Cheney: Clinton 'Totally Ineffective' in Terror War

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that the Clinton administration's strategy for dealing with the al-Qaida threat under the stewardship of terrorism czar Richard Clarke was "totally ineffective."

"The only thing I can say about Dick Clarke," Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh, "is he was here throughout those eight years going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in '98 when the embassies were hit in east Africa, in 2000 when the USS Cole was hit.

"And the question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?"

Cheney said that when President Bush took office, he did not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s.

"The fact is what the president did not want to do is to have an ineffective response with respect to al-Qaida, and we felt up till that point much of what had been done vis-à-vis al-Qaida had been totally ineffective."

Without mentioning Clinton by name, the vice president complained that the previous administration's August 1998 cruise missile attack on bin Laden's encampment in Khost, Afghanistan, "basically didn't hit anything, and it made the U.S. look weak and ineffective."

Bush, he said, "wanted a far more effective policy for trying to deal with that, and that process was in motion throughout the spring [of 2001]."

As for Clarke's motivations, Cheney said that his attack on the White House was likely rooted in personal animosity toward National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who had demoted him to chief of cybersecurity.

"I suppose he may have a grudge to bear there since he probably wanted a more prominent position than she was prepared to give him," he told Limbaugh.

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