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Not many people seem to have noticed it, but Oliver North caught it: apparently former President Clinton, in his touted interview with Chris Wallace in which he lost his temper and defende his record on terrorism, admitted to committing a crime!

Clinton's Braggadocio Will Haunt U.S. in War on Terror
Friday, September 29, 2006

By Oliver North, Fox News

"I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since."
—Former President Bill Clinton, Sept. 24, 2006

Now there's a passage for the next edition of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." It is the stunning, blatant confession made in the midst of a heated exchange on "FOX News Sunday" with Chris Wallace that as president, Bill Clinton sanctioned the assassination of Usama bin Laden.

To put this little piece of braggadocio in context, it should be noted that no other American president has ever admitted to such a serious violation of law. Although assassination is specifically forbidden as a course of action open to U.S. officials, including presidents, no one seems to have noticed what was being said— perhaps because they were so caught up with the theater of what was happening on the screen.

Mr North continues with the documentation of the law on the matter; it's interesting reading. (Hat tip to The Virginia Conservative.)

Now, I don't have a particular problem with President Clinton ordering the assassination of Mr bin Laden; that was the right thing to do! But as I think about the liberal sites which have proclaimed Mr Clinton's great victory in the interview (see The Liberal Avenger), I also seem to recall that so many of our liberal friends were appalled by the idea that President Bush might have violated the law with the NSA's warrantless interceptions of overseas calls. One would think that the same liberals would be deeply upset that President Clinton ordered an assassination, something clearly against the law.

Where is their outrage?

E J Dionne, one of the many liberal columnists for The Washington Post, wrote:

Why Bill Clinton Pushed Back
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, September 29, 2006; Page A21

Bill Clinton's eruption on "Fox News Sunday" last weekend over questions about his administration's handling of terrorism was a long time coming and has political implications that go beyond this fall's elections.

By choosing to intervene in the terror debate in a way that no one could miss, Clinton forced an argument about the past that had up to now been largely a one-sided propaganda war waged by the right. The conservative movement understands the political value of controlling the interpretation of history. Now its control is finally being contested.

Our friends on the left are just swooning over the former president's comments, and most of them are citing Mr Dionne's column this morning. But Mr Dionne got it wholly wrong.

Why did President Clinton push back? Because he knew his record on terrorism was toast, and he figured that if he exercised his greatest skill, talking, maybe no one would notice that his actual score never changed.

Did President Clinton stop al Qaeda? No. Did President Clinton get Osama bin Laden for the 1998 embassy bombings? No. Did President Clinton take Osama bin Laden into custody, when the Sudan was ready to hand him over? No.

So, Mr Clinton went on the air and proclaimed that he had at least tried, and said that the Bush Administration had not, not before September 11th. Well, Mr Clinton had eight years in office, and on September 11th the Bush Administration had been in place for slightly less than eight months -- and President Clinton was trying to make some kind of statement that in eight months the Bush Administration had not beaten his score (which was zero) in eight years.

I'd guess that the real reason Mr Clinton was both angry and ready was that The Path to 9/11 showed what an utter failure his counterterrorism policies were. The one Clinton Administration success shown was the interception of the millenium bombing plot -- which was thwarted by a Customs Bureau border guard who just happened to notice suspicious behavior in the course of her normal duties, and was obviously not part of any special effort by the Clinton Administration.

Other things, such as al Qaeda plotting the September 11th bombings for New Year's Eve, were shown -- which demonstrated that it was only a tactical problem on al Qaeda's part that prevented that, as well, from happening on Mr Clinton's watch. The one time the Clinton Administration was depicted as taking hard action against al Qaeda, the cruise missile attacks, was shown as ineffective because an Administration official notified the Pakistani intelligence service, and it was implied that the IKI warned Osama bin Laden that the missiles were on the way, and he got away in the nick of time.

(Former Secretary of State Albright vigorously protested that the movie uinfairly showed her as doing so, and perhaps the actual details of who did what were fudged for dramatic license, but the actual warning was delivered.)

To be fair, the Bush Administration policies toward terrorism were just as ineffective as those of the Clinton Administration, but that's because they hadn't changed those policies!

But the real reason our friends on the left were so happy to see the former president defend his policies was that they don't have anything else. The Path to 9/11 was so despised by the left not because of the dramatic license used to "condense" the various actions of Clinton Administration personnel, but because, on the whole, it revealed just how ineffective the entire policy was. President Clinton took a law enforcement model into the fight against al Qaeda, and it doesn't matter that he says "at least I tried," the fact is that what he tried, the policy he set, was completely ineffective in preventing terrorism.

It did have some successes in apprehending terrorists who didn't kill themselves during their attacks, and that's all well and good, but the American people are more interested in preventing terrorist attacks in the first place -- and that's where the Clinton policies were just not up to the job.

Unfortunately, our friends on the left don't have anything else. Thus far, there are only two competing "models" of how to combat terrorism: the aggressive seek them out and kill them policies of the Bush Administration, and the law enforcement model of the Clinton and pre-September 11th Bush Administrations.

You can see this in the protests of our friends on the left concerning the use of "torture" to get information from captured terrorists and the just passed legislation which authorized military tribunals to try and punish captured terrorists. Their protests, about habeus corpus and the Geneva Conventions, all point to the law enforcement model: that's where their mindset originates. But that policy failed when it came to preventing terrorism. In their desire to promote something, anything, different from what President Bush wants to do, they have found the only other model out there, and it was one that did not work. Thus, they need former President Clinton out there, vigorously defending what he did with "at least I tried," hoping that the American people will see the trying and forget the fact that what he tried did not work.

Zero is still zero.