• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Clinton admits failure in stopping 9/11

Status
Not open for further replies.
R

ronito

Member
Mumbles said:
I dunno. Where I'm from, "Lost his temper" would mean that he punched Wallace in the face, and "meltdown" would mean that he sobbing or screaming incoherently. What I saw was someone who picked up on the attempt to blindside him, immediately took control of the interview, and managed to both answer the question and tell Wallace exactly why he was completely out of line. That's usually called "commanding", and yes, the raised voice and body language are a part of that.
Click to expand...
Yeah, you have to reference your Right wing/Fox News Thesarus:

Commanding:
For democrat: Whiny, unhinged, lunatic, meltdown, loss of temper.
For Republican: Strong, Good leadership, American.
 
W

whytemyke

Honorary Canadian.
Mumbles said:
I dunno. Where I'm from, "Lost his temper" would mean that he punched Wallace in the face, and "meltdown" would mean that he sobbing or screaming incoherently. What I saw was someone who picked up on the attempt to blindside him, immediately took control of the interview, and managed to both answer the question and tell Wallace exactly why he was completely out of line. That's usually called "commanding", and yes, the raised voice and body language are a part of that.
Click to expand...
bingo. if you watch the interview, you can see exactly how weak he made wallace look by doing everything with his body language. wallace looked like the scared little kid, speaking up cuz he had to and laughing to kill tension, while Clinton dominated the conversation.
 
3

3phemeral

Member
Wow, finally able to watch the video now that I'm not at work. Wallace got what he wanted -- answers to his questions and a whole lot more. Only thing is that he wasn't expecting that retort. He sat mug in his chair and he got a fistful that he couldn't handle. It's nice to see him try to squirm out of the situation by trying to make Bill Clinton look like he din't know what he was talking about, but Clinton fired back with clear, concise, and solid arguments. All Wallace could focus on was "but you admit you failed", clearly showing how he couldn't grasp the situation. He couldn't handle his own medicine.
 
M

MrSardonic

The nerdiest nerd of all the nerds in nerdland
pretty funny seeing fox news try to spin that interview before and after it was aired, despite Clinton putting them in their place. It's laughable to see how Bush handles himself, and the kind of policies he puts forward, when compared to Bill Clinton. His conversation at the World Economic Forum is also interesting.
 
M

MrSardonic

The nerdiest nerd of all the nerds in nerdland
T

Templar Wizard

Member
Isnt it wonderful that they completely forget about the issue and only concentrate on the so-called 'reaction'?

'I was assualted by a mountain! I was afraid of his hair!'

WTF!
 
3

3phemeral

Member
Templar Wizard said:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200609260002?src=newsbox-www.crooksandliars.com

i think i have to lay down after watching that.
it really is too much.
Click to expand...

After hearing him say (moreso statement than an actual question, really) "you think you got him on something?" while trying to correlate Clinton's response to their accusations; pretty much spelled out the direction of the interview and the opinion of anchor asking the question of Wallace. The rest just had me in disbelief.
 
S

sprsk

force push the doodoo rock
I have been out of the states for 7 months and I just cant believe those fox news clips. I mean, am I crazy for watching the interview clips and then finding the fox news reactions totally "WTF?"

It's not even the liberal in me talking, I mean does ANYONE outside of fox news see the interview this way? What are other news stations covering?
 
M

MrSardonic

The nerdiest nerd of all the nerds in nerdland
sp0rsk said:
It's not even the liberal in me talking, I mean does ANYONE outside of fox news see the interview this way? What are other news stations covering?
Click to expand...

I don't know but in the UK it was shown as Clinton owning Fox News. No one in their right mind could view that interview as anything other than a man correcting once more the fabrications put forward by propagandists.

And based on this video - http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/...ent-are-yours-the-actions-of-a-true-american/ - MSNBC (at least) don't look like they are peddling Fox News' bullshit interpretation of the interview
 
A

APF

Member
Clinton's reaction is not simply about Fox News, although attacking Fox for being "Republican" only helps raise his prestige; it's the reaction of a man who is no longer campaigning for himself, who has long-felt beleaguered by the press, lashing out (zomg I said it) at a harshly-put question that cuts to issues of his legacy, issues that recently came to light (unfairly) in that recent docu-drama scandal hype, and issues that the current Administration don't really fare any better at in the first place (so they themselves mostly keep quiet about trying to place blame).

Clinton doesn't just "bravely stick up for himself" against the dreaded Fox News however--I remember him reacting in a similar huffy manner when challenged by a BBC reporter a year or so ago, on (again IIRC) a completely different issue. All the people applauding Clinton's attack against Wallace himself tangentially brings-up an important reminder of one of APF's Rules: 95% of people who clamor for hard-hitting journalism that puts government officials' feet to the fire really want news that's biased towards their political outlook.
 
B

bob_arctor

Tough_Smooth
LordMaji said:
well, when will we get the thread "Bush admits failure in Stopping 9/11?"

When Damnit WHEN!?!
Click to expand...

front092606.gif


RICE BOILS OVER AT BUBBA

More:

Rice challenges Clinton on terror record
 
B

borghe

Loves the Greater Toronto Area
You know, 20/20 hindsight and all that, but it sucks that I never realized how amazing of a president clinton was when he was in office. ok, maybe not amazing, but certainly the best president this country had seen since reagan and has seen since. the good of his presidency has long outlived and stood the test of time than the bad of his presidency.

and yeah, hearing him next to bush is just scary. I think Bush is probably one of the biggest and best examples of using perception and campaigning to solely win a presidency. having seen this guy work for 6 years now it is clear he has no business as president of america.

and this is coming from a fiscal conservative.
 
W

whytemyke

Honorary Canadian.
Clinton just got exactly what he wanted. He changed the debate to the point that the White House had to send someone out to address everything he said. And even more to the point, they had to send their smartest person out to do it.

Now that I see the White House's reaction to it, I have even more respect for what Clinton did. Not one bit was overexaggerating-- everything was cooly planned by him to elicit the type of reaction from Fox that he got, which would then swing into the rest of the media.

I mean, seriously... that's some cold-hearted shit right there. That's an old political cat showing exactly how he got to be where he is. My respect for Clinton just shot up another 50 points, haha. I really didn't think he'd be able to draw the attention of the White House from this shit, but he did. Good for him.
 
M

MrSardonic

The nerdiest nerd of all the nerds in nerdland
condi rice can **** off. what a piece of shit.

borghe said:
but certainly the best president this country had seen since reagan and has seen since.
Click to expand...

reagan was a shit president. time to realise that.
 
L

Learn2read

Member
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/rice_boils_over_at_bubba_nationalnews_ian_bishop____________post_correspondent.htm
The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton’s claim that he “left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy” for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

“We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” Rice responded during the hourlong session.
Click to expand...



http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf#search=%229%2F11%20Commission%20Report%22
As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA’s new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. Clarke and his staff proposed a goal to “roll back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years …[including] covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States.” [p. 197]
Click to expand...


LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
A

Ark-AMN

Banned
Dick Morris on Clinton's latest:
The real Clinton emerges
From behind the benign façade and the tranquilizing smile, the real Bill Clinton emerged Sunday during Chris Wallace’s interview on Fox News Channel. There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation. Clinton jabbed his finger in Wallace’s face, poking his knee, and invading the commentator’s space.

But beyond noting the ex-president’s non-presidential style, it is important to answer his distortions and misrepresentations. His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the “definition of ‘is’ is” could perform.

Clinton told Wallace, “There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down.” Nobody said there was. The point of citing Somalia in the run up to 9-11 is that bin Laden told Fortune Magazine in a 1999 interview that the precipitous American pullout after Black Hawk Down convinced him that Americans would not stand up to armed resistance.

Clinton said conservatives “were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day” after the attack which killed American soldiers. But the real question was whether Clinton would honor the military’s request to be allowed to stay and avenge the attack, a request he denied. The debate was not between immediate withdrawal and a six-month delay. (Then-first lady, now-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) favored the first option, by the way). The fight was over whether to attack or pull out eventually without any major offensive operations.

The president told Wallace, “I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill bin Laden.” But actually, the 9-11 Commission was clear that the plan to kidnap Osama was derailed by Sandy Berger and George Tenet because Clinton had not yet made a finding authorizing his assassination. They were fearful that Osama would die in the kidnapping and the U.S. would be blamed for using assassination as an instrument of policy.

Clinton claims “the CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible [for the Cole bombing] while I was there.” But he could replace or direct his employees as he felt. His helplessness was, as usual, self-imposed.

Why didn’t the CIA and FBI realize the extent of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism? Because Clinton never took the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center sufficiently seriously. He never visited the site and his only public comment was to caution against “over-reaction.” In his pre-9/11 memoirs, George Stephanopoulos confirms that he and others on the staff saw it as a “failed bombing” and noted that it was far from topic A at the White House. Rather than the full-court press that the first terror attack on American soil deserved, Clinton let the investigation be handled by the FBI on location in New York without making it the national emergency it actually was.

In my frequent phone and personal conversations with both Clintons in 1993, there was never a mention, not one, of the World Trade Center attack. It was never a subject of presidential focus.

Failure to grasp the import of the 1993 attack led to a delay in fingering bin Laden and understanding his danger. This, in turn, led to our failure to seize him when Sudan evicted him and also to our failure to carry through with the plot to kidnap him. And, it was responsible for the failure to “certify” him as the culprit until very late in the Clinton administration.

The former president says, “I worked hard to try to kill him.” If so, why did he notify Pakistan of our cruise-missile strike in time for them to warn Osama and allow him to escape? Why did he refuse to allow us to fire cruise missiles to kill bin Laden when we had the best chance, by far, in 1999? The answer to the first question — incompetence; to the second — he was paralyzed by fear of civilian casualties and by accusations that he was wagging the dog. The 9/11 Commission report also attributes the 1999 failure to the fear that we would be labeled trigger-happy having just bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake.

President Clinton assumes that criticism of his failure to kill bin Laden is a “nice little conservative hit job on me.” But he has it backwards. It is not because people are right-wingers that they criticize him over the failure to prevent 9/11. It was his failure to catch bin Laden that drove them to the right wing.

The ex-president is fully justified in laying eight months of the blame for the failure to kill or catch bin Laden at the doorstep of George W. Bush. But he should candidly acknowledge that eight years of blame fall on him.

One also has to wonder when the volcanic rage beneath the surface of this would-be statesman will cool. When will the chip on his shoulder finally disappear? When will he feel sufficiently secure in his own legacy and his own skin not to boil over repeatedly in private and occasionally even in public?
Click to expand...
 
L

LakeEarth

Member
Has the media always been this weak? I mean, the guy who wrote the Condi article could've easily checked if that was true or not. "She said this. However, instead of blindly printing what she said as fact, I actually looked up shit and found out she was wrong."
 
E

Eric P

Member
dick morris said:
Clinton claims “the CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible [for the Cole bombing] while I was there.” But he could replace or direct his employees as he felt. His helplessness was, as usual, self-imposed.
Click to expand...

so, he should fire or tell them to find a connection if they could not or would not do so on thier own using the tools at their disposal?
 
B

bob_arctor

Tough_Smooth
Eric P said:
so, he should fire or tell them to find a connection if they could not or would not do so on thier own using the tools at their disposal?
Click to expand...

I can only assume that he's of the mind that the current policy of "Shoot first, confirm later (if ever)" is the right one.
 
B

bob_arctor

Tough_Smooth
BLITZER: So you the asked the president in the Oval Office — and the vice president — why didn’t you go after the Taliban in those eight months before 9/11 after he was president. What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: Well, now that it was established that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing and the president was briefed in January of 2001, soon after he took office, by George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling him of the finding that al Qaeda was responsible, and I said, "Well, why wouldn’t you go after the Taliban in order to get them to kick bin Laden out of Afghanistan?"

Maybe, just maybe, who knows — we don’t know the answer to that question — but maybe that could have affected the 9/11 plot.

BLITZER: What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: He said that no one had told him that we had made that threat. And I found that very discouraging and surprising.
Click to expand...

CLIP
 
A

Ark-AMN

Banned
maynerd said:
Condi OWNED.
Click to expand...
The report states that Clarke and his advisors developed this memo on their own, there's no mention it was given to the next administration, and in fact, in regards to the Blue Sky memo which his stuff was based on:
No action was taken on these ideas in the few remaining weeks of the Clinton administration. Berger did not recall seeing or being briefed on the Blue Sky memo. Nor was the memo discussed with incoming top Bush administration officials.
Click to expand...
 
J

JayDubya

Banned
As is often the case with politics, there's inappropriate finger pointing and scapegoating on all sides. The reality is both administrations failed to treat the threat as seriously as it needed to be treated.
 
R

ronito

Member
JayDubya said:
As is often the case with politics, there's inappropriate finger pointing and scapegoating on all sides. The reality is both administrations failed to treat the threat as seriously as it needed to be treated.
Click to expand...
True enough. But at least Clinton admits he failed. Here we just get a denial of easily verifiable facts.
 
L

Learn2read

Member
Also, why do all you Bushies act like history was somehow wiped clean at the start of Bush's presidency. If there were all of these obvious warning signs that Clinton was "negligent" in not addressing, why didn't Bush address them day one?

Edit: Maybe nobody is claiming that in this thread, but I'm hearing enough of it in the media to make my freaking head e'splode.
 
J

JayDubya

Banned
mamacint said:
Also, why do all you Bushies act like history was somehow wiped clean at the start of Bush's presidency. If there were all of these obvious warning signs that Clinton was "negligent" in not addressing, why didn't Bush address them day one?
Click to expand...

I don't think I've seen a single "Bushie" on GAF.

Edit: Squaregamer, maybe, but he recites one talking point and one of the mods makes a troll thread about it.
 
M

maynerd

Banned
Ark-AMN said:
The report states that Clarke and his advisors developed this memo on their own, there's no mention it was given to the next administration, and in fact, in regards to the Blue Sky memo which his stuff was based on:
Click to expand...

So they put the document called "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of Al Qida: Status and Prospects" together at the end of the clinton administration then put it in their pocket and kept it secret. Yeah ok. That's what they did.
 
J

JayDubya

Banned
mamacint said:
The legality of that is a bit wishy-washy no? I'd push for it.
Click to expand...

Wishy washy? Nope. Try explicitly forbidden.

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Click to expand...

It used to be a gentleman's agreement / tradition set forth by George Washington, but we can thank FDR for making a damn constitutional amendment to be required. It's a good thing that bastard died before he could run for his fourth term - he ****ed the nation up enough in the three he had.
 
C

Crag Dweller

aka kindbudmaster
Ark-AMN said:
The report states that Clarke and his advisors developed this memo on their own, there's no mention it was given to the next administration, and in fact, in regards to the Blue Sky memo which his stuff was based on:
Click to expand...

Elsewhere in the report you have this:

Within the first few days after Bush's inauguration, Clarke approached Rice in an effort to get her-and the new President-to give terrorism very high priority and to act on the agenda that he had pushed during the last few months of the previous administration. After Rice requested that all senior staff identify desirable major policy reviews or initiatives, Clarke submitted an elaborate memorandum on January 25, 2001. He attached to it his 1998 Delenda Plan and the December 2000 strategy paper. "We urgently need . . . a Principals level review on the al Qida network," Clarke wrote.172
Click to expand...

http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch6.htm
 
A

Ark-AMN

Banned
Indeed, and reading through the report, it seems that the administration spent way too much time pursuing "diplomatic" actions and other beaurocratic nonsense rather than pushing for major changes. Basically no different than the Clinton administration.

Bah, is there any way to cut/copy and paste from this damn thing?
 
A

APF

Member
Diplomacy sucks; I want to toss some cruise missiles at suspected sites, find out that there was some collateral damage, then completely fail to follow up because I'm too worried about the political fallout both domestic and international.

Seriously though, this entire blowup is completely retarded.
 
R

ronito

Member
Ark-AMN said:
Indeed, and reading through the report, it seems that the administration spent way too much time pursuing "diplomatic" actions and other beaurocratic nonsense rather than pushing for major changes. Basically no different than the Clinton administration.

Bah, is there any way to cut/copy and paste from this damn thing?
Click to expand...
Contracting with the CIA and outside groups to kill people is diplomacy? If so I want to be a diplomat!
 
Freshmaker

Freshmaker

I am Korean.
Eric P said:
so, he should fire or tell them to find a connection if they could not or would not do so on thier own using the tools at their disposal?
Click to expand...

Clinton's a fool. All he had to do was demand a slam dunk case against Osama, then give the CIA director a freedom medal.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

[Digital Foundry] Handheld PC Triple-A Gaming: Lenovo Legion Go vs OneXPlayer 2 Pro vs AyaNeo Kun vs Asus ROG Ally
Analysis Review
3
700
mckmas8808 replied
Digital Foundry: Starfield Performance Mode Upgrade - 40FPS, 60FPS, VRR And More - The Complete Breakdown
2
50
3K
Danknugz replied
Digital Foundry: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake - PS5/XSX/S Tech Review - UE5 Nanite/Lumen Come at a Heavy Cost
2 3
100
6K
SlimySnake replied
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course 6 arrives on 11/9
News Trailer
9
865
Woopah replied
Digital Foundry: Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered - PlayStation/Xbox/PC/Steam Deck/Switch - Digital Foundry Tech Review
34
4K
intbal replied
Top Bottom