Posted on 05/17/2002 6:07:58 PM PDT by JohnPaulJones
The Washington Times
December 10, 2001, Monday, Final Edition COMMENTARY; Pg. A17
Clinton legacy addendum
Mona Charen
His beaming smile made it to the front page for the first time in months. Alas for him it was only the front page of the Style section in The Washington Post. There he was, shovel in hand, laying the groundwork for his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.
But the groundwork for his place in history has already been laid - and no gleaming edifice of stone and glass will obscure it. We have witnessed, in the days since September 11, new but unsurprising evidence of what a sociopath we had as our leader for eight years. And we have learned that his immaturity, shallowness and thermonuclear self-centeredness had consequences for the nation that were tragic and very nearly catastrophic.
While the sane world grieved at the savagery of the September 11 calamity, Mr. Clinton confided to a friend his regret. What? That he hadn't done more to protect the nation? That he underestimated the danger? No. He "regretted" that this tragedy hadn't happened on his watch, and that he had therefore lost an opportunity for "greatness." Even by the vanity standards applicable to movie stars and tenors, that qualifies as pathology.
But far more damning than his solipsistic response to the nation's anguish is the abundant evidence that he did almost nothing to protect us while he had the chance. In 1996, as Monsoor Ijaz relates in the Los Angeles Times, Sudan offered to extradite Osama bin Laden to the United States. The Clinton administration declined the offer.
Demonstrating the lawyerly folly of the administration's approach to international terror, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger explained that the United States feared it did not have the evidence to convict him in our courts. Even as late as 2000 - after the two African embassy bombings and well after it was known that bin Laden was behind the Khobar Towers attack - an Arab nation approached the Clinton White House through Mr. Ijaz, offering to collar bin Laden and eventually deliver him to the United States. The Arab nation, which Mr. Ijaz declined to name, also offered to give key information to the United States about Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah - the groups that taught bin Laden the terror ropes. Again the Clinton administration failed to act.
Even after the USS Cole was struck and nearly sunk in 2000, Mr. Clinton was too busy chasing the chimera of a grand Middle East peace to deal with those he knew had attacked us. Hoping for a secure place in history for William J. Clinton, he declined to do anything that might annoy or unsettle the Islamic world.(snip)
Bin Laden-gate Witness Dares Dems: Depose Me on Clinton 9-11 Cover-Up
The man who negotiated a deal for Osama bin Laden's extradition to the United States six years ago is daring Senate Democrats to call him as a witness in the upcoming probe into the government's 9-11 intelligence failures, saying he can blow the lid off the Clinton administration's cover-up of the episode.
Mansoor Ijaz, a major Clinton financial supporter who hammered out the 1996 bin Laden agreement with the government of Sudan only to have the White House turn the offer down, issued the challenge Thursday during an interview with nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity.
"I'm saying this point blank," Ijaz announced in impassioned tones. "Clinton, Berger, Albright, Susan Rice - any of them that want to come and take us on. I've got the paperwork to back up what I've said and they know it. And they know they can't run and hide."
Ijaz complained that since Sept. 11, he has yet to be called by either the House or Senate intelligence committees to give sworn testimony.
"[Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman] Bob Graham is a friend of mine and he knows what I've got in my files. And they know where to find me if they really want to find out the truth about what was possible at that time."
Ijaz charged that Senate Democrats don't want to call him, in order to protect the previous administration.
"I'm absolutely convinced," he told Hannity, "that the Democrats are desperately trying to find a way to deflect the attention from the complicity of the Clinton administration in letting this terrorism problem get so far out of hand."
The former Clinton negotiator described the missed opportunity to get bin Laden and fingered former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and former Attorney General Janet Reno as having key roles in the deadly foul-up.
"By May of 1996 the Sudanese had decided to get rid of bin Laden because he was becoming a problem there as well. They called the Clinton administration one last time and said, 'If you don't want him to go to Saudi Arabia, we're prepared to hand him over to you guys directly.'"
"And the Clinton administration's response to that was 'We don't have enough legal evidence against him,'" Ijaz explained.
Besides Berger and Reno, "Clearly the president had to have had a hand in making that decision," he added. "There's no question in my mind that he was involved in those decisions as well. There's no question about that at all."
The former Clinton negotiator suggested that Congress depose other witnesses who could corroborate and expand upon his account.
"The American people should know that I have even persuaded a senior Sudanese intelligence official, who was later the intelligence chief, that if it became necessary he would come to the United States and testify in closed hearings about precisely what they were prepared to do," he said. "And he would bring the data with him."
Another witness suggested by Ijaz: former Clinton administration ambassador to the Sudan, Tim Carney.
"Frankly, [Carney] can take the American people a couple of steps further in terms of taking them inside the deliberations that went on and telling people precisely how the politicizing of the intelligence took place at that time."
Ijaz also charged that Clinton officials deliberately went out of their way to stifle FBI anti-terrorism probes.
"The FBI, in 1996 and 1997, had their efforts to look at terrorism data and deal with the bin Laden issue overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan," he said.
The Bush administration takes a different approach entirely, according to Ijaz.
"I can tell you personally that I have dealt with the Bush administration's national security team." he told Hannity. "These are people who immediately react to information that is brought to their attention that is necessary and important for people to know. ... There is no comparison to the Clinton administration."
The most corrupt administration of the Republic, which murdered Vince Foster, incinerated eighty innocents in Waco, crashed a plane to get Ron Brown, murdered Jim McDougal, sent 150 SS thugs for a six-year-old boy didn't want to imprison the most dangerous man on earth because it feared it did not have the evidence to convict him in our courts.
Per Webb Hubbell's father-in-law Seth Ward, "There's horsepower and then there's horsesh*t."
This ain't horsepower.
Ya Think .. Oh OK .. maybe just a little
...HILLARY RODHAM -&- BILL CLINTON behaved here at home just like the Communist North Vietnamese Enemy we were still fighting in a then Free South Vietnam.
...Watching OxFord "Student" BILL CLINTON's Anti-America misbehaviors in England and the Communist Soviet Union during the late 1960's, early 1970's ...I said to myself and others...
.."This man is a VIPER. If he ever gets into a position of Real Political Power here ...WE ARE IN ..T-R-O-U-B-L-E..!!!
...The Enemy is now within and always has been as one with our Terrorist and Communist Terrorist Enemies everywhere.
...1970's = CLINTONS Destroy...
...1980's = CLINTONS Destroy...
...1990's = CLINTONS Destroy...
...2000's = CLINTONS Destroy for as long as allowed to.
That's got to be drummed in the Sheeple's skulls, IMO...the RATS in general--and Osama bil Clinton, in particular--are not anti-Terrorism--or anti-Chi-Com--as it gives them yet another excuse to expand the Federal Leviathan and their own Power. Clinton couldn't be bothered by any of the big issues of the 90's (Social Security Privatization, the Proliferation of Nukes, the Dumbing Down of Public Education), he dodged them all. 9/11 was but the first evidence of Clinton's Failure to Act...will China's Nuclear Attack upon America be that unimaginable in a few years?! That future catastrophe should clearly be laid at the feet of the EX-Traitor-in-Chief!!
FReegards...MUD
BTW...I saw the Monzoor Ijaz segment but the young'uns were hollerin' at me to play Daddy-Monster and I only got the highlights...LOL!! Anybody got a transcript? Rangel tried to laugh it off, but bin Laden's crimes are directly traceable to Clinton's Failure to Act. The RATS have stepped in it again, IMHO, and Rangel actually looked almost ashamed to argue otherwise this evening.
Oooops, I left out the Emasculation of our Military and Intelligence Agencies, but that was intentional on Billzabubba's part...MUD
True. We know it. They know it. But their real goal here is to cast enough of doubt on Bush, or to put him on the defensive so that he develops a chink in his image of political invincibility, such that it places a doubt in people's minds, before this whole thing does blow up in their faces. They want Bush to suffer collateral damage. It's the Democrats' version of a political suicide bombing...
I heard that exchange on Hannity's radio piece with Davis. Hannity didn't press Davis for WHY he wouldn't talk about Ijaz.
Looks like the Republicans on the Congressional committees have a star witness, which takes the wind out of the democrats' sails, on this issue.
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