The Bush Administration is cutting funds for counterterrorism efforts across the country. Must mean the War on Terror is over. How about bringing those troops home now?

You've heard about the now-discounted report that Clinton turned down a deal from Sudan to turn over Osama Bin Laden. But it seems that the Taliban offered the same deal to Bush in February, 2001. Watch the video.

Condi Rice shot back this morning at Bill Clinton, to say they did try to get Bin Laden before 9/11.

Oh really? Think Progress lays out the reactions of both adminstrations concerning warnings of terrorists attacks:

The 9/11 Commission Report contradicts Rice's claims. On December 4, 1998, for example, the Clinton administration received a President's Daily Brief entitled "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks." Here's how the Clinton administration reacted, according to the 9/11 Commission report:

The same day, [Counterterrorism Czar Richard] Clarke convened a meeting of his CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] to discuss both the hijacking concern and the antiaircraft missile threat. To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The CIA agreed to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York Police Department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York area airports. [pg. 128-30]

On August 6, 2001, the Bush administration received a President's Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S." Here's how the Bush administration reacted, according to the 9/11 Commission report:

[President Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so.[p. 260]

We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on August 17 and participated in the PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. [p. 262]

Hurray for Glen Greenwald, whe searched the historical archives to show how the Republicans are the original cut & runners from Islamic terrorism. Check it out.

Well, the big dog finally got off the porch. Bill Clinton's face-off with Chris Wallace on Fox News is what the Dems have needed for a long time.

Clinton has been very quiet these last six years, trying to act like the statesman. But in that time, there has been an unrelenting effort to revise the history of his presidency in order to serve the political spin of the Republican party.

The narrative that I hear every day is that even if you think George W. Bush is a total disaster, at least he is doing something, because Clinton did nothing to combat terrorism, and everything is his fault anyway.

What Clinton did this weekend was to point that he did plenty, far more than the Bush team did.

But it's more than just staightening out the facts that is important. It's the shrillness of the defense that should wake Democrats up and get them to fight. They need to destroy this narrative of Clinton as a do-nothing president. The facts are on the Dems' side. Clinton was actively engaged in going after Osama and the Taliban when he left office. But Bush dropped the ball until 9/11 gave him the chance to pretend he was a real leader.

If Democrats fail to take up the fight on this issue, then they deserve to get beat like a Gitmo detainee.

Well, imagine that:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

...as long as they are Christians.

Funny how Malkin and those of her ideological bent have no problem with muslim terrorists being imprisoned without due process, being put into secret prisons, tortured and tried with secret evidence, but they scream and yell if a Christian doesn't get the full Miranda Rights treatment.

Hypocrisy runs so deep on the right side of the spectrum, you have to wonder how long they can tread water before going under.

I have written many times in the past how the roots of our conflict in the Middle East go back to past actions we took, actions that satisfied short-term goals at the cost of long-term peace. Here we have the president of Pakistan pointing out the problems this has caused:

In a speech to the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee on Tuesday, Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf blamed the United States and the West for "breeding terrorism in his country by bringing in thousands of mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then leaving Pakistan alone a decade later to face the armed warriors," according to an article at Pakistan's Daily Times published on Wednesday.

There are a lot of unanswered questions in this story about Bush admitting that the CIA kept terror suspects in secret prisons:

President Bush on Wednesday for the first time acknowledged the use of secret CIA prisons outside U.S. borders to hold top suspects captured in the war on terrorism.

In a speech at the White House, Bush said captured terror suspects have been the best intelligence source in efforts to stop new attacks and listed attacks blocked because of this intelligence.

The CIA program has "saved innocent lives," the president said.

Bush said torture was not part of the program and he had not authorized any form of torture, saying American law forbids it.

It begs the question, why did the government have to keep these suspects in secret prisons? Was Guantanamo not secure enough? That doesn't wash. Why would the CIA need to move these suspects all over the world? Could they not be interrogated in this hemisphere?

There really is only one logical answer for why they needed secret prisons. There is a clue later on in this story:

Bush said Wednesday he would ask Congress for explicit rules so U.S. personnel are protected from abuse charges as they fight the war on terror.

Why would U.S. personnel have to worry about abuse charges if there was no torture?

The Supreme Court ruling on detainees forced Bush's hand here, and now everyone is trying to ignore the elephant in the room, the fact that these people were tortured.

The coming 9/11 "docu-drama" which attempts to change the facts concerning this event points out a new line of attack from the right. They know that Iraq is a loser of an issue, so they need to turn attention to terrorism.

And there is no better boogeyman for them to trot out than Bill Clinton. They want to brand all Democrats as Friends of Bill, and blame him for 9/11.

Glenn Greenwald rips this apart:

But it is rank, deceitful revisionism to attempt to blame the Clinton administration for failing to be insufficiently aggressive with regard to Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism generally. To make this argument with any plausibility, Bush supporters would have to be able to point to complaints made by Republicans at the time -- and especially during the 2000 election -- that the Clinton administration should have been more attentive or aggressive towards Islamic terrorists. The threat posed by Al Qaeda and bin Laden was well known throughout the 1990s. To pretend that Republicans wanted a more aggressive stance than Clinton took is blatant revisionism.

Greenwald goes to to carefully detail what was said in the 2000 campaign and how Bush literally said nothing about this threat of terrorism. If anything, Bush and the Republicans were playing down the threat.

What the record actually shows is that Republicans were against fighting terrorism before they were for it.

Looking at the entire history, it's clear that neither party did enough to stop 9/11. But that is why hindsight is 20/20.

In this respect, what Bush says about 9/11 changing everything is correct. Without an attack of this magnitude, there was no way that any president, Democrat or Republican, could have mustered the political capital and public opinion needed to have sent troops to Afghanistan to fight Bin Laden.

Bush himself spoke of restraint prior to 9/11. Here is a line from his acceptance speech at the GOP convention: