Decius wrote:
] ... the 1993 WTC bombing -- did they make organizational
] changes then to address the fact that they didn't predict
] that? Also, the embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole. Why
] didn't they foresee these things? Were they repairing that
] problem?

A couple of thoughts.

First, 'predict' is the wrong idea. No one should expect the government to be clairvoyant. Tenet had it right when he recently explained why we didn't prevent 9/11: "We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was. We didn't recruit the right people or technically collect the data notwithstanding enormous efforts to do so."

] These, of course, are questions for the Clinton
] Administration ... Also, there are questions that we should
] have been asking then, and not now, when we were busy fussing
] about interns.

Second, with regard to intelligence, it's largely the same administration. Bush kept Tenet, and Rice kept Clarke. The CSG remained intact throughout the period in question. As Stratfor noted recently, the Bush policies were the Clinton policies.

If anyone is to blame for the intern fiasco, it's the Congress. One can be sure that Clinton would have preferred to focus on foreign affairs, and he tried his best to do so, working all-out on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement right up until the end. Clinton didn't press Tenet to go all-out against al Qaeda because doing so would have precluded a Middle East peace deal. We ended up with a new intifada anyway, but invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in 1999 would have just brought it about that much sooner.

Third, there were efforts to transform the military and intelligence communities for the 21st century -- many of them, in fact. One, for example, was the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Rumsfeld. It issued a report in January 2001. Bob Kerrey and Porter Goss co-chaired a commission on the NRO in 2000. The NIMA commission published its report in April 2001. The Hart-Rudman commission on National Security in the 21st Century issued a highly critical report in early 2001 that made many strong recommendations, including an increased focus on homeland security to protect against terrorist attacks (among other dangers). So, even if Congress was distracted by a dress or sidetracked by the definition of "is", they still did their part along the way.

To claim that we did not do enough before 9/11 is true but unmoving. Could we have ever done enough? Who among us would say, "eh, that's good enough" at some intermediate point? But to claim that no one was doing anything is to dismiss or ignore the facts.

RE: Text of Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001