While President Bush's executive order allowing U.S. forces and the CIA to attack al Qaeda around the world may not have been much of a secret, it certainly was and is a vital measure in waging the war on terrorism. As Richard H. Shultz Jr. wrote in a January 2004 article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
"Prior to 9/11, these [special forces] units were never used even once to hunt down terrorists who had taken American lives. Putting the units to their intended use proved impossible--even after al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. As a result of these and other attacks, operations were planned to capture or kill the ultimate perpetrators, Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, but each time the missions were blocked. A plethora of self-imposed constraints--I call them showstoppers--kept the counterterrorism units on the shelf."
By removing these constraints and actually taking the fight to al Qaeda, Bush accomplished what Clinton couldn't.
