Posted on 06/24/2004 9:41:57 AM PDT by kattracks
Ex-President Bill Clinton said Thursday morning that the Central Intelligence Agency scuttled his plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden - even though he had already approved the missions.
"I had approved in general three other operations against bin Laden," Clinton said during an AOL online interview about his new book, "My Life." "And the CIA came back and said the evidence is insufficient to think that he was at the sites we were going to bomb." "So they recommended we not do it and we took their recommendation," he added, in remarks that contradict an earlier account he gave in a February 2002 address about those operations.Just five months after the 9/11 attacks, Clinton said the primary reason he didn't give the order to attack bin Laden after an initial failed airstrike in 1998 was that he didn't want to violate the airspace of Middle Eastern nations and that he feared the collateral damage would be too great.
"Now, if you look back - in the hindsight of history, everybody's got 20/20 vision - the real issue is, should we have attacked the al-Qaeda network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan," Clinton told the Long Island Association in February 2002.
"Here's the problem. Before September 11 we would have had no support for it - no allied support and no basing rights. So we actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this. We trained people.
"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. And we would have had to do a refueling stop."
In the same speech, Clinton said he decided against another mission to get bin Laden because he feared it would kill innocent women and children.
"Now, I had one other option. I could have bombed or sent more missiles in. 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."
Clinton all but admitted that in hindsight, he made the wrong call:
"Now, after he murdered 3,100 of our people and others who came to our country seeking their livelihood, you may say, 'Well, Mr. President, you should have killed those 200 women and children.'
"But at the time," he insisted, "we didn't think he had the capacity to do that. And no one thought that I should do that. Although I take full responsibility for it."
On Thursday, however, Clinton said others were responsible for bungling the hunt for bin Laden.
"There's not a shred of evidence that I denied either the military or the intelligence services of our country anything when they were after the terrorists in general and bin Laden in particular," he told AOL.
"I gave them the full authority to proceed and to do whatever we could. And I wish we'd been successful in getting him."
Classic bubba...
I thought that they couldn't locate him when they had a chance to make bin laden a grease spot in the desert?
I know people in the CIA. They all take their orders from the President of the United States.
Whew Willie, you just admitted that you are a pussy cat.
"I coulda been a contender."
--Bubba
I coucur,,,but Id dispense with the "cat" off pussy cat..
I'm dumfounded. He keeps piling one lie right on top of another. Incredible!
Well then, I guess that's that. Afterall, the man wouldn't lie would he?
Lies, lies, and more lies.
He's still parsing and blaming others.
I suppose that the CIA has just joined the ranks of the
"vast, right-wing conspirators".
Ah, the old Black Ninja operation.
I'm sure President Bush would be allowed this same courtesy from the press, don't you imagine.
I can just hear the press now, Oh yes George we know you did everything possible but were surrounded by incompetent boobs.
I concur also, and yet this is also a family friendly forum. The message got through, though.
I think he meant "There's a lot of shredded evidence..."
We must have an investigation with cajones enough to go after this!
Slick Willy ranks with Buchanan at the bottom of the pile. He was gonna do a bunch o' stuff, but people kept making life hard for him. This man was just too small to be president -- at least Buchanan meant well.
Anyways, Albright was interviewed and was asked why Clinton didn't take Usama...She said point blank: "I don't know". Give the lady a cigar!!
Regardless, we all now realize what the Muslims were up to all these years and Zacawi's (sp?) latest speech said it best...Either Muslim or dead.
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