Another chapter in the right wing’s never-ending quest to blame everything on President Clinton.
According to the New York Times, Judicial Watch has turned up a top secret memo from 1996 in which the State Department said bin Laden would be a bigger threat in Afghanistan than he was in Sudan.
Two things about this bother me…
One; does anyone remember how hard the Republicans were going after Clinton back in 1996? Now imagine if the President had ordered American troops or the CIA to enter another sovereign nation and go after an individual who at that time had not attacked the US. An individual who had not even called upon others to attack the US. An individual who several years before had been our ally against another enemy. What do you think the Republicans would have made of this? What do you think they would have made of this in an election year? Sad as it is, folks, politics do play a part in important decisions like this, for every President. If President Clinton had gone after Bin Laden in 1996, the Republicans would have had a field day going after the President…and, to some extent, rightfully so. Back then bin Laden wasn’t even the threat he was in 1998, let alone 2001.
Before the East Africa bombings in 1998, however, Mr. bin Laden “wasn’t recognized then as the threat he is now,” Mr. Ereli said. “Yes, he was a bad guy, he was a threat, but he was one of many, and by no means of the prominence that he later came to be.”
Which brings me to my second point; our intelligence agencies field scores of threat assessments just like this one every day. It is a Herculean task to sift through them and decide which ones are “actionable” and which ones aren’t…and sometimes we make mistakes. And sometimes people die because of those mistakes. But the only other choice is to live in a country that attacks everyone who sneezes wrong in our direction. That’s not the America our fathers and grandfathers fought and died for…and it’s not the America we want.
