Clinton caught in another fabrication Posted by: mcq
on Thursday, August 23, 2007
You probably remember an angry Bill Clinton who appeared on Chris Wallace's show, shook his finger at Wallace and lectured him about how hard he'd worked to kill bin Laden.
Yeah, well that performance ranks right up there with "I did not have sex with that woman" apparently:
The report also criticized intelligence problems when Bill Clinton was president, detailing political and legal “constraints” agency officials felt in the late 1990s. In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.”
Clinton appeared to have been referring to a December 1999 Memorandum of Notification (MON) he signed that authorized the CIA to use lethal force to capture, not kill, bin Laden. But the inspector general’s report made it clear that the agency never viewed the order as a license to “kill” bin Laden—one reason it never mounted more effective operations against him. “The restrictions in the authorities given the CIA with respect to bin Laden, while arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed for a period of time in late 1998 and early 1999, limited the range of permissible operations,” the report stated. (Scheuer agreed with the inspector general’s findings on this issue, but said if anything the report was overly diplomatic. “There was never any ambiguity,” he said. “None of those authorities ever allowed us to kill anyone. At least that’s what the CIA lawyers told us.” A spokesman for the former president had no immediate comment.)
At best a huge exaggeration. At worst a blatant lie. Regardless, a crock.
However, it gets difficult to remember that when former presidents essentially lie about their roles on national television. Given Clinton's unique history, this prevarication and self-aggrandizement comes as no surprise, but it is still pretty disappointing. It leaves the historical record muddied, right up to the point when independent investigations reveal the truth. Worse, his shouted fabrications contribute to the partisan atmosphere.
Clinton is all about Clinton and always has been. There's a legacy at stake and he's going to do whatever is necessary to make it a good one. That he lied about his order concerning bin Laden should come as no surprise. It does make you wonder, however, if perhaps Sandy Burger was attempting to support this lie, among others, when stuffing his socks with classified material that day in the National Archives.
That he lied about his order concerning bin Laden should come as no surprise.
Were the cruise missile that were launched in 1998 in an effort to "capture" bin Laden made of frozen smoke?
So CIA Lawyers decided that Clinton’s order that allowed them to use lethal force in attempt to capture UBL was not an order that allowed them to use lethal force in order to capture bin Laden, and the interpretation is that Clinton lied?
Have you considered that the intractable refusal of the CIA, NSA, and other agencies to communicate with agencies, including the White House, was the cause of this misunderstanding, rather than Clinton simply lying?
Clinton will never be as good some of his proponents believe, and he will never be as bad as you believe, McQ. You appear to be incapable of objective analysis on the subject of Bill Clinton.
Sounds funny when you consider he turned down an offer by freaking SYRIA to hand him over...
I think it was Sudan.
Sudan offered to hand bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, not us, and Saudi Arabia didn’t want him. It is doubtful that even the offer to hand bin Laden to Saudi Arabia was even a good faith offer, more likely a feint to try and get out from under the least favored nation status that Sudan was encumbered by.
But hey, it’s good sound bite, so why let details like the truth get in way, in the middle of a post discussion parsing Clinton’s adverbs.
No,he authorized the hit on the Sudanese aspirin factory because the CIA thought they were producing chemical weapons for al-Qaeda. The cruise missile attacks in Afghanistan at the same time were to take out AQ training camps. This was in retaliation for the embassy bombings. Osama had fled Sudan in 1996. It’s a huge stretch to say that we attempted to assassinate OBL with cruise missiles, and completely ignorant to argue that Clinton thought he was in a Sudanese aspirin factory.
"I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him." BTW I was not unaware that the CIA has/used cruise missiles.
It does make you wonder, however, if perhaps Sandy Burger was attempting to support this lie, among others, when stuffing his socks with classified material that day in the National Archives.
We’ll never know because everyone seemed to have such an agenda to make that issue go away. There sure was SOMETHING Sandy and Bill didn’t want anyone to see.
The Clintonistas and the MSM I can understand. Why Bush and the GOP didn’t do everything they could to get this guy, up to and including having him swinging in a noose, is beyond me.
No,he authorized the hit on the Sudanese aspirin factory because the CIA thought they were producing chemical weapons for al-Qaeda. The cruise missile attacks in Afghanistan at the same time were to take out AQ training camps. This was in retaliation for the embassy bombings. Osama had fled Sudan in 1996. It’s a huge stretch to say that we attempted to assassinate OBL with cruise missiles, and completely ignorant to argue that Clinton thought he was in a Sudanese aspirin factory.
Are you sure the Captain approves of repeating his misinformation?
First, get out the irony meter again, you gotta love it when people whine about Clinton maybe being wrong about the supposed pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, when they supported the invasion of entire nation for nonexistent WMD’s. But that is completely irrelevant to my statement that Clinton authorized a launch of cruise missiles with targetting based on CIA intelligence, for the express purpose of killing UBL.
Clinton probably came within hours of killing bin Laden on Aug. 20, 1998 when the US attacked training camps in Afghanistan near Khost, where the CIA believed terrorist leaders were gathering to plan further attacks in the wake of earlier bombings of US embassies. The cruise missile strikes, launched from Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea, mostly hit their targets but missed bin Laden, most likely by just a few hours (9/11 Report, p. 117).
"I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him."
Yes, George Tenet’s idiocy aside, Clinton authorized killing UBL.
Clinton issued an order that allowed for deadly force to be used to kill OBL if capture was infeasible, this was a strengthening of the previous order which could have been interpreted to mean that deadly force could only be used in self defense during a capture attempt. As to why George Tenet reverted back to the weaker language in internal CIA memo’s, I have no idea, but Tenet knew he had the authority to strike.
CIA Director George Tenet told the Commission that he alone took responsibility for pulling the plug, and he conveyed that decision to Berger (p. 114). It is true that members of the intelligence community were frustrated at times, such as in mid-1999, by not getting a green light to mount a strike when they believed they had bin Laden’s location pinpointed. "The reporting [on bin Laden’s whereabouts] was very detailed and came from several sources," according to the Report (p. 140). But CIA Director George Tenet apparently didn’t consider the intelligence good enough to authorize a strike. Tenet told the Commission that he remembers the intelligence coming from a single uncorroborated source and that there was a risk of collateral damage.
BTW I was not unaware that the CIA has/used cruise missiles.
Clinton said he gave orders to kill OBL, I have shown evidence that an attempt was made to kill UBL on Clinton’s orders, and you want to pick the nit of how the CIA intelligence works with the military resources and the WH? I guess I should consider that a rhetorical white flag.
Being that he opposed the TRODPINT and JAWBREAKER teams; when they did provide a target at Tarnak Farms, the falconing camp, et al. It seems unlikely that much really went on. "Rich" the UZbek liason at the CTC has been faulted for letting Al Midhar and Al Hamzi slip through the nets; but the IG report indicates dozens of case officers; viewed up to 50 cables re; the Mecca twosome. As Ali Soufan’s account in Wright’s Looming Tower shows there was little that could be done without extensive FBI/CIA cooperation blocked by the Gorelick memo.
Ya had me at TRODPINT, but then you had throw this howler on the tail...
blocked by the Gorelick memo.
in his opening statement to the 9/11 Commission, Ashcroft went on the offensive in a way that no witness testifying to the Commission has before. The attorney general blamed the failure to prevent 9/11 on the "wall," a government-imposed legal barrier that prevented intelligence investigators from sharing information with criminal investigators. Disparaging the wall is, in itself, relatively uncontroversial: Not long after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration and Congress tore down the wall as part of the Patriot Act, a decision that a federal appeals court upheld in November 2002. But then Ashcroft went a step further: He claimed the Clinton administration was responsible for building the "wall" in the first place — and that the administration’s primary bricklayer had been none other than current 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. Brandishing a secret memo that Gorelick wrote as deputy attorney general in 1995 — a memo that Ashcroft had helpfully declassified for the occasion — the current attorney general declared, "Somebody built this wall. ... Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the Commission."
It was a smug bit of political theater, but it was both disingenuous and irrelevant to the proceedings at hand. For one thing, Gorelick didn’t exactly build the wall on her own. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a secret intelligence court and relaxed the standard Fourth Amendment rule requiring "probable cause" when the government sought search warrants for the "primary purpose" of gathering foreign intelligence. But over the years, in order to prevent criminal investigators from abusing FISA — and its lower threshold for obtaining search warrants — the government built a wall to keep criminal and intelligence investigations separate. Gorelick’s memo merely codified what was already standard practice. What’s more, if Ashcroft really thought the wall was such an impediment to combating terrorism, he could have moved to tear it down himself before 9/11. But as 9/11 Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, noted, the Bush Justice Department actually ratified the existence of the wall, noting in its own secret memorandum on August 6, 2001, that "the 1995 procedures remain in effect today."
Call it what you want, the key is that Ashcroft’s Justice Department ratified the existence of the wall, noting in its own secret memorandum on August 6, 2001, that the 1995 procedures remain in effect today.
Clinton’s JD could have trid to tear down that wall, so you can knock them for that, but Reagan’s JD approved of the wall, GHWB’s JD approved of the wall, and so did GWB’s JD, so attempts to hang the wall on Gorelick, and Clinton by extension, is as you say, nothing but spin.
Is anyone working on what exactly was taken out of the archives by Berger? That would seem to really tack them to the wall and dispense the bloviating. The major media really don’t seem to care about a major security issue that doesn’t involve Rove.
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