Biden Was the Only One on Capitol Hill Who Saw 9/11 Coming
Is He Too Politically Inept to Capitalize on Such Strengths?
Will He Wind Up As Bernie's Secretary of State?
By Paul Iorio
The ghost of Biden past. [photo credit: Paul Iorio]
The problem with Joe Biden's campaign is that he and his people don't seem well-versed about the best parts of his own political history. Hence, the emphases are on the gaffes -- and a constant cycle of apologizing for them.
But my own independent research of The Congressional Record and other sources has turned up something even Biden doesn't tout: he was one of the very few national elected officials who virtually saw the 9/11 attacks coming -- months before they happened.
Listen to Biden on June 21, 2000, speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate: "We all know about Pakistan, the gateway to Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden and his buddies. Can anybody think of a better place to beef up border security, so that terrorists can be apprehended as they go to and from those Afghan training camps?"
Again, that was Biden in the year 2000, over a year before bin Laden, who had been plotting his attack from precisely that location, committed mass murder on U.S. soil. And Biden had the danger sized-up perfectly -- well before the fact.
Yet this is in no Biden ads, none of his speeches, none of the media coverage about him. Perhaps Biden himself has simply forgotten how prescient he had been about 9/11.
And Biden was almost completely alone in ringing the alarm at the time. According to the Congressional Record, the only other major politician on Capitol Hill who came close to speaking out about the threat of the Taliban was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "The Taliban in their activities...there [in Afghanistan] have placed them outside the circle of civilized human behavior," said Pelosi, on June 13, 2001. (The least prescient about 9/11? Dennis Kucinich -- but that's another story!)
Another instance in which Biden was ahead of the curve was when he proposed a partitioned Iraq as the solution to the war in 2006. Some laughed at the time, but in subsequent years, many foreign policy wonks came to see that an Anbar province (and surrounding areas) under autonomous Sunni rule might not have given root and rise to ISIS. And an independent Kurdish spin-off republic might have been better able to ward off the sorts of genocidal attacks the Kurds are still threatened with today.
None of this is mentioned in Biden's highlight reel or press coverage. Instead, the spotlight falls on his less exalted moments: the Anita Hill hearings, his opposition to school busing in the seventies and whose hair he kissed on the campaign trail.
Perhaps the candidate and his campaign staff need to do some deep research on Joe Biden, so that they themselves know how to publicize the best of him. Because at this rate, Biden seems destined to become -- in a best case scenario -- Bernie Sanders' Secretary of State. Or retired.
The current mood of the Democratic electorate. [photo credit: Paul Iorio]
