Pres Bill Clinton Bitch Slaps Chris Wallace on FOX [Archive]

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SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 01:17 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6tosfl3Bmk&mode=related&search=

My favorite quote is, "You got that little smirk on your face - you think you're so clever." Although that probably won't play well to the other side and is easily spun. Still, it's great. :lol:

He asks his question at 3:30. In part 2 it gets particularly interesting at 4:40.

Clinton mentions that Fox does not ask the same questions of Ds and Rs. He points out that he tried to get Bin Laden many times, that Richard Clark and he told the new administration that terrorism would be their #1 priority, which they ignored, and then demoted Clark. He mentions that all the right wingers used to criticize him for spending so much time on Bin Laden and now they say he didn't do enough.

I'm glad he agreed to go on there because Wallace (smirky pants) was forced to be respectful because of Clinton's status. That is not the case with other Dems that wind up on the network. It is also interesting that Wallace denied that there was any spin to the questions they ask. Oddly, he asked Clinton "Why didn't you do enough to get Bin Laden?" instead of, "What did you do to get Bin Laden?", which would have been a more neutral, less accusatory question. He either does not get this distinction or is content to lie to an ex-president regarding his intentions. What a hack.

bikerchic

09-25-2006, 01:21 PM

As much as I hate Bush, I have to put more blame on Clinton for not getting Osama :distress:

SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 01:23 PM

As much as I hate Bush, I have to put more blame on Clinton for not getting Osama :distress:

Ah that's baloney!

DrummerDeanna

09-25-2006, 01:26 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6tosfl3Bmk&mode=related&search=

"Why didn't you do enough to get Bin Laden?" instead of, "What did you do to get Bin Laden?", which would have been a more neutral, less accusatory question. He either does not get this distinction or is content to lie to an ex-president regarding his intentions. What a hack.

:eek: That is appalling. That is bad journalism. That is why the news media today is becoming a joke.

SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 01:27 PM

:eek: That is appalling. That is bad journalism. That is why the news media today is becoming a joke.

He tries to cover his tracks by blaming his viewers, it was their emailed inquiries that made him ask the question. :eek:

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 01:29 PM

yes yes yes!!!! time for a blobbie! :blob1: :blob1:

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 01:30 PM

As much as I hate Bush, I have to put more blame on Clinton for not getting Osama :distress:

apparently you swallowed WHOLE that garbage ABC broadcast even tho it was apparent that it was full of inaccuracies :distress:

estranged4life

09-25-2006, 01:30 PM

He tries to cover his tracks by blaming his viewers, it was their emailed inquiries that made him ask the question. :eek:

WTH??? My email inquiry asking about Pres.Clinton in 'the ORAL office' must've not made their cut, darn!!! :shrug:

estranged4life

09-25-2006, 01:32 PM

apparently you swallowed WHOLE that garbage ABC broadcast even tho it was apparent that it was full of inaccuracies :distress:

Awful
Bad
Comedy

or

Awful
Bad
CRAP

Sorry, Dis-knee makes me more nauseated than I already feel due to health issues

DrummerDeanna

09-25-2006, 01:34 PM

He tries to cover his tracks by blaming his viewers, it was their emailed inquiries that made him ask the question. :eek:

In that case, one can still ask in a more professional manner. "We've had many e-mails saying you didn't do enough to get Bin Laden...what is your response to that?" or something - but to come out and say, "Why didn't you do enough..." that's confrontational, and just plain unprofessional. But I guess it's yet another showcase of Fox's ethics (or lack thereof.)

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 01:41 PM

In that case, one can still ask in a more professional manner. "We've had many e-mails saying you didn't do enough to get Bin Laden...what is your response to that?" or something - but to come out and say, "Why didn't you do enough..." that's confrontational, and just plain unprofessional. But I guess it's yet another showcase of Fox's ethics (or lack thereof.)

exact-alac-alee (sp???)

SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 01:51 PM

bikerchic

09-25-2006, 01:57 PM

Clinton admits he failed at getting Bin Laden. He was alittle pre-occupied ;) Thinking with the wrong head :distress:

Clinton doesn't look so good and his speech sounds tired and abit slurred. He better slow down abit.

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 02:02 PM

As much as I hate Bush, I have to put more blame on Clinton for not getting Osama :distress:

Which Clinton accepted when he said I tried and failed, which is true :shrug: Clinton's efforts were, however, hampered by his own BS sexcapdes as well as the unwillingness of the armed forces, CIA, etc. to cooperate. Having said that, he was the fukcing Commander in Chief - which begs the question why not just order the campaign executed and be done with it. We all know the answer to that is politics and public perception.

In the end, Clinton did a lot to catch OBL, which IMO W has not done.

Interestingly, I love how Clinton points out that though he was unable to prevent or catch the people responsible for the Cole bombing, W did little or nothing to catch them once Clinton left office and instead seemingly focused on Iraq, despite being told by everyone that although SH was a bad guy, OBL was far worse.

SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 02:36 PM

Which Clinton accepted when he said I tried and failed, which is true :shrug: Clinton's efforts were, however, hampered by his own BS sexcapdes as well as the unwillingness of the armed forces, CIA, etc. to cooperate. Having said that, he was the fukcing Commander in Chief - which begs the question why not just order the campaign executed and be done with it. We all know the answer to that is politics and public perception.

In the end, Clinton did a lot to catch OBL, which IMO W has not done.

Interestingly, I love how Clinton points out that though he was unable to prevent or catch the people responsible for the Cole bombing, W did little or nothing to catch them once Clinton left office and instead seemingly focused on Iraq, despite being told by everyone that although SH was a bad guy, OBL was far worse.

Clinton mentioned that he told the 9/11 commission exactly what mistakes he made in catchig Bin Laden, he told them they could quote him on them, and they left them out of their report. Was that so they could say he didn't do anything? Or allude it it that is? What I mean is, if they published his words, they would surely include detailed descriptions of what he DID DO along with what went wrong. They didn't want to document his actions so they could make it look like he did nothing IMO.

On edit: Ed Schultz is talking about this right now. http://wegoted.com/

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 02:55 PM

I do not think they in fact said he did nothing - so, that argument is inaccurate.

Here is some info. -

9/11 Panel Critical of Clinton, Bush
Officials From Both Administrations Defend Response to Al Qaeda Threat
By Dan Eggen and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 24, 2004; Page A01

The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks issued a stinging condemnation yesterday of the U.S. government's failed hunt for Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network, finding that both the Clinton and Bush administrations focused too heavily on diplomacy that did not work and were reluctant to consider aggressive military action.

The criticism prompted spirited defenses from top Clinton and Bush officials, who testified in a day-long public hearing that the government proceeded as aggressively as possible given what was known about the threat from al Qaeda.

Several of the witnesses, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, also suggested that there was little public or congressional appetite for military action against Afghanistan, which harbored al Qaeda, until after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that even removing bin Laden may not have prevented the hijackings.

"This administration came in fully recognizing the threat presented to the United States and its interests and allies around the world by terrorism," Powell said. "We went to work on it immediately. The president made it clear it was a high priority."

But the new reports by the commission's investigative staff portray the Bush administration as giving terrorism scant attention during its first eight months, noting that officials did not draw up concrete plans to confront al Qaeda and its Afghan protectors until just days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The reports suggest that many of the Clinton administration's policies also were ineffectual, revealing significant new details about as many as four missed opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden in 1998 and 1999.

The reports also appear to confirm some of the key criticisms made by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator for Clinton and Bush, in a book released Monday that has revived the bitter debate over the government's war on terror. Clarke set off a political firestorm with allegations that the current administration neglected the al Qaeda threat in part because senior officials were obsessed with attacking Iraq, and accused both administrations of failing to act aggressively enough. He is scheduled to testify before the commission today, along with CIA Director George J. Tenet, Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage.

Addressing what more could have been done, Madeleine K. Albright, Clinton's secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, said: "I can say with confidence that President Clinton and his team did everything we could, everything that we could think of, based on the knowledge we had, to protect our people and disrupt and defeat al Qaeda. We certainly recognized the threat posed by the terrorist groups."

The panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is a 10-member bipartisan commission established by Congress to examine the missteps leading up to the attacks. Unlike previous efforts, including a joint inquiry by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the commission is conducting a wide-ranging probe that reviews foreign policy, aviation, border control and other issues. It is scheduled to issue a report this summer.

The panel has engaged in repeated battles with the Bush administration over access to documents and witnesses, and several commissioners repeated their request yesterday that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice be permitted to testify. Rice, citing the opinion of White House lawyers, has declined to appear, but has submitted to private interviews with the commission. The current and former presidents and vice presidents also are scheduled to be interviewed privately.

The panel's staff issued reports earlier this year showing that the government fumbled repeated opportunities to stop many of the hijackers from entering the country. Among the new findings disclosed yesterday:

• The Clinton administration had as many as four chances to kill or capture bin Laden between December 1998 and July 1999, but all the operations were scuttled because of uncertain intelligence and fears that civilians or dignitaries might be killed. In one example, in May 1999, sources provided detailed reports about bin Laden's whereabouts in the Kandahar area over a period of five nights, but strikes were not ordered because the military was concerned about the accuracy of the reports and the risk of collateral damage, investigators found.

"Having a chance to get [bin Laden] three times in 36 hours and foregoing the chance each time has made me a bit angry," a CIA unit chief wrote to a colleague, adding that Tenet "finds himself alone at the table, with the other princip[als] basically saying 'we'll go along with your decision Mr. Director,' and implicitly saying that the Agency will hang alone if the attack doesn't get [bin Laden]."

• Rumsfeld told the commission in earlier interviews that he "did not recall any particular counterterrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11," other than the debate over preparing armed drones to target bin Laden.

• A month after the Clinton administration launched missile strikes on al Qaeda targets in retaliation for the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, counterterrorism officials within the Pentagon prepared a paper proposing "a more aggressive counterterrorism posture" to "take up the gauntlet that international terrorists have thrown at our feet." The authors also warned that in case of more "horrific attacks . . . we will have no choice nor, unfortunately, will we have a plan."

The eight-point proposal went nowhere, in part because senior officials thought the plan was too aggressive, investigators found.

• In the spring of 1998, the Saudi government broke up a plot organized by bin Laden to launch attacks on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia using portable missiles. Scores were arrested, but the Saudis did not publicize the case at the time, the commission report said.

• U.S. officials learned that Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistani intelligence, had assured Taliban leaders in July 1999 that he would provide three or four hours of warning before any U.S. missile launch as he had the "last time" -- an apparent reference to the failed 1998 missile strike.

Testifying yesterday were Albright, Powell, Rumsfeld and Clinton defense secretary William S. Cohen. The pairs of representatives agreed with one another on many broad issues, including the difficulties of targeting bin Laden and his allies before Sept. 11, 2001, and the perceived lack of political support for military action during those years. Some commissioners, particularly former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), argued that both administrations could have rallied support for military operations just as they did in Kosovo and Iraq, respectively.

The officials from both administrations also struck a similar theme on the question of preventing the terror strikes, arguing that it is unclear how effective aggressive action might have been, given the extent of the plot and the determination of the participants. Powell noted that al Qaeda and its allies have launched attacks since the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001.

"Anything we might have done against al Qaeda in this period or against Osama bin Laden may or may not have had any influence on these people who were already in this country," Powell said.

Albright said that "things looked very different before 9/11. We were mostly accused of overreacting, not underreacting."

But each side disparaged the other on several occasions. Albright, for example, bemoaned many of the policy changes pursued by Bush and his aides after they took office, while Rumsfeld said the new president was determined not to repeat the Clinton administration's tactic of "bouncing the rubble" by sending cruise missiles at al Qaeda sites of little strategic value.

Rumsfeld and Powell defended the administration's pace in adopting new strategies to battle al Qaeda and persuade the Taliban to give up bin Laden. Final plans for both were completed the week before the terrorist attacks.

Cohen and Albright similarly defended Clinton's actions against al Qaeda. Cohen said that missile strikes against bin Laden were called off in each instance because of CIA doubts about the accuracy of the intelligence involved.

In his testimony, Powell confirmed one claim by Clarke that Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary who strongly supported U.S. military action against Iraq, suggested an attack on the government of Saddam Hussein during a meeting at Camp David just four days after the 2001 attacks. President Bush "said first things first," Powell said. "He decided on Afghanistan." Wolfowitz, who appeared alongside Rumsfeld later, did not directly address the issue.

Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

gldstwmn

09-25-2006, 03:06 PM

gldstwmn

09-25-2006, 03:07 PM

As much as I hate Bush, I have to put more blame on Clinton for not getting Osama :distress:

Then you don't know the facts. Read Richard Clarke's book.

gldstwmn

09-25-2006, 03:10 PM

WTH??? My email inquiry asking about Pres.Clinton in 'the ORAL office' must've not made their cut, darn!!! :shrug:

Thank god because I'm sick of hearing about his blow job. Our country is infinintely more ****ed up now than it ever was under his administration.

SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 03:12 PM

...Clinton administration had as many as four chances to kill or capture bin Laden between December 1998 and July 1999, but all the operations were scuttled because of uncertain intelligence and fears that civilians or dignitaries might be killed. In one example, in May 1999, sources provided detailed reports about bin Laden's whereabouts in the Kandahar area over a period of five nights, but strikes were not ordered because the military was concerned about the accuracy of the reports and the risk of collateral damage, investigators found...

Thanks for this. Faux news apparently leaves out the part where the CIA advised the White House not to strike in all 4 cases. In which case there is shared blame. Although it is true that ultimately it was Clinton's responsiblity to make the call and he could have overruled the CIA. However, being told the reports might be innacurate would probably make anyone hesitate. You would want to be pretty certain your target was, in fact, in your sights.

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 03:16 PM

. . . I was so glad to see Clinton lay it down on what Fox News is. He also admitted that he felt that he had made mistakes.

He ate that poor fool's lunch - no question about that. I think Fox is used to people either being terrified of them and/or easy interviews with yes men. I think they are also used to W and his cronies and their canned answers and lack of relative intelect. Clinton is none of those things and he sure showed it in brilliant colors in that interview. I was watching it thinking what a charm it was to have someone who could at least speak English in the White House.

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 03:18 PM

Thanks for this. Faux news apparently leaves out the part where the CIA advised the White House not to strike in all 4 cases. In which case there is shared blame. Although it is true that ultimately it was Clinton's responsiblity to make the call and he could have overruled the CIA. However, being told the reports might be innacurate would probably make anyone hesitate. You would want to be pretty certain your target was, in fact, in your sights.

I think there can be no qustion that Clinton did not go ball$ out against OBL because there was little public support for it and he had other issues - any politician would have done the same thing. But, Clinton brought up the opposition in this interview.

Again, I think the interviewer was at first taken aback and then scared shiitteeless :nod:

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 03:19 PM

He ate that poor fool's lunch - no question about that. I think Fox is used to people either being terrified of them and/or easy interviews with yes men. I think they are also used to W and his cronies and their canned answers and lack of relative intelect. Clinton is none of those things and he sure showed it in brilliant colors in that interview. I was watching it thinking what a charm it was to have someone who could at least speak English in the White House.

I read an article about how the country is actually nostalgic for the Clinton era and the article discusses the possibility of bringing Clinton back as the VP!
can you imagine? the article discusses the issues of the 12th and 22nd amendments and how a Dem Presidential Candidate could LEGALLY name Clinton the VP running mate, what a freakin miracle that would be........if anyone's interested, I'll post the article.

in fact, here's the link (http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0613/p09s02-coop.html)

SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 03:21 PM

I read an article about how the country is actually nostalgic for the Clinton era and the article discusses the possibility of bringing Clinton back as the VP!
can you imagine? the article discusses the issues of the 12th and 22nd amendments and how a Dem Presidential Candidate could LEGALLY name Clinton the VP running mate, what a freakin miracle that would be........if anyone's interested, I'll post the article.

Post! There have been reports of standing ovations when Clinton walks into a public place! :eek:

This is weird that you posted this because after I read strand's post I thought, "I sure am feeling nostalgic for Clinton's era."

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 03:24 PM

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 03:25 PM

Post! There have been reports of standing ovations when Clinton walks into a public place! :eek:

This is weird that you posted this because after I read strand's post I thought, "I sure am feeling nostalgic for Clinton's era."

Oh darling - do not get me wrong, I think Clinton was a snake - but I'd take him back in a second over the tripe in power now.

estranged4life

09-25-2006, 03:29 PM

Thank god because I'm sick of hearing about his blow job. Our country is infinintely more ****ed up now than it ever was under his administration.

of it to me, who cares what happened years ago.

Putting ALL (As in 100%) the blame squarely on Clinton for OBL is like blaming Bush for McVeigh & OKC.

As for blowjobs, need I say more:

<div align=center><img src="http://www.stickergiant.com/Merchant2/imgs/450/y1696_450.jpeg" height=300 width=400></div>

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 03:30 PM

. . . Putting ALL (As in 100%) the blame squarely on Clinton for OBL is like blaming Bush for McVeigh & OKC.

Exactly, and the fact remains that OBL attacked eight months into W's watch and W was warned about Al-Q and repeatedly refused to lift a finger to investigate it. Could he have connected the dots to have prevented 9/11? Who knows and I personally doubt it. But, at least the effort would have been there.

Nixxxed

09-25-2006, 03:54 PM

Thank god because I'm sick of hearing about his blow job. Our country is infinintely more ****ed up now than it ever was under his administration.
Amen.

Dubya has now had more than 5 years to catch Osama, WITH the full support of the entire government/US military/country and most of the world, none of which Clinton ever had. Did Dubya catch Osama yet?

SuzeQuze

09-25-2006, 03:56 PM

Amen.

Dubya has now had more than 5 years to catch Osama, WITH the full support of the entire government/US military/country and most of the world, none of which Clinton ever had. Did Dubya catch Osama yet?

Nope, and he called off the unit assigned to getting him! "I don't know where he is. He's not that important. He's not our priority."

The Tower

09-25-2006, 03:58 PM

He ate that poor fool's lunch - no question about that. I think Fox is used to people either being terrified of them and/or easy interviews with yes men. I think they are also used to W and his cronies and their canned answers and lack of relative intelect. Clinton is none of those things and he sure showed it in brilliant colors in that interview. I was watching it thinking what a charm it was to have someone who could at least speak English in the White House.
Damn right.

Clinton kicked Wallace's ass... And rightly so. Wallace was trying to steer away from the line of questioning once he realized where he was at (location: up **** creek), but Bill was having none of it and stuck to his guns. "You asked the questions, so I'm going to give you the answers."

Clinton is ****ing brilliant- faults and all. The whole time I was just thinking to myself- what a moron Wallace was to think that he would just be able to breeze into that kind of question and that someone of Clinton's intellect would just sit back and take it.

Democrats take note- fight back, fight hard and fight smart.

estranged4life

09-25-2006, 04:02 PM

<div align=center><img src="http://www.stickergiant.com/Merchant2/imgs/450/fjp01_450.jpeg">
"I don't know where he is. He's not that important. He's not our priority."
</div>

Nixxxed

09-25-2006, 04:15 PM

As for the rest of the inteview, ThinkProgress and MediaMatters both have analyses of Wallace's other interviews with prominent Republicans. And, like you couldn't have guessed, he's never asked them anything remotely as caustic as this. In fact, he's never asked most of them a tough or even important question at all.

http://thinkprogress.org/ - most of it has been bumped to page 2 now...

http://mediamatters.org/items/200609240002

I know most you peeps in this thread already know this - I'm posting these more for the lurkers...

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 04:36 PM

I do not think Clinton could legally run for VP or really for any office that could eventually lead to him being the Pres. for a third term as the 22nd Amendment says:

Section 1.

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once . . . .

____________________________________________________________

Clinton could, however, accept a cabinet position because although that put him in line for the Oval Office - the 22nd Amendment prohibits only being "elected" - not appointed.
Jason, the article I referenced says it IS possible. to wit:

How to bring back Bill
A Clinton-Clinton 2008 ticket is constitutionally possible.
By Scott E. Gant and Bruce G. Peabody
WASHINGTON, D.C., AND MADISON, N.J. – Americans are nostalgic for the 1990s. They long for a time when terrorism was perceived as a problem confined to foreign lands and when the stock market's rise seemed unstoppable. And, it turns out, many of them miss former President Bill Clinton.

In a recent poll conducted for CNN, respondents favored Mr. Clinton over President Bush on a variety of issues, including policy areas traditionally viewed as GOP strongholds. By a wide margin, those surveyed indicated that Clinton did a better job managing the economy and handling foreign affairs and taxes.

Clinton's resurgent popularity, and Democrats' difficulties in taking over the White House in recent years, might counsel a bold strategy for 2008. Whoever is selected as the Democratic nominee for the next presidential race should consider William Jefferson Clinton as a candidate for vice president.

While the political advisability of such a move is subject to legitimate debate, the legal issues are more straightforward. The only serious question about the constitutionality of Clinton assuming the vice presidency relates to the interplay of the Constitution's 12th and 22nd Amendments.

The 12th Amendment was ratified following the election of 1800, which produced sustained electoral uncertainty after Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, Jefferson's designated vice president, received the same number of electoral votes. The election was sent to the House of Representatives, which took 36 ballots to select Jefferson. The 12th Amendment thereafter required that electoral votes be cast separately for president and vice president, and specified that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president of the United States."

A century and a half later, the states ratified the 22nd Amendment, largely as a response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's four electoral victories. The amendment bars individuals from being "elected to the office of the president more than twice."

The 22nd Amendment is often described as prohibiting an already twice-elected president, such as Clinton, from again serving as president. But the text of the amendment suggests otherwise. In preventing individuals from being elected to the presidency more than twice, the amendment does not preclude a former president from again assuming the presidency by means other than election, including succession from the vice presidency. If this view is correct, then Clinton is not "constitutionally ineligible to the office of president," and is not barred by the 12th Amendment from being elected vice president.
Clinton's public approval at the time he stepped down from the White House was remarkably high given the voter "fatigue" that normally accompanies a second-term president. Now, nearly six years later, his popularity appears considerable and is seemingly increasing.

Of course, Clinton's spouse, Sen. Hillary Clinton, is viewed as a leading Democratic candidate for president. She would surely have reservations about putting her husband on the 2008 ticket. But Bill Clinton might help energize the Democratic base and defuse arguments that Mrs. Clinton is too liberal.

In the event that Senator Clinton elects not to run in 2008, perhaps an alternate Democratic nominee will have enough self-confidence to consider sharing the stage with the charismatic Bill Clinton in the hopes of recapturing the White House. As for Clinton himself, although there are many reasons why he might decline an invitation to run for vice president, the thrill of another campaign and the lure of a return to the West Wing might be too tempting to resist.

• Scott Gant is a partner with Boies, Schiller & Flexner in Washington. Bruce Peabody is an assistant professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, N.J.

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 04:41 PM

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 05:02 PM

That is reaching because the VP is elected for the sole purpose of being the Pres. in the Pres. cannot be and the Amendment strictly prohibts the election, etc. So, I cannot see that pasting any kind of muster, etc. But, the cabinet position is far more doable.

Well, we've got two legal eagles saying he could so......:shrug:

again:
the amendment does not preclude a former president from again assuming the presidency by means other than election, including succession from the vice presidency.

believe me, the Rethugs would HOWL if they thought this was even a REMOTE possibility, but if it is, then I think the Dems need to utilize old William Jefferson because Lord knows we sure NEED him! And it just might give the Dems the boost they need! The very idea is exciting to me! :blob1:

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 05:05 PM

That is an inaccurate and fallacious conclusion - VP is elected solely for that reason and the 22nd Amendment expressly prohibits that in plain language, etc. But, he could always try.

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 05:11 PM

That is an inaccurate and fallacious conclusion - VP is elected solely for that reason and the 22nd Amendment expressly prohibits that in plain language, etc. But, he could always try.

I think the "plain language" says otherwise and it is NOT forbidden in either the 12th or 22nd amendment. And I hope someone DOES try it. I think this country NEEDS him....

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 05:33 PM

by the way, I found the exact same interpretation in another place:
There has also been some heated discussion on a possible loophole in the 22nd amendment that might allow Bill Clinton to serve beyond his
prescribed constitutional limit. There is nothing in the language of the 22nd Amendment that precludes a former president from becoming vice-president. So, for example, Al Gore or Hilary Clinton could run for president in 2004 and name Bill Clinton as their vice-president.
Upon the death, incapacity, impeachment, or resignation of the president, Bill Clinton could then assume the office. There is a statement in the 12th Amendment which appears to cover this loophole, however: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am12

In an article title "Why the Constitution Permits a Clinton-Gore
ticket," Michael C. Dorf, vice dean and professor of law at Columbia
University, says that the 12th Amendment would allow Clinton to become
Vice-President, however. "The 12th Amendment would allow a Clinton vice-presidency. Its language only bars from the vice-presidency those persons who are "ineligible to the office" of President. Clinton is
not ineligible to the office of president, however. He is only disqualified (by the 22nd Amendment) from being elected to that office."
http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/08/columns/fl.dorf.goreclinton.08.01/

bikerchic

09-25-2006, 05:35 PM

Then you don't know the facts. Read Richard Clarke's book.

No I don't know all the facts and I don't think any of us will ever know "all" the facts. And if I did read his book, it would be with a grain of salt. After all, he worked for the government ;)

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 05:43 PM

No I don't know all the facts and I don't think any of us will ever know "all" the facts. And if I did read his book, it would be with a grain of salt. After all, he worked for the government ;)

yes but he had inside knowledge, thus would be a more credible source than a paid hack such as the folks behind the ABC spewfest :shrug:

strandinthewind

09-25-2006, 06:14 PM

by the way, I found the exact same interpretation in another place:

Thus, under the 12th Amendment, he could not assume office, which makes sense because the intent was no more than two terms by any method. If anyone does not like that, then they need to do 1. get the Court to overrule the 22nd and 12th Amendments or 2. change the Const. via the legislative process. Both of these avenues are not based in reality mind you :cool:

gldstwmn

09-25-2006, 06:27 PM

Faux news apparently leaves out the part where the CIA advised the White House not to strike in all 4 cases. In which case there is shared blame.

And yet George Tenet still received the medal of freedom from Bush.

gldstwmn

09-25-2006, 06:33 PM

Jason, the article I referenced says it IS possible. to wit:

It is absolutely possible.

irishgrl

09-25-2006, 06:41 PM

Thus, under the 12th Amendment, he could not assume office, which makes sense because the intent was no more than two terms by any method. If anyone does not like that, then they need to do 1. get the Court to overrule the 22nd and 12th Amendments or 2. change the Const. via the legislative process. Both of these avenues are not based in reality mind you :cool:

you completely ignored the next sentence where the Law Professor says that Clinton is not ineligible to be President, he just cant be ELECTED again. He COULD go in by the backdoor as it were....

personally I'd like to see him try it and get the PEOPLE onboard to voice THEIR choice.....

Brwn_eyes0511

09-25-2006, 07:02 PM

Ah that's baloney!

8 years or 8 months..

Nixxxed

09-25-2006, 07:06 PM

Olbermann is leading with this tonight (right now), and will have another of his now-famous commentaries at the end of the show.

The lead in: "Mr. Bush's free pass on 9/11 is now officially over."

:blob1:

gldstwmn

09-25-2006, 07:09 PM

Nixxxed

09-25-2006, 08:43 PM

A textbook definition of cowardice
Keith Olbermann comments on Bill Clinton's Fox News interview

Transcript and video:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15004160

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 05:13 AM

A textbook definition of cowardice
Keith Olbermann comments on Bill Clinton's Fox News interview

Transcript and video:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15004160

Thanks for posting that. Keith Olbermann is my new Hero! We need MORE of him! now Im off to read that lovely piece of truth telling AGAIN. :nod:

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 06:04 AM

Here is Condi's reply - which flies in the face of Clarke's statements and the statements of all others related to this fiasco.

Note - I could find her comments only on Fox and then at the very bottom of the page hidden amongst other lesser stories [on edit - the others news sources have picked it up].

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Sep26/0,4670,RiceClinton,00.html

---------------------------------------

Rice Challenges Clinton 9/11 Comments

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

NEW YORK — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged former President Clinton's claim that he did more than many of his conservative critics to pursue al-Qaida, saying in an interview published Tuesday that the Bush administration aggressively pursued the group even before the 9/11 attacks.

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years,"Rice said during a meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Post.

The newspaper published her comments after Clinton appeared on"Fox News Sunday"in a combative interview in which he defended his handling of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and said he"worked hard"to have the al-Qaida leader killed.

"That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now,"Clinton said in the interview."They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try."

Rice disputed his assessment.

"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,"she said.

Rice also took exception to Clinton's statement that he"left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy"for incoming officials when he left office.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida,"she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., the same company that owns Fox News Channel.

In the interview, Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of a"conservative hit job"and asked:"I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked,'Why didn't you do anything about the Cole?'I want to know how many people you asked,'Why did you fire Dick Clarke?'"

Rice portrayed the departure of former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke differently, saying he"left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security."

The interview has been thefocus of much attention _ drawing more than 800,000 views on YouTube and earning the show its best ratings in nearly three years.

Rice questioned the value of the dialogue.

"I think this is not a very fruitful discussion,"she said."We've been through it. The 9/11 commission has turned over every rock and we know exactly what they said."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 07:06 AM

How does that woman live with herself I wonder :shrug:

One of the signs of Sociopathy is a firm belief in your own lies....this entire Administration is peopled with Psychopaths and Sociopaths. Absolutely disgusting.

Condi has not failed to mouth the Administration's mantra since day one, regardless of how many times they've all been proven wrong. Doesnt make for a whole lot of credibility in MY book :distress: What about you Jason? Dont tell me her denials (flying in the face of Clarke's and everyone else's statements) hold water with you???

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 07:57 AM

As for Condi's statement about why Clarke left: (way back in 2004!!)

Dick Clarke Is Telling the TruthWhy he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, March 23, 2004, at 6:22 PM ET

I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge. There are three reasons for this confidence.

First, his basic accusations are consistent with tales told by other officials, including some who had no significant dealings with Clarke.

Second, the White House's attempts at rebuttal have been extremely weak and contradictory. If Clarke were wrong, one would expect the comebacks—especially from Bush's aides, who excel at the counterstrike—to be stronger and more substantive.

Third, I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he's too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted. As Daniel Benjamin, another terrorism specialist who worked alongside Clarke in the Clinton White House, put it in a phone conversation today, "Dick did not survive and flourish in the bureaucracy all those years by leaving himself open to attack."

Clarke did suffer one setback in his 30-year career in high office, though he doesn't mention it in his book. James Baker, the first President Bush's secretary of state, fired Clarke from his position as director of the department's politico-military bureau. (Bush's NSC director, Brent Scowcroft, hired him almost instantly.) I doubt we'll be hearing from Baker on this episode: He fired Clarke for being too close to Israel—not a point the Bush family's political savior is likely to make in an election season. (For details on this unwritten chapter and on why Clarke hasn't talked to me for over 15 years, click here.)

But on to the substance. Clarke's main argument—made in his new book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, in lengthy interviews on CBS's 60 Minutes and PBS's Charlie Rose Show, and presumably in his testimony scheduled for tomorrow before the 9/11 Commission—is that Bush has done (as Clarke put it on CBS) "a terrible job" at fighting terrorism. Specifically: In the summer of 2001, Bush did almost nothing to deal with mounting evidence of an impending al-Qaida attack. Then, after 9/11, his main response was to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. This move not only distracted us from the real war on terrorism, it fed into Osama Bin Laden's propaganda—that the United States would invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country—and thus served as the rallying cry for new terrorist recruits.

Clarke's charges have raised a furor because of who he is. In every administration starting with Ronald Reagan's, Clarke was a high-ranking official in the State Department or the NSC, dealing mainly with countering weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Under Clinton and the first year of George W. Bush, he worked in the White House as the national coordinator for terrorism, a Cabinet-level post created specifically for his talents. When the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, Condi Rice, Bush's national security adviser, designated Clarke as the "crisis manager;" he ran the interagency meetings from the Situation Room, coordinating—in some cases, directing—the response.

Clarke backs up his chronicle with meticulous detail, but the basic charges themselves should not be so controversial; certainly, they're nothing new. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's account in Ron Suskind's* The Price of Loyalty, Bush's top officials talked about invading Iraq from the very start of the administration. Jim Mann's new book about Bush's war Cabinet, Rise of the Vulcans, reveals the historic depths of this obsession.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded." (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)

Clarke's distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider—as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.

Cheney's elaboration of his dismissal is blatantly misleading. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things ... attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology," Cheney scoffed. Limbaugh replied, "Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there."

It explains nothing. First, he wasn't "moved out"; he transferred, at his own request, out of frustration with being cut out of the action on broad terrorism policy, to a new NSC office dealing with cyberterrorism. Second, he did so after 9/11. (He left government altogether in February 2003.)

In a further effort to minimize Clarke's importance, a talking-points paper put out by the White House press office states that, contrary to his claims, "Dick Clarke never had Cabinet rank." At the same time, the paper denies—again, contrary to the book—that he was demoted: He "continued to be the National Coordinator on Counter-terrorism."

Both arguments are deceptive. Clarke wasn't a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton's NCC, he ran the "Principals Committee" meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals' meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke's book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

The White House talking-points paper is filled with these sorts of distortions. For instance, it notes that Bush didn't need to meet with Clarke because, unlike Clinton, he met every day with CIA Director George Tenet, who talked frequently about al-Qaida.

But here's how Clarke describes those meetings:

[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. ... We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.

The problem is: Nothing happened. (It is significant, by the way, that Tenet has not been recruited—not successfully, anyway—to rebut Clarke's charges. Clarke told Charlie Rose that he was "very close" to Tenet. The two come off as frustrated allies in Clarke's book.)

The White House document insists Bush did take the threat seriously, telling Rice at one point "that he was 'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda."

Here's how Clarke describes that exchange:

President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies' Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

That's what Clarke says is the tragedy of Bush's inaction, and nobody in the White House has dealt with the charge at all.

Correction, March 24, 2004: This article originally identified former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as the author of The Price of Loyalty. In fact, Ron Suskind wrote the book; O'Neill was his chief source. (Return to corrected sentence.)

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 08:29 AM

More proof Clarke was right and Condi was LYING:

Before Sept 11... (http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020812/story.html)

Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
Long before the tragic events of September 11th, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda. It didn't happen and soon it was too late. The saga of a lost chance
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it.

One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.

Berger attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject." The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.

Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11-that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.

The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to institute its own "policy review process" on the terrorist threat. Clarke told Time that the review moved "as fast as could be expected." And Administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it was more aggressive than anything contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was designed not to "roll back" al-Qaeda but to "eliminate" it. But that delay came at a cost. The Northern Alliance was desperate for help but got little of it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone-an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror camps-should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11. No single person was responsible for all this. But "Washington"-that organic compound of officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown-failed horribly.

Could al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash-not wire transfers-wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored, Atta's team might still never have been caught.

But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended-just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Berger was determined that when he left office, Rice should have a full understanding of the terrorist threat. In a sense, this was an admission of failure. For the Clinton years had been marked by a drumbeat of terror attacks against American targets, and they didn't seem to be stopping.

In 1993 the World Trade Center had been bombed for the first time; in 1996 19 American servicemen had been killed when the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was bombed; two years later, American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked. As the millennium celebrations at the end of 1999 approached, the CIA warned that it expected five to 15 attacks against American targets over the New Year's weekend. But three times, the U.S. got lucky. The Jordanians broke up an al-Qaeda cell in Amman; Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian based in Montreal, panicked when stopped at a border crossing from Canada while carrying explosives intended for Los Angeles International Airport; and on Jan. 3, 2000, an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. The Sullivans in Yemen foundered after terrorists overloaded their small boat.

From the start of the Clinton Administration, the job of thwarting terror had fallen to Clarke. A bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's office on cyberterrorism, he has served four Presidents from both parties-staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two sides, one for a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat. Aggressive and legendarily abrasive, Clarke was desperate to persuade skeptics to take the terror threat as seriously as he did. "Clarke is unbelievably determined, high-energy, focused and imaginative," says a senior Clinton Administration official. "But he's totally insensitive to rolling over others who are in his way." By the end of 2000, Clarke didn't need to roll over his boss; Berger was just as sure of the danger.

The two men had an ally in George Tenet, who had been appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1997. "He wasn't sleeping on the job on this," says a senior Clinton aide of Tenet, "whatever inherent problems there were in the agency." Those problems were immense. Although the CIA claims it had penetrated al-Qaeda, Republican Congressman Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, doubts that it ever got anywhere near the top of the organization. "The CIA," he says, "were not able to recruit human assets to penetrate al-Qaeda and the al-Qaeda leadership." Nobody pretends that such an exercise would have been easy. Says a counterterrorism official: "Where are you going to find a person loyal to the U.S. who's willing to eat dung beetles and sleep on the ground in a cave for two or three years? You don't find people willing to do that who also speak fluent Pashtu or Arabic."

In the absence of men sleeping with the beetles, the CIA had to depend on less reliable allies. The agency attempted to recruit tribal leaders in Afghanistan who might be persuaded to take on bin Laden; contingency plans had been made for the CIA to fly one of its planes to a desert landing strip in Afghanistan if he was ever captured. (Clinton had signed presidential "findings" that were ambiguous on the question of whether bin Laden could be killed in such an attack.) But the tribal groups' loyalty was always in doubt. Despite the occasional abortive raid, they never seemed to get close to bin Laden. That meant that the Clinton team had to fall back on a second strategy: taking out bin Laden by cruise missile, which had been tried after the embassy bombings in 1998. For all of 2000, sources tell Time, Clinton ordered two U.S. Navy submarines to stay on station in the northern Arabian Sea, ready to attack if bin Laden's coordinates could be determined.

But the plan was twice flawed. First, the missiles could be used only if bin Laden's whereabouts were known, and the CIA never definitively delivered that information. By early 2000, Clinton was becoming infuriated by the lack of intelligence on bin Laden's movements. "We've got to do better than this," he scribbled on one memo. "This is unsatisfactory." Second, even if a target could ever be found, the missiles might take too long to hit it. The Pentagon thought it could dump a Tomahawk missile on bin Laden's camp within six hours of a decision to attack, but the experts in the White House thought that was impossibly long. Any missiles fired at Afghanistan would have to fly over Pakistan, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was close to the Taliban. White House aides were sure bin Laden would be tipped off as soon as the Pakistanis detected the missiles.

Berger and Clarke wanted something more robust. On Nov. 7, Berger met with William Cohen, then Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. The time had come, said Berger, for the Pentagon to rethink its approach to operations against bin Laden. "We've been hit many times, and we'll be hit again," Berger said. "Yet we have no option beyond cruise missiles." He wanted "boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces deployed inside Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he would look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were dead set against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One, the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in Iran during an abortive mission to rescue American hostages.

It wasn't just Pentagon nerves that got in the way of a more aggressive counterterrorism policy. So did politics. After the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, the secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., drew up plans to have Delta Force members swoop into Afghanistan and grab bin Laden. But the warriors were never given the go-ahead; the Clinton Administration did not order an American retaliation for the attack. "We didn't do diddly," gripes a counterterrorism official. "We didn't even blow up a baby-milk factory." In fact, despite strong suspicion that bin Laden was behind the attack in Yemen, the CIA and FBI had not officially concluded that he was, and would be unable to do so before Clinton left office. That made it politically impossible for Clinton to strike-especially given the upcoming election and his own lack of credibility on national security. "If we had done anything, say, two weeks before the election," says a former senior Clinton aide, "we'd be accused of helping Al Gore."

For Clarke, the bombing of the Cole was final proof that the old policy hadn't worked. It was time for something more aggressive-a plan to make war against al-Qaeda. One element was vital. The Taliban's control of Afghanistan was not yet complete; in the northeast of the country, Northern Alliance forces led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla leader who had fought against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s, were still resisting Taliban rule. Clarke argued that Massoud should be given the resources to develop a viable fighting force. That way, terrorists leaving al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan would have been forced to join the Taliban forces fighting in the north. "You keep them on the front lines in Afghanistan," says a counterterrorism official. "Hopefully you're killing them in the process, and they're not leaving Afghanistan to plot terrorist operations. That was the general approach." But the approach meant that Americans had to engage directly in the snake pit of Afghan politics.

THE LAST MAN STANDING
In the spring of 2001, afghanistan was as rough a place as it ever is. Four sets of forces battled for position. Most of the country was under the authority of the Taliban, but it was not a homogeneous group. Some of its leaders, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the self-styled emir of Afghanistan, were dyed-in-the-wool Islamic radicals; others were fierce Afghan nationalists. The Taliban's principal support had come from Pakistan-another interested party, which wanted a reasonably peaceful border to its west-and in particular from the hard men of the isi. But Pakistan's policy was not all of a piece either. Since General Pervez Musharraf had taken power in a 1999 coup, some Pakistani officials, desperate to curry favor with the U.S.-which had cut off aid to Pakistan after it tested a nuclear device in 1998-had seen the wisdom of distancing themselves from the Taliban, or at the least attempting to moderate its more radical behavior. The third element was the Northern Alliance, a resistance movement whose stronghold was in northeast Afghanistan. Most of the Alliance's forces and leaders were, like Massoud, ethnic Tajiks-a minority in Afghanistan. Massoud controlled less than 10% of the country and had been beaten back by the Taliban in 2000. Nonetheless, by dint of his personality and reputation, Massoud was "the only military threat to the Taliban," says Francesc Vendrell, who was then the special representative in Afghanistan of the U.N. Secretary-General.

And then there was al-Qaeda. The group had been born in Afghanistan when Islamic radicals began flocking there in 1979, after the Soviets invaded. Bin Laden and his closest associates had returned in 1996, when they were expelled from Sudan. Al-Qaeda's terrorist training camps were in Afghanistan, and bin Laden's forces and money were vital to sustaining the Taliban's offensives against Massoud.

By last spring, the uneasy equilibrium among the four forces was beginning to break down. "Moderates" in the Taliban-those who tried to keep lines open to intermediaries in the U.N. and the U.S.-were losing ground. In 2000, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, thought to be the second most powerful member of the Taliban, had reached out clandestinely to Massoud. "He understood that our country had been sold out to al-Qaeda and Pakistan," says Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary. But in April 2001, Rabbani died of liver cancer. By that month, says the U.N.'s Vendrell, "it was al- Qaeda that was running the Taliban, not vice versa."

A few weeks before Rabbani's death, Musharraf's government had started to come to the same conclusion: the Pakistanis were no longer able to moderate Taliban behavior. To worldwide condemnation, the Taliban had announced its intention to blow up the 1,700-year-old stone statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Musharraf dispatched his right-hand man, Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider, to plead with Mullah Omar for the Buddhas to be saved. The Taliban's Foreign Minister and its ambassador to Pakistan, says a Pakistani official close to the talks, were in favor of saving the Buddhas. But Mullah Omar, says a member of the Pakistani delegation, listened to what Haider had to say and replied, "If on Judgment Day I stand before Allah, I'll see those two statues floating before me, and I know that Allah will ask me why, when I had the power, I did not destroy them." A few days later, the Buddhas were blown up.

By summer, Pakistan had a deeper grievance. The country had suffered a wave of sectarian assassinations, with gangs throwing grenades into mosques and murdering clerics. The authorities in Islamabad knew that the murderers had fled to Afghanistan (one of them was openly running a store in Kabul) and sent a delegation to ask for their return. "We gave them lists of names, photos and the locations of training camps where these fellows could be found," says Brigadier Javid Iqbal Cheema, director of Pakistan's National Crisis Management Cell, "but not a single individual was ever handed over to us." The Pakistanis were furious.

As the snows cleared for the annual spring military campaign, a joint offensive against Massoud by the Taliban and al-Qaeda seemed likely. But the influence of al-Qaeda on the Taliban was proving deeply unpopular among ordinary Afghans, especially in the urban centers. "I thought at most 20% of the population supported the Taliban by early summer," says Vendrell. And bin Laden's power made Massoud's plea for outside assistance more urgent. "We told the Americans-we told everyone-that al-Qaeda was set upon a transnational program," says Abdullah Abdullah, once a close aide to Massoud and now the Afghan Foreign Minister. In April, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, seeking support for the Northern Alliance. "If President Bush doesn't help us," he told a reporter, "these terrorists will damage the U.S. and Europe very soon."

But Massoud never got the help that he needed-or that Clarke's plan had deemed necessary. Most of the time, Northern Alliance delegates to Washington had to be satisfied with meeting low-level bureaucrats. The Alliance craved recognition by the U.S. as a "legitimate resistance movement" but never got it, though on a visit in July, Abdullah did finally get to meet some top National Security Council (NSC) and State Department officials for the first time. The best the Americans seemed prepared to do was turn a blind eye to the trickle of aid from Iran, Russia and India. Vendrell remembers much talk that spring of increased support from the Americans. But in truth Massoud's best help came from Iran, which persuaded all supporters of the Northern Alliance to channel their aid through Massoud alone.

Only once did something happen that might have given Massoud hope that the U.S. would help. In late June, he was joined in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, by Abdul Haq, a leading Pashtun, based in Dubai, who was opposed to the Taliban. Haq was accompanied by someone Massoud knew well: Peter Tomsen, a retired ambassador who from 1989 to '92 had been the U.S. State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance. Also present was James Ritchie, a successful Chicago options trader who had spent part of his childhood in Afghanistan and was helping bankroll the groups opposed to the Taliban. (Haq was captured and executed by the Taliban last October while on a quixotic mission to Afghanistan.) Tomsen insists that the June 2001 trip was a private one, though he had told State Department officials of it in advance. Their message, he says, was limited to a noncommittal "good luck and be careful."

The purpose of the meeting, according to Tomsen, was to see if Massoud and Haq could forge a joint strategy against the Taliban. "The idea," says Sayeed Hussain Anwari, now the Afghan Minister of Agriculture, who was present at the meeting, "was to bring Abdul Haq inside the country to begin an armed struggle in the southeast." Still hoping for direct assistance from Washington, Massoud gave Tomsen all the intelligence he had on al-Qaeda and asked Tomsen to take it back to Washington. But when he briefed State Department officials after his trip, their reaction was muted. The American position was clear. If anything was to be done to change the realities in Afghanistan, it would have to be done not by the U.S. but by Pakistan. Massoud was on his own.

CLARKE: CRYING WOLF
In Washington, dick clarke didn't seem to have a lot of friends either. His proposals were still grinding away. No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way as the U.S.-new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker with even the most sensible of existing policies. The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear. "If we hadn't had a transition," says a senior Clinton Administration official, "probably in late October or early November 2000, we would have had (the plan to go on the offensive) as a presidential directive."

As the new Administration took office, Rice kept Clarke in his job as counterterrorism czar. In early February, he repeated to Vice President Dick Cheney the briefing he had given to Rice and Hadley. There are differing opinions on how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's warnings. Some members of the outgoing Administration got the sense that the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed with terrorism. "It was clear," says one, "that this was not the same priority to them that it was to us."

For other observers, however, the real point was not that the new Administration dismissed the terrorist theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, "all got that it was important." The question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda "was in the top tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration." But other topics got far more attention. The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to keep in line a national-security team-including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell-whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. "Terrorism," says a former Clinton White House official, speaking of the new Administration, "wasn't on their plate of key issues." Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, "had to learn about (al-Qaeda) and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy." But doing so meant delay.

Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush Administration's dilatory response. Clarke's paper, says an official, "was a Clinton proposal." Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat. Clarke dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death.

This was, after all, a White House plan, which means it was resented from the moment of conception. "When you look at the Pentagon and the cia," says a former senior Clinton aide, "it's not their plan. The military will never accept the White House staff doing military planning." Terrorism, officials from the State Department suggested, needed to be put in the broader context of American policy in South Asia. The rollback plan was becoming the victim of a classic Washington power play between those with "functional" responsibilities-like terrorism-and those with "regional" ones-like relations with India and Pakistan. The State Department's South Asia bureau, according to a participant in the meetings, argued that a fistful of other issues-Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, Musharraf's dictatorship-were just as pressing as terrorism. By now, Clarke's famously short fuse was giving off sparks. A participant at one of the meetings paraphrases Clarke's attitude this way: "These people are trying to kill us. I could give a f___ if Musharraf was democratically elected. What I do care about is Pakistan's support for the Taliban and turning a blind eye to this terrorist cancer growing in their neighbor's backyard."

It was Bush who broke the deadlock. Each morning the CIA gives the Chief Executive a top-secret Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on pressing issues of national security. One day in early spring, Tenet briefed Bush on the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's head of international operations, who was suspected of having been involved in the planning of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. After the PDB, Bush told Rice that the approach to al-Qaeda was too scattershot. He was tired of "swatting at flies" and asked for a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. According to an official, Rice came back to the nsc and said, "The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda." Clarke reminded her that he already had one.

But having a plan isn't the same as executing it. Clarke's paper now had to go through three more stages: the Deputies' Committee, made up of the No. 2s to the main national-security officials; the Principals' Committee, which included Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Powell and Rumsfeld; and finally, the President. Only when Bush had signed off would the plan become what the Bush team called a national-security presidential directive.

On April 30, nearly six weeks after the Administration started holding deputies' meetings, Clarke presented a new plan to them. In addition to Hadley, who chaired the hour-long meeting, the gathering included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; Richard Armitage, the barrel-chested Deputy Secretary of State; Paul Wolfowitz, the scholarly hawk from the Pentagon; and John McLaughlin from the cia. Armitage was enthusiastic about Clarke's plan, according to a senior official. But the CIA was gun-shy. Tenet was a Clinton holdover and thus vulnerable if anything went wrong. His agency was unwilling to take risks; it wanted "top cover" from the White House. The deputies, says a senior official, decided to have "three parallel reviews-one on al-Qaeda, one on the Pakistani political situation and the third on Indo-Pakistani relations." The issues, the deputies thought, were interrelated. "They wanted to view them holistically," says the senior official, "and not until they'd had three separate meetings on each of these were they able to hold a fourth integrating them all."

There was more. Throughout the spring, one bureaucratic wrangle in particular rumbled on, poisoning the atmosphere. At issue: the Predator.

The Predator had first been used in Bosnia in 1995. Later, the CIA and the Pentagon began a highly classified program designed to produce pictures-viewable in real time-that would be fine-grained enough to identify individuals. The new, improved Predator was finally ready in September 2000, and the CIA flew it over Afghanistan in a two-week "test of concept." First results were promising; one video sent to the White House showed a man who might have been bin Laden. For the first time, the CIA now had a way to check out a tip by one of its agents among the Afghan tribes. If there was a report that bin Laden was in the vicinity, says a former aide to Clinton, "we could put the Predator over the location and have eyes on the target."

But in October 2000, the Predator crashed when landing at its base in a country bordering Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle needed repairs, and in any event, the CIA and the Pentagon decided that the winter weather over Afghanistan would make it difficult to take good pictures. The Clinton team left office assuming that the Predator would be back in the skies by March 2001.

In fact, the Predator wouldn't fly again until after Sept. 11. In early 2001 it was decided to develop a new version that would not just take photos but also be armed with Hellfire missiles. To the frustration of Clarke and other White House aides, the CIA and the Pentagon couldn't decide who controlled the new program or who should pay for it-though each craft cost only $1 million. While the new uav was being rapidly developed at a site in the southwestern U.S., the CIA opposed using the old one for pure surveillance because it feared al-Qaeda might see it. "Once we were going to arm the thing," says a senior U.S. intelligence official, "we didn't want to expose the capability by just having it fly overhead and spot a bunch of guys we couldn't do anything about." Clarke and his supporters were livid. "Dick Clarke insisted that it be kept in the air," says a Bush Administration official. The counterterrorism team argued that the Taliban had shot at the uav during the Clinton test, so its existence was hardly a secret. Besides, combined with on-the-ground intelligence, a Predator might just gather enough information in time to get a Tomahawk off to the target. But when the deputies held their fourth and final meeting on July 16, they still hadn't sorted out what to do with the Predator. Squabbles over who would pay for it continued into August.

Administration sources insist that they were not idle in the spring. They set up, for example, a new center in the Treasury to track suspicious foreign assets and reviewed Clinton's "findings" on whether the CIA could kill bin Laden. But by the summer, policy reviews were hardly what was needed.

Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top officials. On June 22, the Defense Department put its troops on full alert and ordered six ships from the Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, to steam out to sea, for fear that they might be attacked in port. U.S. officials thought an attack might be mounted on American forces at the nato base at Incirlik, Turkey, or maybe in Rome or Belgium, Germany or Southeast Asia, perhaps the Philippines-anywhere, it seems, but in the U.S. When Independence Day passed without incident, Clarke called a meeting and asked Ben Bonk, deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, to brief on bin Laden's plans. Bonk's evidence that al-Qaeda was planning "something spectacular," says an official who was in the room, "was very gripping." But nobody knew what or when or where the spectacular would be. As if to crystallize how much and how little anyone in the know actually knew, the counterterrorism center released a report titled "Threat of Impending al- Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely."

Predictably, nerves frayed. Clarke, who was widely loathed in the cia, where he was accused of self-aggrandizement, began to lose credibility. He cried wolf, said his detractors; he had been in the job too long. "The guy was reading way too many fiction novels," says a counterterrorism official. "He turned into a Chicken Little. The sky was always falling for Dick Clarke. We had our strings jerked by him so many times, he was simply not taken seriously." Clarke wasn't the only one living on the edge. So, say senior officials, was Tenet. Every few days, the CIA director would call Tom Pickard, who had become acting director of the FBI in June, asking "What do you hear? Do you have anything?" Pickard never had to ask what the topic was.

In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. "George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack," says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet broke out a huge wall chart ("They always have wall charts") with dozens of threats. Tenet couldn't rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas. One date already worrying the Secret Service was July 20, when Bush would arrive in Genoa for the G-8 summit; Tenet had intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to attack Bush there. The Italians, who had heard the same report (the way European intelligence sources tell it, everyone but the President's dog "knew" an attack was coming) put frogmen in the harbor, closed airspace around the town and ringed it with antiaircraft guns.

But nothing happened. After Genoa, says a senior intelligence official, there was a collective sigh of relief: "A lot of folks started letting their guard down." After the final deputies' meeting on Clarke's draft of a presidential directive, on July 16, it wasn't easy to find a date for the Principals' Committee to look at the plan-the last stage before the paper went to Bush. "There was one meeting scheduled for August," says a senior official, "but too many principals were out of town." Eventually a date was picked: the principals would look at the draft on Sept. 4. That was about nine months after Clarke first put his plan on paper.

A BURNED-OUT CASE
Clarke wasn't the only person having a bad year. In New York City, John O'Neill led the FBI's National Security Division, commanding more than 100 experienced agents. By spring they were all overloaded. O'Neill's boss, Assistant FBI Director Barry Mawn, spent part of his time pleading with Washington for more agents, more linguists, more clerical help. He got nowhere. O'Neill was a legend both in New York, where he hung out at famous watering holes like Elaine's, and in the counterterrorism world. Since 1995, when he helped coordinate the arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Yousef, the man responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, O'Neill had been one of the FBI's leading figures in the fight against terrorism. Brash, slick and ambitious, he had spent the late 1990s working closely with Clarke and the handful of other top officials for whom bin Laden had become an obsession.

Now O'Neill was having a lousy few months. The New York City field office had primary responsibility for the investigation of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. But the case had gone badly from the start. The Yemeni authorities had been lethargic and uncooperative, and O'Neill, who led the team in Aden, had run afoul of Barbara Bodine, then the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, who believed the FBI's large presence was causing political problems for the Yemeni regime. When O'Neill left Yemen on a trip home for Thanksgiving, Bodine barred his return. Seething, O'Neill tried to supervise the investigation from afar. At the same time, his team in New York City was working double time preparing for the trial in January 2001 of four co-conspirators in the case of the 1998 African embassy bombings. That involved agents shuttling between Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and New York, escorting witnesses, ferrying documents and guarding al-Qaeda turncoats who would give evidence for the prosecution.

Yet the FBI as a whole was ill equipped to deal with the terrorist threat. It had neither the language skills nor the analytical savvy to understand al-Qaeda. The bureau's information-technology capability dated to pre-Internet days. Chambliss says the counterterrorism investigations were decentralized at the bureau's 56 field offices, which were actually discouraged from sharing information with one another or with headquarters.

That was if the cases ever got started. An investigation by Chambliss's subcommittee found that the FBI paid "insufficient attention" to tracking terrorists' finances. Most agents in the field were assigned to criminal units; few field squads were dedicated to gathering intelligence on radical fundamentalists. During the Clinton Administration, says a former senior aide, Clarke became so frustrated with the bureau that he began touring its field offices, giving agents "al- Qaeda 101" classes. The bureau was, in fact, wiretapping some suspected Islamic radicals and debriefing a few al-Qaeda hands who had flipped. But at the end of the Clinton years, the aide says, the FBI told the White House that "there's not a substantial al-Qaeda presence in the U.S., and to the extent there was a presence, they had it covered." The FBI didn't, and O'Neill must have known that it didn't. So, as it happens, did some of his key allies, who were not in the U.S. at all but overseas. In Europe and especially in France the threat of Islamic terrorism had been particularly sharp ever since the Algerian Armed Islamic Group launched a bombing campaign in Paris in 1995. By 2000, counterterrorism experts in Europe knew the Islamic diaspora communities in Europe were seeded with cells of terrorists. And after the arrest of Ressam, European officials were convinced that terrorists would soon attack targets in the U.S. Jean-Louis Bruguire, a French magistrate who has led many of the most prominent terrorist cases, says Ressam's arrest signaled that the U.S. "had to join the rest of the world in considering itself at acute risk of attack."

Throughout the winter and spring of 2001, European law-enforcement agencies scored a series of dramatic hits against al-Qaeda and associated radical Islamic cells, with some help from the cia. The day after Christmas 2000, German authorities in Frankfurt arrested four Algerians on suspicion of plotting to bomb targets in Strasbourg. Two months later, the British arrested six Algerians on terrorism charges. In April, Italian police busted a cell whose members were suspected of plotting to bomb the American embassy in Rome. Two months later, the Spanish arrested Mohammed Bensakhria, an Algerian who had been in Afghanistan and had links to top al-Qaeda officials, including bin Laden. Bensakhria, the French alleged, had directed the Frankfurt cell involved in the Strasbourg plot. And in the most stunning coup of all, on July 28, Djamel Beghal, a Frenchman of Algerian descent who had been on France's terrorist watch list since 1997, was arrested in Dubai on his way back from Afghanistan. After being persuaded of terrorism's evil by Islamic scholars, Beghal told of a plot to attack the American embassy in Paris and gave investigators new details on al-Qaeda's top leadership, including the international-operations role of Abu Zubaydah. (Now back in France, he has tried to recant his confession.) French sources tell Time they believe U.S. authorities knew about Beghal's testimony.

This action by cops in Europe was meat and drink to O'Neill. The problem was that it convinced some U.S. antiterrorism officials that if there was going to be an attack on American interests that summer, it would take place outside the U.S. In early June, for example, the FBI was so concerned about threats to investigators left in Yemen that it moved the agents from Aden to the American embassy in Sana'a. Then came a second, very specific warning about the team's safety, and Washington decided to pull out of Yemen entirely. "John (O'Neill) would say, 'There's a lot of traffic,'" recalls Mawn. "Everybody was saying, 'The drumbeats are going; something's going to happen.' I said, 'Where and what?' And they'd say, 'We don't know, but it seems to be overseas, probably.'"

Some didn't lose sight of the threat at home. On Aug. 6, while on vacation in Crawford, Texas, Bush was given a PDB, this one on the possibility of al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S. And not one but two FBI field offices had inklings of al-Qaeda activity in the U.S. that, had they been aggressively pursued, might have fleshed out the intelligence chatter about an upcoming attack. But the systemic weaknesses in the FBI's bureaucracy prevented anything from being done.

The first warning came from Phoenix, Ariz. On July 10, agent Kenneth Williams wrote a paper detailing his suspicions about some suspected Islamic radicals who had been taking flying lessons in Arizona. Williams proposed an investigation to see if al-Qaeda was using flight schools nationwide. He spoke with the voice of experience; he had been working on international terrorism cases for years. The Phoenix office, according to former FBI agent James Hauswirth, had been investigating men with possible Islamic terrorist links since 1994, though without much support from the FBI's local bosses. Williams had started work on his probe of flight schools in early 2001 but had spent much of the next months on nonterrorist cases. Once he was back on terrorism, it took only a few weeks for alarm bells to ring. He submitted his memo to headquarters and to two FBI field offices, including New York City. In all three places it died.

Five weeks after Williams wrote his memo, a second warning came in from another FBI field office, and once again, headquarters bungled the case. On Aug. 13, Zacarias Moussaoui, a 33-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan ancestry, arrived at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota for simulator training on a Boeing 747. Moussaoui, who had been in the U.S. since February and had already taken flying lessons at a school in Norman, Okla., was in a hurry. John Rosengren, who was director of operations at Pan Am until February this year, says Moussaoui wanted to learn how to fly the 747 in "four or five days." After just two days of training, Moussaoui's flight instructor expressed concern that his student didn't want it known that he was a Muslim. One of Pan Am's managers had a contact in the FBI; should the manager call him? "I said, 'No problem,'" says Rosengren. "The next day I got a call from a Minneapolis agent telling me Moussaoui had been detained at the Residence Inn in Eagan."

Though Moussaoui is the only person to be indicted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, his role in them is as clear as mud. (He is detained in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial in federal district court.) German authorities have confirmed to Time that-as alleged in the indictment-Ramzi Binalshibh, a Hamburg friend of Atta and Al-Shehhi, wired two money transfers to Moussaoui in August. Binalshibh, who was denied a visa to visit the U.S. four times in 2000, is thought to have been one of the conduits for funds to the hijackers, relaying cash that originated in the Persian Gulf. But no known telephone calls or other evidence links the hijackers directly to Moussaoui.

Whatever Moussaoui's true tale may be, the Minnesota field office was convinced he was worth checking out. Agents spent much of the next two weeks in an increasingly frantic-and ultimately fruitless- effort to persuade FBI headquarters to authorize a national-security warrant to search Moussaoui's computer. From Washington, requests were sent to authorities in Paris for background details on the suspect. Like most things having to do with Moussaoui, the contents of the dossier sent over from Paris are in dispute. One senior French law-enforcement source told Time the Americans were given "everything they needed" to understand that Moussaoui was associated with Islamic terrorist groups. "Even a neophyte," says this source, "working in some remote corner of Florida, would have understood the threat based on what was sent." But several officials in FBI headquarters say that before Sept. 11 the French sent only a three-page document, which portrayed Moussaoui as a radical but was too sketchy to justify a search warrant for his computer.

The precise wording of the French letter isn't the issue. The extraordinary thing about Moussaoui's case-like the Phoenix memo-is that it was never brought to the attention of top officials in Washington who were, almost literally, sleepless with worry about an imminent terrorist attack. Nobody in the FBI or CIA ever informed anybody in the White House of Moussaoui's detention. That was unforgivable. "Do you think," says a White House antiterrorism official, "that if Dick Clarke had known the FBI had in custody a foreigner who was learning to fly a plane in midair, he wouldn't have done something?"

In blissless ignorance, Clarke and Tenet waited for the meeting of the Principals. But the odd little ways of Washington had one more trick to play. Heeding the pleas from the FBI's New York City office, where Mawn and O'Neill were desperate for new linguists and analysts, acting FBI director Pickard asked the Justice Department for some $50 million for the bureau's counterterrorism program. He was turned down. In August, a bureau source says, he appealed to Attorney General Ashcroft. The reply was a flat no.

Pickard got Ashcroft's letter on Sept. 10. A few days before, O'Neill had started a new job. He was burned out, and he knew it. Over the summer, he had come to realize that he had made too many enemies ever to succeed Mawn. O'Neill handed in his papers, left the FBI and began a new life as head of security at the World Trade Center.

THE TWO VISITORS
As the first cool nights of fall settled on northeast Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud was barely hanging on. His summer offensive had been a bust. An attempt to capture the city of Taloqan, which he had lost to the Taliban in 2000, ended in failure. But old allies, like the brutal Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, had returned to the field, and Massoud still thought the unpopularity of the Taliban might yet make them vulnerable. "He was telling us not to worry, that we'd soon capture Kabul," says Shah Pacha, an infantry commander in the Northern Alliance.

Around Sept. 1, Massoud summoned his top men to his command post in Khoja Bahauddin. The intention was to plan an attack, but Zahir Akbar, one of Massoud's generals, remembers a phone call after which Massoud changed his plans. "He'd been told al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis were deploying five combat units to the front line," says Akbar. Northern Alliance soldiers reported a buildup of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces; there was no big push from the south, although there were a number of skirmishes in the first week in September. "We were puzzled and confused when they didn't attack," says a senior Afghan intelligence source. "And Taliban communications showed the units had been ordered to wait."

What were they waiting for? Some of Massoud's closest aides think they know. For about three weeks, two Arab journalists had been waiting in Khoja Bahauddin to interview Massoud. The men said they represented the Islamic Observation Center in London and had a letter of introduction from its head, Yasser al-Siri. The men, who had been given safe passage through the Taliban front lines, "said they'd like to document Islam in Afghanistan," recalls Faheem Dashty, who made films with the Northern Alliance and is editor in chief of the Kabul Weekly newspaper. By the night of Sept. 8, the visitors were getting antsy, pestering Massoud's officials to firm up the meeting with him and threatening to return to Kabul if they could not see Massoud in the next 24 hours. "They were so worried and excitable they were begging us," says Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary.

The interview was finally granted just before lunch on Sunday, Sept. 9. Dashty was asked to record it on his camera. Massoud sat next to his friend Masood Khalili, now Afghanistan's ambassador to India. "The commander said he wanted to sit with me and translate," says Khalili. "Then he and I would go and have lunch together by the Oxus River." The Arabs entered and set up a TV camera in front of Massoud; the guests, says Khalili, were "very calm, very quiet." Khalili asked them which newspaper they represented. When they replied that they were acting for "Islamic Centers," says Khalili, he became reluctant to continue, but Massoud said they should all go ahead.

Khalili says Massoud asked to know the Arabs' questions before they started recording. "I remember that out of 15 questions, eight were about bin Laden," says Khalili. "I looked over at Massoud. He looked uncomfortable; there were five worry lines on his forehead instead of the one he usually had. But he said, 'O.K. Let's film.'" Khalili started translating the first question into Dari; Dashty was fiddling with the lighting on his camera. "Then," says Dashty, "I felt the explosion." The bomb was in the camera, and it killed one of the Arabs; the second was shot dead by Massoud's guards while trying to escape. Khalili believes he was saved by his passport, which was in his left breast pocket-eight pieces of shrapnel were found embedded in it. Dashty remembers being rushed to a helicopter with Massoud, who had terrible wounds. The chopper flew them both to a hospital in Tajikistan. By the time they arrived, Massoud was dead. The killers had come from Europe, and they were members of a group allied with al-Qaeda. Massoud's enemies had been waiting for the news. Within hours, Taliban radio began to crackle: "Your father is dead. Now you can't resist us." "They were clever," says a member of Massoud's staff. "Their offensive was primed to begin after the assassination." That night the Taliban attacked Massoud's front lines. One last time, his forces held out on their own.

As the battle raged, Clarke's plan awaited Bush's signature. Soon enough, the Northern Alliance would get all the aid it had been seeking-U.S. special forces, money, B-52 bombers, and, of course, as many Predators as the CIA and Pentagon could get into the sky. The decision that had been put off for so long had suddenly become easy because a little more than 50 hours after Massoud's death, Atta, sitting on American Airlines Flight 11 on the runway at Boston's Logan Airport, had used his mobile phone to speak for the last time to his friend Al-Shehhi, on United Flight 175. Their plot was a go.

That morning, O'Neill, Clarke's former partner in the fight against international terrorism, arrived at his new place of work. He had been on the job just two weeks. After Atta and Al-Shehhi crashed their planes into the World Trade Center, O'Neill called his son and a girlfriend from outside the Towers to say he was safe. Then he rushed back in. His body was identified 10 days later.

— Reported by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington; Hannah Bloch and Tim McGirk/Islamabad; Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas; Wendy Cole and Marguerite Michaels/ Chicago; Bruce Crumley/Paris; James Graff/Brussels; David Schwartz/Phoenix; and Michael Ware/Kabul

Rice is a freakin LIAR.

SuzeQuze

09-26-2006, 10:33 AM

Fox has pulled the video from YouTube. There's a note that the poster didn't have permission. I think it's posted in its entirety on crooksandliars.com now though. Shame on Fox!

gldstwmn

09-26-2006, 10:50 AM

A textbook definition of cowardice
Keith Olbermann comments on Bill Clinton's Fox News interview

Transcript and video:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15004160

That was awesome! :]

estranged4life

09-26-2006, 11:08 AM

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 11:44 AM

Fox has pulled the video from YouTube. There's a note that the poster didn't have permission. I think it's posted in its entirety on crooksandliars.com now though. Shame on Fox!

there's also a video on the Olbermann link.

SuzeQuze

09-26-2006, 11:50 AM

why are the politicals worried about what happened in the past with regards with OBL, when they should be worried about what is to come?

I don't give a **** who is at fault in the past, but what is CURRENTLY being done in regards to OBL? Nothing if ya ask me.

Trust me, when a reporter on Bill Maher's HBO show says OBL has the blessings of radical Muslim leaders to kill 10,000,000 people by use of a WMD something is definitely not being done.

Well that is a good point. Clinton felt the need to defend his record in the wake of that ABC docudrama piece of crap. The question framed as "Why didn't you do more?" just set those wheels in motion.

The current administration is busy illegally wire tapping and arguing about torture being necessary. They don't even have to wire tap illegally to get the warrants. They can tap the wires and then apply for the warrant within 72 hours, legally. Are they just lazy? Or, extremely secretive about WHO they are tapping. Political opponents? That is purely speculation of course, but why else would they not get the necessary warrants? I doubt terrorists, who seem pretty sophisticated, would give any info over a phone line anyway.

So what else is being done? Oh yeah, we're gettin' 'em over there. Um, not working. Completely failed policy. But don't adjust it to something that might work! Oh no. It's a smokescreen anyway because we did not go into Iraq to fight terrorism and almost everyone sees that now.

I love how righties are all excited about the president's rising approval rating. It is still only about 44% which is "sucks". He had to go up just to get to "sucks".

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 12:13 PM

Nixxxed

09-26-2006, 12:34 PM

Interestingly, and to stir it up just a little :eek:

I get that Clinton tried and failed - but so did W, who indeed went into Afgan, etc.

So, despite Clinton's posturing (based in fact though) - - what does this interview show about how the D's would have handled 9/11 (post) differently. Remember almost all D's voted for the war in Afgan and for the war in Iraq. So, they can make the argument that W screwed those up, which he did, but they will likely as history demonstrates be seen as flipp flopping.

So, my question is, what can the D's show to the American people that will demonstrate they are not weak on national defense, etc. I can tell you I think that talking about no spying and no torture ain't gonna cut it because most Americans do not care about that and, mostly correctly, think those avenues had lead to stopping the terrorists. So, what are the D's gonna do is the question.
It might be a good start to actually implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission report...

And on a side note, I read (somewhere) yesterday that bin Laden hasn't even been indicted for the 9/11 attacks. Is that true? I know he was indicted for the 98 bombings, but not for 9/11 apparently. I find that very strange.

SuzeQuze

09-26-2006, 12:51 PM

Interestingly, and to stir it up just a little :eek:

I get that Clinton tried and failed - but so did W, who indeed went into Afgan, etc.

So, despite Clinton's posturing (based in fact though) - - what does this interview show about how the D's would have handled 9/11 (post) differently. Remember almost all D's voted for the war in Afgan and for the war in Iraq. So, they can make the argument that W screwed those up, which he did, but they will likely as history demonstrates be seen as flipp flopping.

So, my question is, what can the D's show to the American people that will demonstrate they are not weak on national defense, etc. I can tell you I think that talking about no spying and no torture ain't gonna cut it because most Americans do not care about that and, mostly correctly, think those avenues had lead to stopping the terrorists. So, what are the D's gonna do is the question.

Clark still would have been at his post and they would have been paying attention.

Ds are not saying no spying (just no illegals spying) nor is there any proof that torture has lead to any foiled plots. It has, however, led to many false confessions. It is also leaves our soldiers vulnerable to torture out of revenge. I agree though that they should not run on these issues. I think the distinctions are too complex for most people to get. They don't pay close enough attention.

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 12:58 PM

Interestingly, and to stir it up just a little :eek:

I get that Clinton tried and failed - but so did W, who indeed went into Afgan, etc.

So, despite Clinton's posturing (based in fact though) - - what does this interview show about how the D's would have handled 9/11 (post) differently. Remember almost all D's voted for the war in Afgan and for the war in Iraq. So, they can make the argument that W screwed those up, which he did, but they will likely as history demonstrates be seen as flipp flopping.

So, my question is, what can the D's show to the American people that will demonstrate they are not weak on national defense, etc. I can tell you I think that talking about no spying and no torture ain't gonna cut it because most Americans do not care about that and, mostly correctly, think those avenues had lead to stopping the terrorists. So, what are the D's gonna do is the question.

its a whole different kettle of fish to ask what the Dems would do NOW as opposed to what they would have done THEN. Its too late to now ask what the Dems would have done differently if they had been in office, and its unreasonable to expect the Dems to clean up a GOP mess...

I think we need to get OUT of Iraq, develop alternative energy sources and vehicles, scale back the protections on multinationals and financial institutions (bring back consumer protection and the anti-monopoly mindset!!) remind the country that the Church and State are SEPARATE,
take global warming seriously and restore social programs that benefit the least advantaged among us. (Thats MY platform!!)

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 01:03 PM

Clark still would have been at his post and they would have been paying attention.

Ds are not saying no spying (just no illegals spying) nor is there any proof that torture has lead to any foiled plots. It has, however, led to many false confessions. It is also leaves our soldiers vulnerable to torture out of revenge. I agree though that they should not run on these issues. I think the distinctions are too complex for most people to get. They don't pay close enough attention.

There was an article awhile back that said some of the confessions were valid. of course, we will never really know the truth, etc.

As for Clark being there - it still would have been a crap shoot as he was there for part of that eight months and the planning of 9/11 stretched out further than that and they did not catch them, etc. So, the facts indicate 9/11 likely could not have been prevented, though more effort by W would have helped :shrug: This is what Clinton was saying.

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 01:07 PM

its a whole different kettle of fish to ask what the Dems would do NOW as opposed to what they would have done THEN. Its too late to now ask what the Dems would have done differently if they had been in office, and its unreasonable to expect the Dems to clean up a GOP mess...

I think we need to get OUT of Iraq, develop alternative energy sources and vehicles, scale back the protections on multinationals and financial institutions (bring back consumer protection and the anti-monopoly mindset!!) remind the country that the Church and State are SEPARATE,
take global warming seriously and restore social programs that benefit the least advantaged among us. (Thats MY platform!!)

1. Any notion that the US should get out of Iraq completely today is not only inhumane, but a death sentence for any candidate. Powell correctly said we broke it and now have to fix it. The D's should implement a year or so schedule for staged withdrawal, etc.

2. If course the D's have to clean it up, esp. when they played a part in making it. Certainly, not even you think the D's hands are clean on Iraq :eek: Again, Clinton killed there, Kerry was a huge cheerleader for the invasion, etc. So, yes, the D's have egg on their faces.

3. There never really has been any significant consumer protection or anti-monopoly mind set.

4. Though the govt. should stay out of religion, good luck getting elected even in crazy California with that platform :laugh:

estranged4life

09-26-2006, 01:08 PM

I love how righties are all excited about the president's rising approval rating. It is still only about 44% which is "sucks". He had to go up just to get to "sucks".

but "44" is a failing grade, correct? I remember in high school anything under a "66" was a failing grade (My school had A, B, C & F grades-Anything lower than 66 is an F)

It would take alot to get from '44' to '67' (From failing to passing) if ya ask me.

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 01:08 PM

There was an article awhile back that said some of the confessions were valid. of course, we will never really know the truth, etc.

As for Clark being there - it still would have been a crap shoot as he was there for part of that eight months and the planning of 9/11 stretched out further than that and they did not catch them, etc. So, the facts indicate 9/11 likely could not have been prevented, though more effort by W would have helped :shrug: This is what Clinton was saying.

maybe planes should be outfitted with some sort of device that alerts air traffic when a plane deviates from its scheduled course :shrug:

although, I doubt terrorists will use that avenue again....I think they would go for some other mass transit target or maybe a water supply or something...

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 01:11 PM

maybe planes should be outfitted with some sort of device that alerts air traffic when a plane deviates from its scheduled course :shrug:

although, I doubt terrorists will use that avenue again....I think they would go for some other mass transit target or maybe a water supply or something...

Planed should be fitted with many devices like that and the missle deterent systems. The US has known this since like the 70's and all military planes have them. The govt. just refuses to make the airlines spend the money. Interestingly, from a cost benefit point of view - only one, maybe two planes out of hundreds of thousands if not millions of planes in the last 30 years have gone down this way :shrug:

estranged4life

09-26-2006, 01:16 PM

maybe planes should be outfitted with some sort of device that alerts air traffic when a plane deviates from its scheduled course :shrug:

but it would be too much (In financial terms) to retro-fit the current fleet of airplanes for all the airlines.

although, I doubt terrorists will use that avenue again....I think they would go for some other mass transit target or maybe a water supply or something...

I believe their next targets will either be the oil supplies in the Middle East to cause a World-wide economic panic & collapse, or even worse a nuclear attack on the US West Coast (Possibly Los Angeles) which would cripple the US (Fallout would travel West to East in the jetstreams, causing panic unlike any ever seen in our lifetimes & absolute civil unrest.)

gldstwmn

09-26-2006, 01:59 PM

Trust me, when a reporter on Bill Maher's HBO show says OBL has the blessings of radical Muslim leaders to kill 10,000,000 people by use of a WMD something is definitely not being done.

That was a good show. I think it is because of the upcoming elections that they want to take the focus off of what Osama is up to now.

The Tower

09-26-2006, 04:06 PM

Interestingly, and to stir it up just a little :eek:

I get that Clinton tried and failed - but so did W, who indeed went into Afgan, etc.
At least Clinton has the stuff to admit his failures. W never will. Which is the point.

So, despite Clinton's posturing (based in fact though) - - what does this interview show about how the D's would have handled 9/11 (post) differently. Remember almost all D's voted for the war in Afgan and for the war in Iraq. So, they can make the argument that W screwed those up, which he did, but they will likely as history demonstrates be seen as flipp flopping.
One, the debate wasn't about the hypothetical about what a Gore administration would have done, it was about what Clinton didn't do-all in an attempt to deflect blame away from Dubya and put it ALL on Clinton. Again- zero accountability. It's not as cut-and-dry as you'd like to put it.

So, my question is, what can the D's show to the American people that will demonstrate they are not weak on national defense, etc. I can tell you I think that talking about no spying...
Disinformation. The democrats want the W administration to follow the law instead of creating enemy lists and files. It doesn't have anything to do with not being able to "spy".

...and no torture ain't gonna cut it because most Americans do not care about that...
Wrong again. I think most americans care about whether or not our government tortures people.

and, mostly correctly, think those avenues had lead to stopping the terrorists.
Wrong again. Most successful interrogation methods involve working with the suspect to get valid information. To torture someone is just a "thrown-one's-hands-up-in-the-air" / easy way out solution that is completely barbaric.

So, what are the D's gonna do is the question.
Phased redeployment and on the ground detective work- just like British intelligence did with those London airplane jerks.

There was an article awhile back that said some of the confessions were valid. of course, we will never really know the truth, etc.
Torture is illegal, morally wrong and barbaric. Nothing justifies torture. End of story.

1. Any notion that the US should get out of Iraq completely today is not only inhumane, but a death sentence for any candidate. Powell correctly said we broke it and now have to fix it. The D's should implement a year or so schedule for staged withdrawal, etc.
That's their plan Jason- where the hell have you been? I don't think anyone in congress or part of the democratic establishment has stated that they want complete and immediate withdrawl. Phased redeployment.

Nixxxed

09-26-2006, 04:42 PM

Poor CondoLIEza - RawStory just published the Clarke terrorism strategy memo that Dubya got 5 days after being sworn in. It's the one Clinton was referring to in the Wallace interview, and the one she said didn't include any strategies for dealing with the Pakistan angle and was therefore useless.

(Guess what? It does ... 3 pages worth in fact.)

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/2001_memo_to_Rice_contradicts_statements_0926.html

And have you heard yet about the SECOND NIE report that Dubya is hiding because it's worse than the first?

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001603.php

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 04:43 PM

Like Clinton, W admitted his failure to protect America on 9/11 - then he went on about how that failure is prompting to never let it happen again via his methods, which I think are ineffective to say the least.

As for the torture, I make no comment on its morality, etc. I am just going by what I hear and see and I know of none who think the water torture stuff is inappropriate. But, I could be wrong as I do not know everyone LOL and certainly have never tortured anyone - and if you make a crack about my singing . . . :cool:

In the end, W's administration touted good things and them failed to execute any of them, which is sad and pathetic. Conversley, the Clinton Administration succeeded in many areas and failed in fewer than W's deal.

And - them's the facts!

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 05:07 PM

Bush dismisses the notion that his party was using this for political reasons.

In the end, it would be like Rove to leak parts of the doc that were disfavorable to W and then release the doc in full with the favorable parts - though it appears that has not happened.

NIE: Al Qaeda 'damaged,' becoming more scattered
Story Highlights•NEW: Report says anti-Western attacks could increase if "jihadist movement" continues to grow
•NEW: Declassified judgments from NIE released on Director of National Intelligence Web site
•Proposal by top House Democrat for secret session on intelligence fails
•Leaked intelligence report says Iraq war is increasing Islamic radicalism

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Islamist terrorists are adapting to global counterterrorism efforts, as the "jihadist movement" is becoming more decentralized and spawning offshoot organizations with anti-American agendas, according to a declassified intelligence document released Tuesday.

Earlier, President Bush angrily lambasted a media report that said the document asserted that the Iraq war increased the terrorist threat to the United States.

He added that the media accounts of the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate were meant to "create confusion in the minds of the American people" and promised to declassify the document's key judgments.

"It will stop all the speculation, all the politics about somebody saying something about Iraq; you know, somebody trying to confuse the American people about the nature of this enemy," Bush said.

The judgments state that U.S.-led counterterrorism efforts have "seriously damaged" al Qaeda's leadership and operations, but that the group still poses "the greatest threat to the homeland and U.S. interests."

It adds that the number of Muslims who describe themselves as jihadists is increasing, and that "if this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."

During a joint White House press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Bush said he had ordered Director of National Security John Negroponte to declassify the findings. (Full story)

"He'll do so in such a way that we'll be able to protect sources and methods ... that our intelligence community uses," Bush said, "and then everybody can draw their own conclusions about what the report says." (Watch U.S. to declassify terror report -- 2:03)

The full findings are posted at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Web site. (www.dni.gov).

Bush said he agreed with the report's conclusions that al Qaeda is becoming more diffuse and decentralized but rejected the interpretation that the Iraq war had made the U.S. less safe.

"This government is going to do whatever it takes to protect this homeland. We're not going to let their excuses stop us from staying on the offense," Bush said.

"The best way to protect America is to defeat these killers overseas so we do not have to face them here at home," Bush said. "We're not going to let lies and propaganda by the enemy dictate how we win this war." (Watch Bush call critics of war 'naive' -- 3:10)

On Monday evening, Negroponte rejected the argument that the Iraq war had increased the terrorist threat against the United States.

Negroponte conceded that Iraq had become a training ground for a new generation of jihadists.

Democrats push for more disclosures
On Tuesday, congressional Democrats put pressure on the administration to disclose more analysis by the intelligence community on Iraq and the new generation of Islamic terrorists.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, asked that the chamber go into secret session to discuss the intelligence reports, something the House has not done since 1983. The proposal was denied by a vote of 171-217 along mostly party lines.

Senate Democrats Tuesdayalso demanded that Negroponte testify about the report and fully declassify not only the portion leaked over the weekend but also all intelligence estimates dealing with terrorism.

"We want to make certain that what we're doing in Iraq and around the world contains and destroys the threat of terrorism," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, said. "This National Intelligence Estimate suggests just the opposite: that our strategy in Iraq is adding to the problem and not diminishing the problem."

Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called on the White House to release a second, previously unknown national intelligence document that focuses solely on Iraq.

Harman insisted there is a draft NIE that has not been revealed to the public.

"I have learned there is an NIE on Iraq, specifically on Iraq, that has been left in draft form at the National Intelligence Council," the California congresswoman said at a news conference.

Harman said the document has been kept in draft form so that it won't be seen before midterm elections.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN that he is not aware of any draft dealing solely with Iraq, but he believes Harman is reliable.

"If she says she has that information, I wouldn't doubt it for one minute," he said.

The call for declassifying thefirst NIE has been bipartisan. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, on Monday called on Bush to declassify the report so that the public can "come to their own conclusions." Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was negotiating with Negroponte's office to have a declassified version of the findings released.

CNN's Andrea Koppel and Ted Barrett contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/26/nie.iraq/index.html

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 05:07 PM

1. Any notion that the US should get out of Iraq completely today is not only inhumane, but a death sentence for any candidate. Powell correctly said we broke it and now have to fix it. The D's should implement a year or so schedule for staged withdrawal, etc.

2. If course the D's have to clean it up, esp. when they played a part in making it. Certainly, not even you think the D's hands are clean on Iraq :eek: Again, Clinton killed there, Kerry was a huge cheerleader for the invasion, etc. So, yes, the D's have egg on their faces.

3. There never really has been any significant consumer protection or anti-monopoly mind set.

4. Though the govt. should stay out of religion, good luck getting elected even in crazy California with that platform :laugh:

personally I say if Iraq wants us out we should go. Everyone knows the only real reason we're there is for the oil. The Iraqis arent ready for a Democracy and we can never "fix" the situation. To think we could is sheer fantasy.

your notion of "dirty hands" with respect to Iraq is interesting to say the least. Clinton didnt do much there at all........aside from a short bombing stint during Monicagate, how can you even really attach any blame to the Dems? No, Jason, the TRUE culprits in Iraq (from Day ONE) have been the GOP hawks. face it.

as for your statement re: consumer protection and trustbusting/anti-monopoly mindset, you are sadly mistaken. The late 60's, early 70's had all sorts of consumer protection action.....Ralph Nader got his start as a consumer advocate after all.........and we USED to have anti-monopoly laws in place until the Reagan era when deregulation came into being. Maybe you're too young to remember the breakup of ATT? Viacom Cable? The idea was to give the little guys a chance to operate as equals in the various types of businesses, and then it seemed like Government looked the other way while corporations bought each other out and acquired other companies and voila, back we went to conglomerates again..............

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 05:11 PM

I think a phased withdrawal, which I just heard the D's are getting behind, is the only humane thing to do.

Clinton killed many people there. Killing people is killing people and he did it to the gleeful cheers from the D's in the hosue and senate. Yes, W killed more. So what. Killing on BS is killing. That you make a distinction is ridiculous. But, you support Clinton no matter what.

All that stuff in the 60's and 70's was mostly insignificant in the big scheme of things. Products liability, which essentially began with the dawn of the automobile did far more when the concept of privy was lessened http://www.law.unb.ca/cpwala/privity.htm

Also, ATT was considered a monopoly and that is why the R administration broke it into the seven dwarves :shrug: Personally, I think that were it not for the advancement of cell phones and the lessened demand for long distance carriers, there would not have been the subsequent remerging of the ATT companies in one form or another.

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 05:56 PM

All that stuff in the 60's and 70's was mostly insignificant in the big scheme of things. Products liability, which essentially began with the dawn of the automobile did far more when the concept of privy was lessened http://www.law.unb.ca/cpwala/privity.htm

Also, ATT was considered a monopoly and that is why the R administration broke it into the seven dwarves :shrug: Personally, I think that were it not for the advancement of cell phones and the lessened demand for long distance carriers, there would not have been the subsequent remerging of the ATT companies in one form or another.

I wasnt talking about products liability so much as I was warranties and fitness for a particular purpose, and recourse should a manufacturer fail to deliver as promised. dont confuse the issue.

as for the breaking up of monopolies, THAT is what I was referring to as an anti-monopoly mindset. However, late in Reagan's terms, deregulation reared its ugly head and allowed former segments of the whole to again regroup and again form the same ubergiant company. to wit, ATT is again ATT. the little guys dont have a chance. again. We should never have deregulated IMO, if we are left with what we tried to eliminate in the first place. :shrug:

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 06:03 PM

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 06:16 PM

Warranty and all the related law essentially came from the lessening of privy - which was started by products liability law, effectively a sort of form of breach of contract.

As for the deregulation laws, some were good, some bad. Look at banking - without the degregulation, the housing room would have been severely lessened. Then again the S&L fraud may have been lessened had the regulation stayed in place. Interestingly, no Pres. since RR has done much to go after trusts - Reno tried against MS - but it was a half a$$ effort IMO.

Interestingly, the tobacco companies are the only ones hit really hard over the last 20 years.

it wasnt until the 70's however that anyone even THOUGHT of protecting the buyer....previously all the laws were in favor of the seller and it was a "buyer beware" culture. I tell you, deregulation and erasure of consumer protection in favor of big business just STINKS. Period.

according to the author of a book I just got (at home, dont remember his name) the whole rise of the financial/banking behemoth is a good part responsible for the mess this country is now in (he names a culture of debt, the marriage of religion and politics, and a dependance on oil and the resultant geopolitical maneuvering as the three biggest problems facing America today...)

I think its shameful the way the credit card companies have managed to institute such punitive measures against consumers, while at the same time dangling credit offers in front of desperate people like so many carrots....
but I guess thats a discussion for another day.....

gldstwmn

09-26-2006, 06:35 PM

I think a phased withdrawal, which I just heard the D's are getting behind, is the only humane thing to do.

They've been talking about it for at least a year. As Towie said, where the hell have you been? :confused:

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 09:21 PM

it wasnt until the 70's however that anyone even THOUGHT of protecting the buyer....previously all the laws were in favor of the seller and it was a "buyer beware" culture. I tell you, deregulation and erasure of consumer protection in favor of big business just STINKS. Period.

according to the author of a book I just got (at home, dont remember his name) the whole rise of the financial/banking behemoth is a good part responsible for the mess this country is now in (he names a culture of debt, the marriage of religion and politics, and a dependance on oil and the resultant geopolitical maneuvering as the three biggest problems facing America today...)

I think its shameful the way the credit card companies have managed to institute such punitive measures against consumers, while at the same time dangling credit offers in front of desperate people like so many carrots....
but I guess thats a discussion for another day.....

Not really - as the advent of products liability was like 70 years earlier. One of the reasons behind products liability was to force manufacturers to spend that extra 50 cents on stronger headlamps, etc. But, yes, the 70's were a boon as well. I also think the UCC helped greatly as well.

strandinthewind

09-26-2006, 09:22 PM

They've been talking about it for at least a year. As Towie said, where the hell have you been? :confused:

I was referring to Mary saying we need to get out. I took that to mean now. As for the D's Kerry had no plan to speak of and the D's are pretty much just now solidly getting behind the plan your talking about if memory serves me correctly.

on edit - yes, they were not in agreement as of 2/06

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/02/20/democrats_may_unite_on_plan_to_pull_troops/

Democrats may unite on plan to pull troops
See Iraq withdrawal, deployment in region
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | February 20, 2006

WASHINGTON -- After months of trying unsuccessfully to develop a common message on the war in Iraq, Democratic Party leaders are beginning to coalesce around a broad plan to begin a quick withdrawal of US troops and install them elsewhere in the region, where they could respond to emergencies in Iraq and help fight terrorism in other countries.

The concept, dubbed ''strategic redeployment," is outlined in a slim, nine-page report coauthored by a former Reagan administration assistant Defense secretary, Lawrence J. Korb, in the fall. It sets a goal of a phased troop withdrawal that would take nearly all US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2007, although many Democrats disagree on whether troop draw-downs should be tied to a timeline.

Howard Dean, Democratic National Committee chairman, has endorsed Korb's paper and begun mentioning it in meetings with local Democratic groups. In addition, the study's concepts have been touted by the senator assigned to bring Democrats together on Iraq -- Jack Reed of Rhode Island -- and the report has been circulated among all senators by Senator Dianne Feinstein, an influential moderate Democrat from California.

The party remains divided on some points, including how much detail to include in a party-produced document, fearful of giving too much fodder for attacks by Republicans.

But in its broad outlines, many leading Democrats say the Korb plan represents an answer to Republicans' oft-repeated charge that Democrats aren't offering a way forward on Iraq -- and to do so in a way that is neither defeatist nor blindly loyal to the president.

''We're not going to cut and run -- that's just Republican propaganda," Dean said in a speech Feb. 10 in Boston. ''But we are going to redeploy our troops so they don't have targets on their backs, and they're not breaking down doors and putting themselves in the line of fire all the time. . . . It's a sensible plan. It's a thoughtful plan. I think Democrats can coalesce around it."

Reed, an Army veteran and former paratrooper who has been charged with developing a party strategy on the war, said the plan is attractive to many Democrats because it rejects what he calls the ''false dichotomy" suggested by President Bush: that the only options in Iraq are ''stay the course" or ''cut and run."

''It's important to note that it's not withdrawal -- it's redeployment," Reed said. ''We need to pursue a strategy that is going to accomplish the reasonable objectives, and allow us to have strategic flexibility. Not only is it a message, but it's a method to improve the security there and around the globe."

The idea of a phased deployment of troops out of Iraq recognizes that a huge US military presence in the country is straining the armed services as well as feeding the insurgency, Reed said. He added that many military commanders agree that the nation should be moving toward taking American troops out of Iraq, to better equip the military to respond to threats around the world and give the Iraqi government a greater incentive to handle its own security.

Under Korb's outline, all reservists and National Guard members would come home this year. Most of the other troops would be redeployed to other key areas -- Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and the Horn of Africa -- with large, quick-strike forces placed in Kuwait, where they could respond to crises in neighboring Iraq.

Korb said in an interview that setting dates for troop withdrawal would send a message to the Iraqi people that the United States does not intend to set up permanent military bases in Iraq. Starting the redeployment quickly will ensure that the Army does not wear out before the insurgents do, he said.

''The Iraqis want us to go," said Korb, who has opposed Bush's decision to invade Iraq from the start. ''If you're out by the end of 2007, we'll have been there almost five years. That's not cutting and running."

But some strategists say the goal of a near-total withdrawal within two years is overly optimistic. US troops that are a plane ride away won't be an effective deterrent, and Iraqi security forces appear unlikely to be able to handle the violence on their own in the near future, said Michael O'Hanlon, a centrist defense specialist who is a lecturer at Princeton University.

''You're demanding that the political system produces a miracle," O'Hanlon said. ''Any plan that envisions complete American withdrawal in such a period of time is still a prescription for strategic defeat."

The war has been a source of long-running tension among Democrats. Twenty-nine Democratic senators and 81 House Democrats voted to authorize the president to invade Iraq, and while most are now critical of Bush's handling of the war, some -- notably Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut -- remain staunch supporters.

Although ''strategic redeployment" could draw a large portion of Democrats into the same fold, Reed and other Democrats disagree with setting a timeline for troop withdrawal, saying that such decisions should be dictated by commanders on the ground.

Still, Reed noted that the Bush administration has begun modest troop withdrawals. The Senate in November overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for 2006 to be ''a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty," and on Friday, the White House issued a statement reiterating its position: ''In 2006, it is anticipated that the Iraqi military will take more of the lead for security throughout Iraq."

But the president has strongly rejected issuing any time frames, arguing that they would be exploited by insurgents who would strike as soon as troops leave Iraq. Democrats who have suggested time frames for withdrawal have faced harsh attacks from Republicans, who paint them as offering a strategy of defeat.

In November, Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, shook much of Washington with his call for an immediate withdrawal of troops, and his estimate that all troops could be out of Iraq within six months. The generally hawkish Vietnam veteran also called for quick strike forces to remain close to Iraq -- similar to the Korb plan -- but that was largely overlooked in the barrage from Republicans.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Murtha plan amounted to ''surrender to the terrorists."

Representative Jean Schmidt, Republican of Ohio, delivered a blistering speech on the House floor aimed at Murtha, who spent 37 years in the Marine Corps: ''Cowards cut and run, Marines never do," Schmidt said, in remarks she later withdrew from the Congressional Record.

The attacks on Murtha demonstrated the political peril that could face Democrats who offer plans involving troop withdrawals.

Although Murtha has 99 House cosponsors for his plan, some Democrats remain skittish about offering a plan that they know would be attacked harshly -- and, they say, almost certainly misconstrued -- by political opponents.

Still, Dean, Reed, and others in the party are trying to develop a united Democratic vision for Iraq, based in part on the calculation that the war will be a big factor in many 2006 congressional campaigns.

Representative Martin T. Meehan, a Lowell Democrat who voted in favor of the war and now supports the Murtha plan, said that while the war remains Bush's responsibility, Democrats should be able to tell voters what they would do differently.

''There are a lot of different views, but I personally believe that putting forward specifics about how to move forward in Iraq is important to do," said Meehan, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. ''I would like to see Democrats coalesce around a strategy like Korb's strategy."

This fall, in elections that Democrats hope will bring them back to power in Congress, more than 50 military veterans are running in congressional races as Democrats.

Those candidates are asked about Iraq all the time, and the idea of strategic redeployment is appealing to many of them, said Eric Massa, who is challenging an incumbent Republican in upstate New York and is helping to organize strategy for the veterans who are running.

''You can't stand in front of people and say, 'We want your vote,' and not tell people what it is they're voting for," said Massa, a former Navy officer. ''We all know that staying the course is not a strategy that's going to work."

Rick Klein can be reached at [email protected].

irishgrl

09-26-2006, 10:56 PM

Not really - as the advent of products liability was like 70 years earlier. One of the reasons behind products liability was to force manufacturers to spend that extra 50 cents on stronger headlamps, etc. But, yes, the 70's were a boon as well. I also think the UCC helped greatly as well.

I beg to differ, the whole concept of consumer protection was a 70's issue. Consumer Protection as an entity is a 70's child (in the main)
to wit:

History of Trading Standards
History of Trading Standards - Consumer Protection
From the 1960s onwards, legislation was passed concerning consumer safety and consumer protection. This legislation includes the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 which prohibits false descriptions about goods and services; the Consumer Credit Act 1974 which regulates the provision of credit, and the Consumer Protection Act 1987 which covers the safety of consumer goods and also dealt with misleading prices.

gldstwmn

09-26-2006, 11:16 PM

I was referring to Mary saying we need to get out. I took that to mean now. As for the D's Kerry had no plan to speak of and the D's are pretty much just now solidly getting behind the plan your talking about if memory serves me correctly.

on edit - yes, they were not in agreement as of 2/06

I never said ALL the Democrats wanted out of Iraq. I said Dems had been talking about it for at least a year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111700794.html

Hawkish Democrat Joins Call For Pullout
GOP Assails Murtha's Demand to Leave Iraq

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 18, 2005; Page A01

The top House Democrat on military spending matters stunned colleagues yesterday by calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, while many congressional Democrats reacted defiantly to President Bush's latest attack on his critics.

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said many of those troops are demoralized and poorly equipped and, after more than two years of war, are impeding Iraq's progress toward stability and self-governance.

"Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency," Murtha said in a Capitol news conference that left him in tears. Islamic insurgents "are united against U.S. forces, and we have become a catalyst for violence," he said. ". . . It's time to bring them home."

Murtha's action, coupled with stinging rhetoric from the White House, was the catalyst for a remarkable outpouring of rage on Capitol Hill about Iraqi war policy, an issue that for months was relatively dormant but now is dominating congressional debate.

In sometimes vitriolic terms, Republican leaders accused Democrats of siding with terrorists, and Democrats countered that Bush deceived the nation in starting a war that he has no strategy for ending. The bitter exchanges came as polls show Americans are increasingly eager to have Iraqis assume control so U.S. troops can come home.

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) declared: "Murtha and Democratic leaders have adopted a policy of cut and run. They would prefer that the United States surrender to the terrorists who would harm innocent Americans. To add insult to injury, this is done while the president is on foreign soil."

A few dozen other House Democrats have called for withdrawing from Iraq as soon as possible. But most are liberals who voted against going to war, and they have drawn modest attention. Murtha is a hawkish ex-Marine who voted for the war and has close ties to the military.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told colleagues at a closed meeting yesterday morning that she, too, would advocate an immediate troop withdrawal, according to several who attended. But by day's end, Pelosi -- a liberal who has sharply criticized Bush's handling of the war -- chose merely to praise Murtha and say he deserved to have "his day."

The Senate voted on Tuesday to press the administration for concrete steps toward troop withdrawals, designating 2006 as "a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty." But the Senate rejected a Democratic proposal to require the administration to project dates for a phased withdrawal of troops if conditions permitted.

Bush, traveling in South Korea, told reporters he agrees with Vice President Cheney's view that politicians who criticize the administration's handling of prewar intelligence are engaging in "dishonest and reprehensible" behavior. South Korea's Defense Ministry said today that it plans to bring home about one-third of its 3,200 troops from Iraq next year.

"I expect there to be criticism," Bush said. "But when Democrats say that I deliberately misled the Congress and the people, that's irresponsible. They looked at the same intelligence I did, and they voted -- many of them voted -- to support the decision I made. . . . So I agree with the vice president."

Murtha, asked about the comments, replied sarcastically: "I like guys who got five deferments and [have] never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." Cheney did not serve in the military, and Bush was an Air National Guardsman who did not leave the United States during the Vietnam War.

Murtha's Democratic colleagues reacted warily to his remarks, while Republicans pounced. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), head of the House Democrats' campaign effort, said, "Jack Murtha went out and spoke for Jack Murtha." As for Iraq policy, Emanuel added: "At the right time, we will have a position."

The hot rhetoric reflects a fracturing of public and congressional attitudes toward the war, which may lead to more emphatic calls for an exit strategy after lawmakers mingle with constituents during a two-week recess slated to start Monday.

Several Democrats disputed Bush's remarks, saying that Congress was not shown all the prewar intelligence the White House had collected regarding Iraq's potential weapons of mass destruction, and that administration officials gave greater weight to hints that Saddam Hussein had such weapons than to signals that he did not.

Bush and Cheney "have begun a new campaign of distortion and manipulation," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told reporters. "Because of the polls showing that Americans have lost trust in the president and believe he manipulated intelligence before the war, the president and vice president have abandoned any pretense of leading this country and have gone back on the campaign trail." The two men could not find weapons of mass destruction, Kennedy said, and "they can't find the truth, either."

Such comments are a disservice to U.S. troops, said some GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. "Now the attempt is to undermine the people standing abroad by repeatedly calling [Bush] a liar," Stevens said.

At a House Republican news conference responding to Murtha, Rep. Geoff Davis (Ky.) accused Democrats of making politically motivated "shameful statements."

Democrats remain far from united on the war, despite continuing efforts by House and Senate leaders to find common ground. In October 2002, 81 Democrats in the House and 29 Democrats in the Senate voted in favor of going to war.

The party's liberal base is clamoring for the United States to leave Iraq as soon as possible. But many Democratic foreign policy experts contend that deadlines and timetables might have disastrous consequences for the region.

"There's a tendency to want to say 'Cut your losses,' " said retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a 2004 presidential candidate who has consulted extensively with House Democrats on Iraq. "Until we reach the point where engagement there cannot advance us, you have to still work the problem."

A Republican leader -- House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (Calif.) -- said that if the United States does not prevail in Iraq, it will invite attacks akin to those of Sept. 11, 2001. "Four years have expired without a second attack on our homeland because we've aggressively projected America's fighting forces in the theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.

A top Democrat -- Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) -- said in a floor speech that Bush and Cheney have "shamelessly decided to play politics" over Iraq. "We need a commander in chief, not a campaigner in chief," Reid said. "We need leadership from the White House, not more whitewashing of the very serious issues confronting us in Iraq."

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 05:42 AM

^^^^^

I know that - but my original, general point was how the D's are going to defeat the R's in the next month and in the next two years. To do that, they must as a party a la the R's present a plan to withdraw from Iraq and they all must a la the R's all solidly behind it. I think we are talking about two different things.

Mary - here is an article on the genesis of products liability. Clearly, it was developed to benefit the consumer as it allowed the consumer a legal avenue of relief not previously available because there was no contract between the injured party and the supplier of the defective product. This occured at least 50 or 60 years before the 70's - though it did expand in the 70's as you said :shrug:

http://www.pointoflaw.com/products/overview.php

and another

http://www.marlerclark.com/WPMarlerClark.pdf#search=%22history%20products%20liability%20law%20%22

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 06:27 AM

^^^^^
enesis of products liability. Clearly, it was developed to benefit the consumer as it allowed the consumer a legal avenue of relief not previously available because there was no contract between the injured party and the supplier of the defective product. This occured at least 50 or 60 years before the 70's - though it did expand in the 70's as you said :shrug:

http://www.pointoflaw.com/products/overview.php

and another

http://www.marlerclark.com/WPMarlerClark.pdf#search=%22history%20products%20liability%20law%20%22

I wasnt referring to products liability per se but rather the actual expansion of consumer protection but I can see the connection to proucts liability given the information you posted.

in any event, I believe that big business has successfully managed to neutralize consumer protection thanks to a congress williing to pass business friendly laws...for example, class actions are now quite restricted ... :shrug:

Nixxxed

09-27-2006, 12:51 PM

Uh oh... :D

Bush Blamed More Than Clinton for Failure to Capture Bin Laden
Views are predictably partisan; independents mostly blame Bush

September 27, 2006
by Lydia Saad
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

(Excerpt:)
PRINCETON, NJ -- The recent firestorm over former President Bill Clinton's culpability for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was fueled on Tuesday when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice contrasted President Bush's efforts to pursue al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden with Clinton's efforts. Clinton has strongly denied various suggestions that his administration missed key opportunities to kill bin Laden and left the Bush administration without a comprehensive anti-terrorism strategy. However, Bush -- whom Clinton says did nothing about al-Qaeda for the first eight months of his presidency -- has the bigger image problem with Americans on the issue.

According to a recent Gallup Panel survey, the American public puts the primary blame on Bush rather than Clinton for the fact that bin Laden has not been captured. A majority of Americans say Bush is more to blame (53%), compared with 36% blaming Clinton.

Click for more stats and bar charts (everyone loves a good bar chart, right???):
http://www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=24733

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 01:39 PM

btw and in case anyone cares, on Democracy Now, this morning Amy Goodman said that a current poll of Iraqis shows that the MAJORITY want the US out NOW.
State Dept Poll: 75% of Baghdad Residents Want U.S. Out
Only the Politicians in Iraq want us to remain, presumably to ensure their continued power..........I dont think a "phased pullout" is the answer, and no, we cant "fix" it even if we did cause the problem in the first place by invading. Iraq is poised on the brink of civil war because the Sunnis and the Shi'ites refuse to share power. They have very different ideas about how things should be done, and these arent the types to compromise. For them, government and religion are inextricably intertwined, and the two sects are at an impasse. Anyone who thinks that we can "fix" Iraq is incredibly naive.

heres a link:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/250.php?nid=&id=&pnt=250&lb=hmpg1

here's a graph:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/images/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_graph1h.jpg

pertinent excerpts:

large majority of Iraqis—71%—say they would like the Iraqi government to ask for US-led forces to be withdrawn from Iraq within a year or less. Given four options, 37 percent take the position that they would like US-led forces withdrawn “within six months,” while another 34 percent opt for “gradually withdraw[ing] US-led forces according to a one-year timeline.” Twenty percent favor a two-year timeline and just 9 percent favor “only reduc[ing] US-led forces as the security situation improves in Iraq.”

another graph:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/images/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_graph1d.jpg

notice that the Sunnis who comprise the majority, believe themselves to be underrepresented since Saddam's capture, and most strongly resent US involvement.

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 02:09 PM

btw and in case anyone cares, on Democracy Now, this morning Amy Goodman said that a current poll of Iraqis shows that the MAJORITY want the US out NOW.

Only the Politicians in Iraq want us to remain, presumably to ensure their continued power..........I dont think a "phased pullout" is the answer, and no, we cant "fix" it even if we did cause the problem in the first place by invading. Iraq is poised on the brink of civil war because the Sunnis and the Shi'ites refuse to share power. They have very different ideas about how things should be done, and these arent the types to compromise. For them, government and religion are inextricably intertwined, and the two sects are at an impasse. Anyone who thinks that we can "fix" Iraq is incredibly naive.

So, we just pull up and get out now and watch possibly hundreds of thousands die in a matter of months :eek: Or, we try in the next, say year to do what we can and hopefully save those lives. I cannot believe you are that cruel :eek:

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 02:26 PM

So, we just pull up and get out now and watch possibly hundreds of thousands die in a matter of months :eek: Or, we try in the next, say year to do what we can and hopefully save those lives. I cannot believe you are that cruel :eek:

Jason please see the links/graphs and read the excerpts. I am not the cruel one here, these folks are doing this to themselves.........not only that, but Iraqis themselves believe our continued presence there is causing more trouble than it is solving. We arent really saving lives either......because last time I looked innocent folks on all sides of this conflict continue to DIE :shrug:

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 02:27 PM

Jason please see the links/graphs and read the excerpts. I am not the cruel one here, these folks are doing this to themselves.........not only that, but Iraqis themselves believe our continued presence there is causing more trouble than it is solving. We arent really saving lives either......because last time I looked innocent folks on all sides of this conflict continue to DIE :shrug:

If we leave now, it will be utter chaos by all predictions and no matter what any public poll says. But, if you think differently and that taking a little more time to at least try and do it right, so be it - also, if I am not mistaken, those graphs support some sort of stage departure over time, which is what i am talking about as opposed to everyone leaving today, which is I think what you are talking about.

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 03:30 PM

If we leave now, it will be utter chaos by all predictions and no matter what any public poll says. But, if you think differently and that taking a little more time to at least try and do it right, so be it - also, if I am not mistaken, those graphs support some sort of stage departure over time, which is what i am talking about as opposed to everyone leaving today, which is I think what you are talking about.

Jason, its an impossibility to leave "today" but I certainly believe we need to get out ASAP. I dont think we're doing the good we deceive ourselves we are doing :shrug: Im not sure how our staying there longer will do any real good since our presence inflames the population and apparently the locals no longer have much confidence in us and want their own troops/police to take over....

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 07:16 PM

Jason, its an impossibility to leave "today" but I certainly believe we need to get out ASAP. I dont think we're doing the good we deceive ourselves we are doing :shrug: Im not sure how our staying there longer will do any real good since our presence inflames the population and apparently the locals no longer have much confidence in us and want their own troops/police to take over....

I was confused by your lang. about getting out "now." If you think a year is cool for a phased withdrawal, which is what I and many of not most of the D's are talking about, then we agree.

Interestingly, I am unsure I believe that poll. I know many guys who have come back (and sadly gone again) and they say the vast majority of the people are happy they are there to stop the violence. Also, only a small percentage of Iraq sees any significant violence, so the US presence in the non violent areas is mostly for rebuilding, training, etc. So, I think it is not all bad, though I do think we need to leave within the year.

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 08:05 PM

I was confused by your lang. about getting out "now." If you think a year is cool for a phased withdrawal, which is what I and many of not most of the D's are talking about, then we agree.

Interestingly, I am unsure I believe that poll. I know many guys who have come back (and sadly gone again) and they say the vast majority of the people are happy they are there to stop the violence. Also, only a small percentage of Iraq sees any significant violence, so the US presence in the non violent areas is mostly for rebuilding, training, etc. So, I think it is not all bad, though I do think we need to leave within the year.

that IS interesting, because just this morning I heard Amy Goodman interview a journalist who was serving in Iraq and he had the complete opposite perception. According to him, the soldiers over there are savvy to the fact they got duped and that they arent being dealt with honestly and most dont agree with the reason they are there....not only that, the facts are being deliberately distorted by the military higher ups and journalism is being censored. In case you're interested, this guy has a blog site, Chokehold in Iraq (http://chokeholdiniraq.blogspot.com/)

as for when we should leave, I think we should be making plans to get out ASAP. the sooner the better. Realistically I know it wont be in a week or even a month, but for cripes sake, lets not drag this out. The people want us out, and I say they should have their country back and let them sort out their own affairs. Yes, we goofed and made a mistake, but we cant fix it. we cant.

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 08:17 PM

I am not saying the soldiers are happy, etc. I am saying they, despite any feelings they may have against why they are there, have commented that the Iraqi people are greatful they are there and they are, for the most part, doing really good things. I mean even La Nicks commented on this when she told us about the soldiers at Walter Reed.

And, I get that we cannot totally fix it. But, we can do our best to get it mostly secure before we leave. Again, it is a small percentage of the country that is fighting now and some, but certainly not all, of that fighting is being caused by outsiders. So, I say we get the govt. and military in place and move on.

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 08:21 PM

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 08:22 PM

Even if by some miracle we did manage to effect some sort of stability, dont you know that the minute we leave it will be chaos again anyway? :shrug:

My point is the vast majority of the country is not in chaos now :shrug:

Also - once we are gone, we are gone. But the UN will always help Iraq as will all of the modern world as they have oil and its production cannot be stopped.

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 08:32 PM

My point is the vast majority of the country is not in chaos now :shrug:

Also - once we are gone, we are gone. But the UN will always help Iraq as will all of the modern world as they have oil and its production cannot be stopped.

I dont know what the "vast majority" is experiencing and I doubt you do either...

but I agree that other nations/the UN should step in and do what they can.

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 08:33 PM

Giuliani Defends Clinton on 9/11 Efforts

By MATT SEDENSKY
Associated Press Writer

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended Bill Clinton on Wednesday over the former president's counterterrorism efforts, saying recent criticism on preventing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is wrong.

Political bickering over which president — Clinton or George W. Bush — missed more opportunities to prevent the attacks has been escalating since Clinton gave a combative interview on "Fox News Sunday" in which he defended his efforts to kill Osama bin Laden.

"The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don't think he deserves it," Giuliani said in response to a question after an appearance with fellow Republican Charlie Crist, who is running for governor. "I don't think President Bush deserves it. The people who deserve blame for Sept. 11, I think we should remind ourselves, are the terrorists — the Islamic fanatics — who came here and killed us and want to come here again and do it."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged Clinton's claim that he did more than many of his conservative critics to pursue bin Laden, and she accused the Democrat of leaving no comprehensive plan to fight al-Qaida.

Giuliani said he believed Clinton, like his successor, did everything he could with the information he was provided.

"Every American president I've known would have given his life to prevent an attack like that. That includes President Clinton, President Bush," the former mayor said. "They did the best they could with the information they had at the time."

Giuliani also said a recently declassified report that said the Iraq war had become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists demonstrated the need to continue the fight there.

"The jihadists very much want a victory in Iraq. They feel that if they could defeat us in Iraq they will have a great victory for terrorism," Giuliani said. "What that should do is organize us to say if they want a big victory in Iraq then we have to deprive them of that victory."

Giuliani said he was "very interested in considering" a run for president but would not make a decision until after the November election.

___

Copyright 2006, The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP Online news report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Giuliani_Clinton.html

irishgrl

09-27-2006, 08:42 PM

strandinthewind

09-27-2006, 08:46 PM

I know. I like RG. I get that he is not perfect, but no politician is and at least he is, as much as I have ever seen in a politician, blunt to fault.

The GOP, however, will likely never embrace him because he is pro choice and likes gay people - hell he lived with a gay male couple while he was separated from his wife who lived in Gracie Mansion. He also had a mistress for years, but maried her after his divorce.

Personally, I think the vast majority of R's and D's would vote him in in a NY minute.

It is rumored, however, that he has some shady financial dealing in the past that sort of got exposed when his head of security was nominated for something in W's administration.

The Tower

09-28-2006, 12:50 AM

I know. I like RG...

It is rumored, however, that he has some shady financial dealing in the past that sort of got exposed when his head of security was nominated for something in W's administration.
Let's not forget what a GIGANTIC oppressive asshole he was BEFORE (and, in my opinion, never changed after) the lame terrorist attacks....

Jeezus, Jason- sometimes you are such a fukcing Gay Uncle Tom.

Sorry, my love, but it really gets annoying after a while.

strandinthewind

09-28-2006, 09:58 AM

Let's not forget what a GIGANTIC oppressive asshole he was BEFORE (and, in my opinion, never changed after) the lame terrorist attacks....

Jeezus, Jason- sometimes you are such a fukcing Gay Uncle Tom.

Sorry, my love, but it really gets annoying after a while.

First of all the terrorist attacks could hardly be described as "lame" - was that a typo? If not, please explain how the deaths of over 3,000 Americans, the destruction of hundreds of millions of property, the tanking of an economy, and the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Middle East is lame.

Second -

If you had bothered to read what I wrote, you would see I was speaking in comparative terms. In other words, I do not see a D candidate who has a better chance of winning than RG and RG is good on many social issues that the far religious right is oppressive on. In fact, here are some of them:

Abortion

Opposes ban on partial-birth abortion.

Gay marriage

Opposes constitutional ban. “I’m pro-gay rights.”

Gun control

Supports ban on assault weapons. As mayor, he called on New Yorkers “to re-energize the fight for gun control.”

Immigration

“We got to stop illegals from coming in,” he recently told Fox News. “And a tremendous amount of money should be put into the physical security that’s needed to do that.”

Taxes

As mayor, reduced taxes in New York by several billion dollars.

So, I get that he defended the cops in the tragic death of that guy, he refused to fund shiitte as art, and his use of police zones cut crime by like half - but comparatively I can live with those when compared to a person like Romney, Frist, or Santorum. Can you honestly say you can't either? And, it will come down to that I think, though I hope not.

As for the D's the only one I like so far is John Edwards and I do not think he can win. Hillary is an interesting choice and she could possibly win, but it would take luck in addition to her alleged $300 million war chest and please note that other than on partial birth abortion, she is hardly different than RG and he is not a kiss a$$ say anything to get elected sow like she is?

Also and to correct you because you need a little come uppence dear - RG's history on gay issues is stellar compared to most D's you support. I mean the man lived with a gay male couple, marched in gay rights parades, and dressed in drag on several occasions. So, my support of him hardly makes me a gay Uncle Tom.

Here is a cool editorial on RG - again, the man is FAR from perfect, but he is better than most, especially on gay issues Mr. Shelby.

Debunking Giuliani's bad rap

Andrew Carnabuci '06
Posted: 3/31/05

I am greatly alarmed by the general mood of seething indignation around campus regarding the announcement that Rudy Giuliani will be coming to speak for graduation, as demonstrated by an article in last week's campus and talk of an "alternate" graduation speaker, and would like to take this opportunity to respond.

I would like to preface my criticism the campus' response to Mr. Giuliani by establishing two credentials which I believe lend some weight to my thoughts. Firstly, I am a New Yorker, and secondly, I am a registered Democrat.

I am also far from the only registered Democrat in the area, as registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans five to one in New York City (MSNBC). This said, there must be something to this Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, elected as mayor in 1993, and re-elected in 1997 by an overwhelming margin, carrying four of New York's five boroughs (www.nyc.gov) despite being in the radical political minority.

Thus far, I have heard only two substantive criticisms leveled against Mr. Giuliani, both of which are incorrect and misleading. The first is an objection to his homeless policy. Mr. Giuliani's often-criticized policy regarding the homeless is one of the most misunderstood issues in New York politics. Giuliani's policy, which many simply describe as "arresting the homeless," was actually the implementation of the suggestions from a 1990 report, written by prominent Democrat Andrew Cuomo, who was at the time working for H.E.L.P., a non-for-profit homeless advocacy group. New York City now places its homeless in clean, safe shelters where they receive job training and can work towards their G.E.D.s. The city spends 800 million dollars annually to ensure this (Foreman, Jonathan, Salon Magazine, January 4, 2000). This is a far cry from "arresting the homeless," and in fact demonstrates City Hall's compassion for its homeless

Secondly, many cite his "abysmal" record on police brutality. This too, is questionable. While many correctly and accurately allude to the two tragic cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Dialou, this is far from the whole truth. According to Amnesty International's Deputy Executive Director Gerald Lemel, in the 10 years prior to the Giuliani administration, police brutality in New York City was steadily rising at 30 to 40 percent per year. In 1995, the second year of Giuliani's administration, it rose 16 percent. In 1996, it rose 0 percent (www.saxakali.com). What this suggests, contrary to what critics seem to be asserting, is that Rudy Giuliani in fact successfully combatted police brutality in New York.

This all being said, I fail to see what, if anything, Middlebury students could hold against Rudy Giuliani. I suspect, however, that I do know the true reason why so many on this campus despise Rudy Giuliani so much, and that is this: he's a Republican. The enraged response to Mr. Giuliani amounts to nothing more than petty partisan politics as usual. It is indicative of the reactionary, knee-jerk liberalism, which, lamentably, is extremely fashionable on campus these days. That there are Middlebury students out there who cannot think independently of political dogma and find heroes - or at least respect people's accomplishments - across party lines speaks to the lack of genuine intellectualism on campus. There is a word for people who mindlessly chant the party line on every issue and lash out venomously at everything and everyone that demurs from it - that word is fascist.

I would urge all reactionary neo-liberals opposed to Mr. Giuliani's visit to spend less time finding fault with real heroes, and more time reading the Bible they have forsaken in the name of academically fashionable secular humanism, where they might find that timeless bit of wisdom, "and why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye" (Matthew, 7:3).

© Copyright 2006 The Middlebury Campus

irishgrl

09-28-2006, 10:38 AM

Mary -

If you had bothered to read what I wrote, you would see I was speaking in comparative terms. In other words, I do not see a D candidate who has a better chance of winning than RG and RG is good on many social issues that the far religious right is oppressive on. In fact, here are some of them:

Abortion

Opposes ban on partial-birth abortion.

Gay marriage

Opposes constitutional ban. “I’m pro-gay rights.”

Gun control

Supports ban on assault weapons. As mayor, he called on New Yorkers “to re-energize the fight for gun control.”

Immigration

“We got to stop illegals from coming in,” he recently told Fox News. “And a tremendous amount of money should be put into the physical security that’s needed to do that.”

Taxes

As mayor, reduced taxes in New York by several billion dollars.

So, I get that he defended the cops in the tragic death of that guy, he refused to fund shiitte as art, and his use of police zones cut crime by like half - but comparatively I can live with those when compared to a person like Kerry, Frist, or Santorum. Can you honestly say you can't either? And, it will come down to that I think, though I hope not.

As for the D's the only one I like so far is John Edwards and I do not think he can win. Hillary is an interesting choice and she could possibly win, but it would take luck in addition to her alleged $300 million war chest and please note that other than on partial birth abortion, she is hardly different than RG and he is not a kiss a$$ say anything to get elected sow like she is?

Also and to correct you because you need a little come uppence dear - RG's history on gay issues is stellar compared to most D's you support. I mean the man lived with a gay male couple, marched in gay rights parades, and dressed in drag on several occasions. So, my support of him hardly makes me a gay Uncle Tom.

Here is a cool editorial on RG - again, the man is FAR from perfect, but he is better than most, especially on gay issues Mr. Shelby.

Debunking Giuliani's bad rap

Andrew Carnabuci '06
Posted: 3/31/05

I am greatly alarmed by the general mood of seething indignation around campus regarding the announcement that Rudy Giuliani will be coming to speak for graduation, as demonstrated by an article in last week's campus and talk of an "alternate" graduation speaker, and would like to take this opportunity to respond.

I would like to preface my criticism the campus' response to Mr. Giuliani by establishing two credentials which I believe lend some weight to my thoughts. Firstly, I am a New Yorker, and secondly, I am a registered Democrat.

I am also far from the only registered Democrat in the area, as registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans five to one in New York City (MSNBC). This said, there must be something to this Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, elected as mayor in 1993, and re-elected in 1997 by an overwhelming margin, carrying four of New York's five boroughs (www.nyc.gov) despite being in the radical political minority.

Thus far, I have heard only two substantive criticisms leveled against Mr. Giuliani, both of which are incorrect and misleading. The first is an objection to his homeless policy. Mr. Giuliani's often-criticized policy regarding the homeless is one of the most misunderstood issues in New York politics. Giuliani's policy, which many simply describe as "arresting the homeless," was actually the implementation of the suggestions from a 1990 report, written by prominent Democrat Andrew Cuomo, who was at the time working for H.E.L.P., a non-for-profit homeless advocacy group. New York City now places its homeless in clean, safe shelters where they receive job training and can work towards their G.E.D.s. The city spends 800 million dollars annually to ensure this (Foreman, Jonathan, Salon Magazine, January 4, 2000). This is a far cry from "arresting the homeless," and in fact demonstrates City Hall's compassion for its homeless

Secondly, many cite his "abysmal" record on police brutality. This too, is questionable. While many correctly and accurately allude to the two tragic cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Dialou, this is far from the whole truth. According to Amnesty International's Deputy Executive Director Gerald Lemel, in the 10 years prior to the Giuliani administration, police brutality in New York City was steadily rising at 30 to 40 percent per year. In 1995, the second year of Giuliani's administration, it rose 16 percent. In 1996, it rose 0 percent (www.saxakali.com). What this suggests, contrary to what critics seem to be asserting, is that Rudy Giuliani in fact successfully combatted police brutality in New York.

This all being said, I fail to see what, if anything, Middlebury students could hold against Rudy Giuliani. I suspect, however, that I do know the true reason why so many on this campus despise Rudy Giuliani so much, and that is this: he's a Republican. The enraged response to Mr. Giuliani amounts to nothing more than petty partisan politics as usual. It is indicative of the reactionary, knee-jerk liberalism, which, lamentably, is extremely fashionable on campus these days. That there are Middlebury students out there who cannot think independently of political dogma and find heroes - or at least respect people's accomplishments - across party lines speaks to the lack of genuine intellectualism on campus. There is a word for people who mindlessly chant the party line on every issue and lash out venomously at everything and everyone that demurs from it - that word is fascist.

I would urge all reactionary neo-liberals opposed to Mr. Giuliani's visit to spend less time finding fault with real heroes, and more time reading the Bible they have forsaken in the name of academically fashionable secular humanism, where they might find that timeless bit of wisdom, "and why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye" (Matthew, 7:3).

© Copyright 2006 The Middlebury Campus

Jason, why are you directing this at me? Of COURSE I read what you posted and if you'll read what I posted you'll see I appreciated Rudy's comments :shrug: I dont know much about Rudy, but Im not rabidly against him, so Im not sure why you feel the need to single me out ??? Its Towie who made the negative comments and even you yourself hinted not all is well in Rudy-land
:shrug:

SuzeQuze

09-28-2006, 10:44 AM

Jason, why are you directing this at me? Of COURSE I read what you posted and if you'll read what I posted you'll see I appreciated Rudy's comments :shrug: I dont know much about Rudy, but Im not rabidly against him, so Im not sure why you feel the need to single me out ??? Its Towie who made the negative comments and even you yourself hinted not all is well in Rudy-land
:shrug:

He argues merely for argument's sake even if he agrees with you! :lol:

strandinthewind

09-28-2006, 10:48 AM

Jason, why are you directing this at me? Of COURSE I read what you posted and if you'll read what I posted you'll see I appreciated Rudy's comments :shrug: I dont know much about Rudy, but Im not rabidly against him, so Im not sure why you feel the need to single me out ??? Its Towie who made the negative comments and even you yourself hinted not all is well in Rudy-land
:shrug:

I was not referring you - I was addressing Towie as "Mary" - which is a generic gay term akin to "honey." But, I changed it to avoid confusion :sorry:

strandinthewind

09-28-2006, 10:49 AM

He argues merely for argument's sake even if he agrees with you! :lol:

Sit and spin beeyotch :wavey:

irishgrl

09-28-2006, 02:20 PM

He argues merely for argument's sake even if he agrees with you! :lol:

ya think? :lol:

irishgrl

09-28-2006, 02:21 PM

I was not referring you - I was addressing Towie as "Mary" - which is a generic gay term akin to "honey." But, I changed it to avoid confusion :sorry:

alright..........interesting term actually :o

SuzeQuze

09-28-2006, 02:22 PM

Sit and spin beeyotch :wavey:

That's what I get for butting in. :lol: Punk ass.

The Tower

09-28-2006, 02:54 PM

Jason- I have I told you how much I love you lately??? :xoxo: :xoxo:

First of all the terrorist attacks could hardly be described as "lame" - was that a typo? If not, please explain how the deaths of over 3,000 Americans, the destruction of hundreds of millions of property, the tanking of an economy, and the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Middle East is lame.
It was not a typo. The whole thing was/is lame. The terrorists accomplished exactly what they wanted to do. The loss of life was horrendous. However, the only way the terrorists would succeed is for the American public to react to the attack based on the visceral emotions of 3,000 people dying.

Because of the american public playing into the hands of the terrorists, it allowed an evil administration to do its evil work. Because of the weakness of the american public, because it could stand up and say "It doesn't matter that you did this- we will not lower ourselves to your level by resorting to violence and perpetuating the never-ending cycle of bitterness and war.". Because the american public did not say "The world did not change on this day because of the actions of a handful of people- there were evil terrorists before this day and there will be evil terrorists after this day and we will not let your actions change who we are."

Because of those things, the american public allowed the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, not to mention the deaths of an additional 3,000 americans in an invasion of a sovereign nation based on lies and evildoing.

Because of those things, there is an entire generation of people who now see the U.S.A. as a nation of evil- as a nation of aggressors.

The american public saw those evil acts and reacted with fear and retribution. Exactly what the terrorists wanted. Exactly. Which is why it is lame.

Second -

If you had bothered to read what I wrote, you would see I was speaking in comparative terms. In other words, I do not see a D candidate who has a better chance of winning than RG and RG is good on many social issues that the far religious right is oppressive on.
The problem I have with Rudy is that he is a moralistic hypocrite. I don't think government leaders should espouse the notion that suppression of the arts is acceptable. I also don't think that government leaders should blab on about morality while breaking those same "moral values". Granted, no one is perfect (certainly not me)- however, Rudy was no rose up until 09/11. He rallied New York together and was there for them and did his job well as the mayor during those times. But, I don't think that gives him a pass on his previous actions and that certainly doesn't warrant my support for him as a candidate for public office. It is possible for charismatic, likeable people to not be good candidates.

So, I get that he defended the cops in the tragic death of that guy, he refused to fund shiitte as art, and his use of police zones cut crime by like half - but comparatively I can live with those when compared to a person like Romney, Frist, or Santorum. Can you honestly say you can't either? And, it will come down to that I think, though I hope not.
I would rather not support ANY republicans.

As for the D's the only one I like so far is John Edwards and I do not think he can win. Hillary is an interesting choice and she could possibly win, but it would take luck in addition to her alleged $300 million war chest and please note that other than on partial birth abortion, she is hardly different than RG and he is not a kiss a$$ say anything to get elected sow like she is?
I don't support Hillary Clinton. I love her husband, though.

Also and to correct you because you need a little come uppence dear - RG's history on gay issues is stellar compared to most D's you support. I mean the man lived with a gay male couple, marched in gay rights parades, and dressed in drag on several occasions. So, my support of him hardly makes me a gay Uncle Tom.
I was a little blustery with the "Gay Uncle Tom" thing. Sorry it was so jabby. Some of your comments have seemed so Clarence Thomas-ey to me lately <---- no offense!!! Just an overall generalization. Sorry. I've been in such an ennui malaise blah, blah, blah, that I'm really not taking the time to express myself properly at times.

strandinthewind

09-28-2006, 03:35 PM

Did you at least get the Mr. Shelby reference beeyotch :cool:

Also - I agree, I'd rather never vote for any current R because although I may think one like RG is relatively better - his being in power fuels the far religious right and that I never want to do :nod:

Speaking of Clarence "pubic hair on a coke can" Thomas - he is speaking here and I have been invited. I am considering wearing me in that outfit I sent you only in blackface and with a fro.

BlackWidow

09-30-2006, 06:53 PM

As much as I hate Bush, I have to put more blame on Clinton for not getting Osama :distress:

Oh Pleeeeeezzzzzeee!!!!!!!!

strandinthewind

09-30-2006, 07:56 PM

Oh Pleeeeeezzzzzeee!!!!!!!!

esp. considering OBL was not that much of a threat to us in that he had not organized the flying of planes into our buildings to the tune of like 3,000 dead. I get that the Cole was bad, but W did nada to get OBL after that and once he took office. He was too focused on Iraq, which every single person told him was not that much of a threat when compared to OBL and Al-Q. I think it is important to remember that OBL and Al-Q were fledglings throughout most of the Clinton era, which was Clinton's point in that interview and one which the interviewer essentiall scoffed at :shrug:

Again, Clinton made mistakes and there is no question in my mind that the Lewinsky deal distracted him -- but he did catch, prosecute, and kill terrorists :shrug:

BlackWidow

10-04-2006, 08:42 PM

esp. considering OBL was not that much of a threat to us in that he had not organized the flying of planes into our buildings to the tune of like 3,000 dead. I get that the Cole was bad, but W did nada to get OBL after that and once he took office. He was too focused on Iraq, which every single person told him was not that much of a threat when compared to OBL and Al-Q. I think it is important to remember that OBL and Al-Q were fledglings throughout most of the Clinton era, which was Clinton's point in that interview and one which the interviewer essentiall scoffed at :shrug:

Again, Clinton made mistakes and there is no question in my mind that the Lewinsky deal distracted him -- but he did catch, prosecute, and kill terrorists :shrug:

All I know is Bush is the worst President in U.S. History and nothing will ever change that FACT!

strandinthewind

10-04-2006, 08:45 PM

All I know is Bush is the worst President in U.S. History and nothing will ever change that FACT!

I agree and was not disagreeing with you :shrug:

irishgrl

10-04-2006, 08:51 PM

I agree and was not disagreeing with you :shrug:

for ONCE! :laugh:

BlackWidow

10-04-2006, 08:53 PM

for ONCE! :laugh:
We love you Strand!!!!:wavey:

strandinthewind

10-04-2006, 09:00 PM

We love you Strand!!!!:wavey:

Just don't call me an Uncle Tom :] :] :]

BlackWidow

10-04-2006, 09:03 PM

Just don't call me an Uncle Tom :] :] :]

NEVER!!!:cool:

irishgrl

10-04-2006, 09:38 PM

Just don't call me an Uncle Tom :] :] :]

you're a sweetie and here's a :xoxo: