Missed Opportunities By Clinton, Bush & CONGRESS

This has long been a very troublesome thing to me. I mean, these senators — particularly the senators, but even on the House side — these guys… Well, let’s stick with the Senate. There hasn’t been a whole lot of grief from the House, except the House Democrats. But these senators sitting up there holier-than-thou like they knew nothing until their investigation started. Here’s Bob Graham the chairman at one time of the Senate Intelligence Committee who knew all of this. Eery time he goes on TV (he says), “I can’t comment. It’s an ongoing investigation.” He knew what we were facing. These guys, these Democrats, all said way back in 1998 (Letter Urging Clinton to Attack Over Saddam’s WMD) and 1999 and again in 2002. They all said what Bush said about Saddam because Bill Clinton had said it; Al Gore had said it. But all of a sudden it was like they knew nothing! The 9/11 Commission report says that they are at fault as well for poor oversight of intelligence gathering, meaning they knew what was being gathered but they didn’t do anything about it. They are an oversight committee but they didn’t get involved. So I wanted to make mention of that. We’ll see just how much this gets trumpeted when the official report is released tomorrow.
Another upcoming report will contain “a good deal of new information” backing up the Bush claim that Saddam Hussein did indeed pursue weapons of mass destruction, this from Senate Armed Services committee chairman John Warner. This from yesterday. “The administration cited Saddam’s hunger for such weapons as a main reason to invade Iraq last year. ‘I’m not suggesting dramatic discoveries,’ Warner told reporters Tuesday, but ‘bits and pieces that Saddam Hussein was clearly defying’ international restrictions, ‘and he and his government had a continuing interest in maintaining the potential to shift to production of various types of weapons of mass destruction in a short period of time.’

“The report is by the civilian head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, who reports to the CIA director. Initially the report was expected to be done this summer, but instead it will come out in September, Warner said. Warner said the new information covers ‘some weapons that predate the first Gulf War that are still around and were used at the time Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Iranians’ [that would be the Kurds] as well as ‘remnants of what he was doing himself here in the last several years.’ He would not elaborate, saying he didn’t want to pre-empt the report. The senator made the comments after a closed briefing by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, who updated the panel on the Iraq Survey Group’s progress. Dayton returned from Iraq last month after giving up his post as the military head of the hunt for weapons as part of a routine rotation.” A-ha.! So the September Surprise has been leaked!
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RUSH: Champaign, Illinois, next up on the phones on the EIB Network. Rush Limbaugh, to Derrick. Hello, sir. Nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Glad to be on your show.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I had a question for you. I was a bit confused concerning the 9/11 Commission.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: And Bush initially opposed an independent 9/11 Commission, and I was confused as to why he would oppose that this year. I understand it’s an election year, but seeing as how it’s an independent committee, independent commission, you know, why he would do that?

RUSH: He didn’t oppose the commission. I think he opposed the timing of the commission, precisely as you said, because it’s an election year. I think it turned out his impressions were accurate. The 9/11 Commission has become a joke. It’s become a partisan joke. The idea of the 9/11 Commission was to find out what went wrong and help come up with ways to prevent it from happening again. What it became was an equipartisan way to blame people for political advantage in an election year.

The problem with these kind of commissions is when you do them in the midst of a battle or a war, you cannot help but have a negative impact on the effort. It’s like World War II. We didn’t bring generals home in the midst of World War II to sit before blowhards up in Congress to explain what they were doing at D-Day or Normandy or Pointe-Du-Hoc or the Battle of the Bulge or any of that. Whatever hearings / investigations were done took place after the fact. This has all been done within the context “we got to get Bush out of office,” and he knew it. But the Republicans in Congress, Denny Hastert, said “You got to do it this year. We want it moved up,” and Bush said, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, we’ll do it,” but there was a general fear that it was just going to sink and descend into this partisan soiree, and it did. It did. And I guarantee you we already know what they’re going to say. It’s already been leaked and it isn’t any big deal.
Okay, so we missed ten opportunities. We knew that. We know most of the stuff that they’re going to say. Most of the big stuff. We know they’re going to blame the CIA, and the FBI. So that’s the bipartisan nature of it, because after these guys blew it. Both sides of the aisle on this commission will go out there and do their partisan interviews. You know, they’ve got their own reputations to protect, and so (former CIA Director) George Tenet has fallen on the sword, so he’s gone. He’s already taken the hit for it. FBI is going to get some blame. Congress get a little blame. Bush and Clinton get a little blame and, lo and behold, it’s all our faults. It’s all our faults — and this is, of course, what we get when we get “consensus.” We don’t get the truth. We don’t get leadership. We get no hurt feelings, or we get everybody’s feelings are hurt, but we don’t get the truth. We didn’t get the truth. We’re not going to get the truth, and that’s why this thing should not have occurred in an election year.

This is serious stuff and this war on terror is serious stuff, and it’s been trivialized with this commission. “Bush knew it was going to happen.” My friends, I believe brevity is the soul of wit, and I could write the 9/11 Commission report in one sentence, and this one sentence will sum it up, explain it all, and put it to bed: “What we will finally learn after all this time, is that a surprise attack is a surprise attack because it surprised us,” and that’s it. It was a surprise attack. We know it was a surprise attack because we were surprised. We didn’t know it was coming. What else is there to say? You can’t say somebody knew it was coming and blew it because nobody knew it was coming. Everybody was surprised — even Bill Clinton.
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