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Aug. 17, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
August 17, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Oh, wow, are we loaded today?
Ho ho ho!
I have been so eagerly anticipating the start of today's program, folks, and now it's finally here.
I welcome all of you to the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network, America's Anchorman on the scene.
Firmly ensconced here behind the Golden EIB microphone at the Limboy Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Looking forward to talking to you today.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882 and the email address rush at EIBnet.com.
All right.
I told you people yesterday, we had this conversation in the last hour of the program.
I told you two things I want to remind you of.
I told you yesterday, this Abel Danger story wasn't over, that there are a bunch of conservatives.
I got a call about this.
How come some conservatives seem to be shying away?
I said, because they live in Washington and they don't want to be tarred and feathered with what they think is the extreme right wing.
And they think this whole Abel Danger thing is nothing more than a conspiracy because there's an anonymous source.
And I said, just wait.
I don't think Kurt Weldon would go out on a limb like this.
And so the source has come forward.
Actually, two sources have come forward.
We'll have the details.
I also yesterday told you about this Washington Post story, which said, it's all over.
As far as Judge Roberts is concerned, the Democrats aren't even going to fight the guy.
They get 70 votes.
They're just going to make a little appearance of being tough at the hearings in early September, but it's all over.
And I said, don't believe this for a second, folks.
And lo and behold, what do we get today?
We got a Washington Post front page story about how these liberal activist groups are fit to be tied that the Democrats are going to lay down based on the Washington Post story yesterday.
And so predictably, Pat Leahy and Ted Kennedy are, well, we're not laying down.
We're going to go for the juggernaut.
And I'm going to tell you what I think happened here.
I don't think the story yesterday was accurate at all.
I don't think the Democrats ever intended to lay down.
I think after the NAROL ad got pulled because it was such an abomination, I think a couple of Democrats on the committee, Kennedy or Leahy, maybe one.
I don't know who, but they probably did realize, you know, we got a lot of Democrats that are going to vote for this guy.
And I think that they planted that story.
It's all over.
Roberts' may as well be confirmed to get these interest groups fired up so that they would start threatening these senators who claim they're going to vote for Roberts.
It's exactly what I told you.
Don't take a breath on this one, folks.
Do not take a breath on it.
And so we'll have details of that, both of those things coming up.
But first, I have to tell you this.
I have to report this to you because it's just, it's yet another illustration of the, what would you call it?
Do they have any souls left on the left?
I mean, they tell us what big hearts they have and they tell us how compassionate they are and they tell us how tolerant they are and how concerned with everybody that they are.
But do they have any soul left?
And this is not just the extremists.
From John McCaslin's Inside the Beltway today in the Washington Times, we're here to report a rather bizarre, if not disturbing incident combining Hollywood and Washington, specifically this month's special film industry screening of The Killers, a 1964 movie starring Ronald Reagan in his final big screen role.
On hand in Hollywood for the August 4th event was a prestigious crowd of actors, actresses, writers, reviewers, scholars, researchers, and film preservationists, including L.A. Confidential Director Curtis Hanson.
It actually erupted in cheers when Mr. Reagan, the actor, was shot and killed.
Absent the applause, it was already an eerie scene to relive considering that Mr. Reagan, later as president, was shot and was nearly killed in 1981 by John Hinckley Jr.
But that's not all.
The audience also broke into malicious cheers.
One man in attendance tells Inside the Beltway when Reagan was threatened in gunpoint and pushed out of a speeding car.
Then again, was it any surprise?
Consider that when the words also starring Ronald Reagan appeared on the screen during the opening credits, many in the audience booed.
There were supporters of Mr. Reagan in the crowd, given some scattered applause.
The recent screening was part of an industry retrospective salute to director Don Siegel, who made two pictures with Reagan.
The event at which the jeering took place was sponsored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Mr. Hansen, the director of LA Confidential, chairman of the UCLA Film and TV Archive, introduced the film, then took a seat in the audience.
Afterward, he led a discussion about the movie, joined by actor Clue Gulager, who also appeared in the film.
Mr. Güliger told the audience when it came to Mr. Marvin scene, Lee Marvin's scene with Mr. Reagan, he was taken aback at the future president's professionalism and the way Reagan couldn't be shaken like the other actors.
What happened is, in discussing the making of the picture, including how actor Lee Marvin boasted he intended to bury his fellow actors with his intimidating performance.
After scenes with Angie Dickinson and Norman Fell, Marvin held up two fingers indicating he had destroyed them.
But he didn't destroy Reagan.
So anyway, they show a movie, 1964, starring Ronald Reagan called The Killers.
The audience of Hollywood scholars, reviewers, actors, actresses, writers and so forth, film preservationists cheer when Reagan is shot on screen.
Now, this is not the kooks, the squatters in the ditch at Crawford, Texas.
This is not moveon.org.
Or is it?
That's right.
What would be the difference?
Because these are the people who have assumed the mantle of mainstream Democrats.
These are the people that comprise the Democrat base.
And since this is a Washington Times story, I don't know how many of the left will hear about this.
I wanted to make sure that you all did.
Because it's just, it's just classic.
I mean, here we have all of these people who for the longest time have told us that they're the ones with the big hearts and they're the ones with the compassion.
They're the ones who care about the killing of innocent people and so forth.
Here is a man who was shot as president and they laugh at a 1964 movie when he is shot and killed.
They laugh and they cheer.
So that's why I ask if these people have any soul left.
And I guess it's tough to have soul when you're losing and losing big.
By the way, we have great soundbites from the Today Show Today, Matt Wauer, a surprise visit to Iraq.
And Matt Wauer committed a huge error.
He asked a question of a soldier to which he didn't know the answer, but he thought he knew the answer he was going to get.
Sort of like defense lawyers and prosecutors can make real mistakes.
If you grant a witness immunity and then ask a question that you don't know the answer to, you are opening yourself up big time.
That's what they get.
That's what happened to Oliver North.
They granted him immunity back in those hearings, and they thought, we're going to get Reagan.
North's going to spill the beans.
And they didn't do a proper interview job.
And North surprised them with all kinds of answers.
And it just illustrates you don't give people immunity till you know what they're going to say.
Well, in this case, Matt Wauer asked a bunch of soldiers about coverage of the war back home.
And one of the reporters said to Matt Lauer, well, frankly, sir, if I were listening to the news or reading newspapers in America, I'd think it's pretty bad, too, but it isn't.
We have the audio soundbite, and we'll have all of that.
Start out with Abel Danger.
We take a brief break and come back right after this.
Executing assigned host duties flawlessly as your highly trained broadcast specialist, El Rushbo, and the EIB network.
This is so delicious.
All these doubting Thomas is out there.
Well, do you know this Abel Danger guy?
It's an anonymous source.
I don't know.
I don't want to be accused of being a cook.
I got to back off on this story.
The source is no longer anonymous.
New York Times headline, officer says military blocked sharing of files on terrorists.
And in another story in the New York Times, it was only yesterday that Bill Clinton's out there say, I tell you what, if a penny got told me what they knew about bin Laden, I'd have gone after that guy fired into Afghanistan.
I don't know if it affected 9-11, but it sure would have made it more complicated.
I would have gone after bin Laden.
I tell you what.
But the New York Times sort of shoots down and gives another beating to the Clinton legacy.
State Department says it warned about bin Laden 96.
It's getting to the point now you put a bag of excrement in front of Clinton and he'll step in it.
Somebody is maneuvering things here, folks, in a delicious way.
First off, Abel Danger, a military intelligence team repeatedly contact the FBI in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader, Mohamed Atta, of the 9-11 attacks.
This, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer, who said he now had decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly, and he did this because he says he can't believe what the chairman and co-chairman of the 9-11 Commission are saying.
The officer is Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer.
He said military lawyers later blocked Abel Danger from sharing any of its information with the Bureau.
Well, Bill Cohen was the Secretary of Defense at the time for Bill Clinton over there at the Pentagon.
If his name were Rumsfeld, I think we know where the story would be headed.
Colonel Schaefer said in an interview on Monday night that the Abel Danger group had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington Field Office of the FBI to share its information.
But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute, which left the Bureau without information that Colonel Schaefer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the September 11th attacks were still being planned.
I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued, Colonel Schaefer said of his efforts.
Said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the FBI meetings because they feared controversy if Abel Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the U.S.
It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information.
If something goes wrong, we'll get blamed.
Chain of command, who's the chain of command here?
We need some names.
Chain of command, Secretary of Defense was Cohen.
Is that who we're talking about?
It wouldn't seem logical.
A commission spokesman, 9-11 Commission spokesman, didn't return repeated phone calls yesterday for comment.
But a Democrat member of the commission, Richard Ben Venista, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview on Tuesday that while he couldn't judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Schaefer and the others, the Pentagon needed to provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta.
And if these assertions are credible, Ben Vanista continued, the Pentagon would need to explain why it was the 9-11 commissioners were not provided this information despite requests for all information regarding Abel Danger.
Richard, I think you did get the information, at least the staff did.
Colonel Schaefer said that he had provided information about Abel Danger and its identification of Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the commission staff when they visited Afghanistan where he was then serving.
We go to the audio sound bites now.
Schaefer was on television today, the CBS Erling show.
Early show, Hannah Storm was talking to him.
First question, there are new allegations of missed opportunities to prevent the 9-11 attacks.
You are a member of Abel Danger.
You identified four of the 9-11 hijackers, including Atta.
How much of a threat did you think he and his cell were at the time?
Well, it was significant by the fact that we did discover these guys through essentially the advanced developing technology of the time through pattern analysis.
We recognized their linkages and patterns of linkages to the al-Qaeda leadership, and that was what our primary concern was at the time.
When you tried to set up the three meetings with the FBI to share this information about the cell, those meetings were blocked by government lawyers.
Why?
I'm not a lawyer and I wasn't in those meetings.
What I can tell you is that because of my relationship with the FBI at that moment in time, we were trying to find a way to bring the Special Operations Command folks together with the FBI folks here in Washington so they could discuss the potential impact of having these individuals in the United States.
Part of the problem with that was the lawyers didn't allow us to properly go after either by intelligence collection or by allowing the FBI to go out to look at these guys because they were here legally.
And there was a big issue regarding the fact that these four nationals were here in the United States doing things which were, in my judgment, questionable based on their linkages to the al-Qaeda leadership.
But because they were here legally, again, the lawyers really did not want us going after any information or dealing with them.
Let's not forget this.
I don't know if Mr. Schaefer wants to go here or not, but let's not forget there was a memo from the then U.S. attorney, Mary Joe White, and Mary Joe White, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York at Manhattan, all concerned here about the wall that existed that prevented law enforcement from sharing any information they got with the FBI or with the CIA.
She was talking about the fact that this wall existed and it was in the way it was going to be a big problem in solving terrorism.
And this goes back to prior to when this Abel Danger stuff is in action and taking place.
So, you know, nobody wants to address this specifically about the wall.
What appears to me is happening here is they're going to try to dump this on the Pentagon.
Remember what I said about all this, folks.
The political class in that town is going to circle the wagons to do what it can to protect itself, and they're going to blame a building for this.
They're going to blame a five-sided building for this.
And a couple people will get a slap on the wrist or slap on the hands.
But it's obvious here that a commission put together to connect the dots chose not to even look at some of the dots and didn't connect some of its own.
The next question from Hannah Storm was, I want to get some comments about the letters of the September 11th Commission.
They said that Abel Danger, your unit there, did not turn out to be historically significant.
They said that none of the documents that they requested about Abel Danger that were turned over by the Defense Department, referred to Mr. Adda or any of the other hijackers.
Is it possible the Defense Department didn't turn over all the documents?
I believe it's very possible.
I spoke to the officer recently who actually physically took two briefcase-sized packages of documents over to them.
And I can tell you for a fact that was probably 120th of the actual hard copy documents and probably none of the actual data, the 2.5 terabytes of data, which was used as the backdrop to the project.
So no, I don't believe they ever got all the documents.
But then again, I don't think that they pressed properly to get all the documents.
Exactly.
The documents were not presented to them, and they weren't curious at the commission about all the documents.
2.5 terabytes?
That is not an insignificant number.
Next question.
You could be putting your career in serious danger here by coming forward with these allegations.
Why now?
Why are you doing this?
To be honest with you, we were working on some of the fixes.
The Navy approached me early this year to ask me to assist them in putting back together some of the technology which was resonant with an Abel Danger.
Again, trying to bring back some capability, which apparently is not either currently available to the Navy or widely available to DOD.
That was why this all came up.
We saw it through Congressman Weldon some funding to actually bring this back.
It was through discussions with him and his learning the story, him going to the 9-11 commissioners, finding out that the Abel Danger information had never been passed to them.
That's how this all came up now.
And the big question, what's the bottom line, Colonel Schaefer, who dropped the ball here?
Ma'am, I don't know.
I support Congressman Weldon calling for investigations.
I know DOD right now from my discussions with him yesterday.
I spent the morning with the DOD leadership going through this.
I know they're trying to get to the bottom of this.
And I do believe the administration wants to find out what the answers are here and really get to the bottom.
And that's why I've come forward.
I believe DOD is being very focused and very supportive of getting to the bottom of this.
And yeah, after the fact, once the whistle was blown, we've got a good old-fashioned whistleblower here, folks.
And let's just see how this whistleblower is treated.
Remember Colleen Rowley, FBI agent, blew the whistle on the inability to connect the dots.
She was made a heroine.
In fact, she's going down to see Cindy Sheehan.
Going down there to the squatter's ditch to see the Cindy Sheehan crowd down there.
And she's also going to run for office.
And of course, she made the cover.
Wasn't the person of the year whistleblowers on Time magazine?
Had three of them, three of them on the cover, and she was one of them.
We've got a whistleblower here, Anthony Shaffer.
Let's just see what happens to him.
But I tell you, there have been so many people changing their stories.
As I told you yesterday, folks, that you knew there had to be something to this because when we first heard about Abel Danger, members of the commission and commission staff started acting like, uh-oh, they're onto us.
And they started running for the tallgrass, and then they started changing their stories.
Then they came out and changed the story again.
But the initial reaction, I mean, if this is all a bunch of garbage, if it's all BS, your initial reaction, and if you're up to speed on it, your initial reaction, oh, we looked at that.
These guys, there's nothing to it.
We were exhaustive in our investigations, but they didn't act that way.
They acted like they were caught.
And then they started scrambling, and then they started spinning.
Deborah Orrin, New York Post, has found yet another memo from Mary Joe White warning the Clinton administration.
I have that coming next.
Sit tight.
We've only just begun Carpenter's 1969.
A man, a legend, a way of life.
Happy to have you along for the ride today, folks.
It's the most listened to radio talk show in America.
Has been for, what, 15 years?
The Russian ball program.
By the way, Brian, congratulations.
Brian had to get called for jury duty today.
And yesterday I said there's an easy way out of this, Brian.
is go down there and the first question they ask is say, look, I work for the Rush Limbaugh program and that's all you have to say.
And he did it and he's back.
It worked.
So we welcome Brian the broadcast engineer back today.
Nice to know that the tips to help people out that I offer are actually productive.
Bill Clinton's legacy takes another beating the day after.
Bill Clinton says that if he'd have known about it, he'd have taken Afghanistan apart to find Osama bin Laden.
President Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was very dangerous and could have deadly results.
This, according to a blistering memo just obtained by the New York Post.
This is Deborah Oren writing today.
Then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Joe White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorellik to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.
Looking back after 9-11, the memo makes for eerie reading because White's team foresaw years in advance that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.
And Mary Joe White was a Clinton appointee, and here's what she wrote.
This is not an area where it's safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans, or activities.
The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house unless such insulation is absolutely necessary.
Excessive conservatism can have deadly results.
You mean being, you know, keeping things close to the fast, not ideological conservatism.
Now, I know that there are a lot of hairbrain websites out there trying to say there was no wall and that everybody's talking about the wall is lying about the wall, but here's Clinton's own appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan writing a memo to Jamie Gorellik complaining about the wall and in this memo spelling it out exactly as we have told you about it on this program.
You can't compartmentalize this.
You can't prevent law enforcement from learning what intelligence gathers and vice versa.
This is going to lead to disastrous results.
This is because the Clinton administration sought to pursue terrorists in court with grand juries and indictments rather than consider us to be at war.
Clinton did not want anything like that.
Clinton didn't want to tackle big issues in big ways because he didn't want to find himself in a circumstance like Bush is in now.
He didn't have the guts to take on big issues, but oh man, is he courageous after the fact?
Oh man, would I love to have this guy spine after the fact?
I'll tell you what, if I'd have known that about Bill Laden, I would have gone out there.
I'd have fired every missile we got to get bin Laden.
If I'd have just been told about it.
And everybody's dumping on Jamie Gorellik here, but does anybody actually think she alone created this wall without any direction, without any permission, without any gardens, shall we say?
Was Jamie Gorellik just a free agent over there at Justice?
Was she just roaming around being able to convince and create anything that she wanted?
Back to Deborah Oren's piece.
Mary Joe White must have felt like Cassandra foreseeing dangers that proved all too real while no one at Clinton's Justice Department would listen to her.
Team Clinton put up the wall in 1995 and it stayed up until after the 9-11 attacks.
Questions about the wall recently arose in regard to possible warnings from Abel Danger, but the White memo makes clear that the issue was far, far broader than just Abel Danger.
In theory, the wall was supposed to avoid legal challenges to terror prosecutions.
The problem was, as White and her team noted, only prosecutors familiar with the case or a cast of terror players might see the connection that could lead to nabbing a suspect or foiling a plot.
Justice Honchos overruled Mary Joe White's request, even though her team knew better than anybody else in law enforcement what the real risks were.
Mary Joe White's team won a host of convictions, Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 93, and the blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who plotted to bomb landmarks like the Statue of Liberty.
But equally troubling is that the 9-11 Commission, charged with tracing the failure to stop 9-11, got Mary Joe White's stunning memo and several related documents and deep sixed all of them.
Now, you know how journalists, you've heard this about journalists.
They have a story.
They write the story and then they go talk to the people.
The story is written in advance and they go try to put it together in the way they've already got it written in their heads and anything that comes along that challenges their conception or their agenda gets thrown out.
It's exactly what happened on this commission, folks.
It's exactly what happened on this commission.
This commission was not put together to actually find out what happened here.
It was put together to whitewash it, blame it on a couple or three innocent people or persons or building or what have you, and then to make it look like we've learned so much that here are some recommendations to make sure it doesn't happen again.
This commission was, it appears, had no interest in finding out what really led to all of this because too many heads would roll in the political class.
Too many Washington pros, too many Washington lifers, too many elite upper crust members of the political class in Washington would have been vulnerable.
We can't have that.
The Washington political class is going to circle in wagons around itself.
And I know what you're saying.
What about Nixon Rush?
What about Nixon?
Well, you know, the Democrats play the game a little bit different than the Republicans do, but this is a different issue.
This, I mean, this, you could make the case here that there would be Washington insiders from both sides of political aisle here that might be facing some vulnerable challenges.
Let's circle the wagons time.
We'll make it look like we're going to town.
The hearings themselves, the televised portion of the hearings were just a sham.
They were part of the election process.
That's what the Democrats were using them for.
But everybody knew going in that if there was anybody really personally responsible for this, high up, it wasn't going to get named on, blamed on them.
Yeah, we're going to get an FBI agent or two that didn't connect the dots.
We're going to have to get a couple other people over there, small fry, not part of the political class, just, you know, civil service employees that, but has anybody been fired over this?
What does that tell you?
Nobody's been fired over this.
And in fact, some have been promoted.
And that's, I think, a telling fact about all of this.
It's clear that there was all kinds of document.
Did Jamie Gorelik herself?
Why do you think she was on the commission instead of being called as a witness?
So as to make sure that whatever it was that existed about the wall in the Clinton administration itself would be swept under the rug.
I have no doubt about any of this.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion, Deborah Aaron writes, that the commission ignored White's memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed, Commission Member Jamie Gorelik.
White has declined to discuss the matter.
Gorelik didn't immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.
Mary Joe White wrote the memo after her earlier pleas against the wall were rejected.
She enlisted the help of her Bomb 2 team, prosecutors working on terror bombings like the 93 Twin Towers attack.
They gave six pages of detailed reasons why it was a mistake to create too much of a wall between intelligence and prosecutions.
Mary Joe White forwarded that analysis to Gorellic and added her own notes on the Clinton-era decision to keep prosecutors in the dark about intelligence investigations.
She wrote, What troubles me even more, What troubles me even more than the known problems we have encountered are the undoubtedly countless instances of unshared and unacted upon information that reside in some file or other in some head or some unreviewed or not fully understood tape or other.
These can be disasters waiting to happen.
Fast forward, Abel Danger.
Disasters waiting to happen fast forward.
Abel Danger, you've heard now from Anthony Shaffer himself.
His work was suppressed.
Lawyers at the Defense Department shut it down.
Can't share it under the guise of, well, you know, we can't domestically spy on legal citizens.
I can't do that.
Right.
So we can't.
This is the same old lament with other law enforcement.
Somebody's going to shoot you.
Well, we can't stop them until they do, and then we'll go after them.
It's absurd.
And average Americans are never going to understand this.
And that's why this commission didn't bring it up.
Because the fact is, average Americans do understand it.
This is as easily understood as the easiest scandal to understand that's ever come down the pike.
This is so easy to understand is why it had to be swept under the rug.
Try this.
In August 2001, one month after the attacks, the FBI learned that two dangerous characters, future hijackers, might have arrived in the U.S., but didn't connect the dots to see that as a priority.
August 2001, FBI headquarters failed to see the significance of the fact that the arrested 20th hijacker, Zakarius Masawi, had taken flight lessons despite desperate bids by field agents to sound the alarm.
And this guy, by the way, I don't care how to take one of these things off or land it.
He just wanted to know how to steer it.
He goes to flight school.
He wants to know how to steer a 747.
He doesn't care to learn how to take one off or land it.
Red flag anybody?
Apparently not.
Now, could some of these dots have been connected absent the Gorelik wall?
There's no way really knowing, but the 9-11 Commission should have examined the issue.
They wanted no part of it, my friends.
And that's why Gorellic was a commissioner.
Quick timeout.
We will be back and continue right after this.
Now, here's a reminder.
And once again, we're going to deal a blow here.
The Bill Clinton legacy effort.
We're going to go back.
The New York Times is saying that the information around 1996 did not define the Osama bin Laden Sudan opportunity.
That's all part of the news again here today, too, because Clinton's out there saying, I bought a note about bin Laden.
Well, I'd have fired every missile.
I would have taken him out.
I'd have gone into Afghanistan a lot sooner.
9-11.
It might not have stopped him, but I'd have done something.
You know, he said this all yesterday.
So our buddies at Newsbacks have turned back the hands of time, as you will.
They have a transcript from Madeleine Albright appearing with Tim Russert on Meet the Depressed.
Here's the nut of it.
Russert.
In May of 1996, under pressure from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the Sudanese government asked Bin Laden to leave.
He returned to Afghanistan permanently.
Was it a mistake to let bin Laden leave Sudan or at least not apprehend him in Qatar on his way to Afghanistan, Albright?
As I understand it, and I was ambassador to the U.N. at the time, was that basically we felt that he was too intricately involved with some of the activities in Sudan, which is a major issue for us.
was better to get him out of there.
Ha.
Yeah, and don't forget now, Clinton said, and I'm going to tell you what, I considered bin Laden a much bigger threat than Bush ever did.
I want you people to listen to me one more time.
I'm going to say this one more time.
I considered bin Laden a far bigger threat than Bush ever did.
He was offered bin Laden's head two or three times by the Sudanese government and turned it down.
And that's what Albright's talking about here with Tim Russert.
She says, obviously, in hindsight, one would wish that some other action had been taken, but for the most part, that was a decision made on the basis of information at that time that he was playing the terrorist game there and that there had in fact been terrorist activity.
There was an attempt on President Mubarak's life that came out of that area.
It was probably better to move bin Laden out.
Russert, well, why not capture him then?
Why not apprehend him while he was refueling in Qatar?
Albright, I can't answer that question.
It didn't want to deal with it.
New York Times today.
State Department says it warned about bin Laden in 96.
The State Department analyst warned the Clinton administration in July 96 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam.
You just heard Madeline Albright said, we had to get him out of Sadan because he was wreaking havoc there.
Big terrorism.
No, the fact is they were told it'd be even worse if he got to Afghanistan.
And the Sudanese said, do you want him before we let him go?
And Clinton twice, three times said no.
All the while now protesting.
Clinton, he's got that biggest spine after the fact of anybody I've ever seen.
This guy's got a package, folks, after the fact.
Let me tell you, I considered bin Laden a far bigger threat than Bush ever did.
If I'd have known about any of this, I want you people to know I would have unleashed all the firepower in my power to go get this guy.
We are dealing continually here with this administration with, it's more than psychobabble.
I mean, this sociopathic folks is what this is.
I mean, and what sweet justice, what sweet justice for Clinton's own house organ, the New York Times, to come forth with the story that basically blows up his contention yesterday that he took bin Laden as a bigger threat than Bush ever did.
And had he known about it, he'd have gotten bin Laden long before 9-11.
Yes, sir, Rebob.
Well, 2020 heinz, that really helps out a lot here.
Of course, it kind of dovetails with CNN and their groveling interview with Clinton last week.
And they did a poll.
Who do you think, if you could you vote for Bill Clinton again to be who would you rather be president right now, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush?
Little viewer website poll or something that they did.
A quick phone call here before we have to go.
Matt in Odessa, Texas.
I'm glad you called, sir.
Welcome.
Rush, mega West Texas Friday Nightlight Football.
Thank you, sir.
It is an honor to speak to you.
Oh, I've waited so long to talk to you.
My main point, my main question is, when are we going to start seeing people that served in the Clinton administration start turning on each other, start pointing fingers?
I wouldn't hold my breath if it hasn't happened now.
This is, in fact, I'm glad you called, and that's a good question here, Matt.
This is one of the things that has perplexed all of us watching this.
No, really, it has.
I mean, Clinton, when the first thing hit about Monica Lewinsky, I mean, here's Madeline Albright and all the women in the White House.
We believe our president.
And then when it was found out he was lying, there was no what occurred during the Clinton administration is, in my lifetime, anyway, unprecedented.
Not one whistleblower, not one defector.
Not one.
We were all wondering, how can this be?
You know, I mean, look at how many, look at how many Richard Clark, look at how many people have tried to nail Bush from the Clinton administration, but not one.
And so to ask, is anyone in the Clinton administration going to end up pointing a finger if a heat gets too close to them?
They all seem to take the fall for these people.
They all, Webb Hubble rolled over two or three times, did he not?
Vince Foster, I mean, he got, you know, he killed himself over all it.
It's a mind-boggling thing.
It is.
This is what's been responsible for the questions.
All these years, what do the Clintons have on these people?
Because this is Washington.
There are whistleblowers everywhere.
If for no other reason want to write books about things and get rich.
Quick time out.
Back with more.
Just a second.
You also have to understand this, folks.
If somebody in the Clinton administration decided to come forward and blow the whistle and point fingers and say, yeah, this happened or that, do you realize what would happen the next day at dawn?
This person would be sent to the gallows and would be hanged by a team of Tom Brokaw, Andrea Mitchell, Aaron Brown, Wolf Blitzer.
You take your pick.
They'd have to draw lots to see which members of the media got to actually preside at the hanging of whatever whistleblower comes out of the Clinton administration.
And you know that a Clinton whistleblower has got to know this.
So I wouldn't look for this to happen, folks.
I just, I really wouldn't.
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