Blame Clinton Lies Resurrected

The Right-Wing Machine circulates stories to blame Clinton for 9/11. They are wrong.

Sudan never offered to turn bin Laden over to the US. Even if they had at that time we would have refused him because there was no evidence. This was before he had set up al Qaida and most people were blaming Iran for terrorist attacks.

These Right smear campaigns like Christian anti-evolution screeds never die even after they have been discredited. The people repeating them and spreading them never hear the facts discrediting their arguments or forget them if they do for not fitting in with a world view which is reinforced by their peer group. How quickly they forget.

A month before Clinton left office -- and nine months before the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- those successful operations were praised by the nation's most experienced diplomats in this field, including conservatives. "Overall, I give them very high marks," said Robert Oakley, who served as ambassador for counterterrorism in the Reagan State Department, to a reporter for the Washington Post. "The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama, which has made him stronger." Paul Bremer, who also held the same post under Reagan and later was chosen by congressional leaders to chair the National Commission on Terrorism, disagreed slightly with his colleague. Bremer told the Post he believed that the Clinton administration had "correctly focused on bin Laden."

But to give Clinton any credit would scarcely serve his critics, who have more sinister and explicitly political aims.

Their rhetoric is redolent of the old "stab-in-the-back" theories used by right-wing extremists to discredit FDR after Pearl Harbor and JFK following the Bay of Pigs. This brand of demagogy dates back to Germany after WWI, when the nascent Nazi movement insisted that social democrats, capitalists and Jews had betrayed the nation and the people. With that pedigree, such ugly and divisive arguments ought to be repugnant to every responsible citizen.

This is an old article but someone has been repeating these discredited smears against Clinton recently. The smears don't die but live on in Right-Wing Heaven to be resurrected as needed.