Bush, Gore, Al Queda, and Sept. 11

Damadged sculpture that stands in Battery Park in New York City

The Sphere, by Fritz Koenig, in Battery Park. Image by L. Furman

Should the President have been able to foil the attacks of September 11?

Throughout the 1990’s we sustained:

  • The 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City,
  • The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,
  • The 1998 bombings of the Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
  • The 2000 bombing of the U. S. S. Cole,
  • And in 1999 we foiled Al Queda’s Millennium plot.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore knew that Osama bin Laden was a threat. They knew he had been trained by the CIA in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. They also knew that he financed and or masterminded the simultaneous attacks on U. S. embassies in Dar Es Salam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya on August 7, 1998, and the October, 2000 attack on the U. S. S. Cole. And President Clinton told us that after his January 2001 inauguration he briefed President Bush on bin Laden.

Tony Karon, in “Time” magazine on May 30, 2001, 3 months before the September 11 attack on the Pentagon and the attack on The World Trade Center, wrote,

the conviction in New York of four footsoldiers of Osama bin Laden’s jihad to drive the United States out of the Middle East…. the man named in the indictment as the architect of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania wasn’t even in court … Bin Laden remains holed up in Afghanistan under the protection of its ruling Taliban militia, [which] reiterated that it has no intention of handing him over for trial….“

The war on terrorism is primarily about intelligence — being able to monitor your enemy’s communications and anticipate his actions in order to confound his plans and keep him on the defensive.”

The former President, the guy who won the popular vote, the people on the national security team who had been held over from the previous administration, the career agents in the intelligence community, journalists and the public knew that bin Laden posed a threat. And just as Mitt Romney is getting daily briefings from the intelligence community today, just as every major party candidate gets the Daily Briefing after the convention – because he might be the next President, George W. Bush was getting daily briefing from the intelligence community beginning August 4, 2000.

Shouldn’t the President have had a better understanding of the threat posed by bin Laden and Al Queda?

As we know from the mission that brought bin Laden to justice, in Pakistan, far from Kabul and even farther from Baghdad, the ‘war on terrorism’ is a war than can be effectively waged with small teams of commandos using “actionable intelligence.”

And what would a President Gore have done?  Gore knew that bin Laden was a threat. He was Vice President when Clinton, as Commander-In-Chief, set up the CIA unit tasked to investigate bin Laden in 1996. After the Embassies were bombed he ordered an attack on bin Laden’s compound in Sudan.

It’s seems pretty clear that Gore would have known about the threat bin Laden posed for the United States.  While he may not have been able to stop the September 11 attacks, he also might not have let bin Laden escape in Tora Bora and launched an invasion of Iraq.

Image of the Sphere, by Fritz Koenig

The Sphere, by Fritz Koenig, image by Anthony Grimley

More links:

The is part of a series exploring what would have happened if Al Gore, who won the popular vote in 2000 by over 500,000 votes had been inaugurated President in January, 2001. Links to the posts in the series are below.

– This was originally posted on FurmanFiles, here, and Cultural Forensics, here. An analyst with Popular Logistics, I am available for research and analysis on a per project or a per diem basis. I can be reached at L Furman 97 @ G Mail . com.
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