December 26, 2006
Merry Christmas from Congress (by guest blogger Julia)
They say that anger is a difficult emotion to sustain, and I have found this to be true. In recent years I've no longer been feeling the fury and indignation that Bill Clinton deserves me to feel when I see his face.
And so I'm no longer able to keep fresh the list of his countless, aggressive betrayals against this country and the free world, which threaten to go unpunished because of my and everyone else's Clinton fatigue.
Enter the to-be-released-this-week Congressional review of a potentially Clinton-mandated FBI coverup in the investigation of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
From the AP on Christmas Eve:
The FBI failed to fully investigate information suggesting other suspects may have helped Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, allowing questions to linger more than a decade after the deadly attack, a congressional inquiry concludes....The report [by the House International Relations investigative subcommittee] also sharply criticizes the FBI for failing to be curious enough to pursue credible information that foreign or U.S. citizens may have had contact with Nichols or McVeigh and could have assisted their plot.
...
[California Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher's subcommittee saved its sharpest words for the Justice Department, saying officials there exhibited a mindset of thwarting congressional oversight and did not assist the investigation fully.
...
The subcommittee concludes the Justice Department should not have rushed to execute McVeigh in 2001 after he dropped his court appeals, and officials should have made more efforts to interview and question him about evidence suggesting he might have gotten help from other people who remain unpunished.The former lead FBI agent in the case, Dan Defenbaugh, told AP a few years ago he was trying to get one last interview with McVeigh to go over unanswered questions in the case but could not get it arranged before McVeigh was executed.
We may find that, as a frontman and fall guy who opted for execution over appeals, McVeigh was effectively the first American suicide bomber.
Rohrabacher's report cites several leads the subcommittee believes were not fully investigated, including:...Witness accounts that another man was seen with McVeigh around the time of the bombing. The FBI originally looked for another suspect it named John Doe 2, even providing a sketch, but abruptly dropped that line of inquiry. The subcommittee concludes that decision was a mistake.
...Phone record and witness testimony that persons associated with Middle Eastern terrorism in the Philippines may have had contact with Nichols, and that Nichols took a book about explosives to the Philippines. The FBI and Filipino police spent months investigating such a connection, but ruled it out.
Information from a former TV reporter concerning an Iraqi national who was in Oklahoma around the time of the bombing.
Funny thing: a huge attack during the Clinton administration by one or two white nationalists -- and not even a whisper from the conspiracy theorists of a possible coverup; an attack under George W. Bush by 19 Islamists --- and some sort of definite coverup is assumed.
One hopes that my frustration over my unsustainable anger at Bill Clinton will one day become moot. That'll be the day that -- even if it takes a decade or more -- Clinton will finally be behind bars. And I will no longer have to explain to ignoramuses which president, between Bill Clinton and George Bush, is the criminal.
That is, as long as Congress doesn't decide to also "abruptly drop that line of inquiry" when it threatens to reveal a truth too ugly to stomach.
Posted by julia at December 26, 2006 03:30 AM | TrackBackTechnorati Tags:
You're correct. McVeigh's associations as a registered Republican and NRA member should definitely have been followed up.
Oh, if only there had been a different president than Clinton in office in the five months before McVeigh was executed, then something could have been done to investigate all this.
Posted by: Michael at December 26, 2006 09:57 AMMichael, I believe Julia is talking about a Clinton Justice Department that may or may not have screwed up royally. If you're accusing someone of being irrationally angry and obsessed with a President, well, Julia at least backs her case up with salient data.
McVeigh spoke English too. Guess I should switch to Spanish, in order to sever all association....
Posted by: Mark Poling at December 26, 2006 10:53 AMYes. Now you're seeing the point.
On the other issue:
Go ahead and hate Clinton. He did some bad things. I'm just weary of how so many in the blogosphere blame him for things that happened after he left office. I was reading some blogger's description of Clinton-era mistakes recently, and he dealt with the September 11 attacks something like this: "Clinton has a chance to kill bin Laden, but doesn't. Shortly after Clinton leaves office, Islamofascist terrorists crash jet liners into the World Trade Center, killing 3000."
This approach, of course, absolves the president who was in office at the time (and had been for eight months, remember) of all responsibility for anything.
Clinton is still being blamed for stuff. Conservatives have controlled all three branches of government for years now. How powerful is Clinton, anyway? Is he the Allbeing, Master of Time, Space and Dimension? He stopped being president over five years ago; isn't it time to move on?
If the Clinton Justice Department screwed up with the McVeigh thing, then the Bush Justice Department should have done something about it. There was time. If they didn't, then they screwed up, too.
This seems to me to be a huge difference between the approaches the Right and the Left have toward politics: the Right usually seems to say, "Listen: if it's our guy, then he's NEVER WRONG. If it's their guy, then he's NEVER RIGHT." The Left more often says, "Yeah, they're all shmoes and buffoons, but I'm going to go with this buffoon over that one because I like his/her ideas a little more."
An example: if you've been reading the commentary following the November elections, you may have noticed that the Right portrays the ascendency of the Democrats as the harbinger of the End Times; if you believe conservative bloggers, there is not one single solitary competent Democratic lawmaker. Ever one of them is stupid, or a traitor, or evil, or whatever. Really? Every. Single. One? And every single Republican is a Rhodes scholar saint, awaiting only a halo to be affixed?
That's just going overboard. People who take that approach have little or no credibility with me, for what that's worth. There are good and bad people on either side of the aisle.
Also: the idea that conspiracy theorists have never said anything about this is wrong. I've been hearing about the "bomber who got away" for years.
Posted by: Michael at December 26, 2006 11:30 AMYes. Now you're seeing the point.
On the other issue:
Go ahead and hate Clinton. He did some bad things. I'm just weary of how so many in the blogosphere blame him for things that happened after he left office. I was reading some blogger's description of Clinton-era mistakes recently, and he dealt with the September 11 attacks something like this: "Clinton has a chance to kill bin Laden, but doesn't. Shortly after Clinton leaves office, Islamofascist terrorists crash jet liners into the World Trade Center, killing 3000."
This approach, of course, absolves the president who was in office at the time (and had been for eight months, remember) of all responsibility for anything.
Clinton is still being blamed for stuff. Conservatives have controlled all three branches of government for years now. How powerful is Clinton, anyway? Is he the Allbeing, Master of Time, Space and Dimension? He stopped being president over five years ago; isn't it time to move on?
If the Clinton Justice Department screwed up with the McVeigh thing, then the Bush Justice Department should have done something about it. There was time. If they didn't, then they screwed up, too.
This seems to me to be a huge difference between the approaches the Right and the Left have toward politics: the Right usually seems to say, "Listen: if it's our guy, then he's NEVER WRONG. If it's their guy, then he's NEVER RIGHT." The Left more often says, "Yeah, they're all shmoes and buffoons, but I'm going to go with this buffoon over that one because I like his/her ideas a little more."
An example: if you've been reading the commentary following the November elections, you may have noticed that the Right portrays the ascendency of the Democrats as the harbinger of the End Times; if you believe conservative bloggers, there is not one single solitary competent Democratic lawmaker. Ever one of them is stupid, or a traitor, or evil, or whatever. Really? Every. Single. One? And every single Republican is a Rhodes scholar saint, awaiting only a halo to be affixed?
That's just going overboard. People who take that approach have little or no credibility with me, for what that's worth. There are good and bad people on either side of the aisle.
Also: the idea that conspiracy theorists have never said anything about this is wrong. I've been hearing about the "bomber who got away" for years.
Posted by: Michael at December 26, 2006 11:31 AM
