Posted on 05/18/2002 8:35:48 PM PDT by areafiftyone
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday she doesn't intend to "point fingers or place blame" in urging President Bush to reveal how much he knew in the weeks before the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"Are we better prepared today than we were before Sept. 11?" the former first lady said during a trip to upstate New York. "If an FBI office somewhere in America sent in a report about suspicions, how would it be treated today? Where would it go? Who would be the decision-maker?
"Those are the kinds of questions that I think we have to ask and we have to be part of. It's not just for the executive branch to do it. The Congress and the people have to know what's happening as well."
The White House singled out Mrs. Clinton in launching an attack Friday on congressional Democrats who criticized the Republican administration's handling of terrorism warnings last summer. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer accused her of trying to undermine the administration in her Senate speech Thursday in which she called on Bush to explain why he didn't make the threats public.
"The point is not to point fingers or place blame but to be sure we have learned and we are better prepared -- that's my goal," Clinton said during a visit to a car wash in the Rochester suburb of Chili to talk about the health-insurance burdens facing small businesses.
"We want to make sure we've done everything that we can and that the entire government is cooperating," she added. "It is hard, and I know this, to get the different departments and agencies all on the same page trying to move in the same direction, but we don't have any choice now. This is an imperative. Our national security, our homeland security depends on it."
The White House acknowledged that the CIA briefed Bush on Aug. 6 about an al-Qaida hijacking threat. An earlier report by an FBI field office that may never have reached Bush warned that many Middle Eastern men were training in at least one U.S. flight school.
The administration said the information was not specific and there was no intelligence before Sept. 11 that al-Qaida planned to use commercial planes as vessels of destruction.
Is she that predictable? Something to think about....
What a dumb woman ---she and her co-president are very much to blame for it all.
She heard that car wash bosses are always cool, and they sometimes let their employees act the fool...
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