WHY DIDN’T THE DEMOCRATS AND THE LIBERAL PRESS TELL AMERICAN THAT BILL CLINTON COULD HAVE “TAKEN OUT” OSAMA BIN LADEN, BEFORE 9-11-2001? 

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson was a military aide to President Clinton from May 1996 to May 1998 and one of five individuals entrusted with carrying the “nuclear football”—the bag containing the codes for launching nuclear weapons. This responsibility meant that he spent a considerable amount of time next to the president, giving him a unique perspective on the Clinton administration. Though he arrived at the job “filled with professional devotion and commitment to serve,” he left believing that Clinton had “sown a whirlwind of destruction upon the integrity of our government, endangered our national security, and done enormous harm to the American military in which I served.”In the book, Dereliction of Duty is not a personal attack on President Clinton or a commentary on his various scandals; rather, it is a “frank indictment of his obvious—to an eyewitness—failure to lead our country with responsibility and honor.” Lt. Col. Patterson offers a damning list of anecdotes and charges against the President, including how Clinton lost the nuclear codes and shrugged it off; how he stalled and lost the opportunity to launch a direct strike on Osama bin Laden at a confirmed location; how the President and the First Lady, and much of their staff, consistently treated members of the military with disrespect and disdain; and how Clinton groped a female Air Force enlisted member while aboard Air Force One, among other incidents large and small. A considerable portion of this slim book is devoted to the myriad ways in which President Clinton undermined the military, and hence the security, of the nation. He seriously questions Clinton’s decisions to send troops to Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia to accomplish non-military tasks without clear objectives. Having participated in each of these engagements, Lt. Col. Patterson personally “experienced the frustration of needlessly wasted lives, effort, and national prestige” as well as the alarmingly low morale that Clinton inspired.

This is certainly not the first anti-Clinton book, but it is different in that Patterson does not seem to have a political ax to grind. In fact, at times, he appears apologetic about having to write about his ex-commander in chief. Yet, in the end, this retired soldier felt his last act of service should be to share his experience with his country.

Clinton Says No One’s To Blame for 9/11..BULL!

Posted Sep 19th 2007 10:06AM by Dinesh D’Souza
Filed under: 9/11, Islamic Radicals, Bill Clinton

“I don’t think we should be in the business of blaming anybody for 9/11,” Bill Clinton recently said. Yes, you read that right. Clinton was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and his comment is quoted in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly. So is Clinton trying to say that Bin Laden and the radical Muslims didn’t do it? Actually, Clinton’s point is that he himself bears no responsibility for the attacks. That’s because he did everything–everything–to capture and kill the world’s number one terrorist. He even warned Bush about him, Clinton says, but unfortunately Bush was far too obsessed with Saddam Hussein. Having said we shouldn’t blame anyone for allowing Bin Laden to attack us, Clinton proceeds to blame Bush for doing just that.

“I was obsessed with Bin Laden,” Clinton says. “We dealt with him four or five days a week, every week, for the last four years I was president.” So what happened? “We tried to mount a CIA operation to go in and take him out; they couldn’t do it. We contracted with tribals to try and take him out; they couldn’t do it.” Pretty elusive guy, Bin Laden.

Here’s the problem with this account. Between 1996, when Bin Laden moved from the Sudan to Afghanistan, and early 2001, when Clinton left office, Bin Laden was frequently interviewed by media sources around the world. He granted two separate in-person interviews to British journalist Robert Fisk. He was interviewed one-on-one by Peter Arnett, then of CNN News. He met with the Pakistani journalist Abdel Bari Atwan. He was interviewed by John Miller of ABC News. He met with the BBC and Al Jazeera. He even held a press conference in the town of Khost where Chinese and Middle Eastern journalists were present. So how come all these people could find Bin Laden but not the Clinton administration?

Clinton gives us a hint of the answer when he says, “I would’ve attacked him at the end of my presidency…but the CIA and FBI had not jointly certified that he was responsible for the U.S.S. Cole bombing, even though we all knew it.” So now the clouds part and our Prevaricator-in-Chief starts to come clean. It wasn’t that the CIA and the Northern Alliance couldn’t find or couldn’t get Bin Laden. CIA analyst and author Michael Scheuer says Clinton had at least 10 chances to kill Bin Laden and took none. Turns out Clinton was waiting for both the CIA and the FBI to give him bureaucratic confirmation of something he already knew. Bin Laden had declared war on America four years earlier, in 1996, and he was the known mastermind of a series of attacks on U.S. targets. Yet Clinton as late as 2000 was still waiting for a joint CIA-FBI certification before he would act.

Imagine if Clinton had taken one of those 10 chances sometime before 2000, when Bin Laden went into deep hiding. In that case 9/11 would not have happened. So I can see why Clinton eagerly maintains that we shouldn’t be in the business of blaming anyone for 9/11. That gets him off the hook, doesn’t it?

 

 

 

 

WHY WOULD OBAMA AND HOLDER MOVE THESE KILLERS FROM  Guantanamo, CUBA TO NEW YORK?

 

IS OBAMA THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OR WHAT?

NYC trial of 9/11 suspects poses legal risks!

By DEVLIN BARRETT, AP

FILE – In this March 1, 2003 file picture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is seen sh…

 

WASHINGTON — In the biggest trial for the age of terrorism, the professed 9/11 mastermind and four alleged henchmen will be hauled before a civilian court on American soil, barely a thousand yards from the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers they are accused of destroying.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse.

It’s a risky move. Trying the men in civilian court will bar evidence obtained under duress and complicate a case where anything short of slam-dunk convictions will empower President Barack Obama’s critics.

The case is likely to force the federal court to confront a host of difficult issues, including rough treatment of detainees, sensitive intelligence-gathering and the potential spectacle of defiant terrorists disrupting proceedings. U.S. civilian courts prohibit evidence obtained through coercion, and a number of detainees were questioned using harsh methods some call torture.

Holder insisted both the court system and the untainted evidence against the five men are strong enough to deliver a guilty verdict and the penalty he expects to seek: a death sentence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people who were killed when four hijacked jetliners slammed into the towers, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.

“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York — to New York,” Holder repeated for emphasis — “to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”

Holder said he decided to bring Mohammed and the other four before a civilian court rather than a military commission because of the nature of the undisclosed evidence against them, because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil. Institutionally, the Justice Department, where Holder has spent most of his career, has long wanted to reassert the ability of federal courts to handle terrorism cases.

Lawyers for the accused will almost certainly try to have charges thrown out based on the rough treatment of the detainees at the hands of U.S. interrogators, including the repeated waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of Mohammed.

The question has been raised as to whether the government can make its case without using coerced confessions.

That may not matter, said Pat Rowan, a former Justice Department official.

“When you consider everything that’s come out in the proceedings at Gitmo, either from the mouth of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others or from their written statements submitted to the court, it seems clear that they won’t need to use any coerced confessions in order to demonstrate their guilt,” said Rowan.

Held at Guantanamo since September 2006, Mohammed said in military proceedings there that he wanted to plead guilty and be executed to achieve what he views as martyrdom. In a letter from him released by the war crimes court, he referred to the attacks as a “noble victory” and urged U.S. authorities to “pass your sentence on me and give me no respite.”

Holder insisted the case is on firm legal footing, but he acknowledged the political ground may be more shaky when it comes to bringing feared al-Qaida terrorists to U.S. soil.

“To the extent that there are political consequences, I’ll just have to take my lumps,” he said. But any political consequences will reach beyond Holder to his boss, Obama.

Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama’s plan to close the military-run detention center in Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the prison by next Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.

Obama said he is “absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people will insist on it and my administration will insist on it.”

After the announcement, political criticism and praise for the decision divided mostly along party lines.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said bringing the terrorism suspects into the U.S. “is a step backwards for the security of our country and puts Americans unnecessarily at risk.”

Former President George W. Bush’s last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge in New York, also objected that federal courts were not well-suited to this task. “The plan seems to be to abandon the view that we are at war,” Mukasey told a conference of conservative lawyers. He said trial in open court “creates a cornucopia of intelligence for those still at large and a circus for those being tried,” and he advocated military tribunals instead.

But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the federal courts are capable of trying high-profile terrorism cases.

“By trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system — a system respected around the world,” Leahy said.

Family members of Sept. 11 victims were also divided.

“We have a president who doesn’t know we’re at war,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles Burlingame, had been the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She said she was sickened by “the prospect of these barbarians being turned into victims by their attorneys.”

Valerie Lucznikowska, whose nephew died at the World Trade Center, said she wouldn’t care if the suspects sounded off in court — as long as the victims’ families got to see them put on trial.

“What are words? It was a horrible thing to have 3,000 people killed,” she said.

The five suspects headed to New York are likely to face thousands of counts of murder and conspiracy. Mohammed and the four others — Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali — are all accused of orchestrating the 2001 attacks.

The government also announced five other Guantanamo detainees, including the alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, would be sent to military commissions to face charges.

Holder said no decision had been made on where commission-bound detainees would go. A Navy brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of sites under consideration.

The actual transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York isn’t expected to happen for many more weeks because formal charges have not been filed against most of them.

Other trial locations that Holder considered, including Virginia, Washington, D.C., and a different courthouse in New York City, could end up conducting trials of other Guantanamo detainees later.

The administration has already sent one detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to New York to face trial.

The four other detainees headed to military commissions in the United States are: Omar Khadr, Ahmed Mohammed al Darbi, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi and Noor Uthman Muhammed. Their cases are not specifically connected, but two of them are accused of plotting against or attacking U.S. military personnel.

Barry Coburn, a lawyer for Khadr, called the decision about his client “devastating and shocking.”

Khadr “was 15 years old when he was detained in Afghanistan as a child soldier and has been locked away in Guantanamo ever since,” he said.