Hillary Clinton: If My Husband Had Gotten the Warning of Al Queda Attacks...

Sometimes the divide between Democrats and Republicans goes beyond the usual red state/blue state differences. But it gets downright spooky when you realize that Democrats often inhabit a parallel universe where reality, like the meaning of the word "is," can be redefined quicker than the Geneva Conventions.

As usual, evidence of this alternate reality is found in the aura which surrounds Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Take for example Senator Clinton's statement yesterday in response to her husband's interview on Fox News with Chris Wallace:

From Breitbart AP report:

"I think my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks," Hillary Clinton said. "I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team."

The senator was referring to a classified brief given to Bush in August 2001, one that Democrats say showed the Bush administration did not do enough to combat the growing threat from al-Qaida.

Ah yes, the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing given to President Bush on August 6, 2001 (PDF copy here). He received it 36 days before the September 11th attacks. That's 864 hours and clearly there was not enough time to pull down the walls the Clinton Administration had in place to prevent the FBI and CIA from working together, connecting the dots and stop the attacks.

What most of these people, including Senator Clinton, seem to forget is the following warning her husband received on December 4, 1998: "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks...Bin Ladin organization or its allies are moving closer to implementing anti-US attacks..."(full text here).

That's 778 days or 18,672 hours from the time President Clinton received the warning until he left office. Meanwhile, Al Queda bombed the U.S.S. Cole and continued to plot, train and finance the efforts that led to the September 11th attacks.

And as Steve Coll at the Washington Post writes: "Between 1998 and 2000, the CIA and President Bill Clinton's national security team were caught up in paralyzing policy disputes as they secretly debated the legal permissions for covert operations against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. "

Worse still, throughout the 1990's the Clintonistas, under the direction of Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick were building the wall that blocked the sharing of information between intelligence and law enforcement (signed memo PDF) which could have prevented September 11th.

Mary Jo White, the Clinton appointed U.S. Attorney for New York, responsible for prosecuting the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, warned at the time that: "The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."

Ms. White went on to warn: "we must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."

The danger of Clinton's alternate reality universe became apparent to all but the Clintons and their apparatchiks on September 11th.