While Clinton diddled

While Clinton diddled The record doesn't lie. The former president had repeated warnings and wake-up calls, but he failed to protect the country against the growing danger of Islamic terrorism. Part 1 of a debate.

Jan. 9, 2002 | To raise the question of former President Bill Clinton's record on terrorism in the wake of Sept. 11 is to invite a chorus of disapproval. For bringing the subject up, you will be accused of pathological "Clinton hatred," a vendetta, and so on and so forth. Whatever. Let's just go to the tape, shall we? What follows is a chronology of Bill Clinton's response to terrorism, as reported and compiled by major news organizations, in particular the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Sunday Times and the New Yorker. I cite nothing here that isn't already in the public record. Any defense of Clinton has to deal with these facts. So deal with them.

Clinton got his warning about Islamist terrorism very early on. Almost as soon as he got into office, terrorists struck at the World Trade Center in New York. Six people were killed and hundreds injured. Although the investigation found links to Osama bin Laden and a burgeoning network of Islamist terrorists, no commensurate response from the United States was unearthed by any of the major newspapers investigating the record. Was the danger conveyed to the president? "Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Leon Panetta told the New York Times. The president preferred to focus on the economy. "In retrospect, the wake-up call should have been the 1993 World Trade Center bombing," Michael Sheehan, counter-terrorism coordinator at the Clinton State Department, conceded to the New York Times. Some immigration laws were tightened marginally. But that was it. Why wasn't the threat taken more seriously? According to George Stephanopoulos, the White House ignored the implications of the first WTC attack because "it wasn't a successful bombing." Clinton never even paid a visit to the site.

If six dead and hundreds more injured were not enough to galvanize the new commander in chief, neither was the murder of 18 American soldiers in Somalia shortly afterward. The State Department confirmed that bin Laden had helped train the terrorists who killed these soldiers and dragged the body of one through the streets of Mogadishu. Clinton did nothing to retaliate after the incident, blamed Gen. Colin Powell privately for the mess and, indeed, according to administration sources, learned from the fracas only the importance of staying out of dangerous foreign entanglements. For his part, bin Laden learned that the United States was not serious about countering the public murder of its own soldiers abroad or civilians at home.

By the end of Clinton's first term, the government began to stir. The CIA finally set up a special unit to monitor al-Qaida. In the years since 1993, the network had gained traction and organization in its African client state of Sudan. Then the administration got an amazingly lucky break. The Sudanese government offered to hand over bin Laden to the United States, just as it had handed over Carlos the Jackal to the French in 1994. The Sudanese also offered to provide the United States with a massive intelligence file on al-Qaida's operations in Sudan and around the world. Astonishingly, the Clinton administration turned the offer down. They argued that there was no solid legal proof to indict bin Laden in the United States. This was despite the fact that internal government documents had fingered bin Laden for ties to the first WTC bombing, the murders in Mogadishu and the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen. For all this, the administration still viewed al-Qaida as a matter for domestic civil and criminal law enforcement. Instead of seizing the terrorist, the administration wanted Saudi Arabia or some other third party to seize him. The Saudis demurred. "In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia,'" a Sudanese negotiator told the Washington Post. "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.'" The administration didn't even use the negotiations with the Sudanese to disable bin Laden's financial assets in the Sudan. He was able to transfer them to his new base, where he used them essentially to buy the Taliban regime.

Within a month, al-Qaida struck again in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers with a 5,000-pound bomb. Even senior Clinton officials concede that allowing bin Laden to go free was a massive mistake. "Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference," a "U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counterterrorism," told the Washington Post last October. "We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11." Read that sentence again: We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11. That's from someone working in the Clinton administration.

Blame-and-Bash-Clinton Media Misses A Few 'Inconvenient' Facts

Kim Sayers helen_wheels1@yahoo.com

The Blame-and-Bash-Clinton mentality is standard fare in today's consolidated corporate right-wing media. However, there are a few facts the partisans conveniently fail to mention.

First, and most important, the worst terrorist attacks in our nation's history occurred during George W. Bush's occupation of the White House--after he had been in office for the better part of a year. Despite repeated warnings from Israel's Mossad and intelligence agencies from Egypt and Jordan weeks before the attacks, as well as urgent warnings early last spring from the Hart-Rudman commission, our current leader did absolutely nothing to prevent them.

In fact, while the terrorists were plotting the final details of the attacks, George W. Bush dismissed the warnings, assigned the matter to Dick Cheney for "more study" and spent the entire month of August on fundraising junkets and on vacation at his Texas ranch while Cheney vacationed in Wyoming and Colorado.

The Clinton administration's 1996 and 1998 anti-terrorism bills were gutted by congressional Republicans who were far more interested in causing distractions and in bringing down the presidency than in protecting our country from terrorist attacks. They played the dirtiest of politics and weakened the country in the process.

Clinton signed an order to kill Osama bin Laden in 1998. Clinton also launched cruise missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan, missing bin Laden by only a few hours. Instead of praising Clinton for trying to eradicate bin Laden, Republicans called the attacks on the Sudan and Afghanistan "wagging the dog."

Never mind that the film "Wag the Dog" was written about the George H.W. Bush Gulf War and the bogus PR campaign of lies that was used to sell the American public on supporting the war. Reagan's and Bush's Ambassador to Bahrain, Sam Zakhem, was charged with income tax evasion and failure to register as a foreign agent for the part he played in raising those funds. This of course did not stop Zakhem from fundraising in the Mideast for the George W. Bush presidential campaign in late 1999.

From the Bush campaign in 2000 we heard again and again about how the Clinton administration had supposedly decimated the armed forces, and that they were unprepared to fight for our country. The attack on the Cole occurred almost immediately after Bush started making irresponsible campaign speeches about how "decimated" our military force is.

The Bush plan to increase military spending had not gone into effect at the time of the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., yet we have been able to quite effectively and successfully wage war in Afghanistan--and in a much more timely manner than when we prepared for the Gulf War.

Unprepared? Low morale? There is no evidence of it now nor was there in 2000. The military took a quantum leap under Clinton. While "smart bombs" were available during the Gulf War, 98% of all bombs were still dumb, and the targeting system was still largely inaccurate. In Afghanistan, most bombs were smart. What does that mean? It means a plane can hit its target from 40,000 feet where anti-aircraft weapons can't reach it. Even our stockpile of dumb bombs were retrofitted to the newer technology.

One has to wonder how much more progress could have been made if Clinton had not had to deal with an obstructionist partisan Congress. Republicans and the consolidated corporate right-wing media were busy prying into the sordid details of Clinton's private life under the guise of a Whitewater investigation while Clinton was busy trying to find bin Laden.

What kind of integrity does the American media have for "reporting" (I use that word loosely) on nothing but Clinton's private sex life for two years while ignoring substantial evidence that terrorists were plotting to kill thousands of us? What kind of integrity did the Republican-controlled Congress have when they ignored national security to consume themselves with a petty partisan witch hunt?

Shame on them all. In the absence of an atrocity like Sept. 11, the American people, Congress, and the international community -- including the Europeans -- would not have supported a full-scale attack on Afghanistan. Nothing demonstrates this so graphically as the refusal by the Republican-controlled Congress to support the administration's attempts to eliminate al Quaeda and bin Laden, or to fund or support the Clinton administration's anti-terrorism legislation.

Clinton-bashers are so consumed by their hatred that they will not acknowledge the eight years of prosperity our nation enjoyed, his unprecedented success with the deficit, and his monumental contributions to peacekeeping efforts in the Mideast, Africa, Bosnia and Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Bush's biggest campaign contributors from Enron met secretly and illegally with Dick Cheney to mold federal energy policy and are enjoying quid pro quo political appointments to the Bush administration despite having scandalously bilked the public--consumers in California and deceived investors alike.

Bush has not been held accountable for his more than 1 1/2 years of AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, his lies about his arrest record, lies about his insider trading, lies by omission about his drug use, or his apparent perjury in his testimony about his involvement in the Texas Funeralgate lawsuit.

Indeed, rather than hold the Saudis responsible for their complicity in funding al Quaeda, Bush arranged to have bin Laden's brothers safely and quickly escorted out of the country--no doubt repaying them for their family's generous investments in his failed oil company.

Lucky for Bush that the Independent Prosecutor law expired!

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