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

To: Stan who wrote (750192)	9/26/2006 5:24:50 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769667

Condoleezza Rice begs to differ with Bill Clinton. The secretary of state says the for mer president was basically full of beans when he lashed out at Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday - wagging his finger and bitterly accusing the Bush administration of abandoning the search for Osama bin Laden before 9/11. "They had eight months to try, [and] they did not try," Clinton shouted. "I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since." Clinton railed at "all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now" and denounced Wallace's "conservative hit job," demanding to know "how many people in the Bush administration you asked . . . 'Why did you fire Dick Clarke,' " the anti-terrorism chief. But was Clinton telling the truth? (Remember the last time he wagged his finger in public?) Secretary of State Rice suggests not. "The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there . . . is just flatly false," the former national security adviser told The Post's editorial board yesterday. "What we did in eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding [eight] years," Firing Clarke? Far from it, she noted: He "was the counter-terrorism czar when 9/11 happened, and he left [in 2003] when he did not become deputy director of homeland security," as he wanted. That's a critical point. Clinton insisted that his version is backed both by Clarke's book and public testimony before the 9/11 Commission. In fact, Clarke told the commission a very different story during hours of private testimony behind closed doors - one that jibed with a 2002 background briefing he gave to reporters. Back then, he said: "There was no plan on al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. . . . [a] plan, strategy - there was no, nothing new." Indeed, Clarke said, the Bush team in 2001 "changed the [Clinton] strategy from one of rollback [of] al Qaeda over five years to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline." Bush, he added, took action on several "issues that had been on the table for a couple of years," such as instituting a new policy in Pakistan that convinced Islamabad "to break away from the Taliban" and boosting "CIA resources . . . for covert action five-fold to go after al Qaeda." In fact, a 1999 Clarke after-action memo - the one top Clinton aide Sandy Berger later stole from the National Archives - identified national-security weaknesses so "glaring" that only sheer "luck" prevented a cataclysmic attack back then. And, as Clarke told the 9/11 Commission publicly, there was nothing the Bush administration could have done that would have prevented the attacks. Sure, he tells a different story now. But that, he admitted, is because of his opposition to the Iraq war, which he believes distracted from the War on Terror. Secretary Rice was a lot more honest, explaining yesterday that there was no full-scale War on Terror "the way that we're fighting it now" - by either administration - before 9/11: "We just weren't organized as a country, either domestically or as a leader internationally." The blame for 9/11 goes back fully 25 years, and includes both Democratic and Republican presidents. At the same time, the Clinton years were bookended by al Qaeda bombings - the 1993 attack World Trade Center attack, and the October 2000 suicide assault on USS Cole - with plenty of blood spilled in between. Clinton effectively slept through it all - and now he's trying to rewrite history. It won't wash. nypost.com

To: Stan who wrote (750192)	9/26/2006 5:26:13 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times on Sunday re ported that a classified National Intelligence Estimate finds that "the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attack." What's going on? Well, three national newspapers not known to be friendly to Republicans in general, or the Bush administration in particular, just got handed a potentially embarrassing classified document, 42 days before the midterm elections. It's safe to assume that politics is involved. Second, only portions of the estimate have been leaked - that is to say, it has been cherry-picked, presumably not to the administration's advantage. Third, the leakers expect the American people to believe that the jihadists who plotted 9/11 were only mildly annoyed with the United States before that attack. Now they're really angry - so it would have been better to do nothing at all after the towers fell. Sort of like the Clinton administration after the first World Trade Center attack (see above), we assume. That sure made America a safer place. Let's be clear here. Each in their own way, all three papers have been working as hard as possible to undermine the prosecution of the War on Terror almost since it began. There's a word for that, and it ain't pretty. But what of the substance of the latest leaks? Terrorists, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Post yesterday, are "going to find a reason" to wage jihad, no matter what happens. Just as they did before the Iraq war. But that isn't stopping Democrats from trying to make hay of the report. Typically reckless, Sen. Ted Kennedy called it "the final nail in the coffin for President Bush's phony argument about the Iraq war." (Maybe Teddy, his fellow Dems and al Qaeda can all get together for some hearty high-fives this week.) Again, this kind of wartime sabotage-by-leak is dangerous. So leakers need to be punished. As for the assessment itself, the White House must mount a vigorous rebuttal - maybe release a redacted version to show the report's true conclusions. (Officials might consider using congressional intelligence committee members to vet the document before releasing it publicly.) That wouldn't address the core question, of course. "When are we going to stop blaming ourselves for terrorism?" Rice asked. Probably not until the Democrats see no political advantage in doing so. nypost.com