We applaud the decision to keep Clinton's appearance before the 9/11 Commission private. In addition to sidestepping some Constitutional questions, this helped to prevent a wave of strokes and aneurysms amongst the lying, crooked Republicans who might otherwise have suffered inadvertent exposure to Clinton's testimony. If he had spoken publicly yesterday, I wouldn't be with you today.
In talking with Condoleeza Rice, Bob Kerrey was very interested in discussing the Bush Administration's response to the USS Cole bombing. In an attempt to discern Clinton's focus on and approach to terror generally, and the Cole specifically, the Commission might have asked him about this foreign policy speech Clinton delivered in December 2000. We go down a bit for the section on terror, and find this:
...Now, dealing with terrorists is harder, as we have seen in the tragedy of the USS Cole. Why? Because terrorists, unlike countries, cannot be contained as easily and it's harder to deter them through threats of retaliation. They operate across borders, so we have got to strengthen our cooperation across borders. We have succeeded in preventing a lot of terrorist attacks. There were many planned during the millennium celebration that we prevented.
We have arrested a lot of terrorists, including those who bombed the World Trade Center and those who were involved in several other killings in this country. And make no mistake about it: we will do the same for those who killed our brave Navy personnel on the USS Cole.
Is that the strong response Bob Kerrey was looking for?
We excerpt the entire relevant section (yes, all four paragraphs) below. The gist - open borders create problems, loose Russian nukes are troubling, Saddam is evil, North Korea is dangerous, terrorists should and will be arrested, segue to cybersecurity (with an emphasis on playing defense).
There is a good summary at the top of the linked page that provides the transcript.
MORE: CNN reports on the Cole investigation, Dec 8, 2000: "Navy probe: Cole didn't follow security plan";
Many links to discussion of Clinton's National Security strategy from Dec 2000: InstaPundit, Powerline, Capt. Ed. Matt Yglesias was very sensible, but I can't find it. And I actually gave this topic two sentences in an Update on March 25, long before anyone cared.
The fourth point I would like to make to you is that this growing openness of borders and technology is changing our national security priorities. People, information, ideas and goods move around more freely and faster than ever before. That makes us more vulnerable first to the organized forces of destruction, narco-traffickers, terrorists, organized criminals -- they are going to work more and more together, with growing access to more and more sophisticated technology.
Part of the challenge is just to get rid of as many weapons of mass destruction as possible. That's why we got the states of the former Soviet Union outside Russia to give up their nuclear arsenals, and we negotiated a world-wide treaty to ban chemical weapons. That's why we forced Iraq to sell its oil for money that can go to food and medicine, but not to rebuilding its weapons. And I think the other countries of the world that are willing to let them spend that money rebuilding their weapons systems are wrong. And I hope that we can strengthen the resolve of the world not to let Saddam Hussein rebuild the chemical weapons network and other weapons systems that are bad.
It's why we negotiated a freeze on plutonium production with North Korea. Now, dealing with terrorists is harder, as we have seen in the tragedy of the USS Cole. Why? Because terrorists, unlike countries, cannot be contained as easily and it's harder to deter them through threats of retaliation. They operate across borders, so we have got to strengthen our cooperation across borders. We have succeeded in preventing a lot of terrorist attacks. There were many planned during the millennium celebration that we prevented.
We have arrested a lot of terrorists, including those who bombed the World Trade Center and those who were involved in several other killings in this country. And make no mistake about it: we will do the same for those who killed our brave Navy personnel on the USS Cole.
But the most important thing is to prevent bad things from happening. And one of the biggest threats to the future is going to be cyberterrorism -- people fooling with your computer networks, trying to shut down your phones, erase bank records, mess up airline schedules, do things to interrupt the fabric of life.
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