The Aldrich Alert Gary Aldrich
A Publication of the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty

Where’s Waldo?

June 12, 2001

by Gary Aldrich - Volume 2, Issue 32

This article appeared on TownHall.com on Thursday, June 6, 2002.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. To find out why September 11, 2001 happened, we summon all the people who arrived to take important federal posts after January 20, 2001 – even though we have much evidence that the terrorist attacks were being planned as early as 1995, and certain key intelligence agencies knew a great deal about it.

Do I have that about right?

And, even though we know the terrorists are just “dying” to stage another huge terrorist suicide attack on us – one that will get them even more attention than the last time – we make all the people responsible for our current national security sit in one room, in one building – and then, we give out press releases to everyone and tell them the exact time and place where all these folks are going to be meeting, right?

And even though the current crop of national security experts and major players have kept this nation free of any terrorist attacks for eight straight months following 9-11, we tie them up for hours and hours getting ready for our stupid hearings, and then make them wait around in our marble halls and our hardwood seats until our sorry behinds arrive – so many important things to do, you know?

We do this so we can berate and second-guess them and their agencies and make everyone believe that we didn’t know a darn thing about what was happening to this nation for the eight years to President George W. Bush being sworn in.

Well, where’s Waldo – where’s Louis Freeh? Most of the terrorists’ planning for 9-11 happened on his watch. Why isn’t former FBI Director Louis Freeh being called to explain the sorry condition of the FBI – the agency that Robert Mueller inherited just two weeks before our nation was so savagely attacked?

Where’s former FBI Director William Sessions? Judge Sessions was fired by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and when he was asked by journalist Christopher Ruddy why he was fired, Judge Sessions replied that it was because he objected to Clinton’s politicizing of the FBI. Could Judge Sessions tell us anything about FBI prohibitions against “racial profiling?”

Come to think of it, where’s Janet Reno in the current lineup? Didn’t she run the Justice Department for eight years while the FBI atrophied and the INS and other agencies under her control got out of control? Perhaps she could drive her little red truck up here from Florida and lend some help in finding out why this terror has happened to us.

U.S. Senators are calling George Tenet to the stand to explain some serious shortcomings at the CIA – but wait! Where’s James Woolsey, the former CIA Director who has made no secret of his disgust for the Clinton administration? Wasn’t it Woolsey who could not buy a meeting with President Clinton? Funny, isn’t it? Monica Lewinsky could get appointments, but the CIA Director could not. What did Monica have that CIA Director Woolsey did not have? I know – a beret!

And where’s former CIA Director John M. Deutch, the one who Clinton had to pardon because he was accused of mishandling secrets on his CIA laptop that he left unsecured at home while the maids dusted his furniture. By any chance, did the maid wear a headscarf?

Under the leadership – if you can call it that – of Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, the FAA, a dysfunctional joke, was so far gone that whistleblowers who recognized the dangerous practices of the agency stood in line to reveal what they knew. Is Mineta going to be publicly questioned, or would the U.S. Senate consider that “racial profiling?”

Finally, where are the U.S. Senators on the witness list for this week’s hearings? How many senators were warned by career professionals who became whistleblowers that national security was in a state of disaster – including the White House, where it really counts!

The FBI and CIA told Clinton’s National Security Counsel all about the coming storm. What were they doing about it? Perhaps they were too busy feting Irish terrorist Gerry Adams in the White House, or planning photo ops for Hillary in New York with Mrs. Arafat, or advising President Clinton on the “pluses and minuses” of pardoning Puerto Rican terrorists – you know, the ones who killed some of “New York’s finest” our beloved “First Responders?”

President George W. Bush pledged to bring a new attitude to Washington, D.C. He told us that the years of “politics of personal destruction” had ended. That was a great campaign slogan, but somebody forgot to tell the Congress. Even now they are gathering the compliant together, all in one place, at one time, for a proper Washington-style slaughter of the innocent, while Clinton, Deutch, Reno, Freeh and so many others who slept-walked through their assignments carry on with their new lives.

I’m sure if any one of these individuals were called in for questioning we would have a better chance finding out why this devastation was brought upon us, but what the U.S. Senate is doing right now is a truly dangerous waste of our time.

We might as well call in the folks who witnessed low-flying planes on 9-11. Their “evidence” would probably be as enlightening as testimony from an FBI Director who took office two weeks before thousands were killed by terrorists known to the federal government since 1993.

Coincidently, that’s the year Bill Clinton was sworn in.