9-11

by Theron Dash

The issue currently being joined thanks to Richard Clarke and the 9-11 Commission hearings is the Bush administration's culpability for ignoring Clinton administration warnings about al Qaeda's determination to attack, and for diverting attention and resources to conquering Iraq, leaving America vulnerable again to terrorism.

The strength of these charges and the stakes for the Bush administration are clear in the ferocity of the Bush counterattack, using the reflexive strategy of character assassination, the rabid right's answer for everything.

But what should be starting to dawn on people who are hearing for the first time the extent of the Clinton administration's concerns and activities regarding al Qaeda and terrorism---for example, the concentrated attention on possible attacks during the millennium celebrations---is what was going on that prevented the Clinton administration from acting more aggressively.

The answer would seem to be the partisan, ferocious, psychotic and essentially frivolous attempt to impeach President Clinton and remove him from office. Officials who should have been concentrating on protecting the nation were instead obligated to talk to lawyers, search and prepare preposterous volumes of subpoenaed materials, and to testify. Many went into debt, some were threatened with prosecution themselves, and the White House was all but paralyzed. Meanwhile, anything that Clinton attempted to do was derided as trying to change the subject and distract attention from the Whitewater investigations and impeachment.

In a real sense, the culpability of the rabid right and the Republicans in Washington for the deaths on 9-11 began with their attempt to do by cynical misuse of constitutional institutions what they could not do in the election: take power from Clinton and the Democrats. They embroiled the nation for years in this insane exercise. A minor real estate scam (at worst) and a sex scandal. Think of all we've been through since, including Enron.

Then after the impeachment failed, they stole the election of 2000 by suppressing votes in Florida and through their instruments on the Supreme Court, in particular the Justice whose lack of ethics becomes more apparent each day, Antonio Scalia.

After 9-11 they paid much more attention to using that tragic event to consolidate power, further their ideological and political agenda, win elections, and to carry out their plan to conquer Iraq, than they did to addressing either the problem of terrorism or homeland security. Their hands are dripping with the blood let at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the fields of Pennsylvania, and the scorched landscape of Iraq. Whatever bureaucratic, policy and human failures there were in both administrations that contributed---included this much-vaunted lack of imagination---this is their inescapable responsibility.