Thursday, August 23, 2007

HILLARY CLINTON

Can Hillary Be Held Accountable For Bill Clinton's Terror Policies?

The other night on a local DC-area talk radio show, they were talking about the declassified CIA report on their pre-9/11 effort against al-Qaeda, and a caller said something in the vein of, "Husbands talk to wives. We heard about 'two for the price of one' with Bill and Hillary. Well, did she ever tell Bill Clinton to do more to get Osama bin Laden?"

It's not an entirely fair line of attack, as First Ladies rarely direct counterterrorism policy; the buck stops with Bill Clinton for our ineffective efforts against al-Qaeda from January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001, and blaming his wife almost feels like letting him off the hook.

But Captain Ed notices a section in Newsweek that indicates:

The report also criticized intelligence problems when Bill Clinton was president, detailing political and legal “constraints” agency officials felt in the late 1990s. In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.”

Clinton appeared to have been referring to a December 1999 Memorandum of Notification (MON) he signed that authorized the CIA to use lethal force to capture, not kill, bin Laden. But the inspector general’s report made it clear that the agency never viewed the order as a license to “kill” bin Laden—one reason it never mounted more effective operations against him. “The restrictions in the authorities given the CIA with respect to bin Laden, while arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed for a period of time in late 1998 and early 1999, limited the range of permissible operations,” the report stated. (Scheuer agreed with the inspector general’s findings on this issue, but said if anything the report was overly diplomatic. “There was never any ambiguity,” he said. “None of those authorities ever allowed us to kill anyone. At least that’s what the CIA lawyers told us.” A spokesman for the former president had no immediate comment.)

And Americans have a right to wonder, if Hillary was and is Bill's most trusted adviser, where was she during these discussions? Did she and he ever talk about these topics? Time and again, she's refrained from criticizing the policy decisions of her husband in this area, while she's been willing to be more critical of NAFTA and other policies.

Will Hillary even address whether her husband was honest with Chris Wallace? Or will she contend that the CIA inspector general is lying?

UPDATE: Campaign Spot reader Markus puts it clearly: "I don't think she should be held accountable for her husband's policies while he was president, with the exception of her attempt to revamp the healthcare system. But I don't think she has any business calling her time as First Lady 'experience' either. There is little in her experience that qualifies her for the Presidency." Bingo. Can she count her time living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as experience, and yet not take any responsibility for the policies of that time?

08/23 11:30 AMShare