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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (227645)	2/16/2002 12:32:53 PM
From: JEB	Respond to of 769670

Message 17068571

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (227645)	2/16/2002 12:36:05 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

How is this right wing propaganda? newsmax.com Clinton: I Wanted to Bomb Khandahar Ex-President Bill Clinton racheted up his rhetoric on Friday in order to convince an audience that he did everything possible to stop terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, claiming that he had considered invading Afghanistan with attack helicopters and weighed a plan to bomb bin Laden's hideout in Khandahar. "I actually trained people to do this. We trained people," Clinton told a Long Island Association luncheon crowd in Woodbury, New York. "But in order to do it we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat, maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval." Clinton said the option to bomb Khandahar was considered because they had tracked bin Laden to a compound in the city. "As far as we knew, he never went back to his training camp. So the only place bin Laden ever went that we knew was occasionally he went to Khandahar, where he always spent the night in a compound that had 200 women and children. "So I could have, on any given night, ordered an attack that I knew would kill 200 women and children, that had less than a 50 percent chance of getting him," the ex-president explained. Clinton said that from a post-9/11 perspective he might have been wrong not to order the bombing. "But at the time we didn't think [bin Laden] had the capacity to do that," he added. Contrary to the accounts of a number of former White House aides who described him as distracted by his scandals and dismissive of the terrorist threat, Clinton told the Long Island audience, "A lot of people thought I was too obsessed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda." As for the failure of August 1998 cruise missile attacks he launched on bin Laden's Khost encampment, Clinton said he believed the terrorist mastermind was tipped off just hours ahead of time. "I think whoever told us he was going to be there told somebody who told him that our missiles might be there," the ex-president said, adding, " I think we were ratted out." Clinton also defended his administration against charges that it refused to accept Sudan's offer to turn bin Laden over to the U.S. six years ago. "In the period when the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again, they released (bin Laden). At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him - though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America. "So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan." Clinton said that by 1999 he began to consider options like the helicopter attack and the bombing of Khandahar. "So I tried hard (because) I always thought this guy was a big problem." He also pointedly reminded the audience that for its first eight months, the Bush administration was no more successful in getting bin Laden than he had been. "Apparently the options I had were the options that the president and Vice President Cheney and Secretary Powell and all the people involved had for the first eight months until Sept. 11 changed everything." But, said Clinton, "I did the best I could with him. I do not believe, based on what options were available to me, that I could have done much more than I did." Sounding like a man thoroughly haunted by the failure to eliminate the notorious terrorist, the ex-president added, "Obviously, I wish I'd been successful. I tried a lot of different ways to get bin Laden cause I always thought he was a very dangerous man." Clinton's long peroration on bin Laden came during a pre-screened question and answer session following a speech where he argued that America should mount a second Marshal Plan to save Mideast nations from the scourge of terrorism. Though the event was promoted as likely to be sold out, the ballroom at Woodbury's Crest Hollow Country Club was not quite full, with approximately 800 people on hand to hear Clinton speak. Many left before the question and answer session had ended. Clinton's speech was closed to the press except for a pre-approved group of reporters (NewsMax.com attended via alternate credentials).