From the Jewish World Review website:

THIS was George Bush's warning to the international terrorists and their sponsors:

"The United States will be firm with terrorists. We will not make concessions.... If we find states supplying money, weapons, training, identification, documents, travel, or safe haven for terrorists, we will respond. Our aim is to demonstrate to these countries that supporting terrorism is not cost-free.... We will bring terrorists to justice. We will ... identify, track, apprehend, prosecute, and punish terrorists. Terrorism is crime, and terrorists must be treated as criminals."

That muscular vow wasn't uttered after last week's atrocities. It was made in November 1988 by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who put it in writing, over his signature, on the first page of the Defense Department compendium "Terrorist Group Profiles." Two months later, Bush was sworn in as the 41st president, and if anything seemed clear, it was that he would bring to the Oval Office a cold view of terrorism and a steely commitment to fight it.

He didn't. Like Ronald Reagan before him and Bill Clinton after, Bush did little to stop international terror. The result of that failure was to convince Islamist fanatics that America was weak and gutless, and to feed the audacity that led to the most devastating terrorist attack in US history.

As vice president, Bush had seen terror's effects: He went to Beirut in October 1983, a few days after a car bomb blew up the US military barracks there, murdering 241 Marines. The Reagan administration, he said, was "not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards shape the foreign policy of the United States." But that was exactly what the Reagan administration did. Soon after the bombing, American forces quit Lebanon.

And 18 years later, we have yet to "identify, track, apprehend, prosecute, and punish" the killers who butchered those Marines.

Or the ones who had earlier butchered 49 Americans at the US embassy in Beirut.

Or the ones who hijacked TWA 847 in 1985 and killed US Navy diver Robbie Stethem.

Or the ones who kidnapped CIA Officer William Buckley that same year and tortured him to death.

Or the ones who hanged Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in 1989.

Or the ones who seized one US citizen after another -- Terry Anderson, Thomas Sutherland, Alann Steen, Frank Reed, and Joseph Cicippio, among others -- and held them hostage under brutal conditions.

None of these outrages aroused the fury of the US government. Despite all the American blood on their hands, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah were allowed to operate without hindrance, while the regimes in Damascus and Tehran that financed and sheltered them were never forced to pay a price for their hostile behavior.

Even when the United States did retaliate for terrorist attacks, its response was mild and ineffective. To avenge the destruction of Pan Am 103 and the slaughter of 259 innocents in December 1988, the United States was content to prosecute two Libyan operatives who had been involved in the bombing. More hirelings were put on trial after the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. When terrorists blew up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Washington lobbed a few cruise missiles at training camps in Afghanistan and a chemical plant in Sudan.

What the US government should have done was root out and destroy the terrorist groups mounting out these attacks. It should have leveled economic, diplomatic, and military penalties against the dictatorial states backing them. It should have behaved like a great power enraged by the murder of its citizens. Instead it did next to nothing. And vicious men saw, and drew the obvious conclusion.

That wasn't all they saw.

They saw the United States label Saddam Hussein "worse than Hitler" and assemble a vast army to fight him -- only to stop the war when his troops were on the run, leaving him as ruthless and dangerous as ever. They saw how Saddam violated the terms of the cease-fire and resumed his quest for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons -- and how the United States drew line after line in the sand, then failed to defend any of them.

They saw Americans cut and run from Somalia because some of their soldiers were killed there. They saw Washington dither for years about how or whether to stop the bloodshed in the Balkans. They saw how easy it was for the Chinese to acquire military secrets, and how surprised Americans were when India and Pakistan went nuclear. They saw that nothing bad happened to nations on the State Department's list of terror-sponsors. They saw a government so unwilling to give offense that it scrapped the term "rogue states" in favor of "states of concern."

All this and more the vicious men saw. And they concluded that America was rich but cowardly, mighty in arms but weak in spirit, unwilling to fight for its principles or to risk its sons in battle. America, they decided, had gone soft. And so the time had come to attack.

-- Anonymous, September 24, 2001

Answers

In what may be the worst case of "what goes

around, comes around," an Iranian source has reported that the 20 terrorists may have been given phony passports by officials of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)--the top intelligence agency in the country. The passports were supposedly used by the terrorists to transit through Europe and to eventually enter the United States. It was the ISI, during the '80s, that funneled CIA weapons and money to the mujahedin forces in Afghanistan. If it is true that the terrorists were aided by Pakistani government officials, Islamabad may join Kabul as a target for American military retaliation.

Bin Laden's fingerprints on the attack may also have a historical precedent. In 1995, the laptop computer of Ramzi Yousef, a bin Laden associate, was confiscated in the Philippines. Police discovered that Yousef planned to hijack 11 inbound U.S. commercial aircraft taking off from Asia. The plan then may have been to blow them up in mid-air or crash them into targets in the United States.

Those who have followed the warming of relations between the Bush administration and Kabul are asking why the Bush administration wasn't alerted to an impending attack through Taliban back-channels. According to sources close to the Taliban and Pakistan's Jamiaat-i-Islami Party--the Pakistani fundamentalist movement that nurtured and trained the Taliban--a senior Jamiaat official, Qazi Husein Ahmad, recently traveled to both London and Washington. While in Washington, he reportedly re-established ties with the Taliban's old CIA contacts from the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Ahmad is the second Islamist radical to have been welcomed by Langley in recent months. No sooner had the Bush administration taken over than the Taliban's ambassador-at-large, Rahmatullah Hashami, sat down with senior CIA, State and Pentagon officials in a meeting arranged by Laili Helms, the Taliban's unofficial representative in the United States and niece-in-law of Richard Helms, former CIA director and U.S. ambassador to Iran.

According to Pakistani sources, the Taliban and the Pakistani veterans of the CIA-led mujahedin war against the Soviets had been keen to rekindle old ties with the former South Asia CIA chief Richard Armitage, now Secretary of State Colin Powell's deputy, and Christina Rocca, assistant secretary of state for South Asia, who is a 15-year veteran of the CIA's Operations Directorate, a position where she also interfaced with the Islamist guerrillas. Rocca had previously met in Islamabad with Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, and his assistant, Sohail Shaheen. Armitage, however, is considered anti-Taliban because he favors restoring the elderly ousted Afghan monarch, King Zahir Shah, to power.

Powell was reportedly upset about the re-establishment of ties with the Taliban and Pakistani Islamists, but has apparently been overruled by the dominant CIA interests in the administration. Intelligence sources point out that, for its part, the CIA wanted to re-establish contact with murky ex-mujahedin and Taliban-allied arms- and drug-smuggling fronts in Rawalpindi and Peshawar. According to one senior U.S. government source, the Taliban's greatest cheerleaders are the CIA and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The source said the CIA had always argued that bin Laden was "overblown" as a threat.

The United States has recently tilted toward the Taliban and against the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of Gen. Ahmed Shah Massoud. The Defense Department largely supports Massoud, but the CIA and State Department argue that supporting the general would put the United States on the same side as Russia and Iran--his two major backers.

Massoud was the target of a suicide bomb assassination attempt by two bin Laden allies disguised as television journalists the day before the attack on the United States. (At press time, there were conflicting reports as to whether he was dead or alive.) But that did not stop Massoud's forces from launching a missile attack on Kabul Airport the night of September 11--to the delight of many Americans, many of whom were surprised it was not a U.S. military attack. After the recovery and mourning period, Washington will go into its traditional finger-pointing mode. Then, the CIA and other Bush administration officials who have had close contact with the Taliban should be asked by Congress about the nature of their relationships with the protectors of bin Laden. For starters, CIA Director George Tenet should be asked what the United States received in return for even talking to the brutal mullahs who run Kabul. The State Department should be questioned as to why it has banned Massoud's movement from occupying the vacant Afghan Embassy in Washington even though it is recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

At the very least, the American people deserve to know why the Bush administration, through its words and actions, has given tacit support to a government that has provided safe haven to the man who may be the worst mass murderer of American civilians in the nation's history.

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist based in Washington and the author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa.

-- Anonymous, September 26, 2001