Al Gore AWOL for Osama-Monica Crisis
NewsMax 08/18/02 Carl Limbacher
Over a period of 13 days in August 1998, an overwhelmed President Clinton struggled to put together plans for retaliation against Osama bin Laden for the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, while simultaneously facing the biggest legal test of his career - his upcoming testimony before the Monica Lewinsky grand jury.
As defense lawyers and national security advisors competed for Clinton's time, aides privately worried he was so distracted by the sex scandal that he was incapable of confronting the bin Laden threat with a clear head.
If ever there was a moment when Vice President Al Gore's experience, political judgment and crisis management skills were desperately needed, it was then.
But the man who reportedly played more of a hands-on role than any vice president in U.S. history was wasn't on hand to weigh in on the threat.
Al Gore and his wife Tipper decided instead it was time for a vacation in Hawaii.
As the only Clinton administration official whose objections the president would have a tough time overruling, Gore's decision to leave removed the only potential obstacle to a plan that some say, with the hindsight of history, provoked to the 9-11 attack on America.
From August 11th to the 26th, the vice president kept as far away from his boss as geography allowed, desperate to avoid the tarnish of the Monica Lewinsky scandal's denouement - Clinton's August 17 testimony from the White House Map Room.
Gore left Washington just four days after bin Laden's terrorist bombers had killed 12 Americans in the embassy attacks.
A week later on Aug. 14, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright accompanied the bodies of the dead Americans home. Clinton gave them a tearful welcome at Andrews Air Force base.
Meanwhile Gore frolicked in the Honolulu surf.
As Monicagate zero hour approached the president of the United States was virtually incapacitated.
Clinton spent the final weekend before his grand jury grilling holed up with his wife and advisors trying to figure out how to acknowledge he'd had "an inappropriate intimate relationship" with Lewinksy without making his previous under oath denials to Paula Jones' lawyers seem like perjury.
After the grueling four hour ordeal on Monday, Clinton prepared to tell the nation that he'd been lying for seven months. During a nationally televised speech he apologized to his wife, attacked Ken Starr and announced it was time to move on.
"We have important work to do - real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face," he concluded.
Outside of a small handful of advisors, no one had any idea what the "real security matters" were. But behind closed doors, a small cadre of advisors - Albright, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh Shelton and a few others, debated on how best to carry out the embassy bombing retaliation on Clinton's deadline - August 20.
It was the same day Lewinsky was scheduled to make her second appearance before Starr's grand jury to respond to Clinton's testimony.
Her attorney, Plato Cacheris, knew she was livid over Clinton's grand jury denials. She would later reveal that his speech that night made her feel like "trash." If word of the angry witnesses' discontent had gotten back to the White House, it wouldn't have been surprising.
Cacheris was no stranger. He previously represented Vernon Jordan's chauffeur, who, nine months earlier, had driven Lewinsky to the office of her first lawyer, Frank Carter, to sign a false affidavit denying her Clinton affair.
As Clinton struggled to put the tawdry testimony behind him, he pulled out all the stops to keep the attack on bin Laden secret - even from the men who would be charged with carrying it out.
Gen. Shelton was particularly uncomfortable with the secrecy. Clinton had ordered him not to tell the other Joint Chiefs about the plan.
As Seymour Hersh wrote for his bombshell New Yorker magazine expose a month after the attacks, "The four men who knew more about the use of force than anyone in the White House.... were not briefed about the use of Tomahawk missiles until the day before the raids."
Shelton himself "was presented with a fait accompli," an unnamed general told the magazine.
Another Hersh revelation: Attorney General Janet Reno was opposed to the cruise missile strikes. But her warnings to the White House that the available evidence against bin Laden didn't meet the standards of international law were ignored.
Others were deliberately left out of the loop altogether. FBI Director Louis Freeh, who was in Africa investigating the bombings, wasn't warned of the attack plans. The Defense Intelligence Agency was never consulted.
Sources told Hersh that the best U.S. defense minds were excluded from the bin Laden strategy sessions because "the White House did not want to hear what they had to say."
Did that include Gore, too?
Vacationing half-a-world away, the vice president apparently played no role whatsoever in what may have been the most momentous deliberations of the entire Clinton era.
According to contemporaneous press reports, Clinton called Gore about the mission at 2:30 a.m. Eastern Time Thursday, Aug. 20 - just three-and-a-half hours before the final order to launch was given.
In the hindsight of history, Gore's decision to remove himself from the bin Laden debate may have been critical.
While U.S. interests had long been on the terrorist mastermind's hit list, terrorism experts agree that the failed Aug. 20 attack gave bin Laden new resolve for revenge - much as President Kennedy's failed Bay of Pigs invasion provoked the Cuban missile crisis.
What if the vice president had stayed in Washington to help manage the bin Laden crisis, a move that would have allowed his hobbled boss to delegate the national crisis while he looked after his own legal problems?
Would Gore have halted the ill-fated attack plan? Or perhaps have taken the time to come up with an attack strategy that would have worked - irrespective of Monica Lewinsky's grand jury schedule?
We'll never know. But with Clinton home alone and mired up to his eyeballs in the scandal that would eventually result in his impeachment, there's no question Gore should have been in Washington rather than Oahu.
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