How Prominent were the Warnings?

How prominent were the warnings of the danger of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s? Here's one: "The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these extremists can be." This was written by Salman Rushdie in The New York Times in 1993.

Did the Clinton administration overhaul its intelligence and defence priorities in response to the 1993 warning? No. No effort was made to co-ordinate the mess of agencies designed to counter terrorism - the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the airlines, local law enforcement, the Coast Guard. No effort was made to recruit more spies who could speak Arabic or go undercover to pre-empt such attacks. Under the Clinton administration a law was passed making it more difficult for America to use spies who had sleazy or criminal pasts - the kind needed to infiltrate Bin Laden's cells.

The debacle of the Somalia expedition in 1992 and 1993 - which led to US special forces being humiliated - dramatically chilled the military's willingness to use such Delta Force units in action again. This occurred despite the fact that aggressive use of such forces was critical to any successful effort to regain the initiative against terrorism.

The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively, was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: Warren Christopher, the clueless, stately former secretary of state; Anthony Lake, the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but, above all, former president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to military and security matters now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter.

Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after Bin Laden struck again at US embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly. He responded with a couple of missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which seriously impacted on Osama Bin Laden.

Clinton's own former defence secretary, John Deutch, wrote in The New York Times that August: "We must insist on superior intelligence that will warn of potential terrorist actions. We must insist on tough and prompt responses, and on developing an effective capability to manage the consequences of these acts when they occur. In general, public and private experts have concluded that our country is not fully prepared to act effectively on these matters." Clinton largely ignored the warning.

Whatever excuses members of Clinton's administration may have, they cannot trot out the excuse of not having been warned. We were all warned. William "Slick Willy" Clinton just preferred to look the other way.