Posted on 09/26/2006 2:32:49 PM PDT by excludethis
President Bush dismissed as "finger-pointing" criticism from his predecessor Bill Clinton of his counter-terrorism efforts in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Clinton, angrily defending his own administration's attempts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, had accused the Bush administration of doing far less to stop the al Qaeda leader before the 2001 hijack plane attacks.
Bush, who is trying to stave off a Democratic takeover of Congress in November, seemed to bristle when asked about Clinton, only to sidestep his assertions.
"We'll let history judge all the different finger-pointing and all that business. I don't have enough time to finger-point," he said at a news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
"I've got to do my job," he added, "and that is to protect the American people from further attacks."
Bush spoke two days after "Fox News Sunday" aired a heated interview in which Clinton defended steps he took after al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and faulted criticism by "right-wingers" of his efforts to capture bin Laden.
"They had eight months to try, they did not try," Clinton said of the Bush administration response. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred almost eight months after Bush succeeded Clinton.
Clinton also said when his term ended he left the new Republican administration "battle plans" for going into Afghanistan, overthrowing the Taliban and launching a full-scale search for bin Laden.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disputed Clinton's statement. "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," she told the New York Post.
Asked about Clinton's comments, Bush said, "I've watched all the finger-pointing and namings of names and all that stuff. Our objective is to secure the country. We've had investigations. We had the 9/11 commission, we've had the look-back this, we had the look-back that."
Bush also said it was "preposterous" for opponents of his Iraq war strategy to call for a swift U.S. troop withdrawal.
He has sought to rally public support for the unpopular Iraq war by framing it as an extension of the "war on terrorism" he declared after the Sept. 11 attacks. Many Democrats say Iraq is a distraction from the broader fight.
*smirk*
Bush did a good job on this, but someone should be pointing fingers at Clinton for trying to censor a tv program because Clinton didn't like the content. The Clinton bunch has come about as close as possible to announcing that only the truth as they see it will be published when the marxists, I mean democrats, come to power.
Really an amazingly ignorant thing to say about a President who is responsible for more dead Islamic Fascists then all the rabid whiners combined ever will account for.
Bush handled this just right.
The rest of us can comment on the Klintoon's meltdown just fine.
Remember the Slickster hangin' around Ground Zero after 9-11, just looking for someone to comfort? He was apparently walking up and hugging everybody in an ateempt to be part of it. I guess he'd appointed himself Comforter in Chief as he could no longer be Commander in Chief. Probably got in a cheap feel or two while he was at it....
Good post. OOOORAH!
He smirked right at ya, MurderMom. If you looked close enough, he also flipped the bird too.
is there any video of that? Do you remember what channel he said that on?
Eaaaaasy.
This post and my comment is not about how many dead islamic fascist he has killed. It's about how he is finally fighting back against the lame stream media and the clintonistas politically driven charges.
If 9/11 had happened while the Rats were in charge:
-- we would STILL be at the UN trying to convince the Russians and the Chinese to agree to sanctions on the Taliban government of Afghanistan.
-- European groups and US leftists would be protesting in the streets that the sanctions on Afghanistan would lead to the deaths of many Afghan children.
--The sanctions would prove ineffective anyway, since Afghanistan does not have a modern economy and much of Afghanistan's economy is based on illicit trading of the opiate harvest.
--The administration would be trying to get indictments against bin Laden and the Taliban in the US Federal Court in SDNY. The Taliban will claim they are innocent since the hijackers were Saudis.
--Europeans would demand that the Americans make their case against the Taliban and bin Laden in the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands. There would be a lengthy debate in the US between left and right about whether to do so.
--Sanctions against Iraq would finally be lifted at the insistence of the Russians and the Chinese, and with the support of European and US leftist public opinion on the grounds that Iraqi children are the ones paying the price. After France pulls out of the No-Fly patrols, Britain eventually does as well, and then US then throws in the towel. Saddam would restart his WMD programs.
That's probably true.
That doesn't sound like the kind of comment he would make with a "smirk" just in case you haven't been paying attention the last 5-1/2 years (or in case your vision has been obstructed by your blind hatred for GWB).
He had his opportunity, it was OKC.
You can't drive people nuts who are already nuts.
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!
Perfect. Borrowing a line from ol' Slick Willie who loved to say "I get up to go to work for the American people every day."
Classic back in your face in your own words.
"You can't drive people nuts who are already nuts."
You can certainly set them all atwitter for political gain, though.
Wow...pretty decent 'above the fray' slam there. Well done Mr. President.
And You, Sir, had 8--read my lips: E-I-G-H-T--years to break up all the terrorists' planning and teamwork that was going on during the '90s....
...but you didn't [in the CORRECT fashion, that is].
The real Clinton emerges From behind the benign fa�ade and the tranquilizing smile, the real Bill Clinton emerged Sunday during Chris WallaceÂs interview on Fox News Channel. There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know  the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation. Clinton jabbed his finger in WallaceÂs face, poking his knee, and invading the commentatorÂs space. But beyond noting the ex-presidentÂs non-presidential style, it is important to answer his distortions and misrepresentations. His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the Âdefinition of Âis is could perform. Clinton told Wallace, ÂThere is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down. Nobody said there was. The point of citing Somalia in the run up to 9-11 is that bin Laden told Fortune Magazine in a 1999 interview that the precipitous American pullout after Black Hawk Down convinced him that Americans would not stand up to armed resistance. Clinton said conservatives Âwere all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after the attack which killed American soldiers. But the real question was whether Clinton would honor the militaryÂs request to be allowed to stay and avenge the attack, a request he denied. The debate was not between immediate withdrawal and a six-month delay. (Then-first lady, now-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) favored the first option, by the way). The fight was over whether to attack or pull out eventually without any major offensive operations. The president told Wallace, ÂI authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill bin Laden. But actually, the 9-11 Commission was clear that the plan to kidnap Osama was derailed by Sandy Berger and George Tenet because Clinton had not yet made a finding authorizing his assassination. They were fearful that Osama would die in the kidnapping and the U.S. would be blamed for using assassination as an instrument of policy. Clinton claims Âthe CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible [for the Cole bombing] while I was there. But he could replace or direct his employees as he felt. His helplessness was, as usual, self-imposed. Why didnÂt the CIA and FBI realize the extent of bin LadenÂs involvement in terrorism? Because Clinton never took the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center sufficiently seriously. He never visited the site and his only public comment was to caution against Âover-reaction. In his pre-9/11 memoirs, George Stephanopoulos confirms that he and others on the staff saw it as a Âfailed bombing and noted that it was far from topic A at the White House. Rather than the full-court press that the first terror attack on American soil deserved, Clinton let the investigation be handled by the FBI on location in New York without making it the national emergency it actually was. In my frequent phone and personal conversations with both Clintons in 1993, there was never a mention, not one, of the World Trade Center attack. It was never a subject of presidential focus. Failure to grasp the import of the 1993 attack led to a delay in fingering bin Laden and understanding his danger. This, in turn, led to our failure to seize him when Sudan evicted him and also to our failure to carry through with the plot to kidnap him. And, it was responsible for the failure to Âcertify him as the culprit until very late in the Clinton administration. The former president says, ÂI worked hard to try to kill him. If so, why did he notify Pakistan of our cruise-missile strike in time for them to warn Osama and allow him to escape? Why did he refuse to allow us to fire cruise missiles to kill bin Laden when we had the best chance, by far, in 1999? The answer to the first question  incompetence; to the second  he was paralyzed by fear of civilian casualties and by accusations that he was wagging the dog. The 9/11 Commission report also attributes the 1999 failure to the fear that we would be labeled trigger-happy having just bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake. President Clinton assumes that criticism of his failure to kill bin Laden is a Ânice little conservative hit job on me. But he has it backwards. It is not because people are right-wingers that they criticize him over the failure to prevent 9/11. It was his failure to catch bin Laden that drove them to the right wing. The ex-president is fully justified in laying eight months of the blame for the failure to kill or catch bin Laden at the doorstep of George W. Bush. But he should candidly acknowledge that eight years of blame fall on him. One also has to wonder when the volcanic rage beneath the surface of this would-be statesman will cool. When will the chip on his shoulder finally disappear? When will he feel sufficiently secure in his own legacy and his own skin not to boil over repeatedly in private and occasionally even in public?
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