Mike Meehan, the Orlando businessman who paid to put up a billboard displaying the burning World Trade Center next to the words “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat,” appeared on CNN’s American Morning where he argued that the attacks of 9/11 could have been prevented had a Republican been in the White House in the late 1990s. Watch it:
Meehan has his facts wrong. During the Clinton years, al-Qaeda training sites in Afghanistan were targeted by the U.S. military, missing Osama bin Laden by just hours. The federal anti-terrorism budget tripled under Clinton, who also consistently pressed for antiterrorism legislation, even with a Congress hostile to such measures. The common right-wing myth — parroted here by Meehan — that the Clinton administration had bin Laden “in their hands” is false. In contrast, for the first nine months of the Bush administration terrorism wasn’t seen as an “urgent issue.”
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