Bill Clinton Melts Down When Asked if he Could Have Done More to Prevent 9/11

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• published: 20 May 2013
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Many twisted points from BC. Clinton was not accused of being obsessed with Bin Laden, he was accused of bombing Iraq and Afghanistan to get Monica off the headlines. Despite the fact that Clinton timed airstrikes with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, House Speaker Newt Gingrich still recognized that Clinton was finally taking action on the issue of terrorism and regardless of the reasons still appealed to his fellow Republicans to get behind the President. Clinton went on to bomb Bin Laden's pharmacutical factory in the Sudan because it was suspected of making WMD that could fall into the hands of Al Qaeda terrorist. But after the attack UN weapons inspectors said there was no evidence of WMD and Gingrich dismissed what was later dubbed the Monica Missile Strikes as"pinpricks". After the bombing of the Al Shifa aspirin factory, the panicked Sudanese offered to arrest and deport Bin Laden and send him back to Saudi Arabia to get the US to stop the bombings and economic sanctions (the factory was the primary source of pharmacuticals for Sudan and Kenya). The Saudis refused to accept Bin Laden and Clinton then declined to have to him arrested and brought to the US because he said there was a "lack of evidence". Later Clinton retracted that statement and said he "mispoke". Because there was no evidence of WMD the Sudanese demanded an apology from the Clinton Administration for mistakenly bombing thier country. But Clinton refused to apologize and just out of sheer coincidence we now have a president of Kenyan descent who's family was associated with Al Qaeda. Regarding Somalia, G.H.W Bush sent in 50,000 troops, Clinton cut the troop number back to 5,000. After the troop reduction the Somali's then decided they wanted to fight. Colin Powell asked Clinton for armored back up in the form of Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles as well as AC-130 gunships. Clinton denied that request because he did not want the appearance of a military escalation and he referred to a Pakistani armored unit that was already there as part of the UN force. When the armor units were needed to rescue the soldiers in the downed Blackhawk helicopter the Pakistani's refused to move because they were not really trained to fight, and many American soldiers were killed and their dead bodies were dragged through the street of Mogadishu. Clinton responded to this by pulling all US troops out of Somalia. Bin Laden saw the withdraw of American forces and took it as a military retreat and concluded the battle had shifted to inside the United States and started working on the 9/11 attack. "I came closer to killing Bin Laden that anyone since," means he had a opportunity to kill him and let him escape to the vast and lawless wilderness of Afghanistan. After Bin Laden relocated it would have THEN required an invasion of Afghanistan to go after him and the need for "basing rights in Uzbekistan". And even after the US did invade Afghanistan, Bin Laden simply slipped away to Pakistan. This was a major opportunity that Bill Clinton had thrown away. All of this could have been avoided if Clinton had simply followed through with his war on terror he took up during Monicagate and dealt with Bin Laden either overtly or covertly. Clinton had already set himself up for disaster by making a point of choosing a man for Secretary of Defense named Les Aspin who was hands down the worst possible person for the job that he could find. Because Clinton so loathed the military he literally chose a man in the league of Barney Frank for Secretary of Defense to advise him on military issues. I repeat, Clinton deliberately chose the worst possible man for Secretary of Defense to make of point of how he loathed the military. Christopher Hitchens wrote an epic article "They Bomb Pharmacies Don't They?"accusing Clinton of just needing to look "presidential for a day" during the Monica Lewisnky scandal. The LA Times wrote a article claiming "Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize", so this is all acutal history, not a hit job by Fox News as Clinton states in this interview. http://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/05/opinion/oe-ijaz05 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Aspin