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On November 3rd, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who last year admitted that “the idea of trying to cast blame on Clinton [for the 9/11 attacks] is just wrong,” suggested that President Bill Clinton’s cuts to military and intelligence budgets during the 1990s left the country unprepared for a terror attack.
“And now as I said, I don’t pretend that he (Clinton) could predict September the 11th. People are not prophets, even presidents,” said Giuliani. “But he did have his head in the sand. He was cutting those military budgets and intelligence budgets while Islamic terrorists were killing Americans.”
In reality, “the Clinton administration poured more than a billion dollars into counterterrorism activities across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community, into the protection of critical infrastructure, into massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack, into a reorganization of the intelligence community itself.” Here is more:
- From 1993 to 2001, the proposed budget of the National Foreign Intelligence Program – which funds the departments and agencies that make up the national intelligence community – rose by 20 percent.”
- Between 1996 and 2000, “the budget of the Counter-Terrorism Center – which seeks to anticipate and prevent terrorist attacks – doubled.”
- According to the New York Times, “the FBI’s counterterrorism budget increased annually between 1999 and 2001 by an average of 14.5 percent.”
- In 1997, former CIA Director George Tenet said: “We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine service. As Director of Central Intelligence, this has been my highest priority.”
Moreover, as the Body Politik’s Jordan Grossman pointed out in June, “a June 1995 Presidential Decision Directive issued by Clinton for the first time emphasized concern about terrorism “as a national security issue,” not just a matter of law enforcement.”
Clinton’s directive declared that the United States saw “terrorism as a potential threat to national security as well as a criminal act and will apply all appropriate means to combat it.” For the last three years of his presidency, Clinton “raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave.”
Ironically, Giuliani admitted that it was he who had “his head in the sand” about the threat of terrorism before 9/11. According to Wayne Barrett, a reporter for New York’s Village Voice and author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, leaked memos describing Giuliani’s private testimony before the 9/11 Commission suggest that he knew nothing about Al Qaeda.
Giuliani acknowledged that even though he had received information on threats between 1998 and 2001, “At the time I had no idea it was al Qaeda.” He further told the commission that after 9/11, “we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda. … We had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake.”