By Paul Sperry Antiwar.com.
“In its miniseries about the missteps that led to 9/11, ABC spared not only Bill Clinton but also George W. Bush. Our hawkish War President had almost nine months to respond to the USS Cole attack and did nothing, even as his security staff fired off memo after memo fingering Osama bin Laden and urging retaliation.Clinton claims, feebly, that he didn’t have enough evidence to pin the October 2000 attack on bin Laden. But Bush certainly did.
On March 2, 2001, then-senior White House counterterrorism official Roger Cressey sent a memo to then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice relaying intelligence that bin Laden had gloated about the attack on the Cole in a poem he read at his son’s wedding. “BIN LADEN on the USS COLE” was the title of the urgent memo.
But Rice couldn’t be bothered with stuff that happened on Clinton’s watch.
Undeterred, Cressey a few weeks later followed up with Rice’s deputy Steve Hadley. He wrote, “We know all we need to about who did the attack to make a policy decision.” His March 22 email