THE BILL'S COMING DUE
Clinton's Legacy
He didn't do enough to stop terrorists.
BY RUSH LIMBAUGH
Thursday, October 4, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
Since the Sept. 11 massacre, there have been numerous press reports
about Bill Clinton's attendance at funerals, visits to the rescue
site, and his other activities as a former president. What the media
have largely overlooked is the extent to which Mr. Clinton can be held
culpable for not doing enough when he was commander in chief to combat
the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and
Pentagon. If we're serious about avoiding past mistakes and improving
national security, we can't duck some serious questions about Mr.
Clinton's presidency.
Osama bin Laden already had the blood of Americans on his hands before
Sept. 11. He was reportedly behind the World Trade Center bombing that
killed six; the killing of 19 soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Saudi
Arabia; the bombings of the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which
killed 226 people, including 12 Americans; and the attack on the USS
Cole at Aden, Yemen, killing 17 seamen.
Mr. Clinton and his former national security adviser, Sandy Berger,
said after Sept. 11 that they had come within an hour of killing bin
Laden when they launched cruise missiles against his camps in 1998.
(Mr. Clinton also ordered the destruction of a pharmaceutical plant in
Sudan.) Many saw this attack as a diversion from domestic
embarrassments, because it took place only three days after his grand
jury testimony in the Paula Jones case. On Sept. 24, National Review
Online published a report by Byron York that added considerable weight
to this last charge.
Mr. York spoke recently to retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been
U.S. commander in the region. Although he supported the cruise missile
attack, the general revealed it was a "million-to-one-shot." "There
was a possibility [bin Laden] could have been there. . . . My
intelligence people did not put a lot of faith in that." His
recollection is a far cry from the version of Messrs. Clinton and
Berger. Which is accurate?
On Sept. 13, the Associated Press disclosed that "in the waning days
of the Clinton presidency, senior officials received specific
intelligence about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and weighed a
military plan to strike the suspected terrorist mastermind's location.
The administration opted against an attack." The possible attack was
discussed at a meeting last December, which was prompted by "eyes-only
intelligence" about bin Laden's location. A military strike option was
presented at the meeting. There was debate about whether the
intelligence was reliable. In the end, the president decided against
it.
The day after AP's story, Hillary Clinton gave a different explanation
of events to CNN. She said that in the last days of her husband's
administration, he planned to kill bin Laden, but that his location
couldn't be pinpointed: "It was human assets, that is, people on the
ground, who provided the information. My memory is that those assets
proved unreliable and were not able to form the basis of the plan that
we were considering launching."
Exactly what "eyes-on intelligence" was provided to Mr. Clinton in
December? And just how reliable did the information have to be to
merit a military strike? When Mr. Clinton ordered an attack on bin
Laden's camps in August 1998, Gen. Zinni said that it was a
"million-to-one shot."
A partial answer can be found in a Sept. 27 report by Jane's
Intelligence Digest, whose sources "suggested that previous plans to
capture or kill [bin Laden], which were supported by Moscow, had been
shelved by the previous U.S. administration on the grounds that they
might end in humiliating failure and loss of U.S. service personnel."
As a Jane's source put it: "Before the latest catastrophe there was a
distinct lack of political will to resolve the bin Laden problem and
this had a negative impact on wider intelligence operations."
Jane's claimed that the fundamental failure to deal with al Qaeda was
due "to a political reluctance to take decisive action during the
Clinton era, mainly because of a fear that it might derail the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This was "combined with a general
complacency in Washington towards warnings that the U.S. itself (as
opposed to U.S. facilities and personnel abroad) might be targeted."
President Bush is now leading a world-wide war against terrorism,
focused presently on bin Laden, al Qaeda, and their Taliban sponsors.
It has been widely noted that the U.S. is handicapped in this war by a
lack of good "Humint"--human intelligence--about the terrorists. Here
again the Clinton administration is culpable.
In 1995 CIA Director John Deutsch imposed complex guidelines that made
it more difficult to recruit informants who had committed human-rights
violations. Therefore, while the Justice Department has been able to
use former mobsters to get mobsters (e.g. Sammy "the Bull" Gravano,
who killed 19, was the government's key witness against John Gotti),
the CIA has been discouraged from recruiting former terrorists to get
terrorists. This has made infiltrating groups like al Qaeda virtually
impossible.
We have no choice but to address the policies and decisions, made at
the very highest level of our government, which helped bring us to
this point. To do otherwise is to be irresponsible and unprepared in
the face of a ruthless enemy, whose objective is to kill many more
Americans.
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