Sure would've been nice to do this WHEN BILL CLINTON WAS DOING IT.

It was stopped for the last 8 years of anti-American treason by the Terrorist-in-Chief so the Feds couldn't legally backtrack Halliburton's and Brown & Root's terrorist support networks.

Gee, golly. Now that the Head Traitor from the Treason Party is almost out of a job the terrorist money laundering tracking operations which were started in Bill Clinton's Presidency are reinstated.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001120 (pops)

The Clinton-Gore Plan to Stop Al-Qaeda: Would 9-11 have happened?

Would things be any different had Gore been President? Wouldn't 9-11 have still happened?

Perhaps not, according to mainstream media source Time Magazine. In their article, They Had A Plan [requires paid subscription], they explain why: After the bombing of the USS Cole the Clinton Administration had drawn up a comprehensive plan for fighting Al-Qaeda. But they didn't want to execute it with a new President taking office in a few months, so they briefed Bush's team at the highest levels and told them how important it was that they carry it out. And then Bush did nothing.

Here are the relevant quotes:

[Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy] Berger says he told [his successor, Bush's Condoleezza Rice], "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject."
The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, [] who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen [] to become the White House's point man on terrorism. [He was] chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG)[...]. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole [...] he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. [...] Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing [the Bush Administration] a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.

Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble - Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen - would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. [...] In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

[...]

An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide - to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended - just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure.

This isn't some low-level employee talking after-the-fact. This is a comprehensive plan at the highest levels of government, with the greatest stress, simply not carried out.

So what was Bush doing instead of cracking down on terrorism? Well, we now know he was busy planning to invade Iraq.

(Thanks to Al Franken's book for drawing this to my attention.)

// Way back before the year 2000 this was in play. George Walker Bush STOPPED EVERYTHING INVOLVING ANTI-TERRORIST OPERATIONS IN THE USA GOVERNMENT.
/// In short, the worlds worst terrorist became "appointed" by an anti-American team of terrorists in the Supreme Court acting on the orders of the American Terrorist Network known as "The Republican Party".]
//// Thanks to the anti-American southern states, these anti-American terrorist activities have been applauded by the Southern Republicans, the National Treasury gutted, and thousands of civilians and thousands of American soldiers maimed and killed thanks to the efforts of the Southern Terrorist States and the anti-American Republican Party.