What Clinton Did

[Doug]

A president and his critics
BY DONALD L. KERRICK SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Was the Clinton administration truly focused on fighting al-Qaida and getting Osama bin Laden? A bitter national debate over that question was touched off earlier this month by a controversial ABC television miniseries and heightened by former President Clinton’s more recent and forceful comments on Fox News. President Clinton has made his case, Republican critics and ABC’s dramatists made theirs.

No doubt the disputes and discrepancies have left many Americans to wonder what really happened.

I know what happened. I was there. I was an active duty Army officer first assigned to the National Security Council Staff in 1994 and later as a lieutenant general became Deputy National Security Adviser through the end of the Clinton administration in 2001.

Though conservative critics have tried to portray the Clinton national security team as reluctant warriors in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, I observed on a daily basis that then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, then-Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and then-CIA Director George Tenet were positively seized with the mission. Their preoccupation with getting bin Laden rivaled even Richard Clarke’s-whose single-minded focus on the al-Qaida leader was one of the few things ABC got right.

...I was with President Clinton on August 20, 1998, on Martha’s Vineyard when he gave the order to fire 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles at bin Laden’s suspected location in Afghanistan-a fact which would tend to disprove the critics’ aspersions that we favored law enforcement tactics over military force in fighting terrorism. Cruise missiles weren’t tools of law enforcement.

Despite speculation that bin Laden benefited from the Pentagon’s notification of Pakistan that our Afghanistanbound missiles should not be confused with an attack from India upon them, Cohen has explained that the Pentagon didn’t make the notification until the missiles were “well … on their way to the target … there was no way that we were tipping off the Pakistani military.”

...As a former Director of Operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know how hard our intelligence community worked to find bin Laden, but I also know how hard it was to find any one individual who was intent upon staying hidden. The Bush administration has had the same experience with bin Laden for the last five years, even with the added benefit of a large U.S. troop presence and friendly government in Afghanistan.

President Clinton gave the highest priority to the fight against terrorism. He doubled the CIA’s counterterrorism budget and tripled the FBI’s budget for that purpose. He appointed our nation’s first counterterrorism “czar” and supported a plan to deploy and eventually arm the Predator drone as a weapon against bin Laden. (Predator was behind some of the current administration’s greater victories in the war on terrorism.)

The Clinton administration captured more than 50 key terrorists, shut down terrorist cells in over 20 countries, and disrupted a number of conspiracies against U.S. targets, including during the millennium period. And as President Clinton reminded Fox’s Chris Wallace, he passed on to the incoming Bush administration Richard Clarke, who presented them with a comprehensive plan which (according to the 9/11 Commission ) proposed military action to “roll back” al-Qaida...

Donald L. Kerrick, Lt. General (ret.), was Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from 1997-1999 and 2000-2001.

From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, online for subscribers only at:
http://www.arkansasonline.com/ShowStory ... ID=Ar09501

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

History will have no problem with this - only the present, listening to the MSM will ever debate it. But then, Clinton didn't want to take over America - he thought being president was good enough - so he didn't need a war to slip through unconstitutional increases to executive power. The interesting thing is that the topic has come up again - we had all these W-inspired charges against the Clinton administration in late September 2001. And all the same responses. Truth doesn't change its tune.