Rice Disputes Clinton

In an interview with the New York Post, via RCP, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice flatly disputed Clinton's heated assertions on FoxNews Sunday and stated:

--The Clinton administration left no comprehensive plan to fight Al Qaeda.

--Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened, only leaving when he didn't get the job as head of Homeland Security several months later.

And this:

In her pointed rebuttal of Clinton's inflammatory claims about the war on terror, Rice maintained the Bush White House did the best it could to defend against an attack - and expanded on the tools and intelligence it inherited.
"I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 commission report on the efforts of the Bush administration in the eight months - things like working to get an armed Predator [drone] that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important," Rice added.

There is some talk that Clinton strategically lost his temper, that he intended to play to the nutroots to raise Hillary's stature among them by going after us "right-wingers". There is probably some truth to that, but I think he really lost control and the real nasty Bill emerged--lying and lashing out--nothing is ever his fault. His performance reminded Americans of his criminal self-absorption and his photo-op foreign policy.

And this does not help Hillary with most Americans.

Previous post: Setting the Record Straight

UPDATE: Dick Morris, who worked for him, on the failure of Clinton to recognize the threat of terrorism on our soil and the threat of Osama.

Laurie Mylroie on the failure of Clinton to recognize the threat of terrorism on our soil and the threat of Saddam Hussein.

Mylroie, Clinton's advisor on Iraq during his 1992 campaign, says Iraq probably trained both sets of world trade center bombers. The American Spectator:

(In the 1992 presidential campaign, I was Clinton's adviser on Iraq; in later encounters with the White House, I found it strongly resistant to hearing about evidence linking Saddam to terrorism.) .....

Probably, these individuals were selected in the same way we would recruit such a group: they were chosen for their special aptitudes from a much larger pool and then given additional training -- most likely, by Iraq.

The path to 9/11 really began with the Baluch before their alliance with al Qaeda -- with the 1993 Trade Center bombing and the 1995 plane bombing plot. Only after KSM joined with bin Laden, bringing with him the skills of his group, did al Qaeda's major attacks against the U.S. begin -- starting with the 1998 embassy bombings. This would help explain how a virtually unknown organization like al Qaeda managed to bomb two U.S. embassies nearly simultaneously and then carry out the most lethal single attack in U.S. history a mere three years later.