Dick Morris on this matter:
The attack by Bill Clinton and his allies on the upcoming ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11" is "outrageous," charges former Clinton aide Dick Morris.
As NewsMax has reported, Bill Clinton through his surrogates have demanded that ABC "correct all errors" in the docudrama or pull it from the air, charging that it is a "fictitious rewriting of history" regarding President Clinton's handling of the terrorist threat.
But Morris claims that Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and the president himself "were both responsible for failing to catch or kill bin Laden on several different occasions."
Morris has served Clinton as an advisor for twenty years and notably as Clinton's senior campaign strategist during his 1996 re-election.
Morris states that the evidence for this failure is documented in the 9/11 Commission's report and summarized in "Because He Could," the book about Clinton that Morris co-authored with his wife Eileen McGann.
The commission's report, released in the summer of 2004, "highlighted the weak, incompetent, hesitant, and inconsistent attempts of the Clinton administration to kill or capture Osama bin Laden," according to the book, which devotes an entire chapter to Clinton's mishandling of the threat.
"The report's account shows the president and his advisers at their worst."
One time, the United States "canceled an attempt to kidnap bin Laden out of concern that we might injure or kill him and be accused of using assassination as a policy tool," Morris told NewsMax.
"The president had yet to make a finding that it was OK to kill bin Laden. The reason he had not is that he did not yet know bin Laden's connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The reason he did not know that is that he did not fast-track the investigation.
"A second time, we did fire missiles but alerted the Pakistani military to our plans and they tipped off bin Laden, and he escaped."
According to the commission's report, the United States alerted Pakistan because the missiles targeting bin Laden, who was in Afghanistan, had to cross Pakistan, and U.S. officials did not want Pakistan to think the missiles came from India.
"A third time, our plans to attack by missile were canceled, partially out of chagrin over having missed him before and partially because we had just bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by mistake and were worried about being called trigger happy," said Morris.
"The president was also concerned about civilian deaths in any such attack.
"The underlying theme of the ABC coverage, that he was distracted by impeachment, is of course true. But more so, he was gun-shy" because he was afraid conservatives would say he had launched a failed attack "in an effort to 'wag the dog' and distract people from the Monica Lewinsky affair."
Morris concluded: "His fear of such attacks on him inhibited him from acting."
Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:
1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.
2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.
3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.
4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.
6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.
7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.
8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.
9. Did not take an opportunity to take into custody two al Qaeda operatives involved in the East African embassy bombings. In another little scoop, I am able to show that Sudan arrested these two terrorists and offered them to the FBI. The Clinton administration declined to pick them up and they were later allowed to return to Pakistan.
10. Ordered an ineffectual, token missile strike against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.
12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.
15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.
16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.