Disagree. He lost his composure. He can play to his fans, but he came off crazy and out of control.
ABC News even reported that Janet Reno too turned down the 911 mastermind:
"Federal agents seeking bin Laden had developed a plan to have a plane fly in and attack a compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the terror leader was believed to have been holed up back in 1998 — three years before the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But when the plan went up the chain of command for approval, it was killed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno. 'They came to the decision that this plan was probably too dangerous, that the loss of life on the ground would have been significant,' (former FBI agent Jack) Cloonan said. 'There was concern that people around the bin Laden compound would be killed.'"
Clinton himself-- At a February 2002 business luncheon in New York, Clinton said this:
"Mr. Bin Laden used to live in Sudan ... And we’d been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again. They released him. 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."
Clinton: CIA Nixed My Plans to Get bin Laden
Ex-President Bill Clinton said Thursday morning that the Central Intelligence Agency scuttled his plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden - even though he had already approved the missions. "I had approved in general three other operations against bin Laden," Clinton said during an AOL online interview about his new book, "My Life." "And the CIA came back and said the evidence is insufficient to think that he was at the sites we were going to bomb." [More below...]
"So they recommended we not do it and we took their recommendation," he added, in remarks that contradict an earlier account he gave in a February 2002 address about those operations. Just five months after the 9/11 attacks, Clinton said the primary reason he didn't give the order to attack bin Laden after an initial failed airstrike in 1998 was that he didn't want to violate the airspace of Middle Eastern nations and that he feared the collateral damage would be too great.
"Now, if you look back - in the hindsight of history, everybody's got 20/20 vision - the real issue is, should we have attacked the al-Qaeda network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan," Clinton told the Long Island Association in February 2002. "Here's the problem. Before September 11 we would have had no support for it - no allied support and no basing rights. So we actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this. We trained people. "But in order to do it, we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat - maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval. And we would have had to do a refueling stop." In the same speech, Clinton said he decided against another mission to get bin Laden because he feared it would kill innocent women and children. "Now, I had one other option.
I could have bombed or sent more missiles in. As far as we knew he never went back to his training camp. So the only place bin Laden ever went that we knew was occasionally he went to Khandahar, where he always spent the night in a compound that had 200 women and children. "So I could have, on any given night, ordered an attack that I knew would kill 200 women and children that had less than a 50 percent chance of getting him." Clinton all but admitted that in hindsight, he made the wrong call: "Now, after he murdered 3,100 of our people and others who came to our country seeking their livelihood, you may say, 'Well, Mr. President, you should have killed those 200 women and children.' "But at the time," he insisted, "we didn't think he had the capacity to do that. And no one thought that I should do that. Although I take full responsibility for it."
On Thursday, however, Clinton said others were responsible for bungling the hunt for bin Laden. "There's not a shred of evidence that I denied either the military or the intelligence services of our country anything when they were after the terrorists in general and bin Laden in particular," he told AOL. "I gave them the full authority to proceed and to do whatever we could. And I wish we'd been successful in getting him."
You gotta be kidding. I can't believe the posts on this board. If nothing, BJ is a master politician and he's coming on FoxNews for his 1st interview and you don't think he knows his going to be asked the question about his actions (or lack thereof) in the run-up to 9/11?
He had to know that he was going to get asked questions similar to what he was asked (particularly on FN) and he was prepared to react exactly as he did -IMHO..
That he didn't get our vote of approval was a going-in given, but to his fans he did not come off as cracy or out of control and they will love him for it and Hillary will be the beneficiary...