Should President Obama be impeached for breaking the "Oath of Office"?

He has wasted a lot of money and still can't own up to his failure, he still blames Bush!!!!!!!!!!


Like it or not, we'll have two choices come election time. He's one of them.


I have heard one of these stories before - it is actions that count not words or excuses..

I checked this story out at 3 different sites as to whether it's true or not.
It is a true story. I don't like to forward 'false' information...





Like him or not INFO you need on the background on Mitt Romney,



Whether you like Romney or not, this story is very revealing.
Sometimes, this facet of Romney's personality isn't so subtle.

In July, 1996, the 14-year-old daughter of Robert Gay, a partner at Bain
Capital, had disappeared. She had attended a rave party in New York
City and gotten high on ecstasy. Three days later, her distraught
father had no idea where she was, and Romney took immediate action.

He closed down the entire firm and asked all 30 partners and employees to
fly to New York to help find Gay's daughter. Romney set up a command
center at the LaGuardia Marriott and hired a private detective firm to
assist with the search. He established a toll-free number for tips,
coordinating the effort with the NYPD, and went through his Rolodex
and called everyone Bain did business with in New York, and asked them
to help find his friend's missing daughter.

Romney's accountants at Price Waterhouse Cooper put up posters on street
poles, while cashiers at a pharmacy owned by Bain put fliers in the bag of every
shopper. Romney and the other Bain employees scoured every part of New York
and talked with everyone they could... prostitutes, drug addicts, anyone.

That day, their hunt made the evening news, which featured photos of
the girl and the Bain employees searching for her. As a result, a teenage boy
phoned in, asked if there was a reward, and then hung up abruptly.

The NYPD traced the call to a home in New Jersey, where they
found the girl in the basement, shivering and experiencing withdrawal
symptoms from a massive ecstasy dose. Doctors later said the girl
might not have survived another day. Romney's former partner credits
Mitt Romney with saving his daughter's life, saying, "It was the most
amazing thing, and I'll never forget this to the day I die."

So, here's my epiphany: Mitt Romney simply can't help himself. He sees
a problem, and his mind immediately sets to work solving it, sometimes
consciously, and sometimes not-so-consciously. He doesn't do it for
self-aggrandizement, or for personal gain. He does it because that's
just how he's wired.

Many people are unaware of the fact that when Romney was asked by his
old employer, Bill Bain, to come back to Bain & Company as CEO to
rescue the firm from bankruptcy, Romney left Bain Capital to work at
Bain & Company for an annual salary of one dollar. When Romney went
to the rescue of the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, he accepted no salary
for three years, and wouldn't use an expense account. He also accepted
no salary as Governor of Massachusetts.

Character counts! The media and Obama re-election machine will focus
on Romney's wealth and the immorality of it, as they see it, but Romney is
a man who uses his wealth to make this world a better place.
Let's get this message out because it is not likely that the media will do so!

This article can be verified at www.snopes.com. It is completely true. I'd suggest you read the Snopes website for the additional comments about Romney:
http://www.snopes.com/politic...

Another FACT about Mitt Romney that MANY people aren't aware of is that he had already been financially successful BEFORE his father died, and as such, the ENTIRE inheritance that he received from his father he DONATED to Brigham Young University!!!

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/p...

Apr 19, 2012 9:17am
Romney Rejects Obama’s ‘Silver Spoon’ Comment

CLEVELAND — Mitt Romney said he would not apologize for his family’s success this morning when asked about President Obama’s comment Wednesday that suggested the presumptive GOP nominee had been born with a “silver spoon in his mouth.”

“I’m not going to apologize for my dad and his success in his life,” Romney said on “Fox & Friends.” “He was born poor and he worked his way to become very successful despite the fact that he didn’t have a college degree.”

Romney was asked about a comment made by the president during a speech in Ohio Wednesday, during which he seemed to make a veiled jab at the former Massachusetts governor, who stands to become one of the richest presidents ever.

“I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Michelle wasn’t,” said Obama. “But somebody gave us a chance, just like these folks up here are looking for a chance,” he said, drawing polite applause from the swing state crowd.

Romney speaks frequently on the trail about his father’s humble upbringing. Born in Mexico, George Romney eventually moved to the United States where he was a lath and plaster apprentice who would sell paint out of the trunk of car to make extra money, according to Romney.

George Romney went on to become a successful businessman, becoming the head of American Motors Corp. and later serving as the governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969.

And while Romney inherited much of his father’s fortune when he died, he did not keep it, instead donating it to charity.

Please forgive me for such an extremely long reply but I felt it necessary for you to know the FACTS about "Bill and Hillary"!!!


So far, the ONLY sentence I SOMEWHAT agree with is your second, "When Bill was in office, who do you think really ran this country?", however, the RESULTS of what Hillary was responsible for are far more reason to NEVER ELECT her to ANY OFFICE!!!
As for your two RIDICULOUS claims of; "We had a lot less foreign conflicts and Hillary would at least get health care fixed for those who cannot afford it.", I feel compelled to take to task.

#1) The FACT is, Hillary was RESPONSIBLE for MANY of the Clinton administrations' problems, undoubtedly the most heinous being the massacre of the 76 men, women, and CHILDREN at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, TX!!!


http://www.thetruthseeker.co....

Did Hillary Clinton Order Waco Assault?
News Commentary – Winter/Spring 2001

According to Linda Tripp it was Hillary and not Bill Clinton who directed the final assault on Waco.

During an interview in early February 2001 the former White House aide alleged that Hillary Clinton pressured the late Vincent Foster to resolve the Waco standoff. As a result more than eighty men, women and children were killed. Appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Tripp suggested that Foster, at Mrs Clinton’s direction, transmitted the order to move on the Branch Davidian’s Waco compound, which culminated in a military style attack on the wooden building.

Her accusations lend weight to charges made previously by Special Forces expert and Waco investigator, Steve Barry. According to the former Special Forces member, Hillary set up a special “crises centre” in the White House to deal with Waco. Serving with her in the centre was Vincent Foster who, according to his widow was subsequently: “fuelled by horror at the carnage at Waco for which the White House had ultimately been responsible.”


XXXXXXXXXXXXX

The LAUGHABLE idea that, "We had a lot less foreign conflicts" during the Clinton years completely IGNORES the FACTS that, had Clinton actually become INVOLVED in foreign affairs during his time as POTUS, we would very likely NOT have had the need for military conflicts in Iraq nor Afghanistan because Bin Laden would have been dead LONG BEFORE he had created the plans for the 9/11 attacks, or any of the MANY other attacks that were made on U.S. military troops during the Clinton administration, and IGNORED by Clinton!!!

While the below article is extremely long, it is EXTREMELY PRECISE concerning the CLINTON FAILURES in "foreign conflicts", and IF you are truly concerned with FACTS, it is a must read!!!

http://www.discoverthenetwork...

Clinton’s Failure to Address the Growing Threat of Islamic Terrorism, and His Degradation of the U.S. Military:

A notable hallmark of Clinton’s presidency was his failure to address the festering issue of Islamic terrorism, whose practitioners were gearing up to carry out a series of spectacular, high-impact attacks against the United States and its interests. On February 26, 1993, the al Qaeda organization (which ultimately would carry out the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon) struck the World Trade Center (WTC) for the first time. The terrorists' truck bomb created a crater six stories deep, killed six people, and injured more than a thousand. It was the first major terrorist act ever to take place on U.S. soil. The planners’ intent had been to cause one tower to fall and topple the other, killing tens of thousands of people in the process.

Six Palestinian and Egyptian conspirators responsible for the attack were tried in civil courts and were given life sentences like common criminals, but its mastermind -- an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ramzi Ahmed Yousef -- escaped. Yousef's Iraqi identity indicated to U.S. authorities that the WTC attack involved more than individual terrorists; it involved hostile terrorist states. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration’s response was to absorb the injury and accept defeat. The President never visited the bomb site or tended to the victims. Instead, he warned against "over-reaction" to the incident. He also vowed that there would be vengeance, but there was none.

In October 1993, eighteen American servicemen who were engaged in a humanitarian mission in Somalias were ambushed and killed, while another 80 were wounded. The body of one of the dead soldiers was dragged through the streets in an act calculated to humiliate his comrades and his country. Under Clinton’s leadership, America made no military response to the unprovoked carnage.

Al Qaeda groups thereafter made unsuccessful attempts to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other populated targets in the United States. A scheme to hijack commercial airliners and use them as "bombs" (in a manner similar to the 9/11 attacks) was thwarted in the Philippines in 1995; the architect of that plan was the aforementioned Iraqi intelligence agent Ramzi Yousef.

After Yousef's abortive plot, Clinton assigned Vice President Al Gore to work on improving airline security. A commission was formed, but under Gore’s leadership it focused heavily on protecting the “civil liberties” of terror suspects and eschewed any form of “profiling,” thereby diluting any effort to strengthen security measures.

According to former Clinton adviser Dick Morris:

"At a White House strategy meeting on April 27, 1995—two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing—the President was urged to create a ‘President’s List’ of extremist/terrorist groups, their members and donors ‘to warn the public against well-intentioned donations which might foster terrorism.’ [In 1993, the FBI had identified three charities connected to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas that were being used to finance terrorist activities.] On April 1, 1996, Clinton was again advised to ‘prohibit fund-raising by terrorists [including Hamas specifically] and identify terrorist organizations.’”

Clinton ignored these recommendations. FBI agents have stated that they were prevented from opening either criminal or national-security cases because of a fear that such a course of action would be seen as government-sponsored ‘profiling’ of Islamic charities.

One former Clinton administration official told reporter Joe Klein, "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any another President in recent memory." Dick Morris flatly charged, "Clinton’s failure to mobilize America to confront foreign terror after the 1993 attack [on the World Trade Center] led directly to the 9/11 disaster." According to Morris, "Clinton was removed, uninvolved, and distant where the war on terror was concerned."

By Clinton’s own account, Monica Lewinsky (the young White House intern with whom Clinton carried on a sexual affair) was able to visit him privately more than a dozen times in the Oval Office. But according to a USA Today investigative report, James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA director, says he was never able to schedule a private meeting with Clinton after their initial interview.

Letting Bin Laden Go Free:

In 1996 an American Muslim businessman and Clinton supporter named Mansoor Ijaz opened up an unofficial channel between the government of the Sudan and the Clinton administration. At the same time, the State Department was accusing the Sudan of harboring terrorists and was describing Osama bin Laden as “the greatest single financier of terrorist projects in the world.” According to Ijaz, who met with Clinton and his second-term national security adviser Sandy Berger:

"[Sudanese] President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Iran’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas. Among the members of these networks were the two hijackers who [would later pilot] commercial airliners into the World Trade Center. The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening."

President Bashir sent key intelligence officials to Washington in February 1996. Again, according to Ijaz, "the Sudanese offered to arrest bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to ‘baby-sit’ him—monitoring all his activities and associates." But the Saudis did not want him. Instead, Mansoor said, in May 1996 "the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.…."

According to a London Sunday Times account, based on a Clinton administration source, this was only one of three occasions when the Clinton administration had the opportunity to seize bin Laden and failed to do so. Responsibility for those decisions to turn down bin Laden, said the Times, "went to the very top of the White House.” Clinton’s failure to grasp the opportunity, says Ijaz, "represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history."

Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson served during the Clinton administration as one of the carriers of the “nuclear football,” a specially outfitted black briefcase that contains the launch codes for America’s nuclear weapons, in the event that a nuclear strike should be necessary. Reflecting on the missed opportunity to kill bin Laden, Patterson writes:

“This lost bin Laden hit typified the Clinton administration’s ambivalent, indecisive way of dealing with terrorism. Ideologically, the Clinton administration was committed to the idea that most terrorists were misunderstood, had legitimate grievances and could be appeased, which is why such military action as the administration authorized was so halfhearted, and ineffective, and designed more for ‘show’ than for honestly eliminating a threat.”

Clinton himself would later explain why he had turned down Sudan's offer to extradite bin Laden to America:

"Bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again. They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."

More Islamist Attacks Against U.S. Interests:

One month after bin Laden relocated to Afghanistan in 1996, a 5,000-pound truck-bomb was detonated adjacent to the Saudi Arabian Khobar Towers housing complex, which was being used as a U.S. military barracks. Nineteen American soldiers died in the blast. Responsibility for this act of war seemed to rest with a Shiite extremist group, Saudi Hezbollah, which was supported by high-ranking officials in the Iranian government.

President Clinton vowed: "The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished. Let me say again: We will pursue this. America takes care of our own." But because Clinton, at that time, was seeking to thaw U.S. relations with Iran, he never followed up on his pledge. As National Review Online’s Rich Lowry explains:

“It is difficult to warm relations with a regime at the same time as pursuing its connections to terror. So by 1998 the administration appeared prepared to forgive and forget Khobar Towers…. The administration softened the State Department warning about travel to Iran, waived sanctions against foreign oil firms doing business there, and removed it from the list of major exporters of illegal drugs…. FBI director Louis Freeh, and those around him, began to suspect that the administration didn't care that much about finding the perpetrators because if connections with Iran were established it [the administration] would be forced to take, or at least consider, action against Iran. This meant that getting to the bottom of the case would present what the administration hated most: a difficulty, a risk.”

Madeleine Albright biographer Thomas W. Lippman wrote: “American officials stopped saying in public that they suspected Iran of responsibility for the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Air Force residential compound in Saudi Arabia.”

In April 1999, while the FBI was still trying to determine Iran’s role in the Khobar Towers plot, Clinton issued a statement that expressed, in part, his view that Iran’s hatred for America was rooted in some legitimate grievances. He said:

"It may be that the Iranian people have been taught to hate or distrust the United States or the West on the grounds that we are infidels and outside the faith. And, therefore, it is easy for us to be angry and respond in kind. I think it is important to recognize, however, that Iran, because of its enormous geopolitical importance over time, has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it's quite important to tell people, look, you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or others that are generally allied with us today did to you 50 or 60 or 100 or 150 years ago...."

During the Clinton years, the idea that America was somehow responsible for most global distress became a familiar refrain of the President. In March 1998, for instance, Mr. Clinton, with a large delegation of African-American leaders in tow, made a pilgrimage to Uganda to apologize for the crime of American slavery. The apology was offered despite the fact that no slaves had ever been imported to America from Uganda or any East African state; that slavery in Africa preceded any American involvement by a thousand years; that America and Britain were the two powers responsible for ending the slave trade; and that America had abolished slavery more than 130 years before—at great human cost—while slavery still persisted in Africa, without African protest.

In August 1998, four months after Clinton left Uganda, al Qaeda terrorists blew up two U.S. embassies -- in Kenya and Tanzania -- killing 245 people and injuring 5,000. Clinton’s response to those attacks was ill-conceived and ineffectual. At the time, he was preoccupied with preparing his defense before a grand jury convened because of his public lies about a sexual affair he had carried on with his young intern, Monica Lewinsky -- an affair that had first been reported in January 1998.

Three days after Miss Lewinsky’s own grand jury appearance regarding that matter, Clinton, without consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff or his national security advisors, launched cruise missiles into two Islamic countries which he identified as being allied to the terrorists and their leader Osama bin Laden. One of these missiles hit and destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, killing one individual. Since the factory was the sole plant producing medicines for an impoverished African nation, there were almost certainly a number of collateral deaths.

On October 12, 2000, the warship USS Cole was bombed by Islamic terrorists while re-fueling in Yemen, yet another Muslim country aligned with the terrorist enemy. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and 39 were injured. This, like each of the attacks cited above, was an act of war, yet the President and his cabinet refused to recognize it as such. Instead, they framed each incident as a crime that warranted a law-enforcement response rather than military retribution.

Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, described the official White House position toward these attacks as "a little bit like a Whack-A-Mole game at the circus. They bop up and you whack ’em down, and if they bop up again, you bop ’em back, down again."

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was unimpressed by Clinton's sporadic strikes against his regime. Saddam remained defiant, expelling United Nations weapons inspectors, firing at U.S. warplanes, and continuing to build his arsenal of mass destruction. But "the [a]dministration held no clear and consistent view of the Iraqi threat and how it intended to address it," observed Washington Post correspondent Jim Hoagland.

Neglecting America's Security Needs:

Underlying the Clinton security failure was the fact that the administration was made up of people who for 25 years had discounted or minimized foreign totalitarian threats, opposed America’s armed presence abroad, and consistently resisted the deployment of America’s military forces to halt Communist expansion. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was himself a veteran of the Sixties "anti-war" movement, which abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia and created the "Vietnam War Syndrome" that made it so difficult afterwards for American presidents to deploy the nation’s military forces.

Berger had also been a member of "Peace Now," the leftist movement seeking to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists. Clinton’s first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, was a protégé of Berger. All three had met as activists in the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, whose primary issue was opposition to the Vietnam War based on the view that the "arrogance of American power" was responsible for the conflict rather than Communist aggression.

For nearly a decade before 9/11, the Clinton administration was aware that Americans were increasingly vulnerable to attacks which might involve biological or chemical weapons, or even nuclear devices bought or stolen from broken pieces of the former Soviet Union. This was the insistent message of Republican speeches on the floors of Congress and was reflected in the warnings not only of several government commissions, but also of Clinton’s own Secretary of Defense, William Cohen. In July 1999, for example, Cohen wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, predicting a terrorist attack on the American mainland:

"In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes. Someday, one will be real."

During its eight years, the Clinton administration hamstrung the government’s intelligence services in the name of civil liberties; shrunk the U.S. military in the name of fiscal responsibility; and prevented the Pentagon from adopting (and funding) a "two-war" strategy, because "the Cold War was over" and, in the White House’s judgment, there was no military threat in the post-Communist world that might make it necessary for the United States to be able to fight wars on two fronts simultaneously.

In less than a three-year period under Clinton, America's military manpower decreased from 2.1 million to 1.6 million. Of the 305,000 employees removed from the federal payroll by Clinton, some 286,000 (or 90 percent) were military cuts. Over the entire course of the Clinton years, the Army was cut from 18 divisions to 12. The Navy was reduced from 546 ships to 380. Air Force flight squadrons were cut from 76 to 50. Moreover, the administration enacted a pay freeze on U.S. troops, 80 percent of whom earned $30,000 or less annually.

Inattention to defense did not, however, prevent the Clinton administration from pursuing massive social experiments in the military in the name of gender and diversity reform, which included requiring "consciousness raising" classes for military personnel, redefining physical standards if women were unable to meet the traditional norms, and in general undermining the meritocratic benchmarks that are a crucial component of military morale.

While budget cuts forced some military families to go on food stamps, the Pentagon spent enormous sums to re-equip ships and barracks to accommodate co-ed living. All these efforts further reduced the Pentagon’s ability to put a fighting force in the field—a glaring national vulnerability dramatized by the war in Kosovo. This diminished the crucial elements of fear and respect for American power in the eyes of adversaries waiting in the wings.

During the Clinton years, the Democrats’ insistence that American power was somehow the disturber—rather than the enforcer—of international tranquility, prompted the White House to turn to multilateral agencies for leadership, particularly the discredited United Nations. While useful in limited peacekeeping operations, the UN was in large part a collection of theocratic tyrannies and brutal dictatorships which regularly indicted and condemned the world’s most tolerant democracies -- specifically the United States, England and Israel -- while supporting the very states providing safe harbors for America’s al Qaeda enemy.

The Clinton deployments of American forces were often non-military in nature: a "democracy building" effort in Haiti that failed; flood relief and "peace keeping" operations that were more appropriately the province of international institutions. Even the conflict which Clinton belatedly engaged in the Balkans was officially characterized as a new kind of "humanitarian war," as though the old kinds of war for national interest and self-defense were somehow tainted.

Also among Clinton’s deployments were half-hearted strikes using cruise missiles against essentially defenseless countries like the Sudan, or the sporadic bombing of Iraq when Saddam violated the terms of the Gulf peace. Clinton’s strikes failed in their primary objective—to maintain the UN inspections. On the other hand, a negative result of this "Whack-A-Mole" strategy was the continual antagonizing of Muslim populations throughout the world.

During the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s most frequent foreign guest was Yasser Arafat, whose PLO supported al Qaeda, and whose allegiance to Iraq and betrayal of America during the Gulf War could not have been more brazen. Arafat's PLO had created the first terrorist training camps, invented suicide bombings, and been the chief propaganda machine behind the idea that terrorist armies were really missionaries for "social justice." Far from treating Arafat as an enemy of civilized order and an international pariah, the Clinton administration was busily cultivating him as a "partner for peace."


Chinagate and the Compromising of U.S. Intelligence:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Chinese missiles were greatly limited in terms of their range and accuracy. But as journalist Richard Poe noted in 2003, “Thanks to Bill Clinton, China can now hit any city in the USA, using state-of-the-art, solid-fueled missiles with dead-accurate, computerized guidance systems and multiple warheads.”

Poe explains that the Clinton administration willingly permitted China to obtain the technology necessary for this giant leap forward. In part this was due to Clinton’s globalist view of international relations, where "multipolarity" -- the notion that a balance of power among nations is preferable to the existence of a single superpower -- is the ideal. Acting out of that mindset, Clinton appointed the anti-nuclear activist Hazel O’Leary as his Energy Secretary. A self-identified advocate of "leveling the playing field" in terms of miltary capacity, O’Leary declassified some 11 million pages of military data; she also loosened security procedures at U.S. weapons labs. According to Poe, “Federal investigators later concluded that China made off with the 'crown jewels' of our nuclear weapons research under Clinton’s open-door policy -- probably including design specifications for suitcase nukes.”

But declassification was not the only means by which President Clinton transferred missile technology and nuclear secrets to the Chinese. He also permitted those secrets to be sold directly to Beijing. Poe elaborates:

"In his book The China Threat, Washington Times correspondent Bill Gertz describes how the system worked. Defense contractors eager to sell technology to China poured millions of dollars into Clinton’s campaign. In return, Clinton called off the dogs. Janet Reno and other counterintelligence officials stood down while Lockheed Martin, Hughes Electronics, Loral Space & Communications and other U.S. companies helped China modernize its nuclear strike force.

"'We like your president. We want to see him reelected,' former Chinese intelligence chief General Ji Shengde told Chinagate bagman Johnny Chung.

"Indeed, Chinese intelligence organized a massive covert operation aimed at tilting the 1996 election Clinton’s way.

"Clinton’s top campaign contributors for 1992 were Chinese agents; his top donors in 1996 were U.S. defense contractors selling missile technology to China.

"Clinton recieved funding directly from known or suspected Chinese intelligence agents, among them James and Mochtar Riady who own the Indonesian Lippo Group; John Huang; Charlie Trie; Ted Sioeng; Maria Hsia; Wang Jun and others."

In a related move, Clinton in 1997 awarded a 25- to 50-year contract to Hutchinson Whampoa Ltd., a Hong Kong-based shipping firm with ties to Communist China's government and its People's Liberation Army. The contract authorized Hutchinson to control the two major ports on the Panama Canal's Atlantic and Pacific entrances. As Senator Trent Lott put it:

“This administration is allowing a scenario to develop where U.S. national security interests could not be protected without confronting the Chinese communists in the Americas. U.S. naval ships will be at the mercy of Chinese-controlled pilots and could even be denied passage through the Panama Canal by Hutchinson, an arm of the People's Liberation Army. In addition, the Chinese Communist Party will gain an intelligence information advantage by controlling this strategic chokepoint. It appears that we have given away the farm without a shot being fired.”

Noting the ominous implications of this, Richard Poe observed: “China can now strike U.S. targets easily from their bases in Panama, Vancouver and the Bahamas.”


The Clinton Administration Erects a "Wall of Separation" between Law-Enforcement and Intelligence:

In 1995, while America’s intelligence agencies were still investigating the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Clinton's Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick called for increased separation between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, and sought to stifle inter-agency information sharing. In a 1995 memo to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, titled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,” Gorelick wrote the following:

"We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."

The wall between agencies was not new; it had been first created during the Carter administration via the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted to defuse allegations of FBI espionage abuses. But Gorelick’s 1995 efforts served to strengthen the barrier and made it abundantly clear that cooperation between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies was forbidden.

It should be noted that at the time Gorelick penned the aforementioned memo, Mr. Clinton was worried about ongoing FBI and CIA investigations into illegal Chinese contributions that had been made to U.S. presidential campaigns. Both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese, and ultimately the Clinton administration itself.

It was also a period when the FBI had begun to systematically investigate technology theft by foreign powers, most notably Russia and China. For the first time, these investigations singled out the U.S. chemical, telecommunications, aircraft and aerospace industries for intelligence collection. Had FBI agents confirmed China's theft of weapons technology -- or its transfer of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria -- Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react (and to thereby jeopardize the future flow of Chinese money into his political coffers).

By the time Gorelick wrote the March 1995 memo that sealed off American intelligence agencies from each other and from the outside world, all of the most critical Chinagate investigations by American intelligence agencies were already underway. Some of their findings were damning:

In an investigation originally instigated by the CIA, the FBI was beginning its search for the source of the leak of W-88 nuclear warhead technology to China among the more than 1,000 people who had access to the secrets. Despite Justice Department stonewalling and the Department’s refusal to seek wiretap authority in 1997, the investigation eventually led to Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The FBI first collected extensive evidence in 1995 linking illegal Democratic Party donations to China, according to the Congressional Record. But Congress and the Director of the CIA didn’t find out about the Justice Department’s failure to act upon that evidence until 1997, safely after the 1996 election.
According to classified CIA documents leaked to the Washington Times, between 1994 and 1997 the CIA learned that China had sold Iran missile technology, a nuclear fission reactor, advanced air-defense radar, and chemical agents. The Chinese had also provided Pakistan with 5,000 ring magnets, used in producing weapons-grade uranium. Moreover, China had provided uranium fuel for India's reactors.

Gorelick's 1995 memo essentially emphasized Clinton's Presidential Decision Directive 24 (PDD 24), which he had signed the previous year (just one month after Gorelick began her tenure at the Justice Department. PDD 24 placed intelligence-gathering under the direct control of the President’s National Security Council, and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of command set up to govern (i.e., stifle) intelligence-sharing and cooperation between intelligence agencies. From the moment the directive was implemented, intelligence-sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare that required negotiating a befuddling bureaucracy that stopped directly at the President’s office.

First, the directive effectively neutered the CIA by creating a National Counterintelligence Center (NCI) to oversee the Agency. NCI was staffed by an FBI agent appointed by the Clinton administration. It also brought multiple international investigations underway at the time under direct administrative control. The job of the NCI was to “implement counterintelligence activities,” which meant that virtually everything the CIA did, from a foreign intelligence agent’s report to polygraph test results, now passed through the intelligence center that PDD 24 created.

NCI reported to an administration-appointed National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NCOB) charged with “discussing counterintelligence matters.” The NCOB in turn reported to a National Intelligence Policy Board, which coordinated activities between intelligence agencies attempting to work together. The policy board reported “directly” to the President through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

The result was a massive bureaucratic roadblock for the CIA -- which at the time had a vast lead on the FBI in matters of foreign intelligence -- and for the FBI itself, which was also forced to report to the NCOB. This hampered cooperation between the two entities.

As a result of Clinton's PDD 24 and Gorelick's 1995 memo, the only place left to go with intelligence information -- particularly for efforts to share intelligence information or obtain search warrants -- was straight up Clinton and Gorelick’s multi-tiered chain of command. Consequently, information lethal to Clinton and the Democratic Party languished inside the Justice Department, trapped behind PDD 24 and Gorelick’s walls.

The implications were enormous. In her letter of protest to Attorney General Reno over Gorelick’s memo, United States Attorney Mary Jo White spelled them out: “These instructions leave entirely to OIPR and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage.”

President Clinton and his administration were not the only ones to benefit from keeping secret any information about Chinese espionage, campaign contributions, and acquisition of military technology. A number of American corporations benefitted as well.

In 1994, for instance, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation transferred military-use machine tools to the China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation that ended up in the hands of the Chinese army. The sale occurred despite Defense Department objections. McDonnell Douglas was a client of the Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P. (now called Baker Botts), the Washington, DC law firm where Gorelick worked for 17 years and was a partner. Rayn Larroca, another partner in the firm, represented McDonnell in the Justice Department’s investigation of the technology transfer.
In 1995, General Electric, a former client of Gorelick’s, also had much to lose if the damaging information possessed by the CIA and the FBI were to have reached Congress. At the time, GE was publicly lobbying for a lucrative permit to assist the Chinese in replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear plants. A 1990 law required that the President certify to Congress that China was not aiding in nuclear proliferation before U.S. companies could execute the business agreement.
Moreover, in 1995 Michael Armstrong, then the CEO of Hughes Electronics -- a division of General Electric and another client of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin -- was publicly lobbying Clinton to switch satellite export controls from the State Department to the Commerce Department. After the controls were lifted, Hughes and another company gave sensitive data to the Chinese, equipment a Pentagon study later concluded would allow China to develop intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles aimed at American targets. Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin partner Randall Turk represented Hughes in the Congressional, State Department, and Justice Department investigations that resulted.

The Cox Report, which detailed, for Congress, the facts about Chinese espionage during the period, revealed that FBI surveillance had caught Chinese officials frantically trying to keep Democratic donor Johnny Chung from divulging any information that would be damaging to Hughes Electronics. Chung funneled $300,000 in illegal contributions from the Chinese military to the Democratic National Committee between 1994 and 1996.


In summation, Clinton and Gorelick erected their roadblocks to intelligence-sharing as a means of derailing the complex web of FBI and CIA investigations that ultimately could have implicated Clinton and the Democratic Party. A few years later, however, those very same roadblocks would prevent intelligence authorities from learning about the terrorist plots that would topple the Twin Towers on 9/11.


Clinton's Failed North Korean Policy:

Evidence that North Korea was violating the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty surfaced within weeks of Clinton's first inauguration. After a year of inaction allowed Pyongyang to create at least one nuclear weapon, the emboldened Stalinists announced their formal withdrawal from the treaty. It seemed that North Korean officials were angling for a payoff.

In an effort to deal with North Korea, Clinton named former President Jimmy Carter as his principal negotiator. Under the final terms of the Agreed Framework approved in October of 1994, Clinton agreed to provide North Korea with two light water nuclear reactors and a massive allotment of oil. The U.S. also agreed to ship 500,000 metric tons of oil annually in response to the North's pretense that it had developed the nuclear facility to generate power.

Upon completing the "Agreed Framework" with North Korea in 1994, Clinton stated: "This agreement will help achieve a vital and long-standing American objective: an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula." Bill Gertz described the terms of the Agreed Framework well: "The agreement gave the North Koreans ten years to dismantle their weapons program and five years to turn over the existing stockpile of plutonium."

But North Korea did not abide by the terms of the agreement.

When Congressional Republicans backed a missile defense bill in September 1998, Senate Democrats filibustered the measure. Clinton offered a different "solution" during this time period. In August 1998, North Korea launched a Taepo Dong missile over Japan's northernmost island. Two months later, the United States re-opened direct, bilateral talks with North Korea -- rushing a generous $15 million aid package to Pyongyang in the meantime. Throughout his presidency, Bill Clinton met North Korean belligerence with tough words and fistfuls of dollars.