Talk about fireworks. The “Fox & Friends” Friday morning broadcast set turned into a verbal battleground over differing opinions — and whether opinions were being spun as facts — about Bill Clinton and his recently revealed audio claim that he almost killed Osama bin Laden.
The argument pitted Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera against former CIA official Michael Scheuer, who headed up the intel agency’s bin Laden unit between 1995 and 1999.
The back-and-forth began after Mr. Scheuer called Mr. Clinton a liar for saying in the audio recording that the only reason he didn’t kill bin Laden was that he would have had to “destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him.”
Mr. Scheuer said any attack on the terrorist leader at that time “would have occurred in the middle of the night [and] … would have killed no one but Taliban people and Osama bin Laden and his crew.”
Mr. Scheuer also said of Mr. Clinton, “If you looked up the word ’lie,’ his face would be right next to it.”
Mr. Rivera immediately defended Mr. Clinton, saying Mr. Scheuer was “mixing and conflating intelligence with his own ideological spin.”
“What you have here with this gentleman … is an analysis on the military action and then, number two, he is spinning it for his own purposes, [to say] Bill Clinton is a horrible man a coward and all the rest of it,” Mr. Rivera said.
Host Steve Doocy tried to interrupt Mr. Rivera to give Mr. Scheuer opportunity to respond, but was largely unsuccessful. Mr. Scheuer finally cut in himself, talking over Mr. Rivera to say that he knew “the intelligence” on the bin Laden issue.
“I know the intelligence. I know the people who risked their lives to get the information and I know that Geraldo knows nothing except what he thinks. He doesn’t know the facts at all,” Mr. Scheuer said.
Mr. Rivera replied he had been physically standing on bin Laden’s property in “Khartoum in Sudan when Bill Clinton tried to take out Osama bin Laden and bomb his house. … You are being disrespectful [to Mr. Clinton] and you’re conflating your role as an analyst with experience with an ideological spinner.
Mr. Scheuer called Mr. Rivera “dummy” and “clown” before he was cut from the broadcast, while Mr. Rivera continued the discussion on the couch with the show’s hosts for another minute or so.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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