Bill Clinton’s Latest Lie
The man who in eight years as chief executive did nothing except sexually assault female employees now claims that he would have attacked Afghanistan had he only known that al-Qaeda was responsible for the USS Cole bombing.
Clinton: I Would Have Attacked Bin Laden (NewsMax)
Ex-president Bill Clinton now says he would have taken out Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks — if only the FBI and CIA had been able to prove the al-Qaida mastermind was behind the attack on the U.S.S. Cole.
“I desperately wish that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole,” Clinton tells New York magazine this week. “Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early.”
“I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11,” he added. “But it certainly would have complicated it.”
Despite his failure to launch such an attack, Clinton said he saw the danger posed by bin Laden much more clearly than did President Bush.
“I always thought that bin Laden was a bigger threat than the Bush administration did,” he told New York magazine.
The unmitigated gall of this man is unbelievable.
h/t: Ace
You know, I was not Bill Clinton’s biggest fan when he was office. But to say he “sexually assulted” female employees is a joke. Clearly Monica was a willing party.
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.
Peace and prosperity…. yeah, just ask some one from the Balkans… too little, too late- a recurring theme with dumbocrats and in the U.N.
So now Clinton is responsible for the tech stock boom also? …and Al Gore invented the internet.
As a rule I always try to avoid any rehashing of the past or complaining about what this one did or that one did and certainly the partisan comparisons because they’re basically irrelevant. But could Clinton and Carter give me some help and observe the longstanding decorum of shutting up after they’re out of office? Would some common courtesy to refrain from back stabbing be too much to ask? Are these guys so insecure that they can’t just walk away?
Say, if you’re going to treat Clinton as a patent liar and fool, aren’t you obliged to provide some facts supporting your position?
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!”
I get your point Anderson; the lie is claiming we didn’t know who attacked the Cole.
See Ace’s post for details.
Or as we say back here in Arkansas, “That cow had to have four stomachs to make a pile that big”. There’s a thousand more just like William Jefferson Blythe-Clinton here in Arkansas; just drive onto any used car lot and you’ll meet a couple of them.
There’s no “lie”; Clinton consistently, and in retrospect ill-advisedly, set a high standard for what was, after all, a matter of war. From Ace’s source:
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.