with Allah at Hot Air:
SeeDubya’s angling to consult on the new script, and has helpfully retrieved this anecdote, as related by Michael Scheuer last year on Hardball, from the memory hole:
Mr. Clinton‘s administration had far more chances to kill Osama bin Laden
than Mr. Bush has until this day… [W]e had at least eight to 10 chances to
capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all
occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act…
When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers
were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with
the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically
designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled
into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it
wouldn‘t irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence
community.
Is this scene in “Path to 9/11″? If not, why the hell not?
And more:
There’s more than enough blame to go around, as Dan Riehl helpfully reminds us by digging out an op-ed by Mansoor Ijaz from 2001. Money quote:
President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.
I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities…
As an American Muslim and a political supporter of Clinton, I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then, that their counter-terrorism policies fueled the rise of Bin Laden from an ordinary man to a Hydra-like monster…
Clinton’s failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger’s assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy
failures in American history.
And best question of the day here from reader David B.:
CBS News showed documents that they knew to be fake showing President Bush
in dereliction of duty in order to stage a domestic coup. ABC is showing
something that they freely admit contains “dramatized” scenes that are based in
reality. Clinton objects that these scenes are not true, which we’ll never know
since the truth was shredded by one Sandy Berger.
Which network gets
threatened with a license pull?
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