Preparing for The Next Pearl Harbor Attack

[Fridays Child]

The other day, Octafish excerpted an article which, in turn, referred to a June 2001 Insight Magazine article entitled "Preparing for The Next Pearl Harbor Attack."

As the sister publication of the Moonie Times, Insight Magazine is umbilically connected to the bushistas. And the article's author, J. Michael Waller, seemingly took his writing orders straight from the White House Press Office, so magnanimous is his praise of Bush's administration and bitter is his condemnation of Clinton's.

But it's extremely interesting to note that, while it characterizes the bushistas as totally focused on domestic terror defense and disaster preparedness, it mentions no real Bush administration activities regarding strategies for confronting and stopping Al Qaeda (or any other terrorists, for that matter) before they hit us. Clearly, the bushistas were interested only in preparing for the aftermath of an attack that they knew was coming.

Although the author obviously never intended his article to be damning to the bushistas, I think it overwhelmingly bolsters the LIHOP theory. But read it and draw your own conclusions.

Preparing for The Next Pearl Harbor Attack

Pearl Harbor probably will happen again. Only this time the attacks won't be in far-off Hawaii but against the American mainland. That's what some of the nation's top experts are saying as the national-security community scrambles to ward off attempts to attack the U.S. homeland with terrorist weapons of mass destruction and crippling raids on public- and private-sector information systems on which the entire economy - and the American way of life - depend.

-snip-

And then there's the "electronic Pearl Harbor," a phrase coined by Richard Clarke, President Clinton's national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counter-terrorism. An electronic Pearl Harbor would be a surprise attack on the country's fragile information systems that keep the economy and society running.

-snip-

The Bush administration has seized the problem aggressively with a range of initiatives to have a working system in place to defend the country against attacks on its critical infrastructure. Pentagon insiders tell Insight that Rumsfeld's reviews pay close attention to homeland defense and that the administration is weighing creation of a special office for that purpose.

-snip-

He warns, however, that the private sector's failure to regulate itself only invites more government regulation. Due to the nature of the threat to the U.S. homeland, Clarke argues that the government must insist on cooperation from the private sector - especially because more than 90 percent of the country's critical infrastructure is in private hands. "There is a unique challenge here," Clarke recently told a CSIS gathering. "For the first time in our history, the armed forces cannot defend us from the foreign threat. They cannot surround the power grid. Therefore, we are asking the private sector to defend not only itself, but the country as well."


more at http://www.insightmag.com/news/2001/06/18/SpecialReport/Preparing.For.The.Next.Pearl.Harbor.Attack-161098.shtml

And Octafish's excerpt is at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1282003#1285493