"The Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden]. At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America. So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato. They didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan." bill clinton Sunday, Aug. 11, 2002 Clinton Reveals on Secret Audio: I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer
- "The instant that second plane hit, I said to the person with whom I was speaking, 'Bin Laden did this.' I knew immediately. I know what this network can do."
bill clinton
- To hear Clinton now say "We must do more to reduce the pool of potential terrorists" is thus beyond farce. He had numerous opportunities to reduce that pool, and he blew it.
A Fish Rots from the Head Investor's Business Daily
- Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.
Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize MANSOOR IJAZ December 5, 2001
isten carefully to clinton's "admission." Watch the flash movie. Diagram the sentences. It's the classic clinton snake-oil sales pitch that exploits liberal credulousness and the gestalt concepts of structural economy and closure (the tendency to perceive incomplete forms as complete). This allows clinton to tell the story of his utter failure to fight terrorism, his failure to take bin Laden from Sudan, his repeated failures, in fact, to decapitate an incipient and still stoppable al Qaeda, without explicitly admitting it.
"The Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again; [so] they released him [to America]." Note that the linkage between the above two sentences and the indirect object of the second sentence are each implied, giving clinton plausible deniability. "[H]e had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America." This position is surprising on two counts:
- clinton has never been one to allow the rule of law get in his way.
- Although bin Laden had repeatedly declared war on America during clinton's tenure, clinton treats terrorism not as a war but as a law enforcement problem, which, by definition is defensive, after-the-fact and fatally-too-late.
The impeached ex-president fails to understand that when terrorists declare war on you
and then proceed to kill you
you are, perforce, at war. At that point, you really have only one decision to make: Do you fight the terrorists
or do you surrender? Critical to the understanding of the clintons' (and Kerry's and the left's) inability to protect America from terrorism is the analysis of clinton's final phrase, "though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America." "though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America." This phrase is clinton's explicit rejection of both bin Laden's repeated declarations/acts of war and the (Bush) doctrine of preemption to fight terror. This phrase underscores clinton's failure to understand that:
- a terrorist war requires only one consenting player
- defining bin Laden's acts of war 'crimes'' is a dangerous, anachronistic, postmodern conceit (It doesn't depend on what the meaning of the word "war" is) and amounts to surrender
- preemption serves a necessary, critically protective, as well as offensive function in any war on terror.
The sorry endpoint of this massive, 8-year clinton blunder was, of course, 9/11 and the exponential growth of al Qaeda.
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"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato." Finally, this last paragraph underscores clinton's penchant for passing off the tough problems (and the buck) to others (while arrogating their solutions as his own). It would have been a simple matter for him to take bin Laden. Why did he turn the offer down? The answer was inadvertently if somewhat obliquely provided by Madeleine Albright at the cabinet meeting that would decide the disposition of the USS Cole bombing by al Qaeda [that is to say, that would decide to do what it had always done when a "bimbo" was not spilling the beans on the clintons--nothing--only Clarke wanted to retaliate militarily for this unambiguous act of war]. According to Albright, a [sham] Mideast accord would yield [, if not peace for the principals, surely] a Nobel Peace Prize for clinton [an unprincipled fraud whose only significance is the devastation that he (and his zipper-hoisted spinoff) have wreaked on America]. |