Posted on 09/06/2002 8:02:06 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
The perils of cover-up journalism became starkly apparent last night, when the media allowed ex-President Clinton to get away with criticizing the Bush adminsitration for not getting Osama bin Laden without breathing a word about his own smoking gun admission that he personally let bin Laden off the hook.
"Saddam Hussein didn't kill 3,100 people on Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden did," Clinton complained at a fundraiser for Rep. Loretta Sanchez. "And as far as we know he's still alive," the ex-president added.
Friday morning the wires were filled with reports on Clinton's remarks urging Bush to take care of business in Afghanistan before taking on Saddam, without a single mention of NewsMax.com's smoking gun recording of the ex-president admitting that when he was offered bin Laden on a silver platter, he said no.
Since NewsMax posted a link last month to the damning audio evidence, the Clinton bin Laden-tape has become a staple of talk radio shows from coast-to-coast, including The Bob Grant, Sean Hannity and George Putnam shows.
But with the exception of Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," "Hannity & Colmes" and FNC's "Fox & Friends" morning show, the television press is keeping the tape a more closely guarded secret than America's nuclear codes.
NBC News producers actually expressed an interest in covering the Clinton-bin Laden tape on its prestigious "Nightly News with Tom Brokaw" broadcast, until higher-ups pulled the plug on the segment at the last minute citing other "breaking news." The network never bothered to reschedule.
The print press has been largely complicit in the cover-up, with no major U.S. daily reporting on the explosive audio.
The upshot of the media's Clinton-bin Laden tape cover-up: The ex-president goes virtually unchallnged as he makes the rounds from one event to the next, talking about how "obsessed" he was about taking bin Laden out of the picture.
That's completely untrue and the mainstream press knows it, because they've all heard, by now, the explosive audiotaped truth.
This time, Bill Clinton isn't merely lying about consensual sex in the Oval Office, but instead about the worst attack on American soil in U.S. history. Yet America's mainstream journalists refuse to expose his big lie, lest they risk exposing their own role in the Clinton-bin Laden-gate cover-up.
NewsMax readers are already familiar with Clinton's damning confession to a New York business group earlier this year. But for the press that refuses to report the truth, we reprint the transcript yet again:
"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again - they released him.
"At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan." (End of excerpt)
Here the explosive NewsMax.com tape that Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly called "a journalistic coup."
The Iraqis are weary unto death of the antics of Saddam Hussein, who represents a minority within Iraq. Sensibly, perhaps Iraq should be three countries, as there are three major (and mutually hostile) ethnic groups, the Kurds, the Sunni, and the Shi'ites, all Muslim, but also at each other's throats when there is nothing else to occupy their time and thoughts.
Iran is a different kettle of fish entirely, as the people of that country, while Muslim, are also Farsi, who speak a different language, have an entirely different history, and have at least some semblence of representative government based on a legitimate code of law in their past, which is something that has not been known in Iraq since about the time of Hammurabi. Given that there were a change of regime in Iraq, the Iranians would undertake their own election quickly enough. Such a chain of events may not bode well for the Saudis at all.
Once Saddam is gone, I just cannot see a down side on the long term.
But in the short term, every pro-pal terrorist will be looking for revenge, and every tin pot dictator will be trying to figure out how to strike at us without it being traced back to its source.
It's not that I flat-out think attacking Iraq is wrong, I just want to know that it will be worth the treasure and blood we will have to expend.
We already got our nose bloodied once. It makes no sense to wait until the other guy gets to land a second blow. Because then it will be brass knuckles to the temple and knee in the groin, and while we roll around writhing on the ground, sand in the eyes. "Fair fight" is not a concept that our opposition understands.
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