RUSH: Kathleen in Canton, Michigan, welcome to the EIB. Are you 12 years old, am I reading that right?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Hi, Kathleen, well, it’s great to have you with us today.
CALLER: I have a question — it’s great to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: My question is, when Clinton was in power, there were multiple terrorist attacks on the United States. Why didn’t he try and stop them?
RUSH: Well, they did in their own way. They tried to use the legal system, but they were never really serious about doing anything about preventing future attacks. They never responded militarily to attacks, until late in the term, second term, during the impeachment scandals. I’ll tell you what, I have to ask you to hold on, I misread the clock when I took your call and I thought I had a minute more than I do. Can you hold on for a couple of minutes?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Good, thank you, because I’ll be happy to try to explain this to you. Twelve years old from Canton, Michigan. You’re not in school today?
CALLER: Home-schooled.
RUSH: Oh. Okay. Home-schooled. Explains a lot.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
All right, back to Kathleen, 12-year-old Kathleen in Canton, Michigan. Yours is actually a very good question. Why didn’t the Clintons do anything about terrorism when there were attacks on this country during both terms of the Clinton presidency. But before I answer that, I’m curious, where did this question come from in your mind? What have you been doing lately, studying, that’s spawned this question today?
CALLER: Well, I’ve been doing a lot in my history book and I was reading about Clinton and how there were some terrorist attacks but they didn’t say exactly what they did about them.
RUSH: Well, the administration did a couple of things. The first World Trade Center attack in 1993, there was not much done on that. However, you may have read about, I don’t know, sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. He’s an Egyptian sheik, his nickname is the blind sheik and he and some cronies, one of whom I think was involved in the ’93 blast, evolved a plan to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and some tunnels and so forth. He and one of his buddies, Ramzi Yousef, were prosecuted by the US attorney’s office in Manhattan and guilty verdicts were secured, and both are in jail for life. So the Clinton administration, Kathleen, looked at terrorism as a criminal enterprise, and they dealt with it legally. But they did a couple of things in the process that created real, real havoc. In the process of using the legal system, you have to impanel grand juries to hear evidence, and the evidence that was presented, much of it was classified intelligence data.
Now, grand jury testimony is secret. It cannot be revealed. It cannot be published. It cannot be legally released to anybody, including other intelligence agencies. So, as an example, if the FBI is called in to the grand jury to give evidence against a potential terrorist, then the CIA and nobody else could know about it, and this was referred to as ‘the wall’ that was built by the Clinton administration and associate attorney general by the name of Jamie Gorelick that actually prevented intelligence agencies in the government from learning what each other knew, since terrorism was being prosecuted legally rather than fought on battlefields on the home grounds of terrorists. Now, why was this? Well, who knows. It probably was just the fact that the Clinton people are Democrats and did not have a serious world view of terrorism, much like Democrats have today.
John Edwards in his debate, the press conference performance last week, (paraphrased) ‘There’s really no war on terror. Terrorism is just something that happens, it’s out there. We gotta be prepared to deal with it, but to go to war against them is silly because there isn’t one and we ought not convince the American people.’ They’re trying to create an atmosphere people call a 9/10 atmosphere where we can pretend that life in America is just as it was before 9/11. Well, in doing that we had the World Trade Center attacks. We had Americans killed all over the world in Al-Qaeda bombings. One of the popular theories to explain why the Clinton administration didn’t do anything about it, other than legally, which very few people saw. But if you go to war or if you respond to terrorist attacks militarily, everybody is going to see that, and the Clinton administration, not big fans of the military. The military to them was a social playground, where they could try the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, women in combat, gays in combat, and this sort of thing.
The theory is that the Clinton administration just didn’t want to risk the high approval they had, and going to war would certainly do that, they thought. So those are the two primary reasons. The Clinton administration had a totally different agenda, and that was to produce a legacy of eight years of bliss, nonconfrontation, and harmony. The Soviet Union had just gone kaput, we had the peace dividend and they didn’t want to tackle any difficult issue that might threaten that legacy or that 65% approval rating that they had. The only time Clinton actually did military strikes involving Al-Qaeda was in ’98 when he launched some missiles into empty camps. It was ’98 and ’99, Kathleen, that he blew up an office building on a Saturday night in Baghdad. I think the janitor was killed. But nothing serious, after rattling some cages. In fact, after 9/11 happened, there were some former Clinton administration officials lamenting that if it was going to happen, why couldn’t it have happened during Clinton’s presidency so that he could have had something around which to forge greatness? Those are the best theories to answer your question. This call was obviously a home school assignment, wasn’t it?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: No? Well, it served a purpose of being a home school assignment nevertheless. Does that help you?
CALLER: Yes, it does.
RUSH: Any other questions? Because I’m a font of answers.
CALLER: Not really, but you’re coming to Michigan on Thursday, and I will be there.
RUSH: You will? You’re going to be in the audience?
CALLER: Yes, I will.
RUSH: Well, terrific. Well, I’m glad. I’m glad to know this, too. And I’m glad that you’re going to be there. You coming with your mom and dad?
CALLER: No, just my mom.
RUSH: Just your mom. Okay. Well, I hope you have a good time. I’ll go out of my way to make sure that you do.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: Okay. That’s Kathleen from — yeah, by the way, programming note, I will not be here Thursday, folks. I gotta fly to Detroit Thursday morning. I’ve got a Rush to Excellence performance that night for our affiliate there, WJR, 2500 people. They sold it out in half an hour, I think they told me. I’m meeting with some of our sponsors that are headquartered in Detroit during the day, but we’ll be back here on Friday.