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Edited on Mon Sep-08-03 11:05 PM by imax2268
This is my response to their emails...
Ok then...you still say that Clinton/Gore were responsible...let's look at it from another perspective...shall we...the following article states how Clinton did not have support from key officials to go after bin laden. Although Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke wanted to go into Afghanistan, he had no support at all...
How Clinton Team blew chance to hit bin Laden
September 1, 2003
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
On Oct. 12, 2000, the day of the devastating terrorist attack on the USS Cole, President Bill Clinton's highest-level national security team met to determine what to do. Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke wanted to hit Afghanistan, aiming at Osama bin Laden's complex and the terrorist leader himself. But Clarke was all alone. There was no support for a retaliatory strike that, if successful, might have prevented the 9/11 carnage.
This startling story is told for the first time in a book by Brussels-based investigative reporter Richard Miniter to be published this week. Losing bin Laden relates that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Attorney General Janet Reno and CIA Director George Tenet all said no to the attack. I have contacted enough people attending the meeting to confirm what Miniter reports. Indeed, his account is based on direct, on-the-record quotes from participants.
Miniter, who was part of the Sunday Times of London investigation of Clinton vs. bin Laden, has written a bitter indictment of the American president. But by the time of the Cole disaster, with only weeks left in his presidency, Clinton had focused on the terrorist threat. The problem of the Oct. 12 meeting was the caution common to all councils of war. Arguments by participants sounded valid, but collectively they built a future catastrophe.
Al-Qaida's bombing of the billion-dollar U.S. destroyer fulfilled Clarke's prediction of the terrorists seeking U.S. military targets. Hours after the attack, Clarke presided over a meeting of four terrorism experts in the White House Situation Room. He and the State Department's Michael Sheehan agreed this almost certainly was bin Laden's doing, but the FBI and CIA representatives wanted more investigation.
That deadlock preceded a meeting of Cabinet-level officials that same day. Clarke proposed already-targeted retaliation against bin Laden's camps and Taliban buildings in Kabul and Kandahar. At least, they would destroy the terrorist infrastructure. A quick strike might also get bin Laden. ''Around the table,'' Miniter writes, ''Clarke heard only objections.''
Reno, told by the FBI that the terrorists were still unidentified, argued that retaliation violated international law. Reno and the CIA's Tenet wanted more investigation. Albright is quoted as saying that with renewed Israeli-Palestinian fighting, ''bombing Muslims wouldn't be helpful at this time.'' (Albright later told Miniter she would have taken a different position if she had ''definitive'' proof of bin Laden's involvement.)
Cohen's position at the meeting is most surprising. The only Republican in the Clinton Cabinet was the architect of missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan after the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. Clarke remembers Cohen saying the attack on the Cole ''was not sufficiently provocative.'' When I contacted him, Cohen said he did not recall this meeting but that ''certainly I regarded the Cole as a major provocation.''
Sheehan, now with the New York City Police Department, did not blame Cohen. ''It was the entire Pentagon,'' he told Miniter, adding he was ''stunned'' by the lack of Defense Department desire to retaliate. After the meeting, Sheehan told Clarke, prophetically: ''What's it going to take to get them to hit al-Qaida in Afghanistan? Does al-Qaida have to attack the Pentagon?''
At the Cabinet-level meeting, only Clarke wanted retaliation. Indeed, he was viewed as a hothead. So much pain has been inflicted, and so much blood has been spilled since then, that the meeting has faded from the memory of its participants--until stirred up by Clarke in Miniter's book.
Less than a month after the Cole disaster, CIA analysts had concluded bin Laden was behind it (though the FBI was still clueless). Osama bin Laden had virtually claimed credit for the most successful attack on a U.S. naval vessel since World War II. He and his gang had escaped to plan greater misery for America.
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Now based on what you have read...do you still think that Clinton & Gore were soley responsible...?
I don't think so...it says that President Bill Clinton's highest-level national security team did not want the attack...nowhere in the article does it say that Clinton refused to or neglected to hit Osama...
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What do you all think...will that work or should I not use it...?
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