by Alan Colmes
Perhaps the most egregious attack on Bill Clinton's legacy is the conservative charge that he is to blame for what happened on September 11. One of the biggest misstatements is the contention that Clinton was offered Osama bin Laden on a silver platter and forfeited a chance to get him. This is patently false. There was never a credible offer for Osama bin Laden, according to Clinton's national security advisor Sandy Berger, then secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and other key officials.
Here is what President Clinton said about bin Laden:
We knew he (bin Laden) wanted to commit crimes against America. ... At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America. So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan.
Conservatives have repeatedly claimed that Clinton could have had bin Laden just for die asking. They use his words in the preceding statement, "so I did not bring him here," to imply that Clinton purposely turned down an opportunity to get bin Laden off the street. But it was the Saudis to whom bin Laden was offered, not die United States, and the Saudis wouldn't take him. Many conservatives leap over diis fact to blame Clinton for not doing enough to fight terrorism.
Here's what really happened according to those involved:
U.S. government representatives met widi Sudanese officials on terrorism issues on multiple occasions from 1996-2001 in venues ranging from Addis Ababa, to Virginia, Washington to New York and Khartoum. In none of those meetings, despite repeated U.S. requests for detailed information on bin Laden's network, finances and operatives and other terrorist organizations, did the Government of Sudan hand over its alleged files or provide detailed information deemed of significant operational value by U.S. Government counter-terrorism, law enforcement or CIA officials.
The website Jane's Intelligence Review reported on October 1, 1998, that President Clinton spent ten weeks trying to get the Saudis to accept Sudan's offer of bin Laden.
Frankly, it's shameful that the Clinton administration had to defend itself from charges that it didn't do enough to combat terrorism. Do the promoters of anti-Clinton propaganda really believe that the president didn't care about the safety of our country and was indifferent to terrorist threats? Do they honestly think President Clinton, his cabinet, and his advisers were cavalier about our vulnerabilities? And did the Republican-controlled Congress bear any responsibility as the legislative powers that were?
As part of a report in the Washington Post about how terrorism was handled leading up to the Bush 43 administration, Barton Gellman pointed out how much the Clinton administration accomplished. He said, "By any measure available, Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him. His government doubled counterterrorist spending across 40 departments and agencies."
In the spring of 1996, President Clinton authorized the CIA to go after bin Laden's network using any means necessary. A multinational mercenary force was put together to hunt down bin Laden. In early 1998, we had trained commandos in Pakistan to be ready to go into Afghanistan and capture bin Laden. But the Pakistani government was overthrown before this plan could be executed. And who was the new sheriff in town? Our newly minted good friend General Pervez Musharraf. Also in 1998, the United States signed a secret agreement with Uzbekistan to initiate joint covert action against bin Laden. When there was credible evidence of bin Laden's terrorist activities, the United States took action, including launching a number of CIA operations.
Nevertheless, after September 11, conservatives viciously attacked Clinton for not doing enough during his presidency to fight "The 'War' on Terror." And when he did take action, as when he bombed what was believed to be a weapons facility in Sudan and another target in Afghanistan, was there appreciation from our security-conscious friends on the right? Not at all. They immediately accused the president of manufacturing a diversion from the effort to impeach him and downplayed the argument that his actions had to do with any terrorist threat. And the words aspirin factory were repeated so many times in reference to the Sudanese weapons facility that the mere thought of it relieves headaches. But it was more than an aspirin factory. I asked Sandy Berger, who was national security advisor at the time, if he would comment on conservative charges that this was nothing more than a commercial plant that we bombed based on poor intelligence. Here's what he told me:
The Sudan factory we bombed was a part of the Sudanese Military Industrial Corporation, which operated their chemical weapons program. We knew bin Laden had cooperated with the Sudanese on chemical weapons and had invested millions in its Military Industrial Corporation. Soil samples taken close to the plant tested positively for a chemical whose only known use is to make VX, a deadly poisonous chemical weapon. We bombed the plant at night when only one person was present. Had we not bombed that plant under these circumstances and chemical weapons had shown up subsequently in, say, the New York City subway system, such a failure would have been inexcusable. Since the bombing, the Sudanese have spent vast sums of money on lobbying firms and PR firms in the United States to try to confuse the facts, but they can't be erased.
The cruise missile strike in Afghanistan was launched in retaliation for the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa. But the right wing would have us believe that Clinton cared only about taking attention away from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. So Clinton got accused of doing nothing, except for those times he did something, in which case he did it in the wrong places and for the wrong reason.
POP QUIZ: Who said:"We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue"?
(a) George W. Bush in 2002
(b) Bill Clinton in 1996
The answer is (b), much to the chagrin of those who would like to argue that the word terrorism was not in the Clinton vocabulary.
At a news conference on July 30, 1996, Clinton urged Congress to pass antiterrorism legislation before it left for the August recess. Among the things he wanted were taggants, or markers in explosives, something Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah called a "phony issue." Clinton also wanted expanded wiretapping powers, which was also opposed by many Republicans. John Ashcroft, who opposed this initiative as a senator, was more than happy to endorse those powers once he became Bush's attorney general. Clinton also wanted to prevent foreign banks from having access to our financial markets if they didn't cooperate with U.S.-led investigations into terrorist financing. That one was killed by Republican Phil Gramm, who was then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Attempts to ban foreigners from entering the United States if they were suspected of having terrorist ties and plans to deport foreign nationals thought to have terrorist links were rejected by conservative groups. One of the groups most opposed to some of these ideas was the National Rifle Association, which was concerned about expanding government power. But that kind of governmental authority didn't bother them so much when Bush 43 did the very same things.
Another Clinton initiative involved asking all laboratories to list all dangerous biological agents, including anthrax, with the federal government. This didn't gain traction because the threat of bioterror wasn't considered much of an issue.
There's plenty of blame to go around if we want to point fingers for our lack of preparedness and for the misplaced priorities that left our country vulnerable. I point a finger directly at those conservatives who were hell-bent on destroying Clinton and could think of nothing else. The brazen attempt to disable the president took up the time of Congress, the courts, and the media and hobbled the executive branch's ability to focus its full energies on the well-being of the nation. The visceral contempt many conservatives had for one man, Bill Clinton, blinded them to what was best for our country as a whole and undermined and diverted our attention from the real issues of the day. I hope the lens
of history enables those who were more obsessed with the president's sex life than the country's real needs to see how wrong they were for their irresponsible and, unfortunately, successful misdirection of our focus during the last part of the Clinton presidency.
One would think, given the behavior of the Bush 43 White House, that if Clinton initiated it, it must not have been worth pursuing. During most of 2000, submarines carrying sea-based missiles were ready to attack bin Laden if his location could be determined. The CIA tried to recruit tribal leaders in Afghanistan to take bin Laden out.
A report presented in December 2000 by Clinton terrorism expert Richard Clarke to senior administration officials called for the breakup of al Qaeda cells, the arrest of their personnel, action against financial support of their activities, reduced aid for nations supporting these cells, and an increase in covert activities in Afghanistan. Outgoing national security advisor Sandy Berger set up a series of briefings with Bush officials such as Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. The Clinton administration didn't want to start a war or to begin initiatives that would largely fall on the Bush administration to carry out. Clinton had been on the receiving end of such a mess, having inherited the Somalia debacle from Bush 41. There was an attempt to coordinate policy, but there was hostility between the outgoing administration and the new one. According to Daniel Benjamin, a counterterrorism official who served in the Clinton administration: "A number of initiatives that were underway either lost speed or were sidetracked, and valuable time was lost."
Time magazine reported, for example, that a Predator Drone, one of the best instruments to gather information on terror camps, sat idle from October 2000 through September 11, 2001. According to a senior CIA official, "Once we were going to arm the thing, we didn't want to expose the capability by just having it fly overhead and spot a bunch of guys we couldn't do anything about."
I see: Bill Clinton was pro-terror because he didn't capture bin Laden, even with no basis on which to hold him, but the Bush 43 administration gets a pass when they "couldn't do anything about" known terrorists.
It seemed acceptable for Republicans to blame Clinton for not getting bin Laden, even though Bush 43 did little to try to achieve the same goal until September 11, 2001, in spite of being told by outgoing Clinton officials that terror should be a top priority and that bin Laden was the one to watch. But wasn't it the Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress, and who controlled the agenda? Oh, that's right, the agenda consisted of trying to run Clinton out of office because he had a dalliance in the Oval Office. Terrorism could wait. And it did. Until September 11, 2001.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration gave $43 million to the Taliban in May of 2001 as a reward for its ban on growing opium poppies. Can you show me a conservative who has made this point? Meanwhile, Bill Clinton, who is still accused of doing nothing to fight terrorism, signed an executive order that froze $2 54 million in Taliban assets in the United States. And let's not forget that the United States supported the Taliban's forerunner, the Mujahedin, in its fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The accusation that President Clinton failed to adequately fight terrorism diverts attention from the failures of previous administrations. On the Reagan/Bush 41 watch, there was the April 18, 1983, destruction of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, which killed 17 Marines. Six months later, on October 23, Shiite suicide bombers hit a marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American military personnel and 58 French paratroopers. On December 12 of the same year, Shiite extremists set off car bombs in front of the French and U.S. embassies in Kuwait City. Five were killed and 86 were wounded. On June 14, 1985, Shiite Muslims seized a TWA Boeing 727 and forced it to land in Beirut. Their demands included the release of 700 Arab prisoners in Israel. A U.S. Navy diver was killed, and 39 Americans were held hostage until Syria intervened to gain their release on July 1 of that year. A few months later, the Achille Lauro was hijacked by Palestinian militants, and a disabled American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, was shot and his body thrown overboard. A year later, on September 5, 1986, a Pan Am jet carrying 358 people was hijacked at the Karachi airport. In the melee that ensued when a SWAT team took over the plane, 20 people were killed. The 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 resulted in another 270 deaths over Lockerbie, Scotland. President Reagan had ordered the bombing of the Libyan capital of Tripoli and the city of Benghazi in 1986 as revenge for the bombing of a Berlin nightclub where two Americans died. One theory is that the Pan Am bombing was a response to this action.
It's predictable that the hard right would blame Bill Clinton for September 11. The very people who tell liberals that they ought to stop being so partisan and act more like "Americans" are the first to point fingers. Of course, when a conservative says "Why don't you act more American?" what that person is really saying is "Why don't you act like a conservative?" What's astounding is the extent to which Clinton gets blamed for even minor infractions. Former South African president Nelson Mandela had some harsh words for Bush 43 when he addressed the International Women's Forum in Johannesburg on January 30, 2003. "What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. . . . Why does the United States behave so arrogantly?" Mandela asked. "Is this because the secretary-general of the United Nations is now a black man?" he asked. "They never did that when secretary-generals were white."
Now, no reasonable person would believe that Bush 43 is a unilateralist because the head of the UN is black. In fact, I may have strong policy differences with Bush 43, but he is certainly not a racist, and to call him one is just plain wrong. But guess who got blamed for this on one well-known right-wing website? That's right: Bill Clinton. According to NewsMax.com, run by Christopher Ruddy (also known as the chief proponent of the theory that Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster was murdered), "Questions are swirling about the role ex-President Clinton may have played in encouraging onetime international human rights icon Nelson Mandela's acid attack on President Bush." Oh really? Where were these questions "swirling"? In someone's right-wing, conspiracy-laden head, that's where. NewsMax is the website of choice for conservative talk-show hosts, and they never fail to deliver red meat to their constituency. And the evidence that Bill Clinton was behind Mandela's attacks on Bush 43? Well, you see, four months before Mandela's statement, Clinton was in Cape Town and met with Mandela to form a partnership to battle AIDS, and they were both behind concerts to raise money for the cause. Furthermore, Rhodes scholars from South Africa were joining with Rhodes scholars from other countries to oppose Bush 43 on Iraq. And what a coincidence! Bill Clinton is a Rhodes scholar!
Frankly, I don't think the right wing goes far enough here. Isn't Bill Clinton responsible for AIDS in the first place? I mean this guy was so loose, who knows what diseases he's carrying? In fact, haven't they determined that Bill Clinton causes cancer in rats? And the Tawana Brawley hoax! We know Clinton was behind that because he once had a conversation with Al Sharpton. Acid rain? Well, he's been in the rain, and Lord knows he must have done acid at some point, even if he didn't inhale.
One of the juicier allegations against Clinton was that he fathered a black child, Danny Williams, allegedly the result of an affair with a black prostitute named Bobbie Ann Willams. It isn't enough to say that Clinton had an affair with a prostitute; it's so much better if you can also say it's a black prostitute with whom he had a black baby. So not only did Bill Clinton like black people, he actually had sex with them on occasion. On December 15, 1998, NewsMax.com asked, "Why won't the same media that chased the story of Rep. Dan Burton's love child and made national headlines out of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde's ancient affair report the Danny Williams story?" And the answer to that question is: because the Danny Williams story isn't true. Star magazine paid a private firm to compare Bill Clinton's DNA, made public by Independent Counsel Ken Starr, and the DNA of Danny Williams. Even though the test came back negative, NewsMax
refused to believe it, questioning "whether the FBI Lab's Clinton DNA report was presented accurately in the Starr Report." Funny that they believed everything else that was in the Starr Report.
The pinnacle of the anti-Clinton garbage had to be what became known as "The Clinton Body Count." From Vince Foster, the White House counsel whose body was found in Washington, D.C.'s, Fort Marcy Park on July 7, 1993, to former Commerce secretary Ron Brown, to Clinton bodyguards, the story was that people associated with Bill Clinton in some way wound up dead. Unfortunately, we all wind up dead at some point, and we all know lots of people; but, when Bill Clinton knows people who die, he must have had something to do with it. I believe Bill Clinton has been linked to almost every death in America between his birth in 1946 and today. We have now solved the mysteries of Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and Jimmy Hoffa. Watch your back. Clinton might be coming for you next.
Not only did Bill Clinton kill people, according to some conservatives; he never really won the presidency. When he was elected president in 1992 with 42 percent of the popular vote, much was made of how his inability to attract a majority delegitimatized him. Even when he was reelected with 49 percent of the vote in 1996, he was derided for not having a mandate. That didn't stop the Bushies from crowing about their wonderful victory in 2000, even though their candidate lost the popular vote. Bush 43 was elected with only 47.8 percent of the popular vote. Richard Nixon won with 43.4 percent in 1968 and Abraham Lincoln a paltry 39.9 percent in 1860, but you never heard the right wing speak up about those minority numbers.
