Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged former President Clinton's claim that he did more than many of his conservative critics to pursue al-Qaida, saying in an interview published Tuesday that the Bush administration aggressively pursued the group even before the 9/11 attacks.
"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice said
"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," she said.
Rice also took exception to Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.
"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida,"
And it looks like some members of Clinton's own administration back Rice:
Former advisers ridiculed ex-President Bill Clinton yesterday for saying he had a plan to invade Afghanistan, topple the Taliban and kill Osama Bin Laden after jihadists nearly sank the destroyer Cole.
"The only order we got from [Clinton] after the Cole was to put together a target list for air attacks," said Michael Scheuer, who led the CIA's hunt for Osama Bin Laden under Clinton.
Fran Townsend, a former top intelligence adviser in Clinton's Justice Department and now Bush's anti-terror czar, rolled her eyes when asked about Clinton's invasion plan.
"There were lots of things that seemed new" in Clinton's recollections on Fox, Townsend said.
a retired senior FBI official agreed that they knew almost immediately that Al Qaeda was behind the Cole bombing. "We all said this was definitely Bin Laden," the ex-FBI official said.
Two sources that Clinton repeatedly cited in the Fox interview - the 9/11 commission report and Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" - never mention plans to invade Afghanistan.
