Washington Post Says Bush AntiTerror Policy Little Diffferent Than Clinton's

by Steve

In a Page One in Saturday's Post, Dana Milbank and Dan Eggen pour cold water on the contention by Condi Rice that the reason it took eight months for the Bushies to get off their asses and do something on Al Qaeda is because they wanted to come up with a better plan than the one Clinton and Dick Clarke had.

Bush officials have claimed that their al Qaeda strategy took eight months to develop because it was significantly more aggressive and sweeping than the tactics employed by the previous administration. "Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote in an op-ed article published in The Post earlier this week.

In fact, according to the details that emerged this week, most of the strategies approved by high-level Bush officials on Sept. 4 and Sept. 10, 2001, were nearly identical in thrust to the policies pursued by the Clinton team. The plans grew out of long-standing proposals made by Clarke in 1998 and 2000 -- ideas derided this week by Rice as a "laundry list" of ideas that were previously "tried or rejected."

Yup, they just didn't want to adopt something from Clinton, even if it cost them 3000 lives.