Bill Clinton’s Excuses

[thedrifter]

September 24, 2006, 9:40 a.m.

Bill Clinton’s Excuses
No matter what he says, the record shows he failed to act against terrorism.

By Byron York

“I worked hard to try and kill him,” former president Bill Clinton told Fox News Sunday. “I tried. I tried and failed.”

”Him” is Osama bin Laden. And in his interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, the former president based nearly his entire defense on one source: Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, the book by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. “All I’m asking is if anybody wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book,” Clinton said at one point in the interview. “All you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror,” he said at another. “All you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s findings and you know it’s not true,” he said at yet another point. In all, Clinton mentioned Clarke’s name 11 times during the Fox interview.

But Clarke’s book does not, in fact, support Clinton’s claim. Judging by Clarke’s sympathetic account — as well as by the sympathetic accounts of other former Clinton aides like Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon — it’s not quite accurate to say that Clinton tried to kill bin Laden. Rather, he tried to convince — as opposed to, say, order — U.S. military and intelligence agencies to kill bin Laden. And when, on a number of occasions, those agencies refused to act, Clinton, the commander-in-chief, gave up.

Clinton did not give up in the sense of an executive who gives an order and then moves on to other things, thinking the order is being carried out when in fact it is being ignored. Instead, Clinton knew at the time that his top military and intelligence officials were dragging their feet on going after bin Laden and al Qaeda. He gave up rather than use his authority to force them into action.

Examples are all over Clarke’s book. On page 223, Clarke describes a meeting, in late 2000, of the National Security Council “principals” — among them, the heads of the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of State, Defense. It was just after al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole. But neither the FBI nor the CIA would say that al Qaeda was behind the bombing, and there was little support for a retaliatory strike. Clarke quotes Mike Sheehan, a State Department official, saying in frustration, “What’s it going to take, Dick? Who the **** do they think attacked the Cole, ****in’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell they won’t even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

That came later. But in October 2000, what would it have taken? A decisive presidential order — which never came.

The story was the same with the CIA. On page 204, Clarke vents his frustration at the CIA’s slow-walking on the question of killing bin Laden. “I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him,” Clarke writes. “I believe that those in CIA who claim the [presidential] authorizations were insufficient or unclear are throwing up that claim as an excuse to cover the fact that they were pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.”

Clarke hit the CIA again a few pages later, on page 210, on the issue of the CIA’s refusal to budget money for the fight against al Qaeda. “The formal, official CIA response was that there were [no funds],” Clarke writes. “Another way to say that was that everything they were doing was more important than fighting al Qaeda.”

The FBI proved equally frustrating. On page 217, Clarke describes a colleague, Roger Cressey, who was frustrated after meeting with an FBI representative on the subject of terrorism. “That ****er is going to get some Americans killed,” Clarke reports Cressey saying. “He just sits there like a bump on a log.” Clarke adds: “I knew he was talking about an FBI representative.”

So Clinton couldn’t get the job done. Why not? According to Clarke’s pro-Clinton view, the president was stymied by Republican opposition. “Weakened by continual political attack,” Clarke writes, “[Clinton] could not get the CIA, the Pentagon, and FBI to act sufficiently to deal with the threat.”

Republicans boxed Clinton in, Clarke writes, beginning in the 1992 campaign, with criticism of Clinton’s avoidance of the draft as a young man, and extending all the way to the Lewinsky scandal and the president’s impeachment. The bottom line, Clarke argues, is that the commander-in-chief was not in command. From page 225:

Because of the intensity of the political opposition that Clinton engendered, he had been heavily criticized for bombing al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, for engaging in ‘Wag the Dog’ tactics to divert attention from a scandal about his personal life. For similar reasons, he could not fire the recalcitrant FBI Director who had failed to fix the Bureau or to uncover terrorists in the United States. He had given the CIA unprecedented authority to go after bin Laden personally and al Qaeda, but had not taken steps when they did little or nothing. Because Clinton was criticized as a Vietnam War opponent without a military record, he was limited in his ability to direct the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct. He had tried that in Somalia, and the military had made mistakes and blamed him. In the absence of a bigger provocation from al Qaeda to silence his critics, Clinton thought he could do no more.

In the end, Clarke writes, Clinton “put in place the plans and programs that allowed America to respond to the big attacks when they did come, sweeping away the political barriers to action.”

But the bottom line is that Bill Clinton, the commander-in-chief, could not find the will to order the military into action against al Qaeda, and Bill Clinton, the head of the executive branch, could not find the will to order the CIA and FBI to act. No matter what the former president says on Fox, or anywhere else, that is his legacy in the war on terror.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

What Clinton Didn't Do . . .
. . . .and when he didn't do it.

BY RICHARD MINITER
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats--the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war--is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap--air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects--there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton's policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush's.

It is vital that this debate be honest, but so far this has not been the case. Both Mr. Clinton's outrage at Chris Wallace's questioning and the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11" are attempts to polarize the nation's memory. While this divisiveness may be good for Mr. Clinton's reputation, it is ultimately unhealthy for the country. What we need, instead, is a cold-eyed look at what works against terrorists and what does not. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations ought to be put to the same iron test.

With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.

In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.

By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.

• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.

• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.

• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.

• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.

• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.

Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.

• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.

• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.

When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Clinton Gives Us Another Finger

by Cal Thomas
Posted Sep 26, 2006

Former President Bill Clinton shook his left index finger at Chris Wallace during an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” denying charges he and his administration did too little to catch Osama bin Laden and ward off the 9/11 terror attacks. Leaning forward and appearing angry, Clinton said, “…at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They (the Bush administration) had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed.”

Clinton added that he authorized the CIA “to get groups together to try to kill (bin Laden).” He said he had drawn up plans to go into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and launch an attack against bin Laden after the Oct. 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni part of Aden. Clinton suggested the plan was thwarted because Uzbekistan would not grant basing rights and only did so after 9/11.

Clinton apparently is coming out about this now because of the recently aired ABC film “The Path to 9/11,” which portrayed him and his top aides as indecisive at best, and incompetent at worst, when they failed to take advantage of an opportunity to kill bin Laden. A docudrama is not necessary to counter Clinton’s claims. There is testimony from many sources that he and his administration blew chances to nail the al-Qaida mastermind.

One credible source is Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran who used to head the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden unit. Scheuer, who is referred to as “Mike” in the 9/11 Commission Report, wrote a July 5 op-ed column in The Washington Times. In it, he referred to former “terrorism czar” Richard Clarke and Clarke’s assertion in his book “Against All Enemies” that the CIA failed to put operatives in Afghanistan to kill bin Laden, relying instead on Afghan locals. Scheuer writes, “In spring 1998, I briefed Mr. Clarke and senior CIA, Department of Defense and FBI officers on a plan to kidnap bin Laden. Mr. Clarke’s reaction was that ‘it was just a thinly disguised attempt to assassinate bin Laden.’ I replied that if he wanted bin Laden dead, we could do the job quickly. Mr. Clarke’s response was that the president did not want bin Laden assassinated, and that we had no authority to do so.”

The planning and plotting by the hijackers was done on Bill Clinton’s watch and executed eight months into the Bush administration, which refused to heed warning signs that an attack was imminent. A wealth of information and evidence about the laxness of the Clinton administration can be found by Googling “Clinton failures to catch terrorists and bin Laden.” Some postings are from what might be regarded as “right-wing” Web sites, but others are from such left-wing sources as The Los Angeles Times.

In a Dec. 5, 2001 op-ed for that newspaper, Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and chairman of an investment company in New York, wrote, “President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates. … I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.”

Ijaz says that from 1996 to 1998 he opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration, including National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and Sudan’s president and national intelligence chief, “President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Iran’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.

“Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center. The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was defeaning.”

When considering whether to take Bill Clinton’s outrage seriously, it is helpful to revisit his notorious finger wagging when he forcefully denied having had sex with Monica Lewinsky. The Web site YouTube.com has juxtaposed the latest finger wagging with the previous one. Viewers can judge for themselves whether Clinton’s latest claim and blame should be believed anymore than his previous denial of extramarital sex with an intern.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Clinton Narcissism Killing the Democrats
September 27th, 2006

A funny thing happened on the way to the midterm elections: everybody started talking about Bill Clinton. Television networks, newspapers, present and former DNC chairmen, Speaker of the House wannabes, left-wing shills, you name it. For almost a solid month, the former president filled the airwaves like a new strain of influenza in the dead of winter.

What haven’t the Democrats and their media minions been talking about since summer ended? Surprisingly, the only issue that can lead them to victory six weeks from now – Iraq.

Doesn’t seem like a very wise campaign strategy, does it?

It’s My Party, I Can Lie if I Want To

It goes without saying that the most self-absorbed and narcissistic politicians ever to walk the face of this planet are Hillary and Billary Clinton, a couple that has done a better job of conning Americans than any other since Bonnie and Clyde. Yet, in all the years these two have propped themselves up as the most intelligent and important individuals ever to grace the political stage, no finer example of their self-infatuation without regard for Party has transpired than this September.

In fact, it is quite possible that their selfish and egotistical concern for his legacy and her political future is impeding any chance the Democrats have of taking over one or both chambers of Congress in November.

This pursuit of self over Party exploded the week before Labor Day when the Clintons and their useful idiot cadre decided to launch a disinformation campaign against an upcoming docudrama about events leading up to the attacks on 9/11. In reality, few Americans had likely heard about this miniseries before the Clintonistas began the firestorm. Given the beginning of the football season, viewing interest probably would have been low.

Instead, as this program depicted Clinton and his band of merry men missing a number of opportunities to catch Osama bin Laden, Hillary and Billary enlisted their troops to leave no stone unturned to discredit it. This included sending well-publicized letters to the CEO of Disney threatening him with all manner of fire and brimstone if he didn’t cancel its airing. As a result, millions tuned in to see what all the fuss was about.

Turn Out the Lights, the Party’s Over a Barrel

If one is to be truly objective, there is no question that there were parts of this miniseries that took literary license for dramatic effect too far. In fact, there are conceivably many historical errors in this presentation raising questions as to why it was so produced. After all, the subject matter was shocking enough without adding more spice to the jambalaya.

However, there was just as much license taken with the history of the Bush presidency as the Clinton years. In fact, one could easily make the case that the fictionalizations in the months prior to 9/11 were much more damaging to the current president than any depicted in the eight years of the former one. Yet, despite the numerous inaccuracies, there was nary a complaint from the White House.

But, that’s beside the point. With the midterm elections only two months away at that time, if Hillary and Billary were good Democrats, they would have ignored these fallacies, kept their eye on the ball, and focused on what was in the best interest of their Party: keeping the electorate fixated on what was going on in Iraq. Period. After all, the only chance the Democrats have this November is if enough Americans feel totally disenchanted with the war, and see this as their primary concern as they cast their ballots.

Regardless of the shifting tides that have been occurring in the past few months reducing the advantage Democrats enjoyed in the spring, there still is a solid opportunity for the left to win at least one Congressional chamber in November. Anything that interferes with this goal should be avoided by Democrats like an interview with Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity.

Sadly, that’s not the way the Clintons see the world, for they are the Democratic Party. As far as they are concerned, nobody else matters. And, as a result of their determination to prevent this docudrama from being aired, the eyes of America moved away from what was going on in Iraq, and squarely on the war on terrorism where Democrats consistently poll more poorly than Republicans.

Roll Another One, Just Like the Other One

To a large extent, the Clintonistas’ weeklong effort to discredit or cancel this television program was akin to a football team opting to kick off after winning the coin toss prior to a sudden-death overtime.

Having voluntarily relinquished control of the ball, the Clintons then incompetently allowed their opponents a huge kickoff return with this pathetic performance by Billary on Fox News Sunday. As a result, America was once again talking about Bill Clinton, Osama bin Laden, the war on terrorism, and not Iraq.

For days, the airwaves were filled with discussions surrounding this interview. DNC Chairman Howard Dean issued a statement on Monday:

President Bill Clinton fought back against the right-wing misinformation and smear campaign and stood up for the truth. President Clinton set the facts straight on his administration’s record fighting the war on terror.

Dean seems to be forgetting that Billary isn’t running for anything in November, and the Clinton legacy isn’t going to be on the minds of voters in six weeks. Frankly, the chairman of the DNC focusing any attention on the media’s portrayal of a president that hasn’t been in office for six years is emblematic of the state of disarray in this party.

The same inexplicable affliction struck former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, who told MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson Tuesday that Fox News’s Chris Wallace “is a tool of the Republican Party.” Equally hard to believe, Democrat talking heads James Carville and Paul Begala went on the Today show Tuesday to discuss – what else – Bill Clinton. The word Iraq never came up.

Like a faithful wife-for-appearances-sake, the junior senator from New York was also talking about former president Bill Clinton. And, the Drudge Report claimed that Nancy Pelosi was about to make a strong statement about Fox News’s treatment of her poor, beleaguered hero-in-chief.

This raises an important question: Have these people all lost their minds?

There’s an election in about six weeks, and Bill Clinton isn’t running. How can what he did or didn’t do with regard to Osama bin Laden and terrorism in the prior decade mean anything to voters today?

Party on, Bill; Party on, Hill

Regardless of the answer, the Clintons are laughing all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or so they hope. Hillary is a shoo-in for re-election in November. What does she care if distracting the public from the only issue the Democrats can actually win on results in another bad election year for her Party? She’ll win in a landslide, and all this revisionist history will make her look stronger as a future commander-in-chief. If Billary’s legacy is softness on bin Laden and the terror threat, her 2008 run will suffer.

As for Billary, regardless of how foolish he must have felt when this interview was taped, he’s clearly loving all this attention and imagining how it will improve posterity’s view of him.

So, in the end, the Clintons must be looking at this entire month as a huge win for their team.

However, if voters are thinking about anything other than Iraq when they go to the polls on November 7, the Democrats will once again lose, and the Republicans might have Hillary and Billary to thank.

Noel Sheppard is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He is also contributing editor for the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters.org, and a contributing writer to its Business & Media Institute. Noel welcomes feedback.


Noel Sheppard

Ellie