http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/22/clinton-fox/?a=b Today, President Bill Clinton taped an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, which is scheduled to be aired Sunday. He was told the interview would focus on his nonpartisan efforts to raise over $7 billion to combat the world’s biggest problems. Early in the interview, Wallace attempted to smear Clinton with the same kind of misinformation contained in ABC’s Path to 9/11. Clinton was having none of it. ThinkProgress has obtained a transcript of the interview. Here are some highlights – Wallace repeats Path to 9/11 misinformation, Clinton fights back: WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President? There’s a new book out which I suspect you’ve read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole. CLINTON: OK.. WALLACE: …may I just finish the question sir. And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20/20. CLINTON: No let’s talk about… WALLACE: …but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business? CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people. Clinton takes on Fox News bias: WALLACE: Do you think you did enough sir? CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him. WALLACE: Right… CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t…I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke… So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know.. WALLACE: Now wait a minute sir… CLINTON:… WALLACE: I asked a question. You don’t think that’s a legitimate question? CLINTON: It was a perfectly legitimate question but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke? I want to know… WALLACE: We asked… CLINTON:… WALLACE: Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday sir? CLINTON: I don’t believe you ask them that. WALLACE: We ask plenty of questions of… CLINTON: You didn’t ask that did you? Tell the truth. WALLACE: About the USS Cole? CLINTON: Tell the truth. WALLACE: I…with Iraq and Afghanistan there’s plenty of stuff to ask. CLINTON: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about… WALLACE: [laughs] CLINTON: You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care. Clinton on his priorities and the Bush administration priorities: CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try and 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. And if I were still president we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is 1/7 as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive theme when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror. And you’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever… WALLACE: [Laughs] CLINTON: I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get Bin Laden. I regret it but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could. The entire military was against sending special forces into Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise…We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaeda was responsible while I was President. Until I left office. And yet I get asked about this all the time and they had three times as much time to get him as I did and no one ever asks them about this. I think that’s strange.
In my view, he tried harder to get a blow job in the oval office from Monica. Like he said, he failed in his war against terror. I don't buy it that he's now talking about how he really tried to get Bin Laden. Your telling me that back in the 90s...they couldn't track Bin Laden or Omar down in Afghanistan before 9/11 when Bin Laden wasn't even really in hiding? That all they could muster was to lob a few bombs at a training camp and call it a day. I smell BS.
Exactly. What did Bush do about OBL in his first 9 months? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Would he had done anything about OBL had he got 18 months back then? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. He was obsessed with Iraq from day 1. He was determined to reverse everything Clinton did.
Back then, before they weren't even in hiding, there was no slam dunk case to kill them. You don't go around to kill people without something to back it up. I asked this question to every rigth winger and NEVER get a direct answer: Why don't republicans talk about Reagan and Rumsfeld made Saddam an ally in 80's and gave him WMD? And Clinton was quite right about this: if the right wringers thought he didn't do enough about OBL, why didn't they do ANYTHING AT ALL in their first 9 months? Clearly, OBL was even lower on their priority list than on Clinton's. So stop pointing the fingers to someone who actually tried harder than they did.
This is documented http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com/thebushfiles/archives/page83_22small.gif , Cheney & co. had meetings about invading Iraq as early as February 1, 2001.
I also bet Rumsfeld knew Saddam was gonna use the WMD when Reagan administration gave it to him. Did the republican congress push Clinton for more action on OBL? NO. Did they do ANYTHING about OBL once they took over the white house too? NO. So who was really ignoring OBL? Clinton or right wringers?
Bush had two things on his mind about Iraq from day 1: 1) How dare he tried to kill my dad, I'm gonna make him pay; 2) All my donors from big oil companies and arm dealers want payback, invading Iraq is exactly the thing they like.
I'm going to DVR this to see if they edit Clinton's responses. He made Wallace look like the pimp for Fox that he is. I feel sorry for Wallace's father, retired now, who has to watch his son do this crap. Keep D&D Civil.
When so-called "journalists" lurked people into interviews on false pretense, intentionally, you just pitty them. It doesn't surprise anyone that they got slammed so hard. If they don't want to be called right winger propaganda machine, I guess they could only explain for the fact that they never asked the exact same question to Bush administrations, is they know that as a fact, that Bush Jr. is highly incompetent, so it doesn't matter whether he tried or not, the end result would be the same.
Anyone else having problems accessing Think Progress' web site? I keep getting the "The page cannot be displayed" error message.
Oh just shut up! Everyone just shut up. Clinton failed at getting Bin Laden. Bush failed at getting Bin Laden. Our horrifically misrepresented bi-partisan government failed to get Bin Laden. I'm so sick of people throwing stones at each other. Tell ya what? Next person to post this crap? Meet me at BW3's. Anytime. Anyplace. You can at least get to throw stones physically at me.
I would have asked the same tough questions to Clinton in his face...BTW, I would love to see his finger wagging in uncomfortable anger. It seemed he was so trying to cut off Wallace and assume this was just bias...Gosh, it's like the debates that go back and forth here...At least he admitted he failed. Failed for 8 long years...
