Hiding Behind a Veil of Executive Privilege?

by Robert Scheer - Los Angeles Times

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

A full-scale investigation is in order as to why this nation was so poorly prepared to fend off an air piracy attack by a terrorist group that had already killed many Americans and attempted air hijackings and yet had total access to our flight schools.

Unfortunately, all clues so far point to a depressingly likely conclusion: Until Sept. 11, the Bush administration was simply too distracted and/or incompetent to maintain the American pressure on Osama bin Laden begun in 1998 under President Clinton with the missile attacks on reported Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan.

As Newsweek reports this week, Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger was "totally preoccupied" with the prospect of a domestic terror attack. He warned his replacement, Condoleezza Rice: "You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other." Problem was, she didn't. Despite many warnings like Berger's, including the recently revealed Central Intelligence Agency briefings last summer, the new administration treated the so-called war on drugs as more important than terrorism, and on that basis even made overtures to the Taliban leadership.

Four days before the ominous CIA briefing on Aug. 6 that warned President Bush of the possibility of Al Qaeda hijackings, Christina B. Rocca, assistant secretary of State for South Asia, was sipping tea in Islamabad with the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef. She offered a mixed message that aptly characterized the administration's confused priorities.

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