Bill Clinton's Chutzpah
Christopher Ruddy
Monday, Sept. 9, 2002
newsmax.com
I give Bill Clinton credit for one thing: having no shame. He has, as we say in New York, real "chutzpah."
With 9-11 around the corner, Clinton has been making the media circuit. Just this week he was on CNN's "Larry King Live."
In his latest pronouncement, the impeached former president was suggesting that the Bush administration is making a mistake by going after Saddam Hussein. Clinton says they should get bin Laden first.
Clinton says getting bin Laden had been an "obsession" during his presidency.
As usual, Bill is not completely honest. Monica and friends were obsessions. Bin Laden was an annoyance, an irritating gnat for America's first playboy president.
In a new book that I co-edited with Carl Limbacher, we lay out the damning evidence of how Clinton actually helped the terrorists and their sponsors.
In "Catastrophe: Clinton's Role in America's Worst Disaster," we reveal:
Clinton's own admission, on tape, that he could have extradited bin Laden from the Sudan in 1996. Bin Laden had already been linked to terrorist bombings in the early '90s, but Clinton gave him a free pass – despite the protests of a senior member of his National Security Council staff.
Robert Baer, the CIA's top officer in Iraq during Clinton's first term, says he was close to helping indigenous Iraqi forces overthrow Saddam when senior Clinton aides suddenly recalled him to Washington. At the same time, Baer says he was baffled that Clinton was allowing Saddam to sell billions of dollars in smuggled oil through Turkey. Baer said it was clear that Clinton wanted to keep Saddam in power.
Dick Morris, the one-time Clinton confidant, reveals that Clinton ambassador Richard Holbrooke complained that Clinton was not interested in hearing intelligence that terrorists planned to strike U.S. troops in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Morris says the Khobar Towers bombing could have been avoided – but Clinton was busy with other matters.
[Editor's Note: You can order this book directly from NewsMax, simply by CLICKING HERE]
All of these are very serious allegations about our former president, made by credible people. Yet, with Clinton hitting the media circuit, no one in the press wants to ask him about his own record during the '90s.
Here's a question Larry King could have asked: "Mr. Clinton, considering that the 19 hijackers were operating in the U.S. for years, training for this operation in this country, under your watch, do you believe you and your administration bear most of the culpability for what happened on 9-11?"
Instead of being asked fair questions, Clinton is using these media ops to polish his own image.
On King's program, Clinton made the totally false claim that since the Gulf War, and after eight years of his presidency, "Saddam Hussein is weaker, and our military is stronger."
After the Gulf War, Saddam's forces were decimated. Our military was at its zenith.
After eight years of Clinton, all estimates suggest that Saddam has been able to rebuild his forces to 50 percent to 75 percent of troop strength from the days before the Gulf War. Worse, Saddam has had years and billions of dollars, thanks to Clinton, to build weapons of mass destruction.
And since Clinton caved in 1998, U.N. inspectors have not been in Iraq. (Why won't members of the press ever ask Clinton why he backed down on his demands for U.N. inspections?)
Saddam has had plenty of time to build dangerous weapons, and in that sense he should be considered more dangerous than he was before the Gulf War and before Clinton came to power. If such weapons are ever used against us, we need to remember who is truly responsible for that.
Clinton's claim the U.S. military is stronger after his presidency is also completely bogus. By every measure – ships, aircraft, troops in the field, conventional and strategic weapons – America witnessed radical reductions under Clinton. When Bush came to power, Clinton had reduced the military's overall force strength by 40 percent.
Even stocks of the so-called "smart weapons" and cruise missiles that had been developed before Clinton took office were depleted during Clinton's "wag the dog" war in Kosovo.
In fact, the real reason the Bush administration has waited so long to attack Iraq is that we needed time to rebuild the arsenal Clinton depleted.
Still, the media spin from the liberals is that we need not discuss Bill Clinton's role in 9-11 (they say it's old news, after all). The same media that still make bashing Richard Nixon a Page One story decades after his presidency can't utter a bad word about Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, Clinton busily goes from media op to media op rewriting history.
We at NewsMax find that unacceptable. "Catastrophe: Clinton's Role in America's Worst Disaster" newsmaxstore.com sets the record straight and places blame exactly where it belongs.
It is important for the future that we honestly admit what happened during Clinton's reign, and take steps to see this never happens again in America. |
