Posted on 05/20/2002 8:45:52 AM PDT by kattracks
"Clinton said he also weighed an option to bomb Khandahar because U.S intelligence had tracked bin Laden to a compound in the city. But he decided to spare the terror chief in order to avoid killing innocent Afghanis."
That clintoon is a jerk. As far as clintoon's quote in the first paragraph including the weasly "would have had," "maybe" and "if" references, he clearly never ever even seriously tried to get bin laden and al qaeda. Leaders develop action plans by arranging definites and they also set up contingency plans as backups. clintoon did not do this; his remarks show he dropped the ball by not arranging or even trying to formalize much of anything.
In the second paragraph I copied above, clintoon shows that the very real 224 innocent civilian casualties from the African Embassy bombings were less important to clintoon than was the possibility that Afghan civilians might perish in a forceful seige against bin laden. Well, I can certainly see why there are those who might say that some of the blood of the victims of both the U.S.S. Cole bombing and 911 lays squarely on clintoon.
"As far as we knew, he never went back to his (Khost) training camp," Clinton told the Long Island crowd. "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.
I thought his story was that he missed him "by that much" (a la Maxwell Smart). So now the story is that he never intended to kill him in the first place. I guess either way the Shlickmeister looks like an incompetent buffoon. Depending on his version he either made a weak attempt to take out Osama without the proper preparation or he made a very weak "show" for public consumption with absolutely zero strategic objectives.
That is the problem with Slick and his administration. It was amature hour from the git go. He never knew how to govern, only to campaign and his governing style was ad hoc, just like a campaign.
No wonder he was so furious when Billy done blowed it up.
Spare me your dingbat theorizing Di.
Clinton discounts 1999 report By B.J. REYES Associated Press
HONOLULU - Former President Clinton said Friday he knew about the dangerous potential of Osama bin Laden but discounted reports that a 1999 analysis should have alerted his administration to a terrorist attack on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The analysis warned that members of bin Laden's al-Qaida organization could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon on suicide missions.
"That has nothing to do with intelligence," said Clinton, who was in Hawaii on a two-day stopover en route to East Timor. "All that says is they used public sources to speculate on what bin Laden might do.
"Let me remind you that's why I attacked his training camp and why I asked the Pakistanis to go get him, and why we contracted with some people in Afghanistan to go get him, because we thought he was dangerous," he said. "But that's not the same thing as having intelligence about specific things."
The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened.
"That was a report by a congressional research service and the Library of Congress using public information and it basically says he's a dangerous guy that might do a lot of things," Clinton said. "So we tried to get him. That doesn't have anything to do with what the intelligence people, the CIA or the FBI, tell the administration.
"That's why I did everything I could to get bin Laden, because I thought he was a dangerous man," he said. "And as we've seen, he is."
Why doesn't the MEDIA just ask him that one simple question?
By the way, somebody should remind Feinstein that the embassy bombings preceded the Monica Missiles. Bin Laden had already decided to go after America.
Wasn't Vernon Jordan involved in that case?
Wonder how long it will take for the media to take this next "logical" (sarcasm for the imapired) step?
He did......but choose Serbia as a target instead of Khandahar....the rotten no good scumsucking ba$tard.
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