Tomorrow's news, today, or yesterday, or whenever

The Hindustan Times is reporting that Kuwaiti officials have captured $60 million worth of chemical and biological weapons which were smuggled into Kuwait from Iraq.

Kuwaiti security authorities have foiled an attempt to smuggle $60 million worth of chemical weapons and biological warheads from Iraq to an unnamed European country, a Kuwaiti newspaper said on Wednesday.

The pro-Government Al-Siyassah, quoting an unnamed security source, said the suspects had been watched by security since they arrived in Kuwait and were arrested "in due time." It did not say when or how the smugglers entered Kuwait or when they were arrested.

There's a catch, though: Note that the article is sourced to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyassah. There's an English-language version of that paper, Arab Times. There's no sign of that article at the web version of Arab Times. You'd think that a story like this would be worth a mention. This has "hoax" written all over it. Tomorrow will, I suspect, tell.

(It occurred to me, and to more than one person on Eschaton, to wonder how one calculates the street value of chemical weapons. That, more even than the lack of actual coverage at the cited paper, makes me think this article is a hoax.)

A randomizer that I like a lot

I was away from LJ for about two weeks last month, so this might be old hat to all of you, but I liked it:

The Potion Maker
womzillarium is a cloudy, lumpy brown solid obtained from the flesh of a doppelganger.
Mix with womzilla! Username:
Yet another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern

It's a multi-stage joke--if you enter your own username (or proposed username, for those non-LJ readers out there), it will tell you your own potion and mix it with womzillarium.

Hey, that's a nice change: Bylines at Tapped

Tapped, the weblog of The American Prospect (TAP) Magazine, is now giving bylines to its several bloggers. Yay them.

What Clinton Did about al-Qaeda

I just posted this over on rec.arts.sf.fandom, but I wanted to be shrill post it here as well.

Something was bouncing around in the back of my head during a recent thread about how much or how little Clinton did about international Islao-supremacist terrorism during his term.

The right-wing talking point characterization is that he "fired some missles at some camels"; it is, of course, in the partisan electoral interests of the right wing to diminish what Clinton did, because there's one thing he did which, if people paid attention, would reflect very poorly on the current occupying administration.

This is from an obscure, ultra-left-wing shrill political rag that no one reads:

Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
by Michael Elliot
Time Magazine, 4 August 2002

As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000--an attack that left 17 Americans dead--he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.

... [S]enior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble--Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen--would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

...

By last summer, many of those in the know--the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries--were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.

So, yes, the Clinton administration didn't take decisive action between the failed assassination-by-cruise-missle attack on bin Laden in 1998 and the bombing of the Cole in 2000. But after the bombing of the Cole, they did decide that enough was enough, and handed a complete plan of action to the incoming maladministration.

I suspect, but cannot prove, that Clinton refrained from starting this initiative himself because he didn't want to do to W. Bush what H.W. Bush had done to Clinton--start a war and hand over the keys after the early, easy part.

W. Bush and his nabobs then failed to act on the plan. By April of 2001, they had all of the information in place, and they sat on their thumbs until September 11th.

You didn't have to be Carnak the Magnificent to see that al-Qaeda was getting more active with each passing month. That's why Clinton decided to act. Why didn't Bush and Cheney and Rove and Rice see it that way?