You Decide

"Leadership: If the foiled airline bomb plot sounded familiar, it should. In 1995, al-Qaida planned the same thing as the Clinton administration slept. Democrats hope to press the snooze button again in November.

The 1995 plot was uncovered when Ramzi Yousef, subsequently convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, hastily fled a burning Manila apartment, leaving behind bomb materials and a laptop with disks containing plans for something called Project Bojinka — the Arabic word for "loud explosion."

The plot was to blow up 11 American jetliners over the Pacific Ocean, then crash a plane into CIA headquarters — a mission to be carried out by a Pakistani pilot who had trained at flight schools in North Carolina, Texas and New York. Sound familiar?

One would have thought that after al-Qaida had tried to blow up the WTC in 1993 and was discovered to be plotting to blow up airliners and fly them into buildings, the Clinton administration would have connected the dots and taken action. But it didn't.

A disgusted Philippine Gen. Avelino Razon was so shocked at 9-11 that he called a hasty press conference in Manila. "We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995," he complained. "Why didn't they pay attention?"

We saw the fruits of Democratic foreign policy on Oct. 3-4, 1993, when the armed forces of the world's only superpower engaged in battle with the forces of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Adid in the streets of Somalia's capital, Mogadishu.

After a 15-hour battle, 18 Americans were killed and 80 wounded. One dead U.S. soldier was dragged through the streets in an act designed to humiliate the U.S. in the jihadist world. There was no military response to the humiliation. Osama bin Laden was watching.

On June 25, 1996, terrorists struck Khobar Towers, a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 soldiers.

In 1998, the year of Monica Lewinsky, al-Qaida operatives blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 245 and injuring 5,000.

On Oct. 12, 2000, the warship USS Cole was bombed while refueling in Yemen, killing 17 sailors and wounding 39. All were acts of war, yet the response to each was to do nothing.

This is the party of Sen. Harry Reid, who once boasted after a filibuster: "We killed the Patriot Act." It is the party of Sen. Russ Feingold, who said on the Senate floor: "Let me make one final point about sneak-and-peek warrants. Don't be fooled for a minute into believing that this power is needed. It's not."

It is a party that has appeased terrorists and dictators for decades, which has opposed every terror-fighting tool, including the tracking of terrorist money through foreign banks, and whose entire strategy in the war on terror is: "Bush is bad."

It is the party of DNC Chairman Howard Dean, who said after the New York Times revealed a wartime secret to the enemy, the NSA surveillance program: "We don't need a big brother." But ironically, such surveillance played a key role in foiling the latest plot.

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reports: "U.S. officials publicly congratulated Britain for the arrest, but privately two officials suggested that electronic surveillance of terror suspects in Pakistan and Britain provided the initial clues to the plot."

And Time magazine reported: "MI5 and Scotland Yard agents tracked the plotters from the ground, while a knowledgeable American official says U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group's communications."

Democrats who whined after 9-11 about what President Bush knew and when he knew it forget about the 1995 plot. They also forget it was Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, who erected the famous "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement, making "connecting the dots" before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.

She wrote the 1995 memo that helped establish what former Attorney General John Ashcroft testified was the "single greatest structural cause" of Sept. 11 — "the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents," Ashcroft said. "Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before Sept. 11, government was blinded by this wall."

Bush tore down that wall just as Ronald Reagan provided the impetus that led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the "evil empire" that built it. It was Reagan who insisted we deploy Pershing missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet SS-20 threat while the likes of John Kerry were pushing for a nuclear freeze.

The two nuclear threats we now face — from Iran and North Korea — both have Jimmy Carter's fingerprints all over them. It was Carter who withdrew U.S. support from our staunch ally, the Shah of Iran, paving the way for the Ayatollah Khomeini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wants to nuke Israel.

In 1994, Carter jetted off to North Korea to broker a deal Clinton embraced whereby the last Stalinist nation would give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a basket of goodies that included food, oil and modern nuclear reactors. It was Clinton's administration, with Carter's assistance, that was responsible for the nuclear threat Pyongyang now poses.

It was no coincidence that 9-11 occurred after decades of Democratic incompetence and appeasement. It's no accident there has not been another such attack on American soil under Bush.

If the airline bomb plot had been uncovered a week earlier, Joe Lieberman might have won his primary. He knew Iraq wasn't a "distraction" from the war on terror, but a central front in it. He could connect the dots and see the bombings in Baghdad and Bombay and Bali were related.

He could see that whether the bombings were at hotels in Amman, Jordan, or in the subways of London, or in the train stations of Madrid, they were all connected, all part of the same war declared by the enemies of freedom and civilization. Whether it be Hamas, or Hezbollah or al-Qaida, they want to slay the infidels, and that includes all of us.

Like Reagan, Lieberman has not left the Democratic Party. It has left him — for the likes of John Murtha, George Soros and George McGovern. Lieberman is not welcome in the Democratic Party. And such a party does not deserve being given the reins of power in the middle of a war its policies helped create."

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=240185954744914