IBD on Bill Clinton’s failure to deal with Al Qaeda and to kill Osama when he had the chance/s.

…Michael Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who led the Osama bin Laden unit of the Counterterrorism Center from 1996 through 1999, and was Special Advisor to it from 2001 until he left the agency in 2004. He is the author of two books on the war on terror.

In a July 4, 2006, Op-Ed in the Washington Times, Scheuer dismisses former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s memoir on the hunt for bin Laden.

Speaking of “Mr. Clinton’s failure to capture or kill bin Laden on any of the eight to 10 chances afforded by CIA reporting, Mr. Clarke never mentions that President Bush had no chances to kill bin Laden before Sept. 11 and leaves readers with the false impression that he, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, did their best to end the bin Laden threat.”

That impression continued with Brian Williams’ fawning “Rock Center” report.

As Clinton guru Dick Morris relates, a first missed opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden came in February 1998, when “Clinton’s aides scuttled a CIA plot that had been eight months in the planning to kidnap Osama.”

The plan would have used Afghan tribesmen to capture the al-Qaida leader who would then have been brought to the U.S. for trial.

Another chance came on Aug. 20, 1998, in the famous “wag the dog” attack at the height of l’affaire Lewinsky, when cruise missiles were actually fired at a bin Laden encampment in Afghanistan.

Problem was, Clinton ordered that the Pakistanis be informed of the attack, lest they believed the cruise missile in their air space were fired by India, which didn’t have any cruise missiles.

The news, of course, was leaked and bin Laden fled.

Yet another missed opportunity came in May 1999 when the CIA reported that bin Laden would be in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for five days. As the 9/11 Commission report said: “If this intelligence was not ‘actionable,’ working-level officials said at the time and today, it was hard for them to imagine how any intelligence could meet that standard.”

It was the Clinton administration that could have put Osama bin Laden out of commission before 9/11. It was under the Clinton administration that Americans were killed by terrorists on three continents without a meaningful response.

It was under Bill Clinton that we left Somalia in disgrace after dead Americans were dragged through the streets, giving Osama all the encouragement and proof of our lack of will he needed.

Bernard Goldberg

I have good news and bad news. Actually, I don’t. What I have is the appearance of good news and the reality of bad news.

First what looks like the good new: The unemployment rate has dropped a tenth of a percentage point to 8.1. Now the bad news: Some of the decline has resulted from people leaving the work force, many of them frustrated because they haven’t been able to find a job in a very long time.

Here’s more bad news. The economy generated a measly 115,000 jobs in April instead of the expected 168,000. This could mean more of the same old sluggish economy ahead.

And here’s something you won’t hear from the White House: In April, the percentage of adults working or looking for work fell to the lowest level in more than 30 years. So if you add back all the people who have stopped looking for work you get a real unemployment rate of almost 15 percent.

Despite those numbers, as he campaigns for re-election, we can expect President Obama to take credit for the lower unemployment rate, leaving out the other inconvenient stuff — and counting on the less sophisticated among us to buy his story. But by and large the president won’t be running on his record of turning the crummy economy around, mainly because he hasn’t, and too many voters know it.

More than anything else, this president who once vowed to bring us together will spend his time trying to tear us apart, to split us into groups and then pit us against each other. At his party’s convention four years ago, he seduced the nation by so eloquently telling us there is “not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” So much for soaring rhetoric. That was then.

This time around Mr. Obama will be running as the war president. There is the war on women and the war on minorities and the war on college kids and the war on the wealthy. They’re all phony wars, of course, but Mr. Obama is counting on the votes of people who don’t really pay attention…

Jim Geraghty from the Morning Jolt

Here’s why the debt is a foreign-policy issue: As long as we owe another country an ungodly sum of money, we have much less leverage to get them to do what we want.

So I understand why Republicans are doing this:

Republican lawmakers on Thursday assailed the Obama administration’s handling of human rights activist Chen Guangcheng.

A State Department deal ensuring that Chen would be able to remain safely in China quickly unraveled Wednesday after Chen had second thoughts and pleaded for President Obama to let him into the United States.

The change of heart appears to have taken place after Chinese police surrounded Chen in his hospital room after he left the embassy to get treated for injuries sustained during his escape from house arrest 10 days ago.

“It should have been obvious to U.S. officials all along that there is no way to guarantee Mr. Chen’s safety so long as he is within reach of the Chinese police state,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said in a statement. “The U.S. should not have given in to Chinese pressure for Chen to be taken out of the safety of the U.S. embassy.”

Separately, Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) — a potential running mate for Mitt Romney — and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) jointly called on Obama to grant Chen and his family political asylum in the United States, a move that’s certain to upset the Chinese government. The Chinese foreign ministry has asked for a formal apology from the United States for harboring Chen at the embassy.

But the fact is that the United States has limited leverage here, unless we really want to escalate a conflict with our creditors, who already see us as weak. Heck, if we’re as financially dependent upon their lending as it appears sometimes, we probably are as weak as they think we are.

The Obama administration pushed back Thursday evening on the notion that U.S. diplomats abandoned Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng when they let him leave the Beijing embassy on Wednesday.

A senior administration official provided The Hill with a detailed account of the past two days that shows U.S. officials were either at Chen’s side or in touch with the activist the whole time.

“The bottom line is that there’s a narrative out there that is misconstrued,” said the senior administration official, who wouldn’t go on the record because of the sensitivity of the situation. “That’s just not true and it’s something that even Chen appears to be rectifying.”

Chinese police have since surrounded the hospital where Chen now is, and U.S. officials have not been able to see him since they left.

“I want to meet with Secretary (of State Hillary) Clinton,” Chen said Thursday in a surprise phone call during an emergency hearing called by Rep. Chris Smith (R-Calif.). “I hope I can get more help from her. I also want to thank her face to face.”

The senior administration official said that on Wednesday, U.S. officials in China met Chen’s wife and children and accompanied them to the hospital. During that time Chen’s wife spoke by phone with Chen, who was still at the embassy.

Should we go to the mattresses for Chen? It is still a source of pride that when human-rights activists and those who are fighting for noble causes are in their most desperate hour, they turn to the United States of America. If there’s a way to get him and his family out of the country safely, we ought to pursue that path. But right now, China has him, and bad decisions in our economic, foreign, and national-security policies have left us with smaller carrots and smaller sticks.

The great Kirsten Powers makes the argument that we are on the verge of losing our reputation as a beacon of freedom throughout the world:

Chai Ling, a former Tiananmen Square leader who escaped China in a cargo box, told me in an interview: “The U.S. Embassy wanted this ‘distraction’ to go away so they could get on with their business [of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to China].” In other words, trade and economic deals couldn’t be hampered by a human-rights nuisance. In Ling’s testimony before Congress today on behalf of her organization All Girls Allowed, which fights China’s one-child policy, she called America’s treatment of Chen “shameful.”

“Chen is revered and so loved in China,” Reggie Littlejohn, founder of the China-focused human-rights group Women Without Frontiers, told me. “When he got into embassy, so many people felt he was safe and they really felt it was the safest place in China. So now the embassy has done this and it has really shaken people’s trust in the U.S. We really completely botched it.”

Sigh.