I knew when I saw that Leopold Stotch blogged this over at at OTB that there was a reason for the timing: Clinton: I Would Have Attacked Bin Laden Ex-president Bill Clinton now says he would have taken out Osama...

Great article here about one a military officer who says he did, in fact, report about Able Danger to the 9/11 Commission, and that he is sure Atta was on the list.

If he's telling the truth, then the entire history of the last five years needs to ...

President Clinton told us that before he could launch further attacks on al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban threatening strikes if they did not immediately expel Bin Ladin, the CIA or the FBI had to be sure enough that they would "be willing to stand up in public and say, we believe that he [Bin Ladin] did this." He said he was very frustrated that he could not get a definitive enough answer to do something about the Cole attack.137 Similarly, Berger recalled that to go to war, a president needs to be able to say that his senior intelligence and law enforcement officers have concluded who is responsible. He recalled that the intelligence agencies had strong suspicions, but had reached "no conclusion by the time we left office that it was al Qaeda."138

CIA guys are now doubtless willing to say they "knew" it was Osama, and they were right, but what may suffice for intel won't suffice for, say, a criminal indictment, which Steve Coll in Ghost Wars says was the standard that Clinton's people tended to set (see pp. 537-38). In Coll's notes, he quotes Berger as saying that "judgment about responsibility for the Cole ... was reached sometime between the time we left office and 9/11." State's annual report on terrorism "found 'no definitive link' between the Cole attack and 'bin Laden's organization.'"

(Coll adds that "for a variety of reasons, including unsettled national politics and a desire not to preempt the next president's options, Clinton and Berger had little interest in a parting military shot. Even without the establishment of definitive responsibility for the Cole attack, they might have found other ways to justify an attack had they wanted to launch one.")

Did Clinton require too strong a showing? Possibly. But remember the Sudan bombing and all the wag-the-dog stuff. Partly through his own foolishness in the Lewinsky affair, Clinton was a very weak president who simply couldn't afford to go on TV and tell America "hey, one of our ships got attacked, so now we're invading Afghanistan."

So I think Clinton's being a little wishful, but not a jerk by any means. Particularly since we did indeed delay too long in invading Afghanistan and botched the effort when we were there. Would Clinton have done better? Who knows. He couldn't have done much worse.

See Ace's post for details.

That is, that the evidence shows he would NOT have attacked Afghanistan had he been sure who bombed the Cole? Or that he was indeed sure?

Holding no brief for Clinton on this one, but if you're going to be taken seriously, you need something other than "Clinton says X --- what gall!"

Besides, why did it take you until the Cole bombing to figure out that handling OBL and his terrorist band of thugs was more than a law enforcement issue? How about the first WTC attack? Or the embassy bombings? Remember those?

So now Clinton is responsible for the tech stock boom also? ...and Al Gore invented the internet.

As for "doing nothing", yea, that peace & prosperity we had under Clinton really blew. I know I prefer $3.00 a gallon for gas and our boys dying with no end in site in Iraq.

I guess we will just have to listen to endless harping about Clinton to distract from Bush's many failures.