Ah, the Good Old Days.

That's what I was reminded of when I saw former President Bill Clinton shaking a crooked finger in Chris Wallace's face during the now-infamous Sunday interview.

The Good Old Days being the days when Clinton was wagging that same finger at the American people and telling us how he never had sex with that woman.

Lately, Clinton has been pretty mellow.

I guess with the mid-term election coming up, he felt like he ought to give his fellow Democrats a shot in the arm.

Honestly, anyone who thinks Clinton's confrontational response to a mundane question wasn't calculated probably also thinks the U.S. government blew up the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

(Apologies to conspiracy theorists.)

The question Wallace posed - about Osama bin Laden - was: "I understand that hindsight is always 20/20, but the question is, why didn't you connect the dots and put him out of business?"

Clinton got really agitated and accused Wallace and Fox News of a "conservative hit job." He said Wallace never asked tough questions of W or his administration.

One thing that strikes me as odd is all the hubbub.

What Clinton did or didn't do is a matter of settled, public record. It's all been hashed out by the 9/11 Commission.

Want a copy? Go here and download it - www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

It's fascinating reading. Granted, the thing runs to 585 pages, but it pretty much tells you everything you ever wanted to know about 9/11.

We don't have to guess who did what about bin Laden. The commission spells it out in black and white.

And the commission was fully bipartisan, including people like former Indiana Democrat Congressmen Tim Roemer and Lee Hamilton, so it's not some hyped-up attack piece or government coverup.

(Again, apologies to conspiracy theorists.)

Clinton to Wallace: "I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him (bin Laden)."

The 9/11 Commission Report: "In February 1999, another draft Memorandum of Notification went to President Clinton. It asked him to allow the CIA to give exactly the same guidance to the Northern Alliance as he had given the tribals: That they could kill bin Laden if a successful capture operation was not feasible. On this occasion, however, President Clinton crossed out key language he had approved in December and inserted more ambiguous language. No one we interviewed could shed light on why the President did this. President Clinton told the commission that he had no recollection of why he rewrote the language.

The result was that on one hand, policymakers in the Clinton administration, including Clinton himself and his national security adviser, told the 9/11 committee that the president's intent regarding covert action against bin Laden was clear. He wanted him dead.

Yet CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 committee the CIA was authorized to kill bin Laden only in the context of a capture operation. "We always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him," Tenet told the committee.

Ah, the confusion of bureaucracy.

Clinton to Wallace: "But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now."

It is true that he tried. And I don't think anyone ever disputed the fact that Clinton and his administration tried to get bin Laden. Problem is, they didn't try very well.

The 9/11 Commission Report: "It was in Kandahar that perhaps the last, and most likely the best, opportunity arose for targeting bin Laden with cruise missiles before 9/11. In May, 1999, CIA assets in Afghanistan reported on bin Laden's location in and around Kandahar over the course of five days and nights. The reporting was very detailed and came from several sources. 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 on bin Laden in Afghanistan would meet the standard. Communications were all good and the cruise missiles were ready. 'This was in our strike zone,' a senior military officer said. 'It was a fat pitch, a home run.' He expected missiles to fly. When the decision came back that they should stand down, not shoot, the officer said, 'we all just slumped.' He told us he knew of no one at the Pentagon or the CIA who thought it was a bad gamble. Bin Laden 'should have been a dead man' that night, he said.

"Working-level CIA officials agreed. ... The bin Laden unit chief wrote: 'having a chance to get bin Laden three times in 36 hours and foregoing the chance each time has made me a bit angry.

"Working-level CIA officials were told by their managers that the strikes were not ordered because the military doubted the intelligence and worried about collateral damage. ... But the military official quoted earlier told the commission that the Pentagon was willing to act. He told the commission that Tenet assessed the chance of the intelligence being accurate as 50-50 and the officer believed Tenet's assessment was key to the decision.

"Tenet told us he does not remember any details about this episode... The story is further complicated by Tenet's absence from the critical principals meeting on this strike. (He was apparently out of town.)"

Again, bureaucracy and confusion.

And as for Clinton's characterization that W's administration did little about terrorism, well that's a little more than overstated.

Fact is, as one peruses the report, it becomes clear W's administration was at least as aggressive as Clinton's in the realm of terror policy. But both administrations had lots of meetings and talked about things and made plans but never really did anything.

From the report: "The al-Qaida presidential directive was revised in the summer of 2001. After months of continuing the previous administration's policy, Richard Armitage told the commission he and Colin Powell were bringing the State Department to a policy of overthrowing the Taliban. From his point of view, once the United States made the commitment to arm the Northern Alliance, even covertly, it was taking action to initiate regime change and it should give those opponents the strength to achieve complete victory.

"The draft included a section directing secretary Rumsfeld to develop contingency plans to attack both al-Qaida and Taliban targets in Afghanistan."

Richard Clarke, the highly touted terrorism czar that Clinton talked about, didn't think either administration was aggressive enough. For years, he tried to persuade both administrations to get serious about al-Qaida. Neither administration did.

The most chilling portion of the 9/11 Commission Report, was an impassioned personal note Clarke sent to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, just a week before 9/11.

Clarke asked in the memo, "Are we serious about dealing with the al Qaida threat? Is al Qaida a big deal? ... Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG (counterterrorism security group) has not succeeded in stoping al-Qaida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S." Clarke couldn't understand "why we continue to allow the existence of large scale al-Qaida bases where we know people are being trained to kill Americans."

And then this:

"You are left with a modest effort to swat flies, to try to prevent specific al-Qaida attacks by using intelligence to detect them, a friendly governments' police and intelligence officers to stop them. You are left waiting for the big attack with lots of casualties, after which some major U.S. retaliation will be in order."

How prophetic.

After boring through about a hundred pages of the report it becomes apparent to a casual reader that both administrations thought and talked a great deal about killing bin Laden, dismantling al-Qaida and thwarting terrorism.

But one also gets the sense that the massive bureaucracy and diversity of opinions in government stood in the way of actually getting anything done. [[In-content Ad]]