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• Thursday, January 8, 2009 07:45 AM

  @gkrevvv

  "C'mon Carmina and all you other increasingly desperate right wingnuts. As has been accurately testified to, PresBush and his regime were so dismissive of everything "Clinton," everything "progressive," everything "Democratic," that they threw into the proverbial dumpster everything the Clinton administration had been trying to do to guard against Al-Qaida and ignored several months of CIA warnings about Al-Qaida."

  Let's see. Al Qaeda bombed two US embassies in August 1998 and the USS Cole in October 2000. According to Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, in November 1997, Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, an Egyptian member of al Qaeda, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and told the CIA about a bombing plot involving the embassy. He was ignored. Prudence Bushnell, the US ambassador to Kenya warned Madeleine Albright and the State Department several times concerning the vulnerability of our embassy there. She was ignored. Can you tell us exactly what the Clinton administration did to guard against al Qaeda?

  As far as CIA warnings, Richard Clarke wrote the following in "Against All Enemies":

  "During the first week of July I convened the CSG and asked each agency to consider itself on full alert. I asked the CSG agencies to cancel summer vacations and official travel for the counterterrorism response staffs. Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree. I asked the FBI to send another warning to the 18,000 police departments, State to alert the embassies, and the Defense Department to go to Threat Condition Delta. The Navy moved ships out of Bahrain.

  "I asked FAA to send another security warning to the airlines and airports and requested special scrutiny at the ports of entry. We considered a broad public warning, but we had no proof or specificity. What would it say? ‘A terrorist group you have never heard of may be planning to do something somewhere?"

  There was no proof or specificity concerning an imminent al Qaeda attack.

  —Groenhagen Read Groenhagen's other letters
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