Imagine if This Had Happened in the Clinton Administration

Since it is Clinton nostalgia week in the US, join me in a little game. (Before tenure we called these “thought experiments”.) Imagine how the press would have played it if this story had broken during the Clinton administration:

How secure is the Department of Homeland Security?:

The policy director for the Department of Homeland Security's intelligence division was briefly removed from his job in March when the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered he had failed to disclose his association with Abdurahman Alamoudi, a jailed American Muslim leader. Alamoudi was indicted last year on terrorism-related money-laundering charges and now claims to have been part of a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah.

After a flurry of interagency meetings, however, Homeland Security decided to leave the policy director, Faisal Gill, in place, according to two government officials with knowledge of the Alamoudi investigation. A White House political appointee with close ties to Republican power broker Grover Norquist and no apparent background in intelligence, Gill has access to top-secret information on the vulnerability of America's seaports, aviation facilities and nuclear power plants to terrorist attacks.

I bet the rest is good too, but you have to register or watch ads or something to read it.

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4 Responses to Imagine if This Had Happened in the Clinton Administration

  1. Why would Homeland Security be any more secure than Ellsworth AFB, which had a surprise visitor…

    http://www.kare11.com/news/news-article.asp?NEWS_ID=65463

    I don’t know if Ellsworth, with two Squadrons of B-1s, has any nuclear-armed aircraft on stand-by, and don’t think I want to know.

    It’s not like anybody could foresee them using airplanes as weapons…

  2. MP says:

    There is an easy answer to your question. All you need to do is look at the reactions that came out to news that the Clinton administration approved the sale of ballistic missile technology to China. At that time, pre-Fox News, CNN burried those types of stories. So there’s your answer.

  3. Michael says:

    I don’t have a TV so I can’t comment on the TV coverage, but the newspapers and print pundits went ballistic over that one for a very long period of time. Especially as, if I recall, there actually were arguments that it was in fact not such a big deal. This seems a much clearer error…it will be curious to see if the papers make nearly as much of it.

  4. Dem says:

    CNN didn’t bury the stories, they headlined them. And it wasn’t pre-Fox News.

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