Donald Trump landed in some controversy once again when he said that President George W. Bush did not keep the country safe. This has reinvigorated not just Jeb Bush but also Marco Rubio, who went on NewsmaxTV to shift the blame from George Bush to Bill Clinton.
When asked how he felt about Trump’s remarks, Rubio replied
“Well its just not true, Bush inherited all sorts of things from the Clinton administration, including intelligence agencies and others who weren’t doing a very good job…including a government that under President Clinton had not taken seriously Al-Qaeda and the threat that they posed even after the U.S.S. Cole, even after the first Trade Center bombings… and as a result President Bush was only in office 9 months when this happened…”
Blaming Bill Clinton has become a tradition in the Republican Party but it’s definitely not true in this case.
After the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000 an investigation was launched into who was responsible. It was assumed that Osama Bin Laden was responsible but not definitive. Bin Laden had been in hiding and on the run for some time after Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes in retaliation for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in Sudan and Tanzania.
It was Clinton who created the National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism and went to Congress with his proposal for $10 Billion to help fund a cohesive counter terrorism policy.
Clinton wasn’t in office on 9/11 but Bush was. Bush was in office ignoring daily briefs, like the Aug. 6 2001 brief which read:
“Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997′ has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Youse! and ‘bring the fighting to America.'”
That wasn’t the first warning that the Bush administration got that an attack was coming. In fact Richard Clarke, the man who helped develop counter terrorism policy under Reagan and the first President Bush, and who would head Clinton’s counter terrorism efforts, sent a Jan. 25, 2001 memo to Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Within the opening of the memo it says:
“We urgently need such a principals level review on the Al Qida network.”
Clarke finally got this meeting on Sept. 4, 2001. Unfortunately it was too late.
When Rubio says Bush was only in office for nine months when 9/11 happened, he is absolutely correct. It’s just a shame that he wasted those nine months ignoring the warnings, ignoring the national security infrastructure that Clinton had put into place.
Clinton didn’t get Bin Laden, but in his own words on Sept.24, 2006 on Fox News:
“At least I tried,That’s the difference [between] me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, [Richard] Clarke, who got demoted.”
Rubio is wrong on the facts, and he doesn’t care. That is what makes his type of mindset dangerous, he hears hoof beats and thinks its a unicorn.
Bush inherited a lot from Clinton: a balanced budget, an intelligence infrastructure, unprecedented goodwill towards the U.S. but 9/11 is 100 percent Bush’s legacy.
Featured Image courtesy of Gage Skidmore at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
