Could Be A Good Listen: Michael Issikoff Talks Clinton, Bin Ladin, That CIA IG Report

A guest on the Dennis Miller show, which is being guest-hosted by Andrew Breitbart.

On right now. I can't guarantee it's interesting. Just potentially so.

"Red Meat For The Blogosphere:" This is the Terror Watch column referenced, the one claimed to be so explosive. I'm still reading it... not sure I see what's explosive here. It's a fair digest of the IG report, but this "explosive" information seems kinda old to me:

The report also criticized intelligence problems when Bill Clinton was president, detailing political and legal “constraints” agency officials felt in the late 1990s. In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to 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.”

Clinton appeared to have been referring to a December 1999 Memorandum of Notification (MON) he signed that authorized the CIA to use lethal force to capture, not kill, bin Laden. But the inspector general’s report made it clear that the agency never viewed the order as a license to “kill” bin Laden—one reason it never mounted more effective operations against him. “The restrictions in the authorities given the CIA with respect to bin Laden, while arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed for a period of time in late 1998 and early 1999, limited the range of permissible operations,” the report stated. (Scheuer agreed with the inspector general’s findings on this issue, but said if anything the report was overly diplomatic. “There was never any ambiguity,” he said. “None of those authorities ever allowed us to kill anyone. At least that’s what the CIA lawyers told us.” A spokesman for the former president had no immediate comment.)

In any case, the inspector general found that the CIA's failure to conduct effective covert actions against bin Laden prior to 9/11 was ultimately not because of ambiguous legal authorities but because it did not have effective assets on the ground who could mount a “credible operation” against him.

Didn't we already know Clinton had refused to actually give a kill order on bin Ladin? We know this, it's proven by documentation, but the media won't report it. I'd say it's possible the media will be shamed into finally reporting it by this new report, but that's simply absurd.

More... "We are at war," a 1998 CIA memorandum announced, putting the agency firmly into warfighting mode.

Right.

posted by Ace at 12:39 PM

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