[109261] in Cypherpunks
Stephanopoulos Says U.S. Bombing of Sudan Could Have Been a 'Wag
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jukka E Isosaari)
Mon Mar 15 20:18:28 1999
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 02:58:03 +0200 (EET)
From: Jukka E Isosaari <jei@zor.hut.fi>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
cc: Conspiracy Theory Research List <CTRL@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
Reply-To: Jukka E Isosaari <jei@zor.hut.fi>
And how many people did pay with their lives for this mistake?
Oh well, like who cares for a bunch o dead niggers in Africa.
Should've nuked them. That would've teached 'em a lesson!
++ J
---------- Forwarded message ----------
http://www.foxnews.com/national/031599/george.sml
Stephanopoulos Says U.S. Bombing of Sudan=20
Could Have Been a 'Wag the Dog'
12.14 p.m. ET (1714 GMT) March 15, 1999=20
By Patrick Riley =20
NEW YORK=97 Last year's military attacks in Sudan and
Afghanistan may have been part of a Clinton administration
"Wag the Dog" scenario, former presidential aide George
Stephanopoulos says.=20
Stephanopoulos, who left the
White House after the 1996 campaign, says that if
the commander-in-chief did not act out of political
motivations, hoping to sway the public's attention
from the scandal, it may have been because he didn't
have to - his advisers had already taken this into
account.=20
"I think there is something subtle at work at times of
crisis in the White House," he said. "I think the
president did what his military advisers advised. But
there is this tendency in the White House to present
the president with the decision you know he wants to
make. So I think that at some level the way the
decision was presented could've been affected by
the political crisis."=20
Stephanopoulos, promoting his new memoir All Too
Human, made the comments in an interview with
Fox News Channel's Catherine Crier, which airs Monday night on the
Crier Report
(10 p.m. EST).=20
In the 1997 movie Wag The Dog, a president creates a fake war to
divert public attention from a sex scandal. When the United States
bombed Sudan and Afghanistan on August 20, 1998, many speculated that
life was imitating art.
While the bombings officially came in retaliation for the terrorist
bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, they occurred
the same day the nation was focused on Monica Lewinsky, who was
testifying before the Starr grand jury, and just days after Clinton
admitted an inappropriate relationship with her.
Stephanopoulos said in the case of the controversial bombing of the
Sudan pharmaceutical plant, a military error is more likely to have
occurred than a political one. "I think in retrospect it has turned
out to be a mistake of some sort," he said. "Maybe an intelligence
error. I don't think it was badly motivated."
During the Stephanopoulos's time in the White House, he says the
president never seemed to be abusing his powers. "Whenever the
president was preparing to order military force I always thought he
was doing it for the right reasons," he says.
Stephanopoulos also defends the Clinton administration against charges
that its actions were delayed concerning the leaking of nuclear
secrets to the Chinese by a worker at a lab in Los Alamos.
"I have full faith in national security advisor Sandy Berger," he
says. "I don't think he did a thing wrong. I think the minute he found
out about wrongdoing at Los Alamos he investigated."
"These are people," he adds. "People make mistakes sometimes, errors
of judgment, you know. That is not the same thing as saying it's
always badly motivated."
