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[Tyrone Slothrop]

If this is the best you can do, throw in the towel now.

Despite being handpicked by Mr. Clinton to head the CIA, the president did not meet even once with Mr. Woolsey privately about any security issues during his first two years in office.

Note how the word "privately" is used as a qualifier to give an misleading impression. So what if they didn't meet privately?

After Osama bin Laden's attack on hotels housing U.S. Marines in Yemen in December 1992 and the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, it was clear that the United States was being targeted by terrorists.

Other sources, like Clarke's book and Ghost Wars make it clear that Clinton understood this as well as anyone. In fact, maybe better than Woolsey, whose primary effort during this time was to redirect resources towards signals intelligence -- something that helps us tremendously with Russia and China, but not so much with Al Qaeda.


Because of the new threat, Mr. Woolsey went out of his way to be accessible to the new president. In fact, he made the trip from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to the White House every day for the president's intelligence briefing, for which Mr. Woolsey's staff had prepared detailed reports.


Whoop de do. Nothing here so far.

It had been the habit of previous presidents to welcome the CIA director into the Oval Office for the briefings so that complex issues could be clarified and advice given. Mr. Clinton, however, left Mr. Woolsey cooling his heels outside in the hall each time.

Clinton was notoriously late. BFD.

The humiliating treatment of the nation's top intelligence expert reflected Mr. Clinton's cavalier lack of respect for the dangers facing the world's only superpower.

There's no humiliation here. Clinton was late for everything, as everyone in D.C. well know. Hell, he was behind schedule at a book-signing in Berkeley the other day, but no one was in the paper saying they were humiliated by it. Although it should be noted that Woolsey used his personality to piss off all sorts of people, including the Republicans in Congress responsible for his budget.

The impertinence of the White House toward Mr. Woolsey reached the level of casting the CIA director as an object of ridicule. As Mr. Miniter reports: "When a small plane accidentally crashed on the White House lawn in 1994, West Wing staffers joked that it was Woolsey trying to see the president."

Res ipsa loquitur indeed.

The planes that crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 — and the fact that the attacks came as a total surprise to America's intelligence community — were made vastly more likely by Mr. Clinton's policy of neglect toward intelligence officers and their role in defending the nation.

I guess the great thing about The Washington Times is that even talentless hacks who can't be troubled to put together a hit piece on Clinton that follows logically from one sentence to the next get a salary and a roof over their heads so that they're aren't roaming the streets and bothering tourists. God bless America, a land of opportunity for all of us, even megalomaniacal Korean religious figures with enough money to buy their own printing presses. Nice job bolding some of these quotes -- it tends to draw attention away from the dreck surrounding them.