WashTimes

Clinton calls terror a U.S. debt to past

By Joseph Curl THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Bill Clinton, the former president, said yesterday that terror has existed in America for hundreds of years and the nation is "paying a price today" for its past of slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed."

"Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed even though they were innocent," said Mr. Clinton in a speech to nearly 1,000 students at Georgetown University's ornate Gaston Hall.

"This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human.

"And we are still paying a price today," said Mr. Clinton, who was invited to address the students by the university's School of Foreign Service.

Mr. Clinton, wearing a gray suit and orange tie, arrived 45 minutes late for the event. Some students camped out overnight to obtain tickets. The former president, a member of the Jesuit university's Class of 1968, opened his 50-minute speech by thanking a former teacher.

"He never abandoned me over all these years, even though he did not succeed in convincing me to become a Jesuit," said Mr. Clinton, drawing laughter and then cheers from the almost entirely white crowd of students.

Mr. Clinton spoke from notes about the world after September 11. He sought to dispel fears of terrorism and "this anthrax business."

"I submit to you that we are now in a struggle for the soul of the 21st century and the world in which you students will live to raise your own children and make your own way," he said.

Mr. Clinton said the international terrorism that has only just reached the United States dates back thousands of years.

"In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount. I can tell you that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it."

Mr. Clinton said America needs to pay more attention to its enemies and to the way the United States is viewed by the rest of the world.

"There are a lot of people that see the world differently than we do. It is quite important that we do more to build the pool of potential partners in the world and to shrink the pool of potential terrorists. And that has nothing to do with fighting, but that has to do with what else we do.

"This is partly a Muslim issue, because there is a war raging within Islam. We need to reach out and engage the Muslim world in a debate."

Mr. Clinton referred to stories in the media about some American citizens cheering the terrorist attacks and suspected mastermind Osama bin Laden.

"This debate is going on all over America. We've got to stop pretending this isn't out there," he said.

Addressing matters of globalization, Mr. Clinton pondered the importance of such issues as technology, poverty, democracy, diversity, the environment, disease and terrorism.

"Here's how I think you ought to think about it," he said. "We cannot ignore the fact that we have vulnerability at home because of our interdependence."

The answer, Mr. Clinton said, is to spread freedom and democracy, reduce global poverty, forgive billions in debt, improve health care systems and encourage — even fund — education in developing countries.

"We ought to pay for these children to go to school — a lot cheaper than going to war," he said.

Perhaps most important, he said, is democracy.

"It's no accident that most of these terrorists come from non-democratic countries. If you live in a country where you're never required to take responsibility for yourself, where you never even have to ask whether there's something you should be doing to solve your own problems, then people are kept in kind of a permanent state of collective immaturity and it becomes quite easy for them to believe that someone else's success is the cause of their distress.

"We've got to defeat people who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. And then we have to be smart enough to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things we deny for others."

The former president, who left office just 10 months ago after an eight-year tenure, said the federal government is "woefully" lacking on several key terrorism-prevention areas. "We need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money and get it, and we need some legislation on that," said Mr. Clinton, coincidentally on the same day President Bush, who has made freezing terrorist assets a "front" of his war on terrorism, announced the United States has moved to block the assets of 62 persons and groups associated with two financial networks linked to bin Laden.

"And one area where we are woefully lacking is the simple use of modern computer tech to track people that come into this country," he said.

While he criticized "the governmental capacity" now, he said "we all must support our current government in whatever decision they make."

"This is not a perfect society but it is stumbling in the right direction," he said.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Clinton — who was impeached for lying under oath about a sexual relationship with a 21-year-old White House intern — said the entire issue revolves around "the nature of truth."

"This battle fundamentally is about what you think about the nature of truth," he said, noting that God has imposed on us the inability to ever know "the whole truth."

He also championed women's rights in Afghanistan, saying the reason "you see all those sanctimonious guys beating those women with sticks" is because the country's rulers demand strict adherence to the rules.

Students crowded around to shake the former president's hand after his speech. There were no detractors in the crowd, despite the fact that the university newspaper in September 1998 called on Mr. Clinton, then mired in scandal, to resign.

"The American public," the Hoya said in a 1998 editorial, "has forgotten that international and domestic terrorism requires a proactive defense plan. Terrorists must be caught before they strike, and we must remember that those strikes always come when our head is turned toward other matters."

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Answers

NRO

Clinton Assigns Blame And, no, it’s not his fault.

By Kevin M. Cherry, a writer living in Alexandria, Va.. November 8, 2001 11:30 a.m. n a speech at Georgetown University, President Bill Clinton blamed, in part, the United States for the terrorist attacks of September 11. Speaking to a group of about 1,000 students, the former president said that our nation is "paying a price" for slavery and for its treatment of the "significant number of native Americans" who "were dispossessed and killed."

Osama bin Laden certainly has given no indication that he was concerned about the American sin of slavery — partially, perhaps, because Islam provides some justification for the abuse. While Clinton cites the Christian sins of the crusades as something for which "we are still paying," bin Laden prefers to focus on more recent events — the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, the sanctions on Iraq, the existence of Israel.

The first two of bin Laden's grievances, of course, are just over a decade old; the last... well, it's been an issue since May, 1948. Bin Laden has also cited the post-WWI breakup of the Ottoman Empire, but let's not dwell on that.

We don't need to turn to such (relatively) ancient history to understand some of the reasons why September 11 happened. Let's look at some of the policy failings of the Clinton administration that severely hampered American efforts to curtail terrorism.

In 1995, the CIA enacted a policy that forbids the recruitment of "dirty" agents — foreign agents that have less than spotless human-rights records. Despite the denials that any recruit was ever turned down, this policy undoubtedly had a chilling effect on who was recruited in the first place. One ex-CIA official told Franklin Foer of The New Republic that under Clinton appointee John Deutsch, the agency had "become very politically correct."

And just last year, the National Commission on Terrorism — chaired by former Reagan counterterrorism head Paul Bremer — issued a report with the eerily foreboding image of the Twin Towers on its cover. A bipartisan effort — led by Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein — was made to attach the recommendations of the panel to an intelligence authorization bill. But Sen. Patrick Leahy feared a threat to "civil liberties" and torpedoed the effort. After the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Kyl and Feinstein tried yet again. This time, Leahy was content with emaciating the proposals instead of defeating them outright. The weakened proposals died as the House realized "it wasn't worth taking up." President Clinton certainly could have encouraged Sen. Leahy to drop his opposition, but he didn't.

In 1996, President Clinton charged Al Gore with improving airline security. But the commission he led "focused on civil liberties" and "not effectiveness," according to the Boston Globe. The commission concluded that "no profile [of passengers] should contain or be based on... race, religion, or national origin." The FAA also decided, in 1999, to seal its passenger screening system from law-enforcement databases — thus preventing the FBI from notifying airlines that suspected terrorists were on board.

When bin Laden fled from the Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, "some officials," according to the Washington Post, "raised the possibility of shooting down his aircraft." But the plan was never pursued, in part because "it was inconceivable" that President Clinton would approve of it.

What President Clinton did do, of course, is launch a series of cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan around the time of his grand-jury testimony in August of 1998. Put aside any talk of "wagging the dog." This low-risk, low-damage effort helped bin Laden in the Muslim world. He looked strong, and we looked weak. We looked (and, of course, were) averse to casualties. It fit a pattern of tepid American responses to serious attacks on our interests — the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (which the Clinton administration treated as a criminal matter and not an act of war), Khobar Towers, embassy bombings. The Muslim world senses weakness and feeds on it; they tremble only before resolution and strength. As one senior Defense Department official put it, "I wish we'd recognized [that we were at war] then and started the campaign then that we've started now."

Russian President Putin echoed the same sentiment when he told ABC News that he was disappointed by the level of cooperation by the Clinton administration in fighting terrorism: "We certainly were counting on a more active cooperation in combating international terrorism."

And they're not alone. Many former Clintonites read recent history, and their part in it, differently than does their ex-boss. Jamie Gorelick, former deputy attorney general, told the Boston Globe, "Clearly, not enough was done." And Nancy Soderberg of the National Security Council admitted, "In hindsight [the administration's effort] wasn't enough, and anyone involved in policy would have to admit that." And, most damning: Joe Klein quotes an unnamed senior Clinton official, who reported that "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other president in recent memory."

Bill Clinton, however is his same old self — content to pass the buck — blaming the Founders, the crusaders, and anyone else in sight for the attacks of September 11. He is entirely unwilling to accept any responsibility for what occurred on his watch. Before, he has pardoned the unpardonable; now he has justified the unjustifiable.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Let's just pile it on.

Former first daughter writes first-person account of Sept. 11 for magazine

The Associated Press 11/8/01 3:08 PM

NEW YORK (AP) -- Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton, who was 12 blocks away from the World Trade Center when it collapsed, has written an account of that day for Talk magazine.

"Before Sept. 11 I wouldn't have believed I had many innocences left," begins the four-page story in the December issue of the magazine. "I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters. ... Despite all that, I woke up that Tuesday morning feeling good about where I was in my life and happy about where I was going."

Clinton was near Union Square, at the apartment of longtime friend Nicole Davison, when the first hijacked airliner hit Tower One. Davison, who had left for work, called Clinton and told her to stay where she was. Like many Americans that day, Clinton turned on the television and watched as the second plane hit.

"I tried to call my mother, but after I said hello to her assistant the line went dead," Clinton wrote. She ventured outside to find a working telephone, and ended up walking downtown -- toward the towers.

"I remember very little about how I got so far downtown. ... I don't know whether I was on the corner or in the middle of the block," she wrote. "I do remember standing in line at a phone somewhere and hearing a deafening rumble."

The noise Clinton heard was the collapse of Tower Two.

Clinton later found Davison and another friend, and the three spent the day working their way uptown. Clinton wrote that a "somewhat irrational medley of thoughts" was running through her head, including concerns about President Bush's tax cut.

"I worried that with the tax cut we wouldn't have enough money to repair New York and D.C. and to help the families of the thousands I knew must have died," she wrote.

At one point, she stopped to pray and thank God that her mother was a senator representing New York and that the city was led by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani -- a leader Clinton wrote she "had been criticizing just the day before for some insensitivity or other."

When Clinton finally got through to her mother, who was in Washington, she burst into tears of relief. She later spoke with her father, who was in Australia.

"The next night I saw my mother, and early Thursday morning I saw my dad in Chappaqua," Clinton wrote. "It was only after I had seen them both that I finally felt secure again in my own skin."

Now studying in Oxford, England, Clinton says she is frustrated to be away from America. She says she encounters anti-American sentiments every day.

"For more than 21 years I lived with the assumption that I was safe, with a sense of security so profound I didn't even know I had it," Clinton wrote. "Today I find myself shocked into a new awareness of how much I loved the country I grew up in."

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Clinton is a bona fide lunatic. He utterly and thoroughly disgusts me. He's creating his oft wished for legacy right now, by continuing to completely remove all doubt from anyone who might have a brain cell that he is despicable. He was the Pathological President.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Brooks,

Amen! Well said, well said! You know, if he had one sincere bone in his body, perhaps his legacy would have been different. As it stands now, he's just making it worse...

Would the diagnosis of meglomaniac be appropriate?

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Would the diagnosis of meglomaniac be appropriate?

Hmmm. . .let's see. . .

Main Entry: meg·a·lo·ma·nia

Pronunciation: "me-g&-lO-'mA-nE-&, -ny&

Function: noun

Etymology: New Latin

Date: circa 1890

1 : a mania for great or grandiose performance 2 : a delusional mental disorder that is marked by infantile feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur

Yup, "Dr. Deb's" diagnosis is correct! ;-)

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Limbaugh

The Real Clinton

We've actually had to have to come up with a name for days like the one we had on Thursday. I've dubbed days like that "CAC days," with the acronym standing for "Cannot Avoid Clinton." I know there's a double entendre there if you pronounce the word to rhyme with "rock," but it fits, does it not? It sure does, once you read about the speech Clinton gave to students at Georgetown University. We're in the middle of a war, and here's a former president out there spouting Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda-type stuff to a bunch of skulls full of mush! Clinton called the terrorist attacks "a U.S. debt to the past." So we deserve what's happening to us. We deserve it because of what we've done in the past - and not only what we've done, but what the Christian crusaders did hundreds and hundreds of years ago, not to Muslims, but to Jews!

The Washington Times reports, "Bill Clinton, the former president, said yesterday that terror has existed in America for hundreds of years and the nation is 'paying a price today' for its past of slavery and for looking 'the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed. Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed, even though they were innocent,' Clinton told the audience of about a thousand students.

The more I think about this, the sicker I get, and the sicker I think it is. Because we've been talking about a man, Wilhelm Von Der Schlick Meister, defined - not just by his "lying about sex" as his worshipers would have you believe - but by his criminal lying under oath in a sexual harassment case. Throughout his administration, he was defined by his lying. He was defined by his cheating. He was defined by his sexual...what are we going to call it? Assaults, appetites, or what have you. Who is this flawed man to define our country into the toilet? Who is he?

I can hear you all saying, "Rush, there's the First Amendment. There's freedom of speech. Clinton can say whatever he wants. He's an ex-president." I know all that. He can say whatever he wants. I don't doubt or disagree with his right to do so. But why is a major university inviting him to pollute the skulls full of mush that are in the audience listening to this rotgut? It is irresponsible. What is the purpose of this kind of a guilt trip down this revisionist, twisted, deep, dark negative path?

You know, this gives new lives to these international thugs. The people who hate America just got a pretty big gift, don't you think? They could feed off this for years. An ex-president has just agreed with Osama bin Laden! An ex-president has just agreed with Yasser Arafat, and whoever it is that consider themselves among our enemies today. This stuff was spoken to a bunch of college co-ed kids, to young skulls full of mush. I don't think most college kids think this stuff anyway - not to this degree. Some of them do, but so what?

Even if college students do believe this false rotgut, that's not the point. The point is not to go confirm a bunch of people who are wrong. Just because the audience believes this stuff and it's wrong doesn't mean you go give them what they want - unless you have plans after the speech. No, I know, I wouldn't, but he would. That's the whole point. He moistens a finger, sticks it in the wind, sees which way it's blowing and puts himself in front of it.

I don't think this is a good thing for him to say, as I told Sarah who called in to my program from Columbus, Georgia to say we should let Clinton "show his true colors." I disagree strongly. I don't think we gain anything by hearing this from anyone, just as I disagreed strongly with those who said we should let Clinton win in 1992 and 1996 because, by losing, we'd win later. You don't win office by lying, just as you don't win wars by encouraging people to tell your people what a rotten, unjust and guilty nation they live in.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

You're trying to get me to vomit, aren't you, OG? Well, you're doing a fine job, friend. Thankseversomuch.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

He's kinda like a skin rash. Just when you think it's cleared up, it breaks out again and irritates the crap outta ya.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2001

Brooke--barf alert!!!

NYDailyNews

Chelsea's Ordeal

The sphinx speaks.

Chelsea Clinton has never given an interview — indeed, most Americans have never heard her voice. But the former First Daughter has written a first-person account for Talk magazine of her experiences Sept. 11, when she was alone in Union Square and unable to reach her parents when cell-phone service was disrupted.

Chelsea in her dorm at Oxford

In a desperate bid to find a working pay phone, the 21-year-old kept walking south — toward the twin towers — and "I remember very little about how I got so far downtown." Later, heading north with friends, "We were all crying," Clinton wrote. "We all thought we were literally going to have fire rain down on us. That we were the next target. For a brief moment, I truly thought I was going to die."

But the only child of former President Bill Clinton and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was already formulating policy. "I worried," she writes, "that with the tax cut we wouldn't have enough money to repair New York and D.C. and to help the families of the thousands I knew must have died."

Now in England attending Oxford University, Clinton bristles at anti-American sentiments. "The idea that anyone believes America would enter into this conflict capriciously boggles my mind, and the notion that the U.S. is acting without regard to the Afghan people is offensive." She makes a call to her generation to serve its country: "We need to step up and serve in any way we can." Like political office, perhaps?

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2001

Yes, I'm hammering on this subject. I recognize that. Used to be I was pretty ambivalent about Clinton, you know, long as he didn't do any long-term damage, what the hell? But we're beginning to find out Clinton did do some long-term damage. And, as of yesterday, he's adding to it, big time. Also, as of yesterday, his daughter is adding to it with a piece of crap that should have been entitled, "the WTC disaster revolved around me-me-me." (The subtitle was "And while I'm at it, let me get in political digs at Bush and Giuliani.") This woman had four years at Stanford--how on earth did she get through English class??? So here's some more on Clinton, an opinion from the Washington Times.

November 9, 2001

A Clinton chorus of 'America the Ugly'

When Chelsea Clinton gets settled in at Oxford she ought to send for the old man.

Bill Clinton never finished the studies there that would have made him a Rhodes Scholar, and he needs remedial work in history. Additional studies in taste, decency and manners can't help. Not even the Oxford dons could sand off the rough spots and polish the man who long ago abandoned Hope.

Mr. Clinton went to Georgetown University the other day to relieve himself of his heaviest thoughts about terrorism, and he couldn't resist taking a few potshots at the nation that honored him with two terms in the White House. Every time we think that not even Bill Clinton could caricature Bill Clinton's shabbiness, he does.

What happened on September 11, he told the students, wouldn't surprise anyone as erudite as he is, because, well, America had it coming. The 5,000 innocents murdered on that day of infamy were paying the debt that America owes to the past. This is similar to the thoughtless remarks of the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (who had the decency to apologize and clarify), except that Mr. Clinton inserted a different set of villains. We're all guilty, stupid.

"Here in the United States," he said, "we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when a significant number of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human. And we are still paying the price today."

He didn't say what the hundreds of foreigners killed at the World Trade Center were paying the price for, nor why any of the Americans slain on September 11 — none of whom ever owned a slave or so far as we know slew an Indian — owed a debt to anyone. And then he descended into a little history lesson with a story from his misspent youth in deepest, darkest Arkansas.

"One example from my childhood," he began, as giggles spread through the audience, which was no doubt expecting a story about how he hit on his Sunday school teacher as a randy adolescent in Hot Springs. "In the Civil War, General Sherman waged a brilliant campaign that cut through the South and went to Atlanta." The laughter grew louder. "It was significant and helpful in bringing the Civil War to a close in a way that, thank God, saved the Union. On the way, Sherman practiced a relatively mild form of terrorism. He didn't kill civilians, but he burned all the farms and then he burned Atlanta, trying to break the spirit of the Confederacy. It had nothing whatever to do with winning the Civil War but it was a story that was told for a hundred years later and prevented Americans from coming together as we might have otherwise done. When I was a boy, growing up in the segregated South, when we should have been thinking how we were going to integrate the schools and give people equal opportunity, people were making excuses for unconscionable behavior by talking about what Sherman had done a hundred years ago."

Mr. Clinton, muddling history to make a point of what a moral tyke he was in a sea of redneck scum, quickly achieved lift-off and was off on a riff, reminiscent of his famous yarn of how he was sickened as a boy in Arkansas by the sight of black churches in flames, torched by white klansmen. When this was too much even for his footmen, flunkeys and factotums back home, who reminded him that for all their sins the white folks in Arkansas had never burned anyone's church, black or white, the president confessed that well, yes, he had made up the story, but he was just trying to pander to an audience of carpetbaggers, scalawags and other Yankee trash.

He missed an opportunity to let the Georgetown audience in on a little of the history the eager students probably had never heard. Sherman did not "cut through the South," but marched his army from Atlanta to the sea, and there was nothing "mild" about burning cities and most of the farms between. Sherman was a cruel general, not a terrorist, and his march was fully sanctioned by Abraham Lincoln. "I can make the march," Sherman told old Abe, "and I can make Georgia howl." Bill Clinton is wrong if he actually thinks it had "nothing whatever to do with winning the Civil War."

He was merely adjusting the facts again to make a point, a skill he demonstrated often as president, but we never know whether he actually believes his stretchers, tall tales, fibs and lies, his duplicity and double-dealing, and to be scrupulously fair, he probably doesn't know himself when he's spinning yarns and fondling the facts. And so he went at it again, this time at the expense of the other 49 states. What else is new?

Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2001

Drudge

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX FRI NOV 09, 2001 11:43:35 ET XXXXX

MOTHER-DAUGHTER CONFLICT IN CHELSEA CLINTON'S TERROR DAY TALE

Curious confusion swirls around former first daughter Chelsea Clinton's upcoming essay for TALK magazine describing exactly where she was on Terror Day in New York City.

Breaking her media silence once and for all -- Chelsea writes in great detail about her personal experience on the morning of September 11.

But, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned, her account now sharply conflicts with her mother's version of Chelsea's New York adventure.

Appearing on NBC's DATELINE, Sen. Hillary Clinton told how daughter Chelsea cheated death on that fateful morning.

"She had gone on what she thought would be a great jog," Hillary Clinton explained. "She was going down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She was going to get a cup of coffee and - that's when the plane hit!"

Hillary's dramatic story about her daughter's close call with the Twin Towers became a media sensation.

"At that moment, she was not just a Senator, but a concerned parent," TODAY show's Katie Couric told viewers.

But now, in her own words, Chelsea does not mention a jog. Does not mention her plans to go to Battery Park, around the towers -- only to be stopped by a coffee break.

In fact, Chelsea writes that she was at her friend's apartment on Park Avenue South -- miles from Ground Zero -- when she learned of the attacks!

"I stared senselessly at the television," Chelsea writes.

Calls to Senator Clinton went unreturned on Friday.

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2001

But, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned, her account now sharply conflicts with her mother's version of Chelsea's New York adventure.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Liars, one and all. . .

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2001