WP
"GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?
CLARKE: No.
GORTON: It just would have allowed our response, after 9/11, to be perhaps a little bit faster?
CLARKE: Well, the response would have begun before 9/11.
GORTON: Yes, but there was no recommendation, on your part or anyone else's part, that we declare war and attempt to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11?
CLARKE: That's right.
"
In short, if all of Clarke's recomendations had been carried out, 9/11 would have still happened.
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"....On a broader scale, Congress chartered the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, led by former senators Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., to identify trends to help predict what the world will be like in 25 years, to assess how the United States would fare amid the technological and geopolitical changes and then to propose fundamental ways in which U.S. national-security approaches should be reformed. In February, after a two-year investigation, the Hart-Rudman commission issued its report, bluntly stating: "This commission has concluded that, without significant reforms, American power and influence cannot be sustained." Hart and Rudman wrote that, "despite the end of the Cold War threat, America faces distinctly new dangers, particularly to the homeland."
The first of the commission's five recommendations for national-security organizational change was "ensuring the security of the American homeland." Its reasoning is blunt: "A direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter-century. The risk is not only death and destruction but also a demoralization that could undermine U.S. global leadership. In the face of this threat, our nation has no coherent or integrated governmental structures."
The Bush administration has seized the problem aggressively with a range of initiatives to have a working system in place to defend the country against attacks on its critical infrastructure. Pentagon insiders tell Insight that Rumsfeld's reviews pay close attention to homeland defense and that the administration is weighing creation of a special office for that purpose.
....
Meanwhile, say insiders, the administration is trying to clean up the mess left by its predecessor. Clarke, Clinton's former national infrastructure chief whom Bush kept on, now admits that his first attempt under the Clinton administration to deal with infrastructure defense was a set of policies "written by bureaucrats" and that they were wholly inadequate. He attacked a 1999 Clinton/Gore infrastructure-protection plan as one that "could not be translated into business terms that corporate boards and senior management could understand."
"
Note the date of that article.
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