thaiphoon wrote:
Clinton lies. He's a known liar. He's admitted to lying in court. Now he wants you to believe him and you do??
Yes, he lied to the American people about his affair with "that woman, Miss Lewinsky," but he never admitted to lying in court as you claim. In fact, he was aquitted of that charge by the Republican controlled Senate.
Huh?? Once again you confuse a legal remedy rather than a political one. Clinton plead and was found guilty of intentionally giving false and misleading testimony during his civil trial. Judge Susan Webber Wright was the one who levied the charges of which he did not contest. He was fined $800,000 and had his law license suspended.
You are confusing the legal remedy (the court case and his conviction) with the political remedy (his impeachment in the house and subsequent trial in the Senate).
Quote:
The Senate voted on the Articles of Impeachment on February 12, with a two-thirds majority, or 67 Senators, required to convict. On Article I, that charged that the President "...willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury" and made "...corrupt efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses and to impede the discovery of evidence" in the Paula Jones lawsuit, the President was found not guilty with 45 Senators voting for the President's removal from office and 55 against. Ten Republicans split with their colleagues to vote for acquittal; all 45 Democrats voted to acquit. On Article II, charging that the President "...has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice"..., the vote was 50-50, with all Democrats and five Republicans voting to acquit.
http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/e-gov/e ... mpeach.htm (notice how I document my assertions with links)
Yes, and your "documentation" is for naught my friend. I wasn't talking about the trial in the Senate....
thaiphoon wrote:
Clinton lied about doing everything he could. Clinton did next to nothing to catch OBL. He had at least 7 years to do so and refused on multiple occasions to "ok" the grab of OBL and bring him to justice.
There you go again. Please reference a credible source showing that Clinton ever had a chance to kill or capture Bin Laden that he did not take.
Clarke's own book (you remember the one that Billie referenced about 8 million times in the Wallace interview?) states it... you outta buy a copy of the book ya know.
Again and again, Clarke and the members of his team agree that a course of action is vital – up to and including air raids against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan - He advocated air raids instead of cruise missiles because the latter are slower and gave the Pakistanis time to tell OBL to bug out of camp. Guess what ?? NOTHING happens. Either the bureaucracy refuses to carry out the order (or the military bogs down and drudges through the motions) or the majority of the time its Billie who nixes any action that would've engendered any risk at all. Go read Clarke's book. It seems Billie thinks it exonerates him. It doesn't.
Other accounts in the book detail where the military was slowly dragging its feet and the Clinton administration did nothing to get them moving;
From the book that Clinton says exonerates him;
"On a brisk October day in 2000, [Army Special Forces colonel Mike] Sheehan stood with me on West Executive Avenue and watch[ed] as the limousines left the White House meeting on the Cole attack to go back to the Pentagon. 'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the *sh$t* do they think attacked the Cole, *f$ck*' Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell, they won't even let the Air Force bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention."
thaiphoon wrote:
Here's one of his "whoppers" with Chris...
Quote:
Bill: OK, now let’s look at all the criticisms: Black Hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew Al Qaida was a growing concern in October of ‘93.
Not a living soul?? Really ???
His own Justice Department indicted OBL and Al Qaeda's military commander, Mohammed Atef, on Nov. 4, 1998, for conspiring to kill Americans. PBS (definitely not right-wing friendly wouldn't ya say??) has the information here...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... tment.html So even if they didn't get around to actually legally "indicting" him until '98 they still knew who did it well ahead of that time. Additionally, he had 2 years to go after him after the indictment.
I agree that PBS is not right-wing friendly, only because they tend to tell the truth in their reporting. So... your claim is that since they discovered al Qaeda's existence several years later, that Clinton was lying about no one in October of '93 believing OBL had any connection to Black Hawk Down? I don't see any refutation of Clinton's claim anywhere in your posted PBS link.
Seriously, did you read my subsequent posts? As early as 1994 the MSM had stories linking OBL to the first WTC bombing. So if the MSM knew then surely our intelligence agencies knew long before then. Additionally, he seems to have forgotten that al Qaeda was identified as the group behind the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Clinton's national-security adviser Anthony Lake was quoted as saying that it was after this attack that he first heard the name Osama bin Laden. He said he then briefed Clinton about bin Laden. Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla), chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare wrote several letters to Clinton, beginning in 1993. Not a living soul huh?? I guess they are just
ghosts then...
thaiphoon wrote:
Clinton mentions Richard Clarke's book a bunch of times. While Clarke is obviously in Clinton's camp (he's no Bush supporter) and his views on Clinton are biased to a pro-clinton viewpoint, his book still doesn't get Clinton off the hook. Read Clarke's book and you'll see that the ball was in court numerous times and Clinton never mustered the will to decisively act and tell certain organizations and military leaders to get the job done. Even though those elements fall under his authority.
He had 7 years to do something. He failed to do it. And now he wants to complain that the others didn't stop the attacks in 8 months when he failed to do anything in 7 years?? Thats just BS.
Richard Clarke also served under Reagan and Bush I. I hardly think you can paint him with a liberal brush. The only reason he is pro-Clinton, is because Clinton actually acted on his recommendations, and took the threat of terrorism seriously. How many times did Dick Cheney's anti-terrorism task force meet in those eight months?
Nonsense. There are many careerists who serve for decades through administrations that they don't agree with. Billie wants you to read his book, you should. In it Clarke attempts to give Billie a pass on a great many things, but its the information you read as he's doing so that is so damning to Clinton's account of his own presidency.
As for acting on his recommendations - when did Bill do this?? I've posted above how that many of his recommendations were ignored. You would know this if you took yourself to Borders and bought a copy of Clarkes book. Just like your pal Bill wants you to.
But don't take my word for it... check out the 9/11 report;
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf*see I can link stuff too *
(Warning - if you print it out the page #'s are ok but if you try to go to the page #'s online then it will be "off" somewhat if you do a search to a particular page)
After page 188 or so you'll see them talking about responses to the Cole bombing. I'll quote from the report;
The report describes the Clinton administration's efforts to respond to the attack on the USS Cole.
President Clinton told us [the authors of the report] that before he could launch further attacks on al Qaida in Afghanistan, or deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban ... the CIA or the FBI had to be sure enough that they would "be willing to stand up in public and say, we believe that he [bin Laden] did this." He said he was very frustrated that he could not get a definitive enough answer to do something about the Cole attack.
another one this time from a Nov. 25, 2000, memo,
[National Security Adviser Sandy] Berger informed President Clinton about a closely held idea: a last-chance ultimatum for the Taliban. Clarke was developing the idea with specific demands: immediate extradition of bin Laden and his lieutenants to a legitimate government for a trial, observable closure of all terrorist facilities in Afghanistan, and expulsion of all terrorists from Afghanistan within 90 days. No such ultimatum was issued.
And again - on Dec. 21, 2000, the CIA presented a "preliminary judgment" that bin Laden had indeed ordered the attack on the Cole. According to the report;
This, President Clinton and Berger told us, was not the conclusion they needed in order to go to war or deliver an ultimatum threatening war. The election and change of power was not the issue, President Clinton added. There was enough time. If the agencies had given him a definitive answer, he said, he would have sought a UN Security Council ultimatum and given the Taliban one, two, or three days before taking further action against both al Qaeda and the Taliban. But he did not think it was responsible for a president to launch an invasion of another country just based on a "preliminary judgment."
Here's what Clarke (remember he's Clinton's authority)had to say about that assessment according to the report;
Clarke recalled that while the Pentagon and State Department had reservations about retaliation, the issue never came to a head because the FBI and CIA never reached a firm conclusion. He thought they were "holding back." He said he did not know why, but his impression was that Tenet and Reno possibly thought the White House "didn't really want to know," since the principals' discussions by November suggested there was not much White House interest in conducting further military operations against Afghanistan in the administration's last weeks. He thought that instead, President Clinton, Berger, and Secretary Albright were concentrating on a last-minute push for a peace agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis."
And the head of the CIA says its not true;
Tenet told us he was surprised to hear that the White House was awaiting a conclusion from him on responsiblity for the Cole attack before taking action against al Qaeda. He did not recall Berger or anyone else telling him that they were waiting for the magic words from the CIA or the FBI. Nor did he remember having any discussions with Berger or Clinton about retaliation.
Want another credible source? How about Michael Scheuer. Michael is a 22-year CIA veteran who used to head the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden unit. Scheuer (who is no fan of Bush's) is referred to as "Mike" in the September 11 Commission Report wrote an Op-Ed in the Wash Times and in it he states the following;
"In spring 1998, I briefed Mr. Clarke and senior CIA, Department of Defense and FBI officers on a plan to kidnap bin Laden. Mr. Clarke's reaction was that 'it was just a thinly disguised attempt to assassinate bin Laden.' I replied that if he wanted bin Laden dead, we could do the job quickly. Mr. Clarke's response was that the president did not want bin Laden assassinated, and that we had no authority to do so."
In Scheuer's interview with 60 Minutes from 2004 here is the following;
In a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees earlier this year, Scheuer says his agents provided the U.S. government with about ten opportunities to capture bin Laden before Sept. 11, and that all of them were rejected.
One of the last proposals, which he described to the 9/11 Commission in a closed-door session, involved a cruise missile attack against a remote hunting camp in the Afghan desert, where bin Laden was believed to be socializing with members of the royal family from the United Arab Emirates.
Lest you not believe that he is not a Bush fan, he is the author of the book titled
"Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," under the pen name Anonymous
Richard Miniter has a nice Op-Ed too which rounds out some of the details;
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 83,00.htmlSo, Clinton supposedly
wanted to do something about it, but the FBI and CIA wouldn't let him?? Seriously, who exactly was in charge during 1993-2000??
Oh and as for that "comprehensive plan". There was none. Sandy Berger, (whom you should remember as the guy who tried to sneak documents relating to the after action reports, for some terrorists plots, out of the Netional Archives) was Clinton's national-security adviser and he told the 9/11 Commission;
"there was no war plan that we turned over to the Bush administration during the transition. And the reports of that are just incorrect."
Richard Clarke, the man Clinton stated over and over was an authority on the subject of his counter-terrorrism, said the same thing to reporters in 2002:
"There was no plan on al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration."
thaiphoon wrote:
Wallace asks tough questions of his guests regardless of which party they belong to.
Once again, you make a statement that is patently false. Immediately below the video, there are three links debunking your (and Wallace's) claim.
What links??
Here's a few for you though;
Wallace's interview with Rumsfeld
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/ ... f0568.htmlWallace's interview with Rice;
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/71998.htmI don't see any powder puff questions like what Clinton got from Larry King, Olbermann or viera do you?? Wallace was doing what he pretty much always does. Ask tough questions of his guests. and Bill over-reacted.
Your gratuitous assertion is denied.
thaiphoon wrote:
I've disagreed with Bush many times in other political venues and have called him on things when I disagree. When he's made mistakes IMHO I've disagreed.... In fact I'd rather just talk sports on this site. But lies from our latex-President Bill should not going to go unanswered as they have in the past in the MSM.
You may have "disagreed with Bush many times in other political venues and have called him on things when I disagree," but to my knowledge you have never disagreed here. Please enlighten us with instances where you have disagreed with Bush.
Gee - where to start on where I differ or have differed with him? Ok -> Steel Tariffs, Abortion (although I support the ban on partial birth abortion), Stem Cell Research, the Dubai port deal I wasn't wild about, guest worker program, etc... There are many issues where I do not agree with his position.
