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Former Clinton administration officials have been busy revising
the history of their failures in the war against international
terrorism. CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover in
the Bush administration, claims to have declared war on Osama
bin Laden in 1998. Other officials, like former Secretary
of Defense William Cohen, have been claiming credit for our
military’s swift success in the war in Iraq.
But a new book fully exposes the failures of these and other
Clinton officials in the war against terrorism. Author Richard
Miniter first wrote about these failures in an award-winning
series in the London Sunday Times in early 2002. His
new book, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures
Unleashed Global Terrorism, expands on that series and
fully documents the Clinton administration’s refusal
to wage all-out war on al Qaeda, disproving Tenet’s declaration.
The investigative journalist was interviewed on Fox News’
Special Report and both Robert Novak and Steve Forbes wrote
columns about the new book. Not surprisingly, however, the
liberal media have completely ignored Miniter’s charges.
Fortunately, the Washington Times published four excerpts
from Losing Bin Laden. The excerpts detail the unwillingness
of Clinton administration officials to provide the U.S. intelligence
community with the necessary resources to conduct anti-terrorism
operations. For example, he writes that the intelligence community
was critically short of linguists trained in Arabic and other
languages spoken by terrorists.
He was told that early in the Clinton years, we could read
only about 10% of intercepted terrorist communications. The
White House, however, was unwilling to support then CIA Director
James Woolsey’s request for more funds to hire and train
new linguists. Miniter concludes that Clinton’s "indifference
kept America blind and deaf as bin Laden plotted." Shockingly,
the recent 9-11 congressional report indicated that we are
still unable to read nearly 70% of such communications today.
Miniter also recounts the bureaucratic dithering that followed
the al Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. Cabinet
members like Janet Reno and Madeleine Albright repeatedly
threw up obstacles and objections to U.S. retaliation for
the Cole attack. Reno, according to Miniter, "insisted"
that the U.S. didn’t really know who had conducted the
attack. She wanted a full investigation prior to any such
U.S. action. Albright worried about the diplomatic consequences
of such an attack and particularly about domestic opinion
in Pakistan.
But the most surprising objections came from Defense Secretary
Cohen. He argued that the attack, which killed seventeen U.S.
sailors, was "not sufficient provocation" for a
retaliatory strike on bin Laden. Miniter says that Cohen’s
objections were fully supported by Clinton-appointed generals
and other Pentagon political appointees. One State Department
official told Miniter that he was "stunned" by their
objections to retaliation. The final vote on whether to retaliate
against bin Laden was seven to one—against.
Not exactly a tough offensive against international terrorism
now, is it?
September 2003
From Accuracy in Media's Media Monitors, by Reed Irvine and
Cliff Kincaid
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