Clinton and 9-11

Investor's Business Daily

9-11: An ABC miniseries finally pays as much attention to Bill Clinton's eight years before 9-11 as the Democrats have to President Bush's eight months. Critics who blame Bush for missing Osama bin Laden are missing the point.

It's understandable the Clintonistas and President Clinton are upset about the two-part ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11" to be broadcast Sunday, concluding on the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaida attack on America on Monday.

Based on the 9-11 commission report and ABC News correspondent John Miller's book, "The Cell," the film strips away the conventional wisdom that somehow the fledgling Bush White House was responsible for 9-11 through neglect or indifference.

The film strips bare the Democratic talking points, exposing them for the fraud they are, accurately depicting the chances the Clinton White House missed to kill or capture bin Laden and the barriers they put up to connecting all the information.

It starts with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, which the Clinton administration chose to treat as a law enforcement matter and not the first shot in al-Qaida's war against America. That, the film shows, is where the path really began.

One objection to the miniseries came from former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger, last seen stuffing classified documents from the National Archives down his pants. He calls the scenes involving his character in an aborted effort to capture bin Laden before the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania "complete fabrications."

The film portrays an incident in which Berger in essence told a CIA and Northern Alliance team in Afghanistan, literally just feet away from bin Laden, that if they wanted to grab him they'd have to do it on their own, without official authorization or backing.

So they didn't, one of three botched chances to get bin Laden.

As Clinton guru Dick Morris relates, this first missed chance to capture or kill bin Laden came in February 1998, when "Clinton's aides scuttled a CIA plot that had been eight months in the planning to kidnap Osama." The plan would have used Afghan tribesman to capture the al-Qaida leader for a later trial in the U.S.

Believe it or don't, Clinton's aides worried that bin Laden might be killed in the process, making it look like a political assassination.

According to the 9-11 commission report, they were worried of "recriminations" in the event "that bin Laden, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive."

The second chance came on Aug. 20, 1998, in the famous "wag the dog" attack at the height of le affaire Lewinsky, when cruise missiles were actually fired at a bin Laden encampment in Afghanistan. The problem was that Clinton ordered that the Pakistanis be told of the attack, lest they think it was an attack from India.

The news was leaked, and bin Laden dodged our bullets.

The final missed chance came in May 1999 when the CIA reported bin Laden would be in Kandahar, Afghanistan. As the 9-11 commission report said: "If this intelligence was not 'actionable,' working-level officials said at the time and today, it was hard for them to imagine how any intelligence could meet that standard."

It was the Clinton administration that could have put Osama bin Laden out of commission.

It was under Clinton that Americans were killed by terrorists on three continents without a meaningful response.

It was under Bill Clinton that we left Somalia in disgrace after dead Americans were dragged through the streets, giving bin Laden all the proof of our lack of will he needed.

And it was Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, who created the wall of separation between the FBI and CIA that kept us from connecting the information and preventing 9-11.

What's the word that describes all this? Ah, yes, incompetence.