"Melvin, the best thing you got going for you is your willingness to humiliate yourself."

"Melvin, the best thing you got going for you is your willingness to humiliate yourself."

"Melvin, the best thing you got going for you is your willingness to humiliate yourself."

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Ron, I doubt that you and I could ever speak partisanship aside

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Other than that, I don't understand your gist but I'd appreciate your input on the other 93 sentences and not only the last one.

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(1) Do I think that 9/11 could have been prevented if Clinton had declared a war on terror after the first WTC bombing attempt and gone after shutting down Al-Qada?...yes.

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Question from LIA President Matthew Crosson:

CROSSON: In hindsight, would you have handled the issue of terrorism, and al-Qaeda specifically, in a different way during your administration?

CLINTON: Well, it's interesting now, you know, that I would be asked that question because, at the time, a lot of people thought I was too obsessed with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

And when I bombed his training camp and tried to kill him and his high command in 1998 after the African embassy bombings, some people criticized me for doing it. We just barely missed him by a couple of hours.

I think whoever told us he was going to be there told somebody who told him that our missiles might be there. I think we were ratted out.

We also bombed a chemical facility in Sudan where we were criticized, even in this country, for overreaching. But in the trial in New York City of the al-Qaeda people who bombed the African embassy, they testified in the trial that the Sudanese facility was, in fact, a part of their attempt to stockpile chemical weapons.

So we tried to be quite aggressive with them. We got - uh - well, Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan.

And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again.

They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan.

We then put a lot of sanctions on the Afghan government and - but they inter-married, Mullah Omar and bin Laden. So that essentially the Taliban didn't care what we did to them.

Now, if you look back - in the hindsight of history, everybody's got 20/20 vision - the real issue is should we have attacked the al-Qaeda network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan.

Here's the problem. Before September 11 we would have had no support for it - no allied support and no basing rights. So we actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this. We trained people.

But in order to do it, we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat - maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval. And we would have had to do a refueling stop.

And we would have had to make the decision in advance that's the reverse of what President Bush made - and I agreed with what he did. They basically decided - this may be frustrating to you now that we don't have bin Laden. But the president had to decide after Sept. 11, which am I going to do first? Just go after bin Laden or get rid of the Taliban?

He decided to get rid of the Taliban. I personally agree with that decision, even though it may or may not have delayed the capture of bin Laden. Why?

Because, first of all the Taliban was the most reactionary government on earth and there was an inherent value in getting rid of them.

Secondly, they supported terrorism and we'd send a good signal to governments that if you support terrorism and they attack us in America, we will hold you responsible.

Thirdly, it enabled our soldiers and Marines and others to operate more safely in-country as they look for bin Laden and the other senior leadership, because if we'd have had to have gone in there to just sort of clean out one area, try to establish a base camp and operate.

So for all those reasons the military recommended against it. There was a high probability that it wouldn't succeed.

Now I had one other option. I could have bombed or sent more missiles in. As far as we knew he never went back to his training camp. So the only place bin Laden ever went that we knew was occasionally he went to Khandahar where he always spent the night in a compound that had 200 women and children.

So I could have, on any given night, ordered an attack that I knew would kill 200 women and children that had less than a 50 percent chance of getting him.

Now, after he murdered 3,100 of our people and others who came to our country seeking their livelihood you may say, "Well, Mr. President, you should have killed those 200 women and children."

But at the time we didn't think he had the capacity to do that. And no one thought that I should do that. Although I take full responsibility for it. You need to know that those are the two options I had. And there was less than a 50/50 chance that the intelligence was right that on this particular night he was in Afghanistan.

Now, we did do a lot of things. We tried to get the Pakistanis to go get him. They could have done it and they wouldn't. They changed governments at the time from Mr. Sharif to President Musharraf. And we tried to get others to do it. We had a standing contract between the CIA and some groups in Afghanistan authorizing them and paying them if they should be successful in arresting and/or killing him.

So I tried hard to - I always thought this guy was a big problem. And apparently the options I had were the options that the President and Vice President Cheney and Secretary Powell and all the people that were involved in the Gulf War thought that they had, too, during the first eight months that they were there - until Sept. 11 changed everything.

But I did the best I could with it and I do not believe, based on what options were available to me, that I could have done much more than I did. Obviously, I wish I'd been successful. I tried a lot of different ways to get bin Laden 'cause I always thought he was a very dangerous man. He's smart, he's bold and committed.

But I think it's very important that the Bush administration do what they're doing to keep the soldiers over there to keep chasing him. But I know - like I said - I know it might be frustrating to you. But it's still better for bin Laden to worry every day more about whether he's going to see the sun come up in the morning than whether he's going to drop a bomb, another bomb somewhere in the U.S. or in Europe or on some other innocent civilians. (END OF TRANSCRIPT)


http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/4/20/112336.shtml

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These contacts with Sudan, which went on for years, have become a source of
controversy. Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to
the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer.

We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim. Sudan did offer to expel Bin Ladin to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him.

U.S. officials became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March 1996. The
evidence suggests that the Saudi government wanted Bin Ladin expelled from Sudan, but
would not agree to pardon him. The Saudis did not want Bin Ladin back in their country
at all.

U.S. officials also wanted Bin Ladin expelled from Sudan. They knew the Sudanese
were considering it. The U.S. government did not ask Sudan to render him into U.S.
custody.

According to Samuel Berger, who was then the deputy national security adviser, the
interagency Counterterrorism and Security Group (CSG) chaired by Richard Clarke had a
hypothetical discussion about bringing Bin Ladin to the United States. In that discussion a Justice Department representative reportedly said there was no basis for bringing him to the United States since there was no way to hold him here, absent an indictment.

Berger adds that in 1996 he was not aware of any intelligence that said Bin Ladin was
responsible for any act against an American citizen. No rendition plan targeting Bin
Ladin, who was still perceived as a terrorist financier, was requested by or presented to senior policymakers during 1996.
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/staff_statement_5.pdf

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Why were Bush's neocon security advisers so insouciant about terrorism? They were still fighting the last war. Obsessed over Russia, China, Iraq and missile defense, the cold warriors refused to give an audience to the career White House security experts who presciently warned about the new greater threat from al-Qaeda terrorists.

The White House before 9/11 held some 100 Cabinet meetings on Iraq, Russia, missile defense and other Bush-41 hobbyhorses, and only one on terrorism. Rice insists al-Qaeda was priority No. 1, but a speech she'd planned to deliver on Sept. 11, 2001, contained no mention of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic terrorists. The focus of the policy speech, before the neocon School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was missile defense, and not of the passenger airliner variety.

In fact, Rice overlooked al-Qaeda in every public speech she made between Jan. 20, 2001, and Sept. 11, 2001, a Nexis search reveals. Even stretching all the way back to early 1993, when the World Trade Center was first hit, Rice mentions al-Qaeda not a single time in any speech, article or media interview.

By comparison, she cites Iraq more than 1,000 times from 1993 to 2001.

And the same misguided set of priorities were in place over at the Pentagon in the run-up to 9/11. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his neoconspirators were just as stuck in the Cold War. Al-Qaeda hardly registered on their radar screen, either – even though the attack on the Cole was arguably an act of war. Al-Qaeda killed 17 U.S. sailors and injured more than 30 while nearly sinking a Navy destroyer anchored in the port of Aden, Yemen. Yet there was no response from the Pentagon at all.

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