hy did bill clinton ignore terrorism? Was it simply the constraints of his liberal mindset, or was it something even more threatening to our national security?
To understand why clinton failed so utterly to protect America from bin Laden, we begin by examining what clinton, himself, has said on the matter:
"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in '91 and he went to the Sudan.
We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden].
At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato. They didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."
bill clinton Sunday, Aug. 11, 2002 Clinton Reveals on Secret Audio: I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer
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We note first that this is classic clinton snake oil, exploiting liberal credulousness and the gestalt concepts of structural economy and closure (the tendency to perceive incomplete forms as complete), sleight of hand that enabled clinton to tell the story of his utter failure to fight terrorism, his failure to take bin Laden from Sudan, his repeated failures to decapitate a nascent, still stoppable al Qaeda, without explicitly admitting it.
"The Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again; [so] they released him [to America]."
Note that the linkage between the above two sentences and the indirect object of the second sentence are each implied, giving clinton plausible deniability.
"[H]e had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."
This position is surprising because:
- clinton has never been one to let the rule of law get in his way.
- We now know the State Department warned clinton in July 1996 that bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven, that bin Laden sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," that bin Laden in Afghanistan "could prove more dangerous to US interests... almost worldwide."
- Bin Laden had repeatedly declared war on America, committed acts of war against America.
Clearly, the impeached ex-president treated terrorism not as war but as a law enforcement problem, which, by definition is defensive, after-the-fact and fatally-too-late.
He appears not to understand that when terrorists declare war on you
and then proceed to kill you
you are, perforce, at war. At that point, you really have only one decision to make: Do you fight the terrorists
or do you surrender?
Critical to the understanding of the clintons' (and the left's) inability to protect America from terrorism is the analysis of clinton's final phrase, "though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."
"I did not bring him [Osama bin Laden] here... though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."
This phrase is clinton's explicit rejection of both bin Laden's repeated declarations/acts of war and the (Bush) doctrine of preemption to fight terror.
This phrase underscores clinton's failure to understand that:
- a terrorist war requires only one consenting player
- the War on Terror is global and irreducible, the Left's postmodern posture notwithstanding.
- defining bin Laden's acts of war as "crimes'' is a dangerous, anachronistic, postmodern conceit (It doesn't depend on what the meaning of the word "war" is) and amounts to surrender
- preemptive action, and even more so, preventative action, serve a necessary, critically protective, as well as offensive function in any war on terror.
The sorry endpoint of this massive, 8-year clinton blunder was, of course, 9/11 and the exponential growth of al Qaeda.
- ASIDE: It is beyond farce, therefore, for Richard Clarke to exalt clinton, even as he attempts to take down Bush, who, unlike clinton, does have the vision, courage and tenacity to fight terrorism, even in the face of seditious undermining by Clarke, the power-hungry clintons and the rest of the leftist lackey accomplices.
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"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato."
Finally, this last paragraph documents the clinton propensity for passing the tough problems (and the buck) to others (while arrogating their solutions as his own). It would have been a simple matter for him to take bin Laden. Why did he turn the offer down?
The answer to this question is the answer to the overarching question.
Why did clinton ignore terrorism?
Richard Miniter's account of clinton's utter failure to combat terrorism provides a clue. (C-SPAN interview and LOSING BIN LADEN: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror)
The answer was inadvertently if somewhat obliquely provided by Madeleine Albright at the cabinet meeting that would decide the disposition of the USS Cole bombing by al Qaeda [that is to say, that would decide to do what it had always done when a "bimbo" was not spilling the beans on the clintons: Nothing]. Only Clarke wanted to retaliate militarily for this unambiguous act of war.
According to Albright, a [sham] Mideast accord would yield [if not peace for the principals, surely] a Nobel Peace Prize for clinton. Kill or capture bin Laden and clinton could kiss the accord and the Peace Prize good-bye.
- WASHINGTON -- Two Norwegian public-relations executives and one member of the Norwegian Parliament say they were contacted by the White House to help campaign for President Clinton to receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his work in trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East.
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Clinton Lobbies for Nobel Prize: What a Punk White House Lobbied For Clinton Nobel Peace Prize Updated Friday, October 13, 2000 By Rita Cosby
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- There's been speculation in the last few months that Clinton was pursuing a Mideast peace accord in an effort to win the prize and secure his legacy as president.
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AIDES PUSH CLINTON FOR THE NOBEL
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- At the time, clinton observed: "I made more progress in the Middle East than I did between Socks and Buddy." Retrospectively, it is clear that clinton's characterization was not correct.
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Mia T, Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers
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Pathologic self-interest (Nobel Gas)
If clinton liberalism, smallness, cowardice, corruption, perfidy--and, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Cuomo, clinton cluelessness--played a part, it was, in the end, the Nobel Peace Prize that produced the puerile pertinacity that enabled the clintons to shrug off terrorism's global danger.
The clintons made their decision not to go after the terrorists for reasons of their own legacy and power. The clintons reasoned that inaction would MAXIMIZE THEIR CHANCES TO RECEIVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. No matter that the inaction would also maximize the terrorists' power, maximize America's danger
- ASIDE: There was an analogous treasonous miscalculation in the clintons' mass proliferation of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology.
For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers.
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William J. Broad Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes, The New York Times, May 30, 1999
Broad would have us believe we are watching "Being There" and not "The Manchurian Candidate." His argument is superficially appealing as most reasonable people would conclude that it requires the simplemindedness of a Chauncy Gardener (in "Being There") to reason that instructing China and a motley assortment of terrorist nations on how to beef up their atom bombs and how not to omit the "key steps" when building hydrogen bombs would somehow blunt and not stimulate their appetites for bigger and better bombs and a higher position in the power food chain.
But it is Broad's failure to fully connect the dots -- clinton's wholesale release of atomic secrets, decades of Chinese money sluicing into clinton's campaigns, clinton's pushing of the test ban treaty, clinton's concomitant sale of supercomputers, and clinton's noxious legacy -- that blows his argument to smithereens and reduces his piece to just another clinton apologia by The New York Times.
But even a Times apologia cannot save clinton from the gallows. Clinton can be both an absolute (albeit postmodern) moron and a traitor. The strict liability Gump-ism, "Treason is as treason does" applies.
The idea that an individual can be convicted of the crime of treason only if there is treasonous intent or *mens rea* runs contrary to the concept of strict liability crimes. That doctrine (Park v United States, (1974) 421 US 658,668) established the principle of 'strict liability' or 'liability without fault' in certain criminal cases, usually involving crimes which endanger the public welfare.
Calling his position on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty "an historic milestone," (if he must say so himself) clinton believed that if he could get China to sign it, he would go down in history as the savior of mankind. This was 11 August 1995.
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Mia T, 2.11.04 BUSH, THE CLINTONS + WMD PROLIFERATION: The REAL "Imminent Threat"
HIROSHIMA'S NUCLEAR LESSON bill clinton is no Harry Truman
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"PAPER TIGER"
Feckless clinton inaction and feckless clinton action serve only to reinforce the almost universally held notion: the clinton calculus was, is, and always will be, solely self-serving.
It is the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening inaction to the attack on the USS Cole and the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening token, ineffectual, August 1998 missile strikes of aspirin factories and empty tents that eliminate "bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance" as the rationale for the latter decision and support "wag the dog," instead.
In the case of the non-response to the attack on the Cole, an unambiguous act of war, the clinton rationale was a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by Arab appeasement. i.e., a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by bin-Laden-emboldenment.
And in the case of the curiously-timed, ineffectual (and, therefore, bin-Laden-emboldening) token missile strikes, the clinton rationale was Lewinsky-recantation distraction -- clearly not bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance. (This is not to say there wasn't a Nobel factor here, too. Obsolete intelligence, bolstered by the redundancy of a clinton tipoff, ensured that both bin Laden and the Mideast Muslim ego would escape unscathed.)
"I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.'
I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him.
bill clinton Sunday, Sept 3, 2002 Larry King Live
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INTERVIEW Osama bin Laden
(may 1998)
- In the first part of this interview which occurred in May 1998, a little over two months before the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Osama bin Laden answers questions posed to him by some of his followers at his mountaintop camp in southern Afghanistan. In the latter part of the interview, ABC reporter John Miller is asking the questions.
Describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia.
- After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim....
The American people, by and large, do not know the name bin Laden, but they soon likely will. Do you have a message for the American people?
I say to them that they have put themselves at the mercy of a disloyal government, and this is most evident in Clinton's administration....
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BIN LADEN FINGERS CLINTON FOR TERROR SUCCESS (SEE FOOTAGE) THE THREAT OF TERRORISM IS AS CLOSE AS A CLINTON IS TO THE OVAL OFFICE
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