause" for Sept. 11 — "the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents."

"Government erected this wall," said Ashcroft. "Government buttressed this wall. And before Sept. 11, government was blinded by this wall."

Clinton's secretary of state, Madeline Albright, who also is featured prominently in "The Path to 9/11," insists the film "depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred."

Albright, who spent much of the Clinton administration helping appease North Korea into becoming a nuclear power, certainly never decided that bin Laden should be killed or captured.

In Richard Miniter's book, "Losing Bin Laden," Clarke tells of a meeting after the USS Cole was bombed in a Yemeni harbor. When the subject of retaliating against bin Laden came up, Albright was more concerned about the reaction of world opinion to an attack on Muslims, and the impact of such a strike on the Mideast peace process.

According to Miniter, Clarke recalled Albright saying, "Bombing Muslims wouldn't be helpful at this time." Or killing bin Laden prior to 9/11?

As we've said, no amount of script rewrites will change the fact that al-Qaida rose and flourished on Clinton's watch, fueled by indecision and perceived lack of American resolve. Opportunities to inflict a mortal wound on al-Qaida by killing or capturing its leader were repeatedly missed or blown.

For their performance in aiding and abetting this threat to America, we give Ben-Veniste, Berger, Gorelick and Albright two thumbs down.