Clark: 9/11 Was Bush's Fault
Gen. Wesley Clark said Tuesday that President Bush is
responsible for leaving America vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks - a charge
severely undermined by ex-President Clinton's admission last year that he pulled
the plug on two missions to kill Osama bin Laden and refused an offer for the
9/11 mastermind's extradition to the U.S.
"There is no way this [Bush] administration can walk away from its
responsibility for 9/11," Clark told a conference titled "New American
Strategies for Security and Peace."
"You can't blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers,
however badly they communicated memos with each other," he added, in quotes
picked up by the Associated Press.
"The buck rests with the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush's desk,"
Clark insisted.
Arguing that Bush had manipulated facts, shown disdain for allies and started
a war without just cause, Clark said the White House had pulled a
"bait-and-switch" that put Americans at risk by pursuing war in Iraq instead of
hunting down bin Laden.
But the former NATO commander made no mention of Mr. Clinton's role in
letting bin Laden off the hook, a blunder the ex-president admitted to in a
speech before a New York business group last year.
"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan," Clark's old boss explained. "He was
expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan.
"And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with
them again. They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime
against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to
hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they
thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in
Afghanistan."
In the same speech, Clinton detailed plans to launch separate attacks on bin
Laden's headquarters in 1999 and 2000, both of which he canceled because they
would have offended other countries and caused collateral
damage.
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