Condi Mad Says Clinton "Flat Wrong"
RICE BOILS OVER AT BUBBA
September 25, 2006 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making "flatly false" claims 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.
The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton's claim that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.
"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice responded during the hourlong session.
Her strong rebuttal was the Bush administration's first response to Clinton's headline-grabbing interview on Fox on Sunday in which he launched into an over-the-top defense of his handling of terrorism - wagging his finger in the air, leaning forward in his chair and getting red-faced, and even attacking Wallace for improper questioning.
The "Fox News Sunday" show had its best ratings since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, according to Nielsen Media Research. Two versions of the interview were the two most-watched clips on YouTube yesterday, totaling more than 800,000 views.
After Clinton got angry during the questioning, Wallace said Clinton aide Jay Carson tried to get his producer to stop the interview. Carson said he was concerned that time was running out and that little of the philanthropy efforts of the former president had been addressed.
In her pointed rebuttal of Clinton's inflammatory claims about the war on terror, Rice maintained the Bush White House did the best it could to defend against an attack - and expanded on the tools and intelligence it inherited.
"I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 commission report on the efforts of the Bush administration in the eight months - things like working to get an armed Predator [drone] that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important," Rice added.
She also said Clinton's claims that Richard Clarke - the White House anti-terror guru hyped by Clinton as the country's "best guy" - had been demoted by Bush were bogus.
"Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened. And he left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security, some several months later," she said.
Rice noted that the world changed after 9/11.
"I would make the divide Sept. 11, 2001, when the attack on this country mobilized us to fight the war on terror in a very different way," Rice said.
Rice cited the final 9/11 commission report to substantiate her claims, while Clinton relied on Clarke's book as the basis for many of his rehashing the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I think this is not a very fruitful discussion. We've been through it. The 9/11 commission has turned over every rock and we know exactly what they said," she added.
Transitioning to the global war on terror, an animated Rice questioned, "When are we going to stop blaming ourselves for the rise of terrorism?"
Asked about recently leaked internal U.S. intelligence estimates that claimed the Iraq war was fueling terrorist recruiting, Rice said: "Now that we're fighting back, of course they are fighting back, too."
"I find it just extraordinary that the argument is, all right, so they're using the fact they're being challenged in the Middle East and challenged in Iraq to recruit, therefore you've made the war on terrorism worse.
"It's as if we were in a good place on Sept. 11. Clearly, we weren't," she added.
"These are people who want to fight against us, and they're going to find a reason. And yes, they will recruit, but it doesn't mean you stop pursuing strategies that are ultimately going to stop them," Rice said.
She insisted U.S. forces must finish the job in Iraq and the wider Middle East to wipe out the "root cause" of violent extremism - not just the terror thugs who carry out the attacks.
"It's a longer-term strategy, and it may even have some short-term down side, but if you don't look at the longer term, you're just leaving the problem to somebody else," she said.
She also said Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have a "major educational reform" effort under way to root out propaganda literature and extremist brainwashing.
In Latin America, home to outrageous Venezuelan bomb thrower Hugo Chavez, Rice said the U.S. approach is to "spend as little time possible in talking about Chavez and more time talking about our positive agenda in Latin America," including several trade agreements.
Read Story Here
9-11 Commission Report....PDF Format
Hillary Defends Bubba...Video
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well Bubba did it now! He even has Condi mad. I'm not sure we want Condi mad! Has Condi ever been mad? Oh Bubba What Have You Done?
September 25, 2006 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making "flatly false" claims 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.
The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton's claim that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.
"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice responded during the hourlong session.
Her strong rebuttal was the Bush administration's first response to Clinton's headline-grabbing interview on Fox on Sunday in which he launched into an over-the-top defense of his handling of terrorism - wagging his finger in the air, leaning forward in his chair and getting red-faced, and even attacking Wallace for improper questioning.
The "Fox News Sunday" show had its best ratings since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, according to Nielsen Media Research. Two versions of the interview were the two most-watched clips on YouTube yesterday, totaling more than 800,000 views.
After Clinton got angry during the questioning, Wallace said Clinton aide Jay Carson tried to get his producer to stop the interview. Carson said he was concerned that time was running out and that little of the philanthropy efforts of the former president had been addressed.
In her pointed rebuttal of Clinton's inflammatory claims about the war on terror, Rice maintained the Bush White House did the best it could to defend against an attack - and expanded on the tools and intelligence it inherited.
"I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 commission report on the efforts of the Bush administration in the eight months - things like working to get an armed Predator [drone] that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important," Rice added.
She also said Clinton's claims that Richard Clarke - the White House anti-terror guru hyped by Clinton as the country's "best guy" - had been demoted by Bush were bogus.
"Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened. And he left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security, some several months later," she said.
Rice noted that the world changed after 9/11.
"I would make the divide Sept. 11, 2001, when the attack on this country mobilized us to fight the war on terror in a very different way," Rice said.
Rice cited the final 9/11 commission report to substantiate her claims, while Clinton relied on Clarke's book as the basis for many of his rehashing the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I think this is not a very fruitful discussion. We've been through it. The 9/11 commission has turned over every rock and we know exactly what they said," she added.
Transitioning to the global war on terror, an animated Rice questioned, "When are we going to stop blaming ourselves for the rise of terrorism?"
Asked about recently leaked internal U.S. intelligence estimates that claimed the Iraq war was fueling terrorist recruiting, Rice said: "Now that we're fighting back, of course they are fighting back, too."
"I find it just extraordinary that the argument is, all right, so they're using the fact they're being challenged in the Middle East and challenged in Iraq to recruit, therefore you've made the war on terrorism worse.
"It's as if we were in a good place on Sept. 11. Clearly, we weren't," she added.
"These are people who want to fight against us, and they're going to find a reason. And yes, they will recruit, but it doesn't mean you stop pursuing strategies that are ultimately going to stop them," Rice said.
She insisted U.S. forces must finish the job in Iraq and the wider Middle East to wipe out the "root cause" of violent extremism - not just the terror thugs who carry out the attacks.
"It's a longer-term strategy, and it may even have some short-term down side, but if you don't look at the longer term, you're just leaving the problem to somebody else," she said.
She also said Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have a "major educational reform" effort under way to root out propaganda literature and extremist brainwashing.
In Latin America, home to outrageous Venezuelan bomb thrower Hugo Chavez, Rice said the U.S. approach is to "spend as little time possible in talking about Chavez and more time talking about our positive agenda in Latin America," including several trade agreements.
Read Story Here
9-11 Commission Report....PDF Format
Hillary Defends Bubba...Video
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well Bubba did it now! He even has Condi mad. I'm not sure we want Condi mad! Has Condi ever been mad? Oh Bubba What Have You Done?
posted by Marie's Two Cents | 11:01 PM
10 Comments:
Dick Morris
The real Clinton emerges
From behind the benign façade and the tranquilizing smile, the real Bill Clinton emerged Sunday during Chris Wallace’s interview on Fox News Channel. There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation. Clinton jabbed his finger in Wallace’s face, poking his knee, and invading the commentator’s space.
But beyond noting the ex-president’s non-presidential style, it is important to answer his distortions and misrepresentations. His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the “definition of ‘is’ is” could perform.
Clinton told Wallace, “There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down.” Nobody said there was. The point of citing Somalia in the run up to 9-11 is that bin Laden told Fortune Magazine in a 1999 interview that the precipitous American pullout after Black Hawk Down convinced him that Americans would not stand up to armed resistance.
Clinton said conservatives “were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day” after the attack which killed American soldiers. But the real question was whether Clinton would honor the military’s request to be allowed to stay and avenge the attack, a request he denied. The debate was not between immediate withdrawal and a six-month delay. (Then-first lady, now-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) favored the first option, by the way). The fight was over whether to attack or pull out eventually without any major offensive operations.
The president told Wallace, “I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill bin Laden.” But actually, the 9-11 Commission was clear that the plan to kidnap Osama was derailed by Sandy Berger and George Tenet because Clinton had not yet made a finding authorizing his assassination. They were fearful that Osama would die in the kidnapping and the U.S. would be blamed for using assassination as an instrument of policy.
Clinton claims “the CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible [for the Cole bombing] while I was there.” But he could replace or direct his employees as he felt. His helplessness was, as usual, self-imposed.
Why didn’t the CIA and FBI realize the extent of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism? Because Clinton never took the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center sufficiently seriously. He never visited the site and his only public comment was to caution against “over-reaction.” In his pre-9/11 memoirs, George Stephanopoulos confirms that he and others on the staff saw it as a “failed bombing” and noted that it was far from topic A at the White House. Rather than the full-court press that the first terror attack on American soil deserved, Clinton let the investigation be handled by the FBI on location in New York without making it the national emergency it actually was.
In my frequent phone and personal conversations with both Clintons in 1993, there was never a mention, not one, of the World Trade Center attack. It was never a subject of presidential focus.
Failure to grasp the import of the 1993 attack led to a delay in fingering bin Laden and understanding his danger. This, in turn, led to our failure to seize him when Sudan evicted him and also to our failure to carry through with the plot to kidnap him. And, it was responsible for the failure to “certify” him as the culprit until very late in the Clinton administration.
The former president says, “I worked hard to try to kill him.” If so, why did he notify Pakistan of our cruise-missile strike in time for them to warn Osama and allow him to escape? Why did he refuse to allow us to fire cruise missiles to kill bin Laden when we had the best chance, by far, in 1999? The answer to the first question — incompetence; to the second — he was paralyzed by fear of civilian casualties and by accusations that he was wagging the dog. The 9/11 Commission report also attributes the 1999 failure to the fear that we would be labeled trigger-happy having just bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake.
President Clinton assumes that criticism of his failure to kill bin Laden is a “nice little conservative hit job on me.” But he has it backwards. It is not because people are right-wingers that they criticize him over the failure to prevent 9/11. It was his failure to catch bin Laden that drove them to the right wing.
The ex-president is fully justified in laying eight months of the blame for the failure to kill or catch bin Laden at the doorstep of George W. Bush. But he should candidly acknowledge that eight years of blame fall on him.
One also has to wonder when the volcanic rage beneath the surface of this would-be statesman will cool. When will the chip on his shoulder finally disappear? When will he feel sufficiently secure in his own legacy and his own skin not to boil over repeatedly in private and occasionally even in public?
There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation. Clinton jabbed his finger in Wallace’s face, poking his knee, and invading the commentator’s space.
But beyond noting the ex-president’s non-presidential style, it is important to answer his distortions and misrepresentations. --Mr. Red
From Time.com Nation
What Bush's Body Language Means
The President's assertive words yield an aggressive posture
By MIKE ALLEN
Posted Sunday, Sep. 17, 2006
"The President is standing face to face with NBC's Matt Lauer by the immaculate oak desk in the Oval Office, jabbing emphatically toward the Today anchorman's chest and insisting, 'My job is to protect this country, Matt. And it gets second-guessed all the time by people who don't live in the United States.' Lauer has interviewed Bush several times, and they have a convivial relationship, bonding about golf and bikes during breaks in the taping. But at the moment, Lauer is pressing the President on the legality of the CIA's secret detention program for accused terrorists. Lauer holds his ground on the big rug as the Commander in Chief edges forward, encroaching on his space to the point that Lauer finally puts a hand on Bush's forearm to prevent a collision.
When the cameras are turned off, according to a witness, Lauer tells the President, "Whoa! I thought you were coming after me there." Aides to both men laugh. The President lightens too, but adds, "I feel really strongly about this subject."
But beyond the PRESENT president's non-presidential style, it's important to note that Bush is a finger-jabber too when it suits him and his "style."
And his followers ignore his "non-presidential style" whatever the heck that is, but criticizes Clinton when he defends himself.
But finger jabbing is not what will define Bush's presidency--it will be his monumental failure in Iraq.
And the world knows it.
Why do you always point out someone else's behavior or try and create a distraction to another subject when the discussion is focused on one subject Mrs. Green? George Bush's body language has nothing to do with the subject of Bubba's rude and defensive behavior to a fair and balanced question by the always polite and mild mannered Chris Wallace.
jg, because you don't see the irony in this, I'll point it out to you:
Both Presidents Bush and Clinton engage in jabbing fingers and aggressive behavior toward their questioners. Both.
But the righties think Clinton is crazed when he does it, thus, exposing the righties as the irredeemable hypocrites that they are.
I heard nothing from the righties criticizing Bush for jabbing his finger toward and getting all snarly with Lauer in his interview.
You guys, along with the Bush administration, have no credibility anymore. It's why only 30+% of the American people support Bush and his administration. And believe me, they watch those polls.
The tide, my friends, has turned.
And speaking of the tide turning, apparently ABC's and Chrissy Wallace's hit jobs on Clinton's presidency haven't worked with the public:
September 27, 2006
Bush Blamed More Than Clinton for Failure to Capture Bin Laden
Views are predictably partisan; independents mostly blame Bush
by Lydia Saad
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ -- The recent firestorm over former President Bill Clinton's culpability for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was fueled on Tuesday when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice contrasted President Bush's efforts to pursue al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden with Clinton's efforts. Clinton has strongly denied various suggestions that his administration missed key opportunities to kill bin Laden and left the Bush administration without a comprehensive anti-terrorism strategy. However, Bush -- whom Clinton says did nothing about al-Qaeda for the first eight months of his presidency -- has the bigger image problem with Americans on the issue.
According to a recent Gallup Panel survey, the American public puts the primary blame on Bush rather than Clinton for the fact that bin Laden has not been captured. A majority of Americans say Bush is more to blame (53%), compared with 36% blaming Clinton.
The tide, indeed, has turned.
Mr Red,
I think Dick Morris know's the Clinton's better than most, and if he think's Bubba is unhinged, I would tend to believe him.
Mrs Green,
What Bush's Body Language Means
The President's assertive words yield an aggressive posture
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This post was suppose to be about Clinton not Bush.
And I have NEVER seen Bush poke someone like Clinton did.
Wallace was right when he said "He thought a wall was crashing down on him"
What we witnessed was The Clinton Meltdown on National TV.
JG,
Why do you always point out someone else's behavior or try and create a distraction to another subject when the discussion is focused on one subject Mrs. Green? George Bush's body language has nothing to do with the subject of Bubba's rude and defensive behavior to a fair and balanced question by the always polite and mild mannered Chris Wallace.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LOL I just wrote almost the same thing.
Mrs Green,
I heard nothing from the righties criticizing Bush for jabbing his finger toward and getting all snarly with Lauer in his interview.
You guys, along with the Bush administration, have no credibility anymore. It's why only 30+% of the American people support Bush and his administration. And believe me, they watch those polls.
The tide, my friends, has turned.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bush NEVER poked Lauer the way Clinton poked Wallace, and called NBC or CBS a bunch of Left Wing Lunatic's, which he should have. But Bush has more decency than that. Bush doesnt bring himself down to those levels.
When will you ever stop with the polls? I told you before you could tell me Bush was at 80% approval and I still wouldnt believe it, the only poll that counts is in November!
Oh the tide has shifted alright, against the left wing Loon's in YOUR party!
Mrs Green,
And speaking of the tide turning, apparently ABC's and Chrissy Wallace's hit jobs on Clinton's presidency haven't worked with the public:
September 27, 2006
Bush Blamed More Than Clinton for Failure to Capture Bin Laden
Views are predictably partisan; independents mostly blame Bush
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NONSENSE!!!!!
You can drag up all the polls you want, but everyone I talk to on and off the Internet think Clinton tore up the Military, lost Bin Laden, didnt do enough about Terrorism, and his biggest acheivement was attacking the Branch Dividian Compound in Waco, Texas.
Oh yeah Clinton's legacy will now read "The Whore of the White House, The Man who failed to catch Bin Laden, and his biggest Military acheivment was attacking our own Country"!
Yep the Tide sure has turned!
Post a Comment
<< Home