It suddenly occurred to me we’ve been over a lot of this ground before. Did a bit of searching and here it is:
[quote=“Vay”]After 911, Newt Gingrich: blamed Clinton because of his “pathetically weak, inability to focus and stay focused.” If Clinton had “lacked focus”, it would’ve been no surprise, since Newt’s House conducted dozens of investigations against him! Gingrich also said, when Clinton ‘dropped a couple of bombs on Sudan and Afghanistan’ that Clinton “did exactly the right thing.” However, on 9/13/01, he said on Fox, “The lesson has to be that firing a few Tomahawks, dropping a few bombs is totally inadequate.”
What a dick.
Regardless, his accusation about “lack of focus” is just b.s. You ask about trophies? Well, 38 days after he took office, the first WTC bombing occurred. Clinton captured, tried, and convicted those responsible: Ramzi Yousef, Adbul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah. Their capture must’ve thrown a big wrench in their plans to blow up 12 airliners simultaneously and kill the Pope!
Clinton could also be said to have thwarted attacks against UN headquarters, the Lincoln tunnel, the Israeli embassy in Washington, the LA and Boston airports, the US embassy in Albania? Well, he didn’t do any of these things himself, but give him a break, he’s not Governator!
So how can he be credited with these successes? Well, he did triple the counter-terrorism budget for the FBI, and doubled anti-terrorism funding overall. (When Clinton asked for this funding, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch objected: “The administration would be wise to utilize the resources Congress has already provided before it requests additional funding.” Damned tax-and-spend Democrats!)
Clinton created a top-level national security post to coordinate federal counter-terrorism activity. The first holder of this post was Richard Clarke.
Plus, both Clinton’s first and second crime bills contained stringent anti-terrorism legislation. (Gingrich opposed expansion of the FBI’s wiretap authority after the Oklahoma bombing. “When you have an agency that turns 900 personnel files over to people like Craig Livingstone?it’s very hard to justify giving that agency more power.”)
Clinton also created a national stockpile of vaccines, including 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine.
“By any measure available, Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him,” Barton Gellman reported in a 4-part series in the Washington Post. Clinton’s was “the first administration to undertake a systematic anti-terrorist effort.”
Furthermore Clinton ordered a presidential directive authorizing the assassination of Bin Laden, which did not contradict Reagan’s presidential order against such, since Bin Laden was not a “head of state”. As for the “letting OBL slip away in Sudan”, well, far as I know that one can be attributed to my favorite Repub mouthpiece Sean Hannity.
The story comes from Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American investment banker with a big stake in Sudanese oil who claims to have transmitted a middleman offer between the US and Sudan. Ijaz wanted the US to lift sanctions against Sudan, which were in place for very justifiable reasons: terrorist sponsorship, slavery, genocide.
Ijaz had said that Sudan was ready to hand over Bin Laden. However, the US doesn’t conduct diplomacy through self-appointed, private individuals. When the Sudanese government was contacted directly, no such offer existed, negotiations produced nothing, and further intelligence did not back up fact Ijaz’ claim.
Anyway, on 10/12/2000, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole. In response, Clinton put Richard Clarke, the 1st national anti-terrorism coordinator, in charge of taking out Al Qaeda. Clarke produced a strategy paper that he presented to Sandy Berger on December 20th, 2000.
The plan was as follows: break up al Qaeda cells and arrest personnel, attack financial support for its activities, freeze its assets, give aid to governments such as Uzbekistan, the Phillipines, and Yemen, scale up covert activity in Afghanistan to reach Osama, increase support for the Northern Alliance, and put Special Forces on the ground in Afghanistan. This was all in the cover story of Time in August, 2002. A Bush administration official said in this article that Clarke’s plan was pretty much “everything we’ve done since 9/11.” (Notice the emphasis on the word, “since.”)
However, as this plan came a bit late in the game for Clinton - the attack on the Cole being the impetus – Sandy Berger arranged 10 briefings for Condoleeze Rice, and personally attended the ones on terrorism. Richard Clarke was kept on as head of counter-terrorism.
However, in spite of the 2/15/01 Hart-Rudman report which warned of mass-casualty terrorist attacks on the US being “a serious and growing concern”, the Bush administration did just about nothing to act on Clarke’s plan. VP Cheney’s task-force to counter domestic terrorist attacks never even met. The plan, after being bounced around since Bush took office, only reached Colin Powell and Rumsfeld on September 4th, 2001. Bush never even saw it - he was out on the ranch.
On 9/09/01, Congress proposed an increase of $600 million for antiterror programs. This aroused a threat of presidential veto, as the money was to come from Rumsfeld’s missile defense program, which was to cost an estimated $200 billion!
When FBI director Thomas J. Pickark requested $58 million from the Justice Department for new agents, translators, and intelligence analysts, Ashcroft turned him down. The date of the official rejection letter was 9/10/01. On that same date, Ashcroft also sent his budget request to Bush. Out of the 68 spending increases requested, none dealt with terrorism. Nor was it mentioned on Ashcroft’s memo list of his top seven priorities.
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[forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.ph … ich#147994](Bush & Blair (BB) nominated