Steamed Rice: Condi Slaps Clinton Over Wallace Interview Comments

Bill Clinton's attempt at a face-saving, over-the-top response to Chris Wallace during an interview aired on Fox News Sunday has resulted in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responding, saying that much of what Clinton intoned was a lie:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making "flatly false" claims that the Bush administration didn't lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.

Rice hammered Clinton, who leveled his charges in a contentious weekend interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, for his claims that the Bush administration "did not try" to kill Osama bin Laden in the eight months they controlled the White House before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false - and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters.

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice added.

The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton's claim that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice responded during the hourlong session.

Her strong rebuttal was the Bush administration's first response to Clinton's headline-grabbing interview on Fox on Sunday in which he launched into an over-the-top defense of his handling of terrorism - wagging his finger in the air, leaning forward in his chair and getting red-faced, and even attacking Wallace for improper questioning.

I'm relatively sure that much of what the Bush Administration has done regarding terrorism in the months prior to 9/11 remains classified, and so it is difficult to say with any certainty what steps the Administration may have been taking. I would have hoped that among the first steps of the Administration on the subject after taking office would have been to start revamping the human intelligence effort that Clinton gutted in his eight years in office.

Why did Clinton gut American surveillance? Look to the Donkey:

In the past twenty years, there have been at least two high-profile incidents involving leaks. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont was forced to resign from the Senate Intelligence Committee after being tied to a series of leaks in the 1980s. Congressman (later Senator) Robert Torricelli revealed secret information acquired by virtue of his position on the House Intelligence Committee. The information involved a source in Guatemala who had been allegedly been involved in a murder at the behest of then-girlfriend Bianca Jagger. The resulting scandal caused a Clinton Administration “human rights scrub” of human intelligence assets who had been alleged to have connections with criminals or terrorists. Of course, the “human rights scrub” placed the very people who would know about the activities of terrorists and other bad guys off limits to the CIA.

In short, Bill Clinton, embarrassed by Democrats leaking top secret information to the press, decided that instead of cracking down on Democrats, that the best thing to do was to sever the CIA's contact with the very people who would be in the best position to give us information about terrorist activity.

This of course, is the same Bill Clinton that invited terrorist leader Yasser Arafat to the White House on numerous occasions and refused to address Iraq's terrorist threat, even though three of the world's most famous terrorists prior to Osama bin Laden—Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and the bomb-builder of the 1993 Word Trade Center attacks Abdul Rahman Yasin—lived as Saddam's guests in Baghdad.

The Clinton Adminstration also downplayed the fact that Yasin's bomb was built as a chemical weapon; an ammonium nitrate bomb laced with sodium cyanide. Yasin hoped that the bomb would disperse a cloud of poisonous cyanide smoke, killing thousands in the tower as it went up through the elevator and ventilation shafts. Fortunately, the cyanide was vaporized by the blast instead of dispersed in the smoke, and the tower was not undermined by the blast as he hoped. If Yasin had been successful in his 1993 attempt, the casualties of the 1993 Trade Center Attack would likely have far eclipsed the casualties of 9/11. The Clinton Administration responded by treating the treating the attack as a matter of criminal law instead of urgent national security.

The pattern continued.

20 were killed and 372 were injured in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The Clinton Administration did not respond. FBI Director Louis Freeh notes that neither Clinton nor Sandy "Pants" Berger wanted to deal with the fact that Iran was behind the attacks. In the remaining years of his Presidency, Clinton did precisely nothing to bring the bombers to justice. Frustrated by the Clinton Adminstration's inaction, Freeh finally contacted former President George H.W. Bush to move the case forward (my bold):

I had learned that he [former President Bush] was about to meet Crown Prince Abdullah on another matter. After fully briefing Mr. Bush on the impasse and faxing him the talking points that I had now been working on for over two years, he personally asked the crown prince to allow FBI agents to interview the detained bombers.

After his Saturday meeting with now-King Abdullah, Mr. Bush called me to say that he made the request, and that the Saudis would be calling me. A few hours later, Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington, asked me to come out to McLean, Va., on Monday to see Crown Prince Abdullah. When I met him with Wyche Fowler, our Saudi ambassador, and FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson, the crown prince was holding my talking points. He told me Mr. Bush had made the request for the FBI, which he granted, and told Prince Bandar to instruct Nayef to arrange for FBI agents to interview the prisoners.

Several weeks later, agents interviewed the co-conspirators. For the first time since the 1996 attack, we obtained direct evidence of Iran's complicity. What Mr. Clinton failed to do for three years was accomplished in minutes by his predecessor.

The Clinton Administration's response? According to Freeh, they buried the evidence collected after a series of "damage control" meetings. It was only after Clinton exited office and President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice got involved that charges were brought forth against the conspirators on June 21, 2001, five years after the attacks, and just four months after President Bush took office.

That pattern continued.

More than 200 were killed and more than 4,000 were wounded in simultaneous 1998 car bomb explosions on the U. S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Clinton responded by firing cruise missiles at the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and at nearly empty al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Physical targets were destroyed, but only 20 terrorists were thought to have been killed, and Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen said that killing bin Laden, "not our design." Legally, a handful of terrorists were captured, tried, and convicted. Many more terrorists associated with the plot remained free.

Clinton's most robust response to terrorism was still ineffective.

Five months before Clinton left office, 17 sailors were killed and 39 were wounded when the U.S.S. Cole was hit by an al Qaeda suicide boat bomber while refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden. The rules of engagement prevented Cole guards from firing upon the approaching vessels without direct order from senior officers. According to Wikipedia:

Petty Officer Jennifer Kudrick said that if the sentries had fired on the suicide craft "we would have gotten in more trouble for shooting two foreigners than losing 17 American sailors."

Bill Clinton left office having never paid more than lip service to finding or destroying those behind the attack. On November 2, 2002, an armed Predator drone operated by the CIA killed Abu Ali al-Harithi and five other terrorists traveling with him in Yemen. The bombing's mastermind, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was captured that same month and is currently being held by the United States at an undisclosed location.

Bill Clinton did next to nothing to attack al Qaeda in response to four terrorist attacks on the United States during his eight years in office. That he would feign outrage and falsify excuses for his inaction is to invite the criticism he so richly deserves.