Bill Clinton Takes On Fox News

Lash was whining about the "attack" on Bush I on CBS. What a load of crap!

Quote:

Was it an assault?

Fox News Chief Roger Ailes is up in arms over the now famous clash between former President Bill Clinton and Fox's Chris Wallace. He says Clinton had a "wild overreaction" and his "attack" on Wallace was "an assault on all journalists."

How supremely ironic that Roger Ailes would be saying this. On January 25th, 1988, it was Ailes who, sitting five feet away from then Vice President George H.W. Bush in his Senate office in the Capitol building, literally used cue cards to help orchestrate the now-famous Bush confrontation with Dan Rather over the Iran/Contra affair.



But the slam at Rather occurred only after Bush feigned surprise at his tough questioning. We know it was feigned because in an interview with ABC's Sam Donaldson in 2000, Bush himself, admitted that the GOP had a mole on the inside at CBS who gave them advance word of the questions Rather was going to ask.

And those of us who worked at CBS at the time also recall the Ailes-orchestrated telephone campaign from viewers "outraged" over Rather's show of "disrespect" to the Vice President. The phone calling onslaught was so effective it brought the CBS-New York switchboard to a grinding halt for nearly three days.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2006/09/was_it_an_assau.html

I'm hardly a liberal plant.

Tell us something we don't know.

IMO if you don't pay taxes you shouldn't be able to vote. There, I said it.

I'll alert the media.

okie wrote:

MarionT, you sound like you've been hanging around the likes of some of the most enlightened folks around, perhaps Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and maybe even Hugo Chavez? Otherwise, how have you been able to figure out some of the most revealing and shocking truths that simply escape so many people because they are possibly too backward, too sheltered, too close minded, or too stupid to figure out.

he's your old friend, bernard/massegetto, okie, you flippin' genius.

you think normal folk with brains around here don't know it by now? why the hell do you think I went after the guy for spamming under the moniker of bernard. seen him lately? and you defended the nut bag too.

Transcript: Counterterror Experts Debate Clinton Claims on 'FNS'

Sunday , October 01, 2006
The following is a partial transcript of the Oct. 1, 2006, edition of "FOX News Sunday With Chris Wallace":

<<<snip>>>>

Let's start with President Clinton's claim in our interview that he may not have known in 1993 about Usama bin Laden but that, as time went on, he became very knowledgeable about him. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Did they know in 1996 when he declared war on the U.S.? Did they know in 1998...

W. CLINTON: Absolutely, absolutely...

WALLACE: ... when he bombed the two embassies? Did they know in 2000 when he hit the Cole?

W. CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized the finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Mr. Scheuer, as the man in charge of what was called "Alec Station," the CIA unit in charge of hunting down Usama bin Laden, you say the Clinton administration missed at least 10 chances to get him. I don't want to go into all 10, but what was the problem?

FORMER CIA UNIT CHIEF MICHAEL SCHEUER: Well, the president is correct, in that he got - President Clinton is correct that he got closer than anyone, but, of course, he always refused to pull the trigger. And in addition, we were never authorized, while I was the chief of operations, to kill Usama bin Laden. In fact, Mr. Richard Clarke definitely told us we had no authorization to kill bin Laden.

Why they didn't shoot, of course, is, at least from Mr. Tenet's viewpoint it was because one time they were afraid to have shrapnel hit a mosque when they killed bin Laden. And two other times I think they were afraid they actually would have to do something, so they warned the emirates on one occasion, the princes from the United Arab Emirates, to move so we couldn't attack bin Laden.

WALLACE: They were on a hunting trip with bin Laden.

SCHEUER: Yes, sir. And Richard Clarke called the emirates and warned them that they should get out of that area, which cost us the chance to kill him.

WALLACE: Mr. Benjamin, you were working in the National Security Council at that time. Weren't there a number of cases where the Clinton administration had bin Laden in their sights and refused or failed to pull the trigger?

FORMER CLINTON NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL OFFICIAL DANIEL BENJAMIN: Well, as the 9/11 commission report has shown, the answer to that is no. On three different occasions we had some intelligence that bin Laden might be in a particular place at a particular time, and we had warships off the coast of Pakistan ready to shoot cruise missiles. However, we never got the confirming intelligence.

I have the greatest respect for Mike Scheuer, but on this case I think he's wrong, because, quite simply, we never had enough information to do this with confidence, knowing that we would get the target. And it doesn't help your deterrence and it doesn't help your case if you fire and you don't hit the right person.

<<<snip>>>>

WALLACE: All right. I want to get into one last area here, and I'll give you all an opportunity. One of the other issues that I discussed with President Clinton was the transition to the Bush administration in 2001, and here's what President Clinton had to say about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

W. CLINTON: At least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers that are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Mr. Benjamin, wasn't the plan that President Clinton talks about there, the plan that Dick Clarke presented to Condi Rice in January of 2001, wasn't that awfully close to the delenda plan, "delenda" being Latin for destruction, which, in fact, he had drawn up in 1998 in the Clinton years and in fact was rejected by the Clinton White House?

BENJAMIN: Well, I was no longer in the administration. My understanding was that it was an elaboration of the original program. And things, of course, had changed because of the bombing of the Cole. This involved elaborate diplomatic approaches to other governments that a new administration needed to take on.

I do think that the key point here is that President Clinton is correct. The administration came into office. They held a meeting immediately on regime change in Iraq. They didn't hold a meeting of the principals of the National Security Council until September 4 on Al Qaeda. They didn't take the threat nearly as seriously as their predecessors had, and valuable time was lost.

WALLACE: Mr. Scheuer, you're very critical of President Clinton, as we've seen today, but you also are on the record as saying that President Bush was, quote, "absolutely negligent in his failure to do more in the first eight months."

SCHEUER: Oh, I think that's absolutely the case. And I think that this administration has led us into a tremendously difficult long-term problem, which will be very bloody and costly for Americans.

I think fair is fair, though. Mr. Clarke, Mr. Berger, Mr. Clinton did have opportunities that were delivered by the men and women of the CIA to kill Usama bin Laden. In the first eight months of the Bush administration, there were no such opportunities. Could Bush have done more?

BENJAMIN: He didn't create any either.

SCHEUER: There were no such opportunities.

<<<snip>>>

WALLACE: Let me bring Mr. Wright into this, as well.

As someone -- and I have read your book -- who has reported this exhaustively for years around the world, after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa, after the attack on the USS Cole, and it's not like the slate gets wiped clean when a new president comes in, why did both presidents fail to appreciate and take more seriously the threat of Al Qaeda?

WRIGHT: Well, first of all, they were both poorly served by their intelligence agencies. And this is not a Clinton or a Bush problem; it goes back to Carter. It has been withered for decades under many administrations. And the will to act had also withered along with that.

And so, when it gets down time for Mike -- you know, when Clinton says, "Get him," and Mike is in charge of getting him, he doesn't have the kind of people really available to him. They're trying to hire tribal people who are not CIA employees. They're trying to give them some kind of reward if they capture him. They don't have people that speak natively Arabic and ...

WALLACE: I understand that, but wasn't it also failure of will by both presidents?

WRIGHT: I think if they actually had a real moment of having bin Laden in their sights, but the truth is, on each of these occasions, when they had tribals who said they thought that he was there, one time when he was in the governor's house but he actually left, another time when the CIA had mistakenly given information that led to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and then the best opportunity to get bin Laden arises right after that, and, you know, and Clinton -- and Tenet had a failure of nerve.

That is a truism though, we have too many voters, both rich and poor, who've never paid a dollar in taxes in their life. They should be denied access to the voting booth until they can show taxes paid, at least at some point in their life.

That is a truism though, we have too many voters, both rich and poor, who've never paid a dollar in taxes in their life. They should be denied access to the voting booth until they can show taxes paid, at least at some point in their life.

I think the dark skinned ones should be made to spell Pachycephalosaurus, recite the Preamble to the constitution and the Gettysburg address, and have 5 pieces of picture ID.

I think the dark skinned ones should be made to spell Pachycephalosaurus, recite the Preamble to the constitution and the Gettysburg address, and have 5 pieces of picture ID.