Friday, August 24, 2007

Did Clinton Lie About Targeting Bin Laden?

Did Clinton Lie About Targeting Bin Laden?
Captain's Quarters--Ed Morrissey

Imagine, a man that can muster such 'feelings'--all while telling a lie...

It appears that Bill Clinton may have exaggerated his record when it came to strategizing against Osama bin Laden. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball take a look at the Inspector General's report of the pre-9/11 intelligence failures at the CIA and find an interesting nugget. Despite Clinton's angry assertion to Chris Wallace in last year's controversial Fox interview, he never gave the CIA an assassination order regarding bin Laden (h/t: CQ reader Mark):

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...

more...


Thanks to our dear Prairieson for bringing us this one!

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello Yofi-

Now I know that Clinton lied.

He is a pathological liar who lies.


Big lies, small lies .

Lies.

His wife is doing the same . Maybe LYING is their marital bed.

batya

4:43 PM  
Blogger VerityINK said...

Oh ho, you are red hot today, Sis! Yes, lying IS their marital bed... it seems the only bed they ever slept in.

5:10 PM  
Blogger The Merry Widow said...

The old canard about Billy-boy, "How do you know he's lying? His mouth is open!"
Hillary is an angry fishwife who wants political power!
Lovely couple, wonder if they'd mind keeping an eye on my 2 teens?
NOT!
I wouldn't trust them with my pet cockroach!

tmw

5:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This tom-cattin', prevaricating mountebank has lied so much so often you only need to see his lips moving to know he's lying. J'Mac.

6:24 PM  

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