Another Clinton-Era Terrorism Victory!

Following up on this news that the State Department warned Clinton in '96 that letting bin Laden escape to Afghanistan would be extremely bad, there's now news that the Clinton administration held secret meetings with the Taliban to try to get bin Laden assassinated or expelled from Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- During secret meetings with U.S. officials in 1998, top Taliban officials discussed assassinating or expelling Osama bin Laden in response to al Qaeda's deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, according to State Department documents.

The newly declassified documents, posted Thursday on the National Archives Web site, provide a fascinating glimpse into U.S. diplomacy exerted on Afghanistan's ruling Taliban -- a regime officially unrecognized by Washington -- nearly three years before the September 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

According to the documents, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, Alan Eastham Jr., met with Wakil Ahmed, a close aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, in November and December 1998. That was just months after the August al Qaeda attacks that killed more than 200 people at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

So not only did Clinton drop the ball on having bin Laden handed to him by the Sudanese government, which we already knew, but he and his underlings unsuccessfully worked to have bin Laden assassinated?

I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, the solution to terrorism in a Gore or Kerry White House: do nothing, accomplish nothing, leave it for the next guy to worry about. It's this kind of cockamamie political bullshit that led me to thank my Maker when President Bush was elected, and to thank Him again when President Bush was re-elected. President Bush has shown us for nearly five years that he doesn't look for short term solutions to long term problems, even if the solutions he finds aren't universally or immediately popular.

If any of you can read these articles and continue disbelieving that Bill Clinton was the poster boy for dereliction of duty, then you're not paying close enough attention.