|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ustwo
Quote:
September 25, 2006 -- <b>Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making "flatly false" claims</b> that the Bush administration didn't lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.
Rice hammered Clinton, who leveled his charges in a contentious weekend interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, for his claims that the Bush administration "did not try" to kill Osama bin Laden in the eight months they controlled the White House before the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false - and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters.
"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice added.....
|
Blah blah blah.
Clinton tries to save his soiled legacy, gets pissy with some reporter almost no one has heard of, lies again. |
Elphaba, since the sources are predictable and limited, it is not difficult to ferret them out....ahhhh....here it is:
Quote:
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/26/...ton-terrorism/
<b>Rice Falsely Claims Bush’s Pre-9/11 Anti-Terror Efforts Were ‘At Least As Aggressive’ As Clinton’s</b>
<b>This morning, in the Fox-owned New York Post</b>, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reacts angrily to President Clinton’s criticisms of how the Bush administration approached the terrorist threat during their first eight months in office. (The Post headlines the article <a href="http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/rice_boils_over_at_bubba_nationalnews_ian_bishop____________post_correspondent.htm">“Rice Boils Over Bubba“</a>) An excerpt:
<b>Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making “flatly false” claims</b> that the Bush administration didn’t lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.
… “What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years,” Rice added.
The 9/11 Commission Report contradicts Rice’s claims. On December 4, 1998, for example, the Clinton administration received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” Here’s how the Clinton administration reacted, <a href="http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf#search=%229%2F11%20Commission%20Report%22">according to the 9/11 Commission report</a>:
The same day, [Counterterrorism Czar Richard] Clarke convened a meeting of his CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] to discuss both the hijacking concern and the antiaircraft missile threat. To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The CIA agreed to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York Police Department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York area airports. [pg. 128-30]
On August 6, 2001, the Bush administration received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” Here’s how the Bush administration reacted, <a href="http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf#search=%229%2F11%20Commission%20Report%22">according to the 9/11 Commission report</a>:
[President Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so.[p. 260]
We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on August 17 and participated in the PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. [p. 262]
Rice acknowledged that the 9/11 Commission report is the authoratative source on this debate: “I think this is not a very fruitful discussion. We’ve been through it. <a href="http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/rice_boils_over_at_bubba_nationalnews_ian_bishop____________post_correspondent.htm">The 9/11 commission has turned over every rock</a> and we know exactly what they said.”
<a href="http://www.digg.com/political_opinion/Rice_Bush_s_Pre_9_11_Anti_Terror_Efforts_Were_As_Aggressive_As_Clinton">Digg It!</a>
|
That quote from Rice, near the bottom of the preceding thinkprogress.org, IMO, is pretty amusing:
Quote:
|
Rice acknowledged that the 9/11 Commission report is the authoratative source on this debate: “I think this is not a very fruitful discussion. We’ve been through it.....
|
When the history of this time of failed American leadership is written, Ron Suskind's written accounts will certainly be incorporated into it:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061901211.html
The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light
By Barton Gellman,
a Washington Post staff writer who reports on intelligence and national security
Tuesday, June 20, 2006; Page C01
THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE
Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
By Ron Suskind
.....Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, <b>to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."</b> Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."
Suskind's portrait of Tenet, respectful but far from adulatory, depicts a man compromised by "insecurity and gratitude" to a president who chose not to fire him after 9/11. "At that point, George Tenet would do anything his President asked," Suskind writes.
<b>Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"</b> Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." <b>And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."</b>
|
|