AP finds memos showing GOP to blame for bad terrorist protection - but [View All]

who will the media blame - can we say Clinton, cause it has not been and will not be Bush's inaction in the face of the Hart Report for 9 months? Or perhaps GOPer Kissinger for not taking things seriously enough and not doing something about the major holiday events, municipal water supplies, nuclear power plants, electric power facilities, poor tracking of Middle Easterners and Arab-Americans who might want to hurt us, and poor CIA intelligence gathering and coordination that he was told were weak spots?

Or is the GOPers running the airlines who in 1976, under government pressure to improve airport security and thwart hijackings, had their lobbyist group the International Air Transport Association say "airport security is the responsibility of the host government. The airline industry did not consider the terrorist threat its most significant problem; it had to measure it against other priorities. If individual companies were forced to provide their own security, they would go broke," according to minutes from one meeting.

Or do we blame Ford's making the working group be absorbed by the National Security Council. Or the GOP controlled Senate from 1981 to 1987 that ignored a 1978 report of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee which worried about our not giving enough attention to terrorism?

Any bets that any thing GOP will not get the blame from our media? :-)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/23/nixon.terrorism.ap/index.html

Nixon-era panel envisioned terrorist attacks
Sunday, January 23, 2005 Posted: 1:07 PM EST (1807 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly three decades before the September 11 attacks, a high-level government panel developed plans to protect the nation against terrorist acts ranging from radiological "dirty bombs" to airline missile attacks, according to declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press.

"Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss," Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977 report that summarized nearly five years of work by the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism.

The group was formed in September 1972 by President Nixon after Palestinian commandos slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. The committee involved people as diverse as Henry Kissinger to a young Rudolph Giuliani, the once-secret documents show.

"It is vital that we take every possible action ourselves and in concert with other nations designed to assure against acts of terrorism," Nixon wrote in asking his secretary of state, William Rogers, to oversee the task force.

"It is equally important that we be prepared to act quickly and effectively in the event that, despite all efforts at prevention, an act of terrorism occurs involving the United States, either at home or abroad," the president said.<snip>