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Q ERTY6 utter failure 
\rodham-clinton reality-check 
BUMP!
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?]
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BY DICK MORRIS Tuesday, February 5, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST As the elections of 1996 loomed, a sense of crisis pervaded America. We seemed under attack from all directions by terrorists, foreign and domestic. A bomb exploded amid the Summer Olympic Games. TWA flight 800 vaporized over the Atlantic and many suspected terror. Nineteen American soldiers died and hundreds were wounded as a bomb ripped through their barracks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A year before, the federal office building in Oklahoma City was destroyed, killing hundreds more. In 1993, a bomb ripped through the World Trade Center hospitalizing a thousand people and killing six. At the White House, we held hurried meetings as we watched with worry the growth of terrorism. We polled and speculated about its possible impact on President Clinton's re-election only a few months later. Some of the president's staff and his consultants pressed the case for aggressive action to contain terror at home and attack it abroad. But at the center of the storm, Bill Clinton sat with an unusual imperturbability. Even as he fretted about whether to sign the welfare reform act and brooded about the FBI file, Paula Jones and Whitewater scandals, he seemed curiously uninvolved in the battle against terror. Advised that his place in history rested on eliminating the deficit, making welfare reform work, and smashing the international network of terrorists militarily and economically, he remained unusually passive. Around him, his foreign-policy advisers--particularly former trade lawyer Sandy Berger, then serving as deputy national security adviser--seemed to work overtime at opposing tough measures against terror. When Sen. Alfonse D'Amato pushed through legislation that sought to cripple the Iranian funding of terrorism by mandating U.S. retaliation against foreign or American companies that aided its oil industry, Mr. Berger advised a veto unless the bill were amended to allow the president to waive the sanctions. When the bill passed--with the waiver--Mr. Berger successfully blocked the implementation of sanctions in virtually every case. When Mr. Clinton was advised to pass a law requiring that driver's licenses for aliens expire when their visas do (so that a routine traffic stop could trigger the deportation process), Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and White House adviser George Stephanopoulos worked hard to kill the idea. They derided the proposal, which called for the interface of FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service data about illegal aliens, visa expirations and terrorist watch lists with state motor vehicle records, as racial profiling and warned that it might alienate Mr. Clinton's political base. Had the idea been adopted, suicide bomber Mohamed Atta would have been subject to deportation when he was stopped for driving without a license, three months before Sept. 11, 2001. President Clinton refused to adopt proposals that he establish a "president's list" of seemingly charitable groups that were really fund-raising fronts for terrorists, to warn Americans to stay away. Despite evidence from a 1993 FBI wiretap that the Homeland Foundation was raising money for the terrorist group Hamas, Mr. Clinton did not seize its assets, and the group functioned until President Bush closed it down. Despite staff and consultant recommendations that he require baggage X-ray screening, federalization of air security checkpoints, and restoration of air marshals to commercial flights, Mr. Clinton did nothing to implement any of these proposals. Vice President Al Gore also failed to embrace them when his Commission on Air Safety made its recommendations in 1997. It required Sept. 11 to get these common-sense initiatives adopted. After the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, President Clinton never visited the site and only alluded to it once in his regular Saturday radio address right after the bombing. Visiting New Jersey shortly after the attack, he urged Americans not to "overreact." After the 1993 bombing--the first attack by foreign terrorists on U.S. soil--Mr. Clinton never met privately with the head of the CIA for the ensuing two years! Because of this lack of presidential focus, the investigation proceeded so slowly that we did not know of Osama bin Laden's involvement until 1996. As a result, the U.S. turned down Sudan's offer to give us the terrorist mastermind on a silver platter because we said that we lacked evidence on which to hold him. Even when the Saudis stonewalled our investigation of the Riyadh bombing and handicapped the FBI by beheading those it suspected of involvement without permitting their interrogation, Mr. Clinton never criticized the kingdom publicly or, in my presence, privately. When advisers proposed an oil embargo against Iran, the president did nothing, despite evidence that the Riyadh bombers had Iranian backing. At the time, Iran's daily oil production of three million barrels could have been offset by an expected increase of 1.5 million barrels in world-wide production (which proved conservative). In addition, the Saudis repeatedly and publicly indicated their commitment to "price stability," signaling their willingness to increase production to help fill the shortfall and avoid a price runup. Republicans deserve their share of the blame as well. After the Oklahoma City attack, President Clinton made an eminently sensible, if somewhat limited, set of recommendations to the GOP-dominated Congress. But, because the Oklahoma City terrorists were right-wing extremists, Republicans looked askance at reasonable ideas like permitting roving wiretaps on terror suspects--subsequently adopted when Mr. Bush proposed it--and attaching tagents to identify the origin of explosives. The real question, however, is why Mr. Clinton was so tentative in the war on terror. Everything else seemed to come first. He wouldn't toughen immigration enforcement because he feared a backlash from his political base. He waived sanctions against companies doing business with Iran because he worried about European reaction. There was no effort to cut off the flow of money to terror fronts because Janet Reno raised civil libertarian concerns. (Mr. Clinton did freeze the Hamas assets, but since they didn't maintain accounts in their own name, it netted no money.) Bill Clinton revealed himself as a man of the 20th century while Mr. Bush has understood that Sept. 11, 2001, marked the beginning of a new era. In Bill Clinton's epoch, terror was primarily a criminal justice problem which must not be allowed to get in the way of the "real" foreign-policy issues--relations with Russia and China and the dynamics of the Western alliance. Indeed, if Mr. Clinton had any personal stamp on foreign policy, it was the subordination of military and security issues to economic concerns. Terrorists fit into the scheme about the same way drug traffickers did--they were deplored, to be sure, and, where possible without undue inconvenience or loss of life, even attacked. But they hardly occupied center stage in our foreign policy. Now, we all know better. Mr. Morris, a Fox News political commentator, was an adviser to President Clinton.
While Clinton Fiddled
A story of fecklessness in the face of terror.
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...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.
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