Clinton defends terror record

BY GLENN THRUSH | Newsday Washington Bureau

September 23, 2006

A red-faced Bill Clinton, fed up with six years of GOP sniping over his failure to kill Osama bin Laden, attacked the Bush administration for neglecting to pursue the al-Qaida leader during its first eight months in office.

"At least I tried," said the enraged former president, speaking to correspondent Chris Wallace in an interview to be aired on Fox News Sunday.

"That's the difference between me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now," he added, leaning forward to point a finger in Wallace's face. "They ridicule me for trying. They had eight months to try - they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed."

Clinton, who authorized an unsuccessful missile strike on bin Laden's Afghanistan camp in 1998, has been fiercely defending his actions after an ABC miniseries portrayed the Clinton White House as inattentive to the threat posed by Islamic extremists.

President George W. Bush has never directly blamed Clinton for failing to head off the Sept. 2001 terrorist attacks, but many of his proxies have laid blame on the Democratic administration, saying Clinton was too distracted with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to pay enough attention to al-Qaida.

In turn, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has ridiculed the Bush White House for failing to aggressively pursue bin Laden, joking earlier this year that Bush had failed to track down the "tallest man in Afghanistan."