Posted on 10/01/2001 12:24:07 PM PDT by Mia T
Political Left Beginning to Finger clinton for Terrorists' Success
clinton through Rose-colored glasses...
|
...The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face and, if the errors are to be rectified, it is essential to acknowledge what went wrong. Two questions come to mind: how was it that the Osama Bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly, for good reasons. There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness that Tuesday is already slowing the capacity to bring Bin Laden to justice by constricting military and diplomatic options. And with a president just a few months in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus. Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries...ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled? The most plausible answer is that nobody has been fired because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in America's security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Bin Laden already attacked American embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been completely frank about his war. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Same guy, same building. ... The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively, was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: Warren Christopher, the clueless, stately former secretary of state; Anthony Lake, the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but, above all, former president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to military and security matters now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter. Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks."It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that.
Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after Bin Laden struck again at US embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly. He responded with a couple of missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which seriously impacted on Osama Bin Laden... If the security manager of a nuclear power plant presides over a massive external attack on it, then it's only right that he should be held responsible, in part, for what happened. More than 6,000 families are now living with the deadly consequences of the negligence of the government of the United States. There is no greater duty for such a government than the maintenance of national security, and the protection of its own citizens. When a senior Clinton official can say of his own leader that he "spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory", and when this administration is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting... We thought for a long time that the Clinton years would be seen, in retrospect, as a mixed blessing. He was sleazy and unprincipled, we surmised, but he was also competent, he led an economic recovery, and he conducted a foreign policy of multilateral distinction. But the further we get away from the Clinton years, the more damning they seem. The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of an America absent without leave in the world was fomented from the top. The boom at the end of the decade turned out to include a dangerous bubble that the administration did little to prevent. The "peace-making" in the Middle East and Ireland merely intensified the conflicts. The sex and money scandals were not just debilitating in themselves - they meant that even the minimal attention that the Clinton presidency paid to strategic military and intelligence work was skimped on. We were warned. But we were coasting. And the main person primarily entrusted with correcting that delusion, with ensuring America's national security - the president - was part of the problem. Through the dust clouds of September 11, and during the difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage - and that is Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker with each passing day.
|
by Mia T New York, Sept. 21 -- In an O'Reilly Factor interview immediately following President Bush's address to Congress tonight, Bill Maher, loyal clinton lackey, correctly fingered bill clinton as the proximate cause of the 9-11 terrorist attack on New York and Washington. Maher specifically implicated clinton's feckless, cowardly bombing of the terrorists from three miles high, implying that clinton bombed from that distance because he was fearful that casualties would cost him popularity in the polls. In a fog of delusion and illogic, however, Maher then incorrectly proceeded to place the ultimate blame for the attacks on the American people, arguing that because clinton was "a poll-driven president" he was only following the people's wishes. Maher does not seem to understand that he has it exactly backwards, that it is a leader's responsibility to shape opinion, that clinton's failure to lead was a symptom of clinton's overriding egomania, cowardice, fecklessness and depravity, that clinton's failure to lead was precisely the first efficient cause of the terrorists' success.
|
|
|
Chris Matthews: Clinton never had shot at greatness/never got opportunity Bush was given Tuesday
|
Bush: "I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." Washington and the liberal media may be getting the message: George Bush is for real and he's no Mr. Nice Guy when it comes to war. Even Newsweek's Howard Fineman, a liberal Bush-basher, has had to do a double take this week. Writing in his column of an Oval office meeting with four U.S. Senators -- including Hillary Rodham -- Fineman described Bush "relaxed and in control." Fineman, drawing a comparison with Winston Churchill's defiance during World War II, quoted the president as telling the Senators: "When I take action," he said, "I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." No doubt, Hillary must have shuddered when she heard that, a clear hit on her husband's eight years of appeasement with terrorists and their backers. Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff [ASIDE: Have you noticed that as of the morning of 9-11-01, hillary clinton's "best memory" informs her--and she is quick to inform us -- that she was not "co-president" after all?] |
|
|
"I was purposely impeached to defend the Constitution---to save the Republic too."
They had his profile(ugh shot)...the one they are going to put on the new dollar bill---in dogpatch...lil abner/daisy mae!
- Silence becomes him
- Paul Greenberg (back to story)
- October 4, 2001
It was good to see George W. Bush's predecessor rallying with the rest of America to support the commander-in-chief in these tense times, but we do wish Bill Clinton would avoid discussing issues of national security. Loose lips still sink ships, and they can also down airplanes and destroy tall buildings.
When the former president was asked about a report that he'd authorized an attempt to take out Osama bin Laden after American embassies were destroyed in Kenya and Tanzania back in 1998, Mr. Clinton not only confirmed the report, but couldn't resist the temptation to present his administration's record in the best light.
It's a record he might not want to shine too much light on. Because as president, he mainly only talked against terrorism. ("America will never tolerate terrorism. ... Defeating these organized forces of destruction is one of the most important challenges our country faces.") The talk was never matched by policy -- at least not a determined, focused, consistent policy. To call it a weak policy would be to overstate its strength; it was showy but pitiful.
To quote Paul Bremer, who chaired the National Commission on Terrorism back in the '90s, "The Clinton administration basically had a very episodic approach to fighting terrorism. And then it acted essentially in a feckless fashion, particularly in 1998 when Clinton used words about a long war and his action was to send a couple of cruise missiles to destroy a couple of mud huts in Afghanistan." He also blew up an empty factory in Khartoum. The plant was supposed to be connected with Osama bin Laden, but in the end the Clinton administration didn't even contest the owner's claims when he came for his assets in court.
As The New York Times' Michael Gordon pointed out, there was no risk to American personnel in this kind of long-distance war against terrorism, but there was little risk to the terrorists, either.
"We did what we thought we could," Bill Clinton now tells NBC. "I made it clear that we should take all necessary action to try to apprehend (Osama bin Laden) and get him. We never had another chance where the intelligence was as reliable to justify military action."
Rather than make excuses, a simple No Comment would have sufficed. Indeed, it would have shown an appropriate modesty on the part of a president who, when it comes to terrorism, has much to be modest about. Which becomes clear when one reviews the low points of the Clinton administration's war on terrorism, which wasn't much of one. The Clinton crew dropped the ball from the beginning, when one of its first decisions was to downgrade the State Department's office of counter-terrorism.
The Clinton administration also responded to Saddam Hussein's attempt to assassinate President George Bush with a barrage of cruise missiles. They hit the headquarters of Saddam's intelligence agency -- in the middle of the night. (When it came to bombing terrorists, this commander-in-chief was Hell on empty buildings.)
Barred from running for president again, Bill Clinton seems to be running for ex-president, burnishing his record whenever he can and sometimes just inventing it. He would do better to follow Jimmy Carter's example by simply doing good deeds; Mr. Carter has been so exemplary at it that a lot of us have just about forgotten his failed presidency.
Let it be noted that Congress did pass some strong and needed legislation against terrorist organizations during the '90s, but often enough over the Clinton administration's opposition. Unfortunately, that administration then failed to enforce those laws with anything like consistent rigor. It played up to terrorist regimes like Iran's and made excuses for Yasser Arafat even after the Palestinian leader had unleashed his bomb-throwers. A month after Camp David had collapsed, the Pollyannas in the Clinton White House were still looking for ways to appease the man who had resurrected terrorism as an instrument of policy in the Middle East.
But the most telling action Bill Clinton took against terrorists, or rather for them, was to offer clemency to 16 convicted Puerto Rican bombers, part of the group that had waged a nine-year war in Puerto Rico and on the mainland. Their toll: six killed and 70 wounded in more than 70 bombings. In offering these terrorists clemency, Bill Clinton overruled the recommendations of his FBI director (which he did with some regularity) and various law enforcement officers.
That he chose to confer clemency on this homicidal bunch while his spouse was angling for Puerto Rican votes in New York's Senate race only added to the injury -- and insult.
George W. Bush can also be criticized for the state of the country's defenses against terrorism during his brief months in the Oval Office before September 11, 2001. But he doesn't ask for it by trying to defend his record. Since September 11th, he's had other things to do, and has been doing them rather well. He's been too busy and too focused to make excuses for what went before -- an omission that would become another president just now. Save it for your memoirs, Bill.
©2001 Tribune Media Services
The thought of someone 'fingering' BillieBlobSlick is more than I can take following a lovely Sunday supper.
Accordingly, I snapped a shot of my close friend hurling his cookies, just to make everybody else just as sick.
Please no email on the picture. I do limit it's usage to only the 'as needed' basis. Now is such a time. Close your eyeballs, should you not like it.
My identical twin brother, first seen atop the WTC, agrees with everything I type, sort of my human truth syrum.
Slop lecker!
The vermin who perpetrated this act of war are responsible.
Justice to the clintons may be delayed, but justice to the animals will soon be done.
5.56mm
Bump!
Enlighten us some more. I love your comments and your brilliant use of the computer!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.