Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed ... (ISBN 1400101077)

This book should scare anyone:
This is the first book I have read by Miniter. I have followed foriegn policy and terrorism since the late 70's. I felt I knew quite a bit of what there was to know about terrorism and foriegn policy but this book should scare anyone. I think it is illustrative of some of the depths of depravity terrorists will descend to and how they drag those without the intestinal fortitude to stand up to them down with them. You will hear a lot of hand wringers and people without the stomach to fight the war on terrorism say a lot of things that are either wholly partisan, hateful or just plain inaccurate about this book. Read it, look at the footnotes, look at the references and decide for yourself. I think Miniter nailed it, much as I hate that saying. Bill Clinton was concerned about terrorism but only as long as it could hold his rather short attention span. The bottom line is he never followed up and was too busy looking out for number one to keep his focus on what has become the #1 evil of our time. Don't listen to the minions of the Leftist moon bats who regurgitate anything Michael Moore says ad nauseum and without the benefit of the first piece of serious research. Bill Clinton wasn't all that and he let us down. It wasn't just him, our entire government failed to recognize the threat for what it was and is. Many people still do not realize what we are up against or the dire consequences we will face if we do not stand up to this evil here and now. Miniter did Clinton more than fair and nobody can call this a partisan hack job. At least not anyone who has a semi-open mind. Read it and make up your own mind. If it doesn't scare the bejeebus out of you, you weren't paying attention.

More Right Wing Hypocrisy:
If only President Clinton had invaded Iraq,tortured the usual suspects, tapped our phones and gone trillions of dollars in debt! Miniter followed this hit piece with a book telling the untold story of how the Bush administration is winning the war on terror. Mission accomplished!

Miniter's entire premise has since been discredited:
The premise of this screed by Richard Miniter, a conservative partisan hack, is that Clinton didn't care enough about finding Bin Laden, and was asleep at the switch. As Richard Clarke has pointed out, this premise is entirely false, and Miniter has been left gasping ever since to make sense of his utterly discredited theory, the exact opposite of reality. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has had seven years and counting to find Bin Laden, and has failed at every turn. It turns out that Bush doesn't even CARE about the perpetrator of 9/11, and has little interest in even trying to find him, as revealed during an interview on March 13th, 2003: Q: Mr. President, in your speeches now, you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? (...) BUSH: ... I don't know where he is. Nor -- you know, I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you (...) Q: Do you believe the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead of alive? BUSH: As I say, we hadn't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, you know, again, I don't know where he is. I'll repeat what I said: I truly am not that concerned about him. -President George W. Bush, March 13, 2003

It takes a strong stomach to read this:
The last time I got sick reading a book was probably while in a car and I got motion sickness. Yet, this book made me physically ill. In this well-researched and thoroughly-documented book, Richard Miniter points out the repeated errors in strategy and lack of interest that Bill Clinton and his administration showed in capturing bin Laden between the time of the February 1993 World Trade Center bomb attack and the September 11th 2001 plane attack on the Twin Towers. Before the 9/11 attack which killed 3,000+ Americans, bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of 59 Americans with attacks on the World Trade Center, several U.S. Embassies, the U.S. Cole and other atrocities. Why was Clinton asleep at the switch? There are several reasons according to Miniter. Foremost was the president's constant fighting to save his political career while facing the Lewinsky and other sexual charges, illegal campaign contributions, and selling sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom. Interestingly, the day after Lewinsky admitted she had previously lied about having sex with the President (which meant Clinton had also lied), bin Laden's forces bombed two American embassies. Clinton now faced a two-war front: his political survival and his country's security. He chose to concentrate attention on the former. Sudan was ready to come to our aid by delivering bin Laden to the FBI at that country's airport. The fact that he did not accept that or any other offer from Sudan to silence bin Laden was, according to a quote from Clinton, "the greatest mistake of my presidency." As Miniter says in his introduction, "After reading the evidence in these pages, the reader can be the judge of that." I have two minor complaints about this book: There is a map, but it is too small. Much of the African-Middle East territory covered by this history is excluded. A bigger map with more information would be very helpful to the reader. Another aid would be a list of participants with a thumbnail sketch of each. Because there were so many people in the Clinton Administration involved, and because the Muslim names are so foreign to us, it is difficult to keep them straight. Such a list would also be very helpful. But beyond that, this is an eye-opener that every American should read. Hopefully, this book will become Clinton's legacy.

Disappointing on many levels:
Richard Miniter's book falls far short of what it could have been. Instead of being an accurate and incisive treatment of the Clinton Administration's shortcomings in dealing with bin Laden, it degenerates into mindless bashing of Clinton at every opportunity. For example, at page 16 (I refer to the 2003 hardcover edition), he faults Clinton for not paying sufficient attention to an attack on a hotel in Yemen--on December 29, 1992, three weeks before Clinton was sworn in. Miniter excuses the outgoing Bush (41) Administration, saying outgoing administrations brief incoming ones and "in practical terms, the decision was not Bush's (41) prerogative, but Clinton's." On the other end of Clinton's term, though, Miniter heaps blame on Clinton for not doing anything about the USS Cole attack on October 12, 2000. I wonder if Miniter would lay as much blame on the incoming Bush (43) Administration's lack of response to an attack that killed 17 American sailors as he lays on Clinton for not noticing the 1992 attack, which didn't hurt any Americans? At another point (pages 85-87), Miniter describes how Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was able to leave Qatar in 1995 through the "lack of focus at the highest levels of the Clinton Administration." However, in his ensuing description, he discusses how the director of the FBI was pressuring Qatar officials to allow FBI agents in Qatar to capture KSM. It is thus unclear what "lack of focus" he is referring to. It seems that he doesn't miss any chance to blame Clinton, no matter how tenuous or unfounded the accusation. Miniter's accuracy also leaves much to be desired. At one point (p. 14) he says bin Laden argued that allowing non-Muslims into Saudi Arabia "violated a well-known passage in the Koran that says that `there shall be no two religions in Arabia.'" However, this is not a passage from the Koran--it is a saying by the prophet Muhammad, allegedly when he was on his deathbed. Even if Miniter is that unfamiliar with Islam, he should have at least opened up a Koran to check (or he could have used the marvelous invention of Al Gore's, the Internet). At another point, he is discussing the Taliban, and notes that their government was only recognized by three nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen (see footnote 31 to page 176; the text of the footnote is on page 294). This time he doesn't even check the facts against his own book! The three nations that recognized the Taliban government were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, as Miniter does correctly state on page 206. It is truly a shame that Miniter didn't do a better job. Clearly the Clinton Administration has many failures to answer for. Miniter discusses many important events in detail, and says that he "interviewed and re-interviewed dozens of participants and experts...(m)uch of what they told me has never been reported..." (page xxi in the introduction). In theory, Miniter's original research could make his book a valuable resource. But given his carelessness with fact-checking, I am not sure that I would take any statement in his book at face value without extensive corroboration. His nearly hysterical anti-Clinton tone in the book doesn't help matters either. There is definitely a need for a clear and critical analysis of the Clinton Administration's actions and inactions with respect to bin Laden and al-Qaeda; unfortunately, this book isn't such an analysis.