Micah Morrison’s huge piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal covers a lot of the ground Gertz first strode over on the Iraq-Oklahoma City connection. Morrison has written a long piece based on a couple of books, the flashpoint of which is that Iraq was involved in that bombing. There’s evidence that the government just stopped with McVeigh, rather than dig into whether a foreign government was involved. Check out these quotes from Mr. Gertz on Thursday’s show:
“Beginning in the early 90s, bin Laden announced that he was going to have his followers kill Americans, both civilian and military, and then they began doing that, through a series of escalating attacks which culminated in September 11th.”
“Under the Clinton administration the CIA was saddled with what had become known as the Deutch rules…a politically correct approach to espionage where they told the operations officers, the spies in the field, ‘You will not recruit agents who have an unsavory background, who may have violated someone’s human rights.'”
“Something so simple as requiring that the intelligence communities standardize the names so that the name Osama bin Laden is spelled with an O instead of a U throughout the community was resisted, and people on Capitol Hill, in the House took that provision out.”
“I got the sense from my research that as long as Al-Qaeda and Osama were blowing up things overseas, that [the Clinton administration] were going to accept that as the cost of doing business.”
“The thinking that (bin Laden) is alive is based on the notion that if he had been killed, they would pick up this so-called chatter among his followers.”
Folks, these wrong-headed liberals like the Clintonistas and Senator Frank Church are gone, but they left their mark on our intelligence community by kicking out the agents and replacing them with bureaucrats. We’ve adopted the liberal mindset that the U.S. is just too big, and it’s unfair, so we should cut the world some slack and it has led us to getting our ass kicked by people whose intent is to rid the world of us completely.