Bin Laden Lived To Fight Another Day–Thanks To Bill Clinton-Henry Miller
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2011/05/05/bin-laden-lived-to-fight-another-day-thanks-to-bill-clinton/
When President Barack Obama made the historic announcement in the White House East Room about the killing of Osama bin Laden, the air was thick with irony. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was there, and her husband’s notorious narcissism and cavalier attitude about governance had allowed bin Laden to escape–in 1998, three years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
In his stunning 2003 book Dereliction of Duty, Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a presidential aide and carrier of the “nuclear football,” describes President Clinton’s gross irresponsibility toward national security. Patterson tells how, in the fall of 1998, the watch officer in the White House Situation Room notified the president’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, that they had located bin Laden and had “a two-hour window to strike.”
Here is Patterson’s chilling account:
“Berger ambled down the stairwell and entered the Sit[uation] Room. He picked up the phone at one of the busy controller consoles and called the president. Amazingly, President Clinton was not available. Berger tried again and again. Bin Laden was within striking distance. The window of opportunity was closing fast. The plan of attack was set and the Tomahawk [missile] crews were ready. For about an hour Berger couldn’t get the commander in chief on the line. Though the president was always accompanied by military aides and the Secret Service, he was somehow unavailable. Berger stalked the Sit Room, anxious and impatient.
Patterson continues:
“Finally, the president accepted Berger’s call. There was discussion, there were pauses – and no decision. The president wanted to talk with his secretaries of Defense and State. He wanted to study the issue further. Berger was forced to wait. The clock was ticking. The president eventually called back. He was still indecisive. He wanted more discussion. Berger alternated between phone calls and watching the clock.
The dithering continued until it was too late–and bin Laden lived to fight another day. And to plot the Sept. 11 attacks.
That was not an isolated incident. On Sept. 13, 1996, while on the golf course with his lawyer friend Vernon Jordan, President Clinton had refused to take repeated urgent phone calls from Berger, who needed the president’s approval for air strikes on Iraq. Patterson wrote: “Pilots were in the cockpits, waiting to launch, targets were identified, everything was in place, all [Berger] needed was the go-ahead.”
He never got it. The protective cover of night lifted, and the mission was aborted.
There were other examples of gross and inexcusable incompetence. President Clinton twice managed to lose the nuclear codes that were necessary to activate the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
There is yet another Clinton irony in view of the relentless tracking and eventual killing of bin Laden by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in a brilliantly executed operation. Patterson relates an incident that occurred during the Clinton administration’s very first week that typified its view of the military. Army Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, greeted a young aide in a White House hallway with a cheery, “Good Morning.”
The young aide replied, “I don’t talk to the military.” I consider that to be a firing offense for a White House pipsqueak.
Speaking of the military and also of Bill Clinton’s predilections, Patterson describes a sordid incident in which the president–the commander-in-chief–groped a female steward on Air Force One. As an enlisted member of the U.S. Air Force, she opted not to make an issue of it and settled for a personal apology from the president.
This incident troubled Patterson: “I brooded over the fact that if our commander in chief had been actually serving in the armed services, he would have been jailed. His immunity struck me as completely unacceptable.”
Another irony: Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, who would certainly have known about this sorry state of affairs, was none other than Leon Panetta, currently the head of the CIA and the nominee to succeed Robert Gates as secretary of Defense. Panetta was also in the room when Obama made the bin Laden announcement. (During Panetta’s forthcoming confirmation hearings, I hope the senators probe his role in suppressing the various “bimbo eruptions,” as the molester-in-chief’s sexual dalliances were known during the Clinton presidency. As they say in court, it goes to character.)
Just as we will never forget Sept. 11, we should not forget the dereliction of duty by President Clinton and those who were his enablers.
Henry I. Miller is the Robert Wesson fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. A physician, he was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA.
Comments are closed.
