Clark's 9/11 Blame Game: Did the Clintons Put Him up to It?
Wesley Clark's attempt to blame
President Bush for leaving America vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks was the
harshest assault yet on the White House by any of the nine major announced
presidential candidates.
But it was not completely unprecedented. Two - and only two - prominent
Democrats have previously attempted to blame Bush for 9/11: Bill and Hillary
Clinton.
The outrageousness of Clark's rhetorical broadside - he said the Bush
administration could not "walk away from its responsibility" for causing
America's darkest day - raises a pertinent question: Did the former first couple
put Gen. Clark up to it?
If Clark's assault on Bush wasn't the Clintons' idea in the first place, or
didn't come from the small army of ex-Clinton aides who now dominate Clark's
campaign, at the very least the ex-military man seems to have taken his cue on
this topic from the two people who pushed him into the presidential race in the
first place.
And that would be Bill and Hillary.
As early as November 2001, for instance, when the rubble at Ground Zero was
still smoldering, Sen. Clinton tried to blame the Bush tax cut for leaving
America vulnerable to Osama bin Laden's kamikaze attacks.
"If we hadn't passed the big tax cut last spring, that I believe undermined
our fiscal responsibility and our ability to deal with this new threat of
terrorism, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in today," Hillary complained to
CNN's Jonathan Karl.
She was at in again a few months later, when news broke that Bush had been
briefed a month before 9/11 on the possibility that al-Qaeda's next attack might
involve airplane hijackings.
From the well of the Senate, Hillary announced, "I am simply here today on
the floor of this hallowed chamber to seek answers to the questions being asked
by my constituents, questions raised by one of our newspapers in New York with
the headline 'Bush Knew.'...
"The president knew what?" the former first lady bellowed. "My constituents
would like to know the answer to that and many other questions, not to blame the
president or any other American but just to know, to learn from experience, to
do all we can today to ensure that a 9/11 never happens again."
Then Sen. Clinton hinted darkly at the possibility of a 9/11 White House
cover-up.
"Why [do] we know today, May 16, about the warning [Bush] received. Why did
we not know this on April 16 or March 16 or February or January 16 or August 16
of last year?"
Hours later, Sen. Clinton told reporters: "Clearly the public demands answers
immediately. The people of New York deserve those answers more than anyone. I
believe that getting the facts out would be the very best response to this
troubling news."
The prospect that 9/11 was Bush's fault was on Hillary's mind again last
January when she said, during a New York radio interview, "I know that during
the transition between the Clinton and Bush administrations that the outgoing
administration told the incoming one that they would spend more time on
terrorism and bin Laden than anything else."
Without skipping a beat, New York's junior U.S. senator added: "That wasn't
their priorities. Their priorities were different."
Mr. Clinton, who has since 9/11 made a habit of telling audiences that his
aides thought he was "too obsessed" with getting bin Laden, chimed in on the
episode described by his wife earlier this month.
"I told [Bush] that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin
Laden."
Mr. Clinton claimed, however, that the president refused to heed his warning,
In fact, he said,t Bush's failure to appreciate the gravity of his advice on bin
Laden was "one of the two or three of the biggest disappointments that I had."
So when Clark blames President Bush for 9/11, it's worth remembering that the
Clintons' political protege is only picking up where they left
off.
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