-Caveat Lector-
>From http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20020531/index.php
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For Friday, May 31, 2002
George Bush is Innocent
The flap in Washington about what did the president know and when did he know it
in regard to alleged warnings about the Sept. 11 attack is 100 percent garbage. In
the heated atmosphere of partisan and media demagoguery, you almost despair of
any intelligent discussion of a public issue.
There were no warnings.
Some Republican water-carriers in the media have tried to blame Bill Clinton. He,
too, is innocent of the charge of ignoring any hard evidence of an impending attack.
As much as I despise Clinton, he would not have jeopardized American lives any
more than George Bush would have. I repeat, there were no warnings.
People seem to have forgotten the famous Osama bin Laden tape. Let me
paraphrase what he said. He said we recruited some young men for a suicide
mission, but we didn't tell them what the mission would be until just before they
boarded the aircraft. Well, if 18 of the 19 hijackers didn't know they were going to
attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then the president darn well didn't
know it either. Nor did the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the
National Security Agency.
Probably no more than four or five people on the globe knew the target. Bin Laden is
no fool. He, perhaps one or two of his top lieutenants and, at some point, Mohamed
Atta knew. Everybody else was probably excluded. Even the guy in Europe who sent
the money. You can be ordered to send money to somebody without knowing what
he or she intends to use it for. Success depended on secrecy, and the only way to
keep a secret is to severely limit the number of people who know what it is.
Many people don't understand the intelligence process. Perhaps they've seen too
many movies that make it seem that the NSA or the CIA can track anybody
anywhere, 24 hours a day. That is not so. Ironically, all you have to do to frustrate
electronic-signals intelligence is just simply revert to methods of the pre-electronic
age. One man's mouth to another man's ear; one man's hand to another man's
hand. A Soviet exile told me that 20 years ago. Any time the Soviets had something
really secret, they simply used verbal instructions and couriers, avoiding altogether
telephones and computers. You can't pick up a signal that doesn't exist. And
cameras, no matter how fine their resolution, still cannot see through hard cover.
People have been yapping about a psychological profile in which the author
speculated that a terrorist might fly an explosive-laden plane into a building. Well,
that's speculation, which is a product of the imagination. Well before that report, Tom
Clancy had written a novel in which a Japanese terrorist flies a fully fueled 747 into
the Capitol. That, too, is imagination, not information.
The conversation between two terrorists picked up by authorities in the Philippines
back in the 1990s was also just that � conversation. I would imagine that every time
two terrorists get together, they talk about what they would like to do, but again,
that
is not hard evidence of any plan actually being implemented. We can all sit around
and speculate and talk about what we'd like to do some day.
As for the so-called warning that appeared in an Arabic newspaper in London, that,
too, was nonspecific. You can warn that a terrorist act is coming any day of any year,
but if you don't know the specific target, there's nothing you can do about it.
What Americans must do is learn to live with insecurity, the same as our forefathers.
Look at Israel. There is nothing it won't do to prevent terrorism � international law,
human rights or world opinion be damned. But is Israel 100 percent successful? Of
course not. The terrorist has one advantage that can't be overcome: He gets to
choose the time and the place. Better learn to live with that.
Charley Reese can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
� 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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