posted on April 9, 2004 03:22:32 PM new
What? Could it be all DEMO's aren't blind to Clinton's BS.
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WASHINGTON (AP) - A Sept. 11 commission Democrat disagreed Friday with President Clinton's assessment there wasn't enough intelligence linking al-Qaida to a deadly attack on a Navy ship to justify an attack on the terrorist organization.
Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said he believes Clinton should have launched a military strike against al-Qaida following the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors.
"I think he did have enough proof to take action," Kerrey said on ABC's "Good Morning America.
The commission interviewed Clinton behind closed doors Thursday for nearly four hours, with many of their questions focused on the Cole attack.
A person familiar with the Clinton session said the former president told the commission he did not order retaliatory military strikes because he could not get "a clear, firm judgment of responsibility" from U.S. intelligence before he left office the following January.
U.S. intelligence didn't conclude that al-Qaida had sponsored the attack on the ship in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, until after the Bush administration took office.
Bush officials have said they didn't retaliate because they didn't want an inadequate "tit-for-tat" response that would embolden the terrorists.
The commission held a private session with former Vice President Al Gore on Friday. The three-hour session was described by the panel as "candid and forthcoming."
"He answered all our questions. We talked a lot about airline safety and security, the Cole, and the Clinton White House attitude toward terrorism," said Republican commissioner James R. Thompson, a former Illinois governor. He declined to give specifics.
A preliminary report on airline security that the panel released in January noted Gore had chaired a 1996 presidential Commission on Aviation Safety and Security that focused on the danger of explosives on aircraft rather than potential foreign hijackings.
"It's too soon to be making assessments at this point," Thompson said.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney also will meet privately with the full panel in a joint session in coming weeks. They initially restricted the interview to one hour with two panel members, but under mounting public pressure agreed last week to a joint session without time constraints.
'We have dispatched Dr. David Kay...to search for the bio-warfare agents we believe hidden in Senator Kerry's forehead. If Senator Kerry has used botox as part of a wrinkle enrichment program, he is in violation of UN Resolution 752. Upon receiving Dr. Kay's report, the weapons of mass destruction that Senator Kerry so adamantly insists do not exist...may well be above his very nose.'" --Dick Cheney when asked whether John Kerry has had Botox treaments
posted on April 9, 2004 03:52:55 PM new ..."because he could not get "a clear, firm judgment of responsibility"
U.S. intelligence didn't conclude that al-Qaida had sponsored the attack on the ship in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, until after the Bush administration took office.
In view of the catastrophe in Iraq, don't you wish that Bush had waited for a clear, firm judgement of responsibility as Clinton did? Now, we are involved in a losing battle in the Mideast because Bush invaded the wrong country looking for WMD which did not exist.
Since when did Clinton ever have a clear, firm judgment of responsibility
'We have dispatched Dr. David Kay...to search for the bio-warfare agents we believe hidden in Senator Kerry's forehead. If Senator Kerry has used botox as part of a wrinkle enrichment program, he is in violation of UN Resolution 752. Upon receiving Dr. Kay's report, the weapons of mass destruction that Senator Kerry so adamantly insists do not exist...may well be above his very nose.'" --Dick Cheney when asked whether John Kerry has had Botox treaments
posted on April 9, 2004 05:52:40 PM new
Rice on the Record
Democrats on the 9/11 Commission inadvertently underscore Bush's successes.
Friday, April 9, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
We predicted yesterday's Condoleezza Rice show would be more about the 9/11 Commissioners themselves than anything the National Security Adviser had to say. But we confess we were unprepared for Bob Kerrey's Vice Presidential audition.
We thought the former Senator had more class than to preface his remarks with a condescending allusion to the fact that Ms. Rice is a black woman. ("I'm very impressed . . . [by] the story of your life." Or to then complain that her attempts to answer his monologue were cutting into his time. In their zeal to show all the things that went undone before 9/11, Mr. Kerrey and other Democrats on the Commission inadvertently underscored all that President Bush has done since. Think of it as one long endorsement of pre-emption.
One genuinely interesting news nugget came in Ms. Rice's opening statement. There she gave details of the Bush Administration's first major national security directive, completed September 4, 2001. It covered "not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda." Obviously this didn't prevent the events of a week later. But it does suggest, contra Richard Clarke, that the Administration was attentive to the terrorist threat.
Mr. Kerrey and his fellow partisans made much of an August 6, 2001, Presidential briefing titled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside United States." But Ms. Rice properly observed that there is no obvious response to non-specific warnings that "something very big may happen." She likewise dismissed Democratic insinuations of a bureaucratic "silver bullet," such as dealing with issues at the "principals" level: Unlike his predecessor, President Bush was already conferring with his Director of Central Intelligence on a daily basis.
posted on April 9, 2004 06:52:11 PM new
I think Ms. Rice gave an astounding testimony, one based in FACT, that will leave the oppisition scrambling for answers.
Has anyone else heard the assertations made by Senator Kennedy, about how "Iraq is President Bushs' Vietnam"? This comming from a man who allowed a young lady to drown when he misjudged about a bridge. Senator Kennedy is so far left he has to look to the right to see what he has been saying.
posted on April 9, 2004 07:42:02 PM new
Al Qaeda absent from final Clinton report
By James G. Lakely
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress — 45,000 words long — makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times.
The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an "urgent" threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "ignored" it.
The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke's testimony and new book.
Miss Rice, who will testify publicly Thursday before the commission investigating the Bush and Clinton administrations' actions before the September 11 attacks, was criticized last week for planning a speech for September 11, 2001, that called a national missile-defense system a leading security priority.
President Bush yesterday denied the accusation that his administration had made dealing with al Qaeda a low priority.
"Let me just be very clear about this: Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack," Mr. Bush said, adding that after September 11, "the stakes had changed."
"This country immediately went on war footing, and we went to war against al Qaeda. It took me very little time to make up my mind," he said. "Once I determined al Qaeda [did] it, [I said], 'We're going to go get them.' And we have, and we're going to keep after them until they're brought to justice and America is secure."
Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will meet with the commission in the coming weeks behind closed doors, but a date has not been set. Meanwhile, the president said he looks forward to hearing Miss Rice defend the administration in a public forum.
"She'll be great," Mr. Bush said. "She's a very smart, capable person who knows exactly what took place and will lay out the facts."
The Clinton administration's final national-security report stated that its reaction to terrorist strikes was to "neither forget the crime, nor ever give up on bringing the perpetrators to justice."
The document boasted of "a dozen terrorist fugitives" who had been captured abroad and handed over to the United States "to answer for their crimes."
Those perpetrators included the men responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Center, which the intelligence community largely thought by late 2000 to be the work of operatives with links to al Qaeda. Listed among those brought to justice was a man who killed two persons outside CIA headquarters in 1993, and "an attack on a Pan Am flight more than 18 years ago."
Several high-ranking Bush administration officials, and the president himself, have faulted the Clinton administration for treating global terrorism as a law enforcement issue and not recognizing that bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1998.
Mr. Bush often notes that about two-thirds of al Qaeda's thousands of members — including many key leaders — have been either captured or killed since the attacks, and that 44 of the 55 top Iraqi officials under Saddam Hussein in a deck of cards have been "taken care of."
The liberal Center for American Progress yesterday echoed Mr. Clarke's criticism of the Bush administration by publishing a timeline of statements that it says proves the current White House national security team did not make fighting al Qaeda a priority before the attacks.
"If they were developing some big strategy of fighting terrorism, it's not reflected in their words," said John Halpin, director of research for the center.
"We wanted to go back and document all the public statements, given some of the discrepancies of what happened before 9/11 and some of the recent news from Richard Clarke," Mr. Halpin said.
In Mr. Clarke's best-selling book "Against All Enemies," he writes that during a transitional briefing in January 2001, Miss Rice's "facial expression gave me the impression that she'd never heard the term [al Qaeda] before."
But the Clinton administration's final national security document, written while Mr. Clarke was a high-level national security adviser, never mentions al Qaeda.
"Clarke was on the job as terrorism czar at that point," said a senior Bush administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "He played a significant role. His concerns should have been well-known."
High-ranking Bush administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, have testified that Mr. Bush wanted to stop "swatting at flies" and take a more aggressive approach to terror.
The Bush administration official noted that the planning of the September 11 attacks happened while Mr. Clinton was in power, and said the commission's probe has turned into a search for blame.
"It's a shame we are not focused more on moving forward, instead of about who was concerned more," he said.
The official said he found the lack of bin Laden and al Qaeda references in the final Clinton terror assessment interesting, but downplayed such "word-counting games."
"We don't measure progress or response [to terrorism] by how many speeches, words, utterances or meetings were held on a particular issue, but by action taken," he said.
'We have dispatched Dr. David Kay...to search for the bio-warfare agents we believe hidden in Senator Kerry's forehead. If Senator Kerry has used botox as part of a wrinkle enrichment program, he is in violation of UN Resolution 752. Upon receiving Dr. Kay's report, the weapons of mass destruction that Senator Kerry so adamantly insists do not exist...may well be above his very nose.'" --Dick Cheney when asked whether John Kerry has had Botox treaments
[ edited by Bear1949 on Apr 9, 2004 07:44 PM ]
Or to then complain that her attempts to answer his monologue were cutting into his time. In their zeal to show all the things that went undone before 9/11, Mr. Kerrey and other Democrats on the Commission inadvertently underscored all that President Bush has done since. Think of it as one long endorsement of pre-emption.