Posted on 08/07/2002 4:17:33 PM PDT by Republican_Strategist
Flatly contradicting Time magazine's claims this week that his administration turned over workable plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden to the Bush White House, ex-President Clinton confessed earlier this year that his administration's plans had a "high probability" of failure.
Clinton's made the stunning admission during a February address to a New York business group, which, apparently, Time declined to cover.
But NewsMax.com was there.
As our exclusive audiotape of the Clinton speech makes clear, the ex-president decided not to implement his own administration's plans to attack al-Qaeda before 9-11 - not because of the impending presidential election (as Time claims) - but because he thought such an attack wouldn't work.
Since the audio is less than broadcast quality, NewsMax has transcribed Clinton's pertinent remarks below. Listen to the audio cut while reading along - and discover what the liberal press doesn't want you to know about Time's dubious report:
Remarks of Ex-President Bill Clinton to the Long Island Association Woodbury, N.Y. Feb. 15, 2002
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.
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.
And we would have had to make the decision in advance that's the reverse of what President Bush made - and I agreed with what he did. They basically decided - this may be frustrating to you now that we don't have bin Laden. But the president had to decide after Sept. 11, which am I going to do first: just go after bin Laden or get rid of the Taliban?
He decided to get rid of the Taliban. I personally agree with that decision, although it may or may not have delayed the capture of bin Laden. Why?
Because, first of all the Taliban was the most reactionary government on earth and there was an inherent value in getting rid of them.
Secondly, they supported terrorism and we'd send a good signal to governments that if you support terrorism and they attack us in America, we will hold you responsible.
Thirdly, it enabled our soldiers and Marines and others to operate more safely in-country as they look for bin Laden and the other senior leadership, because we'd have had to have gone in there to just sort of clean out one area, try to establish a base camp and operate.
So for all those reasons the military recommended against it. There was a high probability that it wouldn't succeed.
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.
Now, after he murdered 3100 or our people and others who came to our country seeking their livelihood you may say, "Well, Mr. President, you should have killed those young women and children."
But at the time 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. You need to know that those are the two options I had. And there was less than a 50/50 chance that the intelligence was right that on this particular night he was in Afghanistan.
Now, we did do a lot of things. We tried to get the Pakistanis to go get him. They could have done it and they wouldn't. They changed governments at the time from Mr. Sharif to President Musharraf. And we tried to get others to do it. We had a standing contract between the CIA and some groups in Afghanistan authorizing them and paying them if they should be successful in arresting (unintelligible).
So I tried hard to - I always thought this guy was a big problem. And apparently the options I had were the options that the President and Vice President Cheney and Secretary Powell and all the people that were involved in the Gulf War thought that they had, too, during the first eight months that they were there - until Sept. 11 changed everything.
But I did the best I could with it and I do not believe, based on what options were available to me, that I could have done any more than I did. Obviously, nobody has been successful. I tried a lot of different ways to get bin Laden cause I always thought he was a very dangerous man. He's (unintelligible), he's bold and he's deadly.
But I think it's very important that the Bush administration do what they're doing to keep the soldiers over there to keep chasing him. But I know - like I said - I know it might be frustrating to you. But it's still better for bin Laden to worry every day more about whether he's going to see the sun come up in the morning than whether he's going to drop a bomb, another bomb somewhere in the U.S. or in Europe or on some other innocent civilians.
Hubba Hubba! I'm gone for one day, and see what I miss!
Check the National Archives...or around Clinton's waist...
Did you see the date this thread was started?
Posted on 08/07/2002 6:17:33 PM CDT by Republican_Strategist
Republican_Strategist has been banned
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