assilem

From Time magazine: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...612309,00.html

So why is it these three testified together before the 9/11 commission in secret? I think I know the answer I'll get from critics of the former Clinton administration - that Clinton was too busy getting BJ's to give a shit so he needs his buddies there to back him up. But I want to know what Clinton supporters have to say about this. Why do you think they felt a need to testify together?
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Did Clinton Do Enough?
The 9/11 commission investigates the former president's actions against terrorism
By JOHN CLOUD

Sunday, Apr. 18, 2004
Earlier this month, Bill Clinton returned to Washington to try to convince the 9/11 commission that as President he did what he could to stop Osama bin Laden. Others who have testified before the commission—particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke—did so before a phalanx of reporters and opponents hoping to see them eviscerated on live TV. But like George W. Bush, who will meet with the commission (together with Dick Cheney) at an undisclosed time, Clinton was allowed to appear in private—in a secret, bugproof room called, in a typical Washington solecism, a SKIF—a secure-conference intelligence facility.

It's a disservice to history that Clinton's four hours of testimony on April 8 went unrecorded—and that the commission has offered the same cloak of secrecy to Bush— but sources close to the panel briefed TIME on the session. One commissioner described the atmosphere in the SKIF as "clearly not hostile." Clinton brought along Sandy Berger, his affable National Security Adviser, and Bruce Lindsey, his longtime friend and White House consigliere.The former President offered to stay "as long as any of you want," according to commission chairman Thomas Kean, a Republican, who wouldn't reveal anything else Clinton said.

But people familiar with the meeting say Clinton told the panel he not only read every scrap of intelligence on the leader of al-Qaeda but became obsessed with bin Laden and wanted him dead after al-Qaeda terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, murdering 224 people.

If Clinton was so focused on bin Laden, why did he fail so spectacularly in his efforts to catch him? The ex-President told the commission he lacked "actionable intelligence," and a U.S. intelligence official agrees. "We didn't have actionable information about where we knew he would be that we could take him out," the official says. Others suggest the real problem was that Clinton's takedown orders were slathered in legalisms.

As the commission's staff members noted in a report, "CIA senior managers, operators and lawyers uniformly said that they read the relevant authorities signed by President Clinton as instructing them to try to capture bin Laden ... They believed that the only acceptable context for killing bin Laden was a credible capture operation." To be sure, White House aides and CIA managers understood that a mission to capture bin Laden would probably turn into a mission to kill him, given that the jihadist would almost certainly never go quietly. But according to numerous officials, the CIA officers who would be leading the covert operations wanted ironclad, unrestricted language in presidential memos—which are known, rather redundantly, as Memorandums of Notification (MONs)—that killing bin Laden would be legal. (Ever since Iran-contra and other scandals, covert ops have routinely been lawyered in advance.) As Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll points out in his new book, Ghost Wars, Attorney General Janet Reno, among others, wouldn't allow a Bond-style license to kill, so Clinton's MONs would say things like, "apprehend with lethal force as authorized."

One source of ambiguity in the Clinton MONs was that they had to be written differently for the various proxy groups the CIA was using to help hunt bin Laden, according to an official familiar with the documents. At the time, proxy groups such as Afghanistan's Northern Alliance were considered the best hope for catching al-Qaeda's leader. But intelligence officials wanted to give some proxies less leeway to kill bin Laden in order to minimize the danger that they might use U.S. power to try to eliminate tribal rivals instead of bin Laden.

Clinton told the 9/11 panel he thought his order to kill bin Laden was unmistakably clear. After all, the Justice Department had ruled that the U.S. government's ban on assassinations didn't apply to bin Laden because he was a military target. Even the commission's chairman is convinced that Clinton wanted to kill bin Laden and that the CIA balked over the slightest ambiguities in his orders: "Some of the people who had to carry that out were part of an agency that had been accused of assassinations in Central America not too long before and who had gotten in deep trouble for that," says Kean. "What [they] wanted [was] all the t's crossed and all the i's dotted." The most memorable part of Clinton's testimony may turn out to be what he said to his successor. The panel quizzed Clinton in detail about a meeting he had with President- elect Bush during the truncated transition period after the 2000 election. Clinton said he told Bush in that meeting that bin Laden would be his No. 1 national-security problem. Clarke, who recounts this episode in his book Against All Enemies, writes that the incoming Administration found this assessment "rather odd." Commissioners are planning to seek Bush's side of the story. He too will have to explain why bin Laden is not yet dead.

__________________
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels

Zeld2.0

Unlike many people I don't find a need to see this kind of stuff by party lines. IMO no one should have this need for what they are doing right now. If there is nothign to hide, then the American people deserve the right to know.

elfstar

Ah, but did he insist that they come along? If the commission had for some reason wanted to meet with him individually, would he have been willing to go along with it? In the case of Bush/Cheney there is no doubt, but at least in this particular article there is no indication that Clinton insisted so adamantly. In fact, as far as I can tell from this source, it was the commission's idea for them to meet as a group.

Also in the case of Bush/Cheney, they have been asked repeatedly why they want to meet together, and have dodged the question every time. Is this also true for Clinton and company? If it is, there's nothing in this article to support that.

My last point is this. Suppose that the situation with Clinton is completely analogous with the situation with Bush. What difference does it make? Clinton isn't running for re-election. Sure, it would be nice for historical reasons to know these sorts of details, but it's too late for them to make any real difference. He's served his term and he's out of office. If we find (further) evidence of his lack of integrity, what difference does it make to us now?

assilem

I am agreed. That was the point of the post. The media makes things very one sided and partisan. Wither you watch Fox as a Conservative or CNN as a liberal. They have turned what was supposed to be a bi-partisan and impartial committee-formed to learn something about what happened on 9/11-into the coliseum for everyone to jeer, boo, and rejoice over political blood loss. This committee should not have even taken place until terrorism and extremism is overcome. They did not hold any committees on Pearl Harbor until well after the war was over. It just gives the enemies of the peace loving people of earth fodder.

__________________
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels

HarmlessRabbit

I see no need to respond to a question worded this way. Come back when you're capable of wording something less offensive.

assilem

No one knows.
No one knows.
See if you can find out. I don't know.See my previous post:
See my previous post:
I like your tenacity elfstar.

__________________
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels

MSD

I smell ...
<img src="http://www.seretogis.org/files/linkables/troll.gif">
a troll

You all know how this works. Keep it civil and productive or this thread goes the way of the Savings and Loan businesse.

assilem

I hear you MrSelfDestruct.

__________________
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels

elfstar

assilem, you are the one trying to draw a parallel with the other thread. "No one knows" is precisely my point. If you have no evidence that the similarity between the Bush and Clinton situations is anything more than superficial, then your point is completely without merit. The burden isn't mine to find evidence which supports your position, it's yours.

Like I said before, I think the situation with Bush is relevant because he is a candidate to be our leader for the next four years. If, as it seems to me, he is unable to face a simple commission without help from others, and if he is unwilling or unable to answer the simplest of questions even when repeated, I think that casts some doubt on his ability to lead our nation. Whether or not the same is true of Clinton is largely immaterial because he isn't a candidate for president.
The objective of the commission is to fully understand the failures which allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed. By understanding these failures, we can hopefully avoid repeating our mistakes. In other words, the commission itself is a tool to help prevent future terrorism. Such a committee would be without purpose if it were held after all terrorism had somehow been vanquished.

Furthermore, do you really believe there will be a moment when we can say, "Terrorism has been overcome. Nobody will ever attempt a terrorist act ever again"? This is going to be a continuing struggle for the foreseeable future. So when do you think this commission should be held?

I understand your point about partisan politics, and I fully agree. I despise the two party system in this country, and personally believe we would be better off without it. However, you haven't provided enough evidence to conclude that partisan politics is the only reason that the Bush/Cheney joint testimony story has come to the forefront.

I think any time a political figure blatantly refuses to answer a simple question, it should raise an eyebrow. Go ahead and dig up some similar examples for other politicians (say Clinton or Kerry). I'd be happy to see them. Be careful though, I only have two eyebrows...

bond007

this whole 9-11 commission thing is like one big circle jerk!