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Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Maybe they can find a way to impeach him again, too
Posted by Jill | 7:51 AM

As the Iraq war proves to be more of a failure every day, and Osama Bin Laden continues to roam the world freely even after attacking the U.S., Washington is responding the only way it knows how: by blaming Bill Clinton:

State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.

The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to The New York Times, shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.

Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Two years after the State Department's warning, with Mr. bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, Al Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan.

Critics of the Clinton administration have accused it of ignoring the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden in the mid-1990's while he was still in Sudan, and they point to claims by some Sudanese officials that they offered to turn him over to the Americans before ultimately expelling him in 1996 under international pressure. But Clinton administration diplomats have adamantly denied that they received such an offer, and the Sept. 11 commission concluded in one of its staff reports that it had "not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."


It's important to keep in mind, while attacking the Clinton Administration for its failures in dealing with Osama Bin Laden, that by 1996, Clinton was already dealing with the fallout from the Whitewater land deal, which was already turning into the octopus of an investigation that would culminate in the Lewinsky scandal. 1996 is when David Hale, a known felon and obsessive Clinton-hater, testified in the Whitewater trial of Jim McDougal. In the second Whitewater trial that year, issues of Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial race were raised. By September of that year, investigations of Bill Clinton had already eaten over $25 million dollars, $17 million of that spent by Ken Starr. In 1997, Susan Mcdougal was jailed for refusing to testify that she had had an affair with Bill Clinton. And so on and so on until we get to the Supreme Court deciding that Paula Jones' lawsuit wouldn't distract the president, and the Lewinsky affair -- and the rest is history.

I realize that Republicans regarded the election of Bill Clinton as an unwanted interruption in the Bush Family Reign and their sense of entitlement to turning this country into feudal Europe. But in retrospect, with the World Trade Center site now a hole in the ground, 2700 people dead in the attacks, 2000 American kids dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead in what is turning into the creation of Iraqran, doesn't it seem now that allowing the Clinton Administration to focus on the Al Qaeda threat, instead of pursuing all this crap from before he took office, and making a bipartisan effort to address the threat then, would have made more sense than making cheap political points? Doesn't it seem now that maybe helping that president deal with Al Qaeda might have been more productive than trying to destroy him?

Barney Frank was right: They're going to hound Clinton till he dies, and then they'll dig him up and hound him again.
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