After the August 7, 1998 Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton initially declined to retaliate. On August 20—three days after Clinton publicly admitted that he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky—Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike on Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Blee suspected that Clinton had turned his attention to Al Qaeda to distract from domestic embarrassments. “Let’s go distract,” Blee told me. “It was the politicization and manipulation of intelligence.” Clinton flatly denied that politics played any role in the
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