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Fairness, Sen. Paul
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Last week Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky declared Hillary Clinton "culpable" in the Benghazi attack, which killed four Americans. If president, he said, he would have fired her.
If only Mr. Paul had been at the hearings on the 2001 attack in which al-Qaida airplane hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people. Those hearings revealed intelligence sources, CIA and FBI included, had information involving several of the hijackers' activities, flight lessons included, in Florida, Arizona and Minnesota. They also disclosed a written Aug. 6, 2001, national security briefing to a vacationing President George W. Bush from security adviser Richard Clarke headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." President Bush stayed on vacation through Labor Day, and he finally held the national security meeting on al-Qaida, which Mr. Clarke had been requesting for months, a few days before the final attack.
We might well have thwarted that attack had President Bush held the requested meeting much earlier, or if he had at least cut his vacation short and held an emergency inter-agency meeting, which might have pulled the disparate information together in time to prevent the attack and save all those people.
Sen. Paul, fair-minded man that he is, would have held President Bush 750 times more culpable than Ms. Clinton, since nearly 750 more people died in 2001, and, he would have moved to impeach President Bush 750 times. After all, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
FRANK FASCIANO
Wilkins
First Published January 31, 2013 12:00 am
