"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Sunday, September 10, 2006

Here's why they have to portray Clinton as refusing to go after Bin Laden
Posted by Jill | 12:28 PM
It's another "Don't look at the man behind the curtain" moment:

The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world -- no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image -- has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."

But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the "zone" is.

"Here you've got a guy who's gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly," said T. McCreary, spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center. "And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That's an extremely difficult problem."

Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.

[snip]

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.


Here's the bottom line: The Republicans and their mouthpieces at ABC/Disney, want you to believe their meme that Bill Clinton did nothing about Osama Bin Laden because he was too busy being blown by Monica Lewinsky. If they can succeed in that, maybe you won't look at how George W. Bush gave up on the Bin Laden search barely five months after the 9/11 attacks because he was focused on his petty family grudge against Saddam Hussein. For five years, we have have had to listen to a nonstop litany of 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 from these people. We have been called traitors if we questioned them. We have had to worry about having our phones tapped and our internet searches monitored. We have had to worry about future employees seeing our words against this president and refusing to hire us. We have been called un-American because we have wanted those responsible for the 9/11 attacks brought to justice.

And so we have George W. Bush -- a joke of a president, a man whose supporters want you to believe that his predecessor, hounded throughout his entire presidency by right-wing nutballs, was trying mightily to address the terrorism issue while Republicans were screaming "Wag the dog!" -- was somehow at fault for the 9/11 attacks. And so we have George W. Bush, who received a bulletin on August 6, 2001 -- a bulletin so urgent that CIA agents hand-delivered it -- said "OK, you've covered your asses now" because he was angry at having his vacation interrupted. And so we have George W. Bush, who despite the attempt of Cyrus Nowrasteh to rewrite history otherwise, is immortalized forever as sitting cluelessly in a classroom for seven minutes after being told the nation was under attack, while people jumped to their deaths rather than be burned alive.

Try as they might to rewrite history, the suits at ABC/Disney, and people like Cyrus Nowrasteh and the Christofascist Zombie Neocon Death Cultists who want to somehow change the past, know in their hearts that their guy -- the empty suit they have chosen to worship as a demigod -- is the one who REALLY dropped the ball, the one who REALLY has allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape, even while Ground Zero was still being emptied, even as the remains of over 2700 Americans who did nothing other than go to work were still being found. Because there's no escaping this: George W. Bush, after being faced with a direct attack on U.S. soil, allowed its perpetrator to get away. Is he that incompetent? Or criminal? Those are your choices.

Unlike the Bush-worshippers who insist on absolving him of all blame in underestimating the urgency of the threat, we Democrats don't blindly worship Bill Clinton. In fact, many of us think he was a very good Republican president. My beef with Clinton is not that he was "distracted" because he was having too much fun, because it's clear from the FACTS -- not Cyrus Nowrasteh's fantasies, but the FACTS -- that Clinton was able to compartmentalize enough to do his job while the witchhunt swirled around him. My beef with Clinton is that KNOWING how much he was hated by the right, and KNOWING that they were going to go after him with anything they could find, he essentially gave them the weapon with which they hoped to bludgeon his presidency to death. Bill Clinton isn't the first man in the world to think with his dick instead of his brain. But while that makes his a tarnished presidency, it does NOT make him responsible for the 9/11 attacks -- not matter how much Disney/ABC might wish it to be so.
0 comments
Bookmark and Share