Anatomy Of Yet Another Clinton Scandal
According to Newsweek magazine, Bill Clinton got a strong warning that Osama bin Laden wanted to hijack airliners. On December 4, 1998, Clinton was presented with a President's Daily Brief (PDB) with the eye-catching title "Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack U.S. Aircraft and other attacks".
The PDB, which has just been declassified, was prompted by a British intelligence report that the son of the Egyptian "blind sheik" Omar Abdel- Rahman - who had been convicted of a plot to blow up New York City landmarks - proposed to hijack airplanes and ransom the passengers in exchange for his father's release.
Curiously, the same information turned up twenty months later, in the August 6, 2001, PDB presented to President Bush, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." One White House official suggested that the existence of the earlier PDB was evidence that President Bush was never properly informed by the outgoing Clintonoids about the full depth of the al Qaeda threat. "This was never briefed to us," said the official about the 1998 PDB.
Conclusion #1: if the Clinton administration didn’t specifically know about the 9/11 attacks in advance, they did know that al Qaeda was (1) in the United States and (2) was intending to launch 9/11-style attacks against American domestic civilian targets.
But what about the part about the outgoing Clintonoids neglecting to mention the full depth of the al Qaeda threat to the incoming Bushies? This is where former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger comes in.
Berger is the focus – brace yourselves, this is just too juicy - of a criminal investigation after removing highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a secure reading room during preparations for the 9/11 commission hearings.
Let that sink in for a few moments. Sandy Berger – Bill Clinton’s Condoleezza Rice – stole (“allegedly”) highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a “secure” reading room during preparations for the 9/11 commission hearings.
Well, then, just what docs did he steal? A big clue is found in the fact that some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaeda terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are still missing.
Conclusion #2: Berger stole, and most likely destroyed, the very documents that showed beyond any doubt the Clinton administration’s complicity in failing to take decisive action against the al Qaeda operations then already in the works, for the nakedly political purpose of sanitizing Bill Clinton’s “legacy” and smearing his successor in the midst of an election year.
Berger has also admitted having stuffed some of the classified documents “down his pants,” (another common Clinton scandal trait) and offered up a typical Clintonoid mea culpa: “I deeply regret the sloppiness involved, but I had no intention of withholding documents from the commission, and to the contrary, to my knowledge, every document requested by the commission from the Clinton administration was produced.” In other words, “mistakes were made,” selective memory failure, “good intentions,” and can’t we just drop this and “move on”?
But we can’t just “move on,” because there’s the additional little matter of Sandy Berger being a top campaign advisor to…John Kerry, whose campaign spokesman said just this morning that they “have no comment” while the “investigation is still ongoing.”
This is SO revealing in so many ways. What does it say about Senator Kerry that he takes on as a senior advisor a man who is, in essence, the Democrat equivalent of a Watergate “plumber”? What does it say that, now that Berger’s “alleged” crime is public knowledge, Kerry doesn’t immediately pink-slip Berger and disassociate himself from the whole mess?
But then the same questions can be asked about Kerry’s cultivation of the now-discredited liar “Yellowcake Joe” Wilson, who is also on the Kerry campaign and even has a website that Kerry subsidizes and links to from his own. The same questions can be applied to the 9/11 commission itself, which ceased to be either “independent” and “nonpartisan” months and months ago. And these questions are never going to be answered or even asked by the partisan media, which have so vested a stake in the realization of the objective – George Bush’s defeat – that these questions so powerfully imperil.
It is, well, “incumbent” upon the Bush campaign, at campaign appearances, through surrogates and through its media advertising, to put these questions front and center, particularly with the flagrantly dishonest personal “introduction” of Kerry that will be splattered across the public airwaves next week in Boston.
If John Kerry wants to be taken seriously as being a “moderate” (despite his twenty year senate record), let him turn the Wilson and Berger disasters into twin “Sister Souljah” moments. Otherwise, let him hang politically alongside of them.
UPDATE: Well, half of it didn’t take long – “Bergeler” was “resigned” from the Kerry campaign today, sparing the Boston Balker any further embarrassment for the moment. But there’s now the question of whether Clinton’s plumber might have shared copies of those pilfered classified documents with the Kerry campaign. It’s imperative that GOPers keep up the heat on this front.
Meanwhile, Joe Wilson is still aboard, whining about having been “smeared.”
The PDB, which has just been declassified, was prompted by a British intelligence report that the son of the Egyptian "blind sheik" Omar Abdel- Rahman - who had been convicted of a plot to blow up New York City landmarks - proposed to hijack airplanes and ransom the passengers in exchange for his father's release.
Curiously, the same information turned up twenty months later, in the August 6, 2001, PDB presented to President Bush, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." One White House official suggested that the existence of the earlier PDB was evidence that President Bush was never properly informed by the outgoing Clintonoids about the full depth of the al Qaeda threat. "This was never briefed to us," said the official about the 1998 PDB.
Conclusion #1: if the Clinton administration didn’t specifically know about the 9/11 attacks in advance, they did know that al Qaeda was (1) in the United States and (2) was intending to launch 9/11-style attacks against American domestic civilian targets.
But what about the part about the outgoing Clintonoids neglecting to mention the full depth of the al Qaeda threat to the incoming Bushies? This is where former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger comes in.
Berger is the focus – brace yourselves, this is just too juicy - of a criminal investigation after removing highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a secure reading room during preparations for the 9/11 commission hearings.
Let that sink in for a few moments. Sandy Berger – Bill Clinton’s Condoleezza Rice – stole (“allegedly”) highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a “secure” reading room during preparations for the 9/11 commission hearings.
Well, then, just what docs did he steal? A big clue is found in the fact that some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaeda terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are still missing.
Conclusion #2: Berger stole, and most likely destroyed, the very documents that showed beyond any doubt the Clinton administration’s complicity in failing to take decisive action against the al Qaeda operations then already in the works, for the nakedly political purpose of sanitizing Bill Clinton’s “legacy” and smearing his successor in the midst of an election year.
Berger has also admitted having stuffed some of the classified documents “down his pants,” (another common Clinton scandal trait) and offered up a typical Clintonoid mea culpa: “I deeply regret the sloppiness involved, but I had no intention of withholding documents from the commission, and to the contrary, to my knowledge, every document requested by the commission from the Clinton administration was produced.” In other words, “mistakes were made,” selective memory failure, “good intentions,” and can’t we just drop this and “move on”?
But we can’t just “move on,” because there’s the additional little matter of Sandy Berger being a top campaign advisor to…John Kerry, whose campaign spokesman said just this morning that they “have no comment” while the “investigation is still ongoing.”
This is SO revealing in so many ways. What does it say about Senator Kerry that he takes on as a senior advisor a man who is, in essence, the Democrat equivalent of a Watergate “plumber”? What does it say that, now that Berger’s “alleged” crime is public knowledge, Kerry doesn’t immediately pink-slip Berger and disassociate himself from the whole mess?
But then the same questions can be asked about Kerry’s cultivation of the now-discredited liar “Yellowcake Joe” Wilson, who is also on the Kerry campaign and even has a website that Kerry subsidizes and links to from his own. The same questions can be applied to the 9/11 commission itself, which ceased to be either “independent” and “nonpartisan” months and months ago. And these questions are never going to be answered or even asked by the partisan media, which have so vested a stake in the realization of the objective – George Bush’s defeat – that these questions so powerfully imperil.
It is, well, “incumbent” upon the Bush campaign, at campaign appearances, through surrogates and through its media advertising, to put these questions front and center, particularly with the flagrantly dishonest personal “introduction” of Kerry that will be splattered across the public airwaves next week in Boston.
If John Kerry wants to be taken seriously as being a “moderate” (despite his twenty year senate record), let him turn the Wilson and Berger disasters into twin “Sister Souljah” moments. Otherwise, let him hang politically alongside of them.
UPDATE: Well, half of it didn’t take long – “Bergeler” was “resigned” from the Kerry campaign today, sparing the Boston Balker any further embarrassment for the moment. But there’s now the question of whether Clinton’s plumber might have shared copies of those pilfered classified documents with the Kerry campaign. It’s imperative that GOPers keep up the heat on this front.
Meanwhile, Joe Wilson is still aboard, whining about having been “smeared.”
posted by JASmius at 8:05 AM
<<< Home