By never again watching his films.

And telling him why via email.

I sure will.

Comment by Jay — October 16, 2006 @ 9:11 pm

Couldn’t of said it better myself! :^)

Correct. Jawbreaker criticises Clinton’s insistance on requiring the CIA to come up with “jury-proof” evidence of guilt before he would respond to terrorist attacks.

As you made many, many references to following Clinton’s Fox news interview, Clinton pointed out the FBI did not certify that al Qaeda was behind the Cole attack until Feb-01. This however doesn’t change the fact that th Cole attack was a successful 2nd attempt at the same attack that al Qaeda attempted to carry out earlier and that intel knew an al Qaeda attack was pending the week it occurred.

By the same standard of proof the Lebanese would still be waiting for confirmation on who flattened all their buildings in July…. after Israel said they were going to flatten them and their first attempt failed.
This is a valid criticism.

You will note that it stops short of the criticism other CIA officers have levelled, particularly in regard to decisions not to kill OBL due to policial fall out and hurting relations with “friendly” princes who happened to be hanging out with OBL at the time.

Would you feel differently about the Bush administration’s failure to pull the trigger on OBL in Tora Bora if it was because some Pakistani officials were with him at the time and he didn’t want to kill these “friends” ?

Because that’s why Clinton is criticised.

While Bernsten describes how he and his cohorts were stunningly told to stand down when they had Bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, he writes approvingly of President George W. Bush’s handling of the invasion.

Yes he does fault one aspect of that campaign and praise the other. This is because the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

The same could be said about Iraq in that the invasion was planned and executed very well but the post-invasion wasn’t planned at all and executed horrifically badly.

If your brain cannot comprehend both aspects of assessments such as these then it can’t. That’s your problem though, not Bernsten’s.

The invasion of Afghanistan and overthrow of the Taliban was one of the stand-out successes of US forces in the past century and Bush deserves absolute credit for deciding to task this to the CIA instead of the military.

The evidence of this success being reinforced by the examples of successful vs unsuccessful post-invasion operations of special forces vs army infantry in Iraq in regard to working with local inhabitants to stem off a domestic insurgency.

On the other hand, the chain of command and the specific tactical decisions which held back resources in Tora Bora which had a solid bead on OBL should indeed see the same criticism that Clinton’s chain of command has seen for doing the same thing in the same country during the 90’s.

One wonders why Judd of Thinkprogress decided to single out these assessments to inform his readers of who Bernsten is.

These assessments are quite easily understood, undeniable and salient assessments of US executive successes and failures in addressing Islamic militants from a man who has spent a couple of decades dedicating his life to that task rather than a political party or ideology.

The only way this makes any sense is if Judd assumes his readers don’t know or care enough about this history to simply misinterpret these assessments as contradictory or ideologically based.
Or more likely, that he needs assume nothing and knows that questioning what they are told to think, isn’t something Thinkprogress readers do.

I saw Stone and David Corn speak here in Los Angeles a year or two ago, and Stone was BY FAR the more alert to the situation, while Corn was still fostering the supposed justification for the illegal Iraq invasion.

Stone seemed to be aware of the facts — but since that time, maybe Bill Clinton convinced him to hide his shame in a sheepskin like Bill does.

Either that, or they killed his poodle and left the head in his bed.

Other people are taking risks in the streets protesting this bs, but Stone is apparently too busy making money on LIES.

I wasn’t a Deaniac. Wesley Clark was more my type of candidate, as he had a long term plan to rehabilitate much of the country’s educational, manufacturing and electrical infrastructure among many other ideas. But in one debate Dean stunned me. He wa…

Bill – you are absolutely right about that. Wonder if there will be any history about how daddy Bush helped to provide weapons to Osama.

These days…

…either you’re with us…

…or “ag’in” us…

…REALLY…