10-8-01, Washington - The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had been over for a few hours when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) announced his conclusion about the root of the problem. "We had Bill Clinton backing off, letting the Taliban go, over and over again," the conservative from Orange County declared at a news conference.

On the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal two days ago, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh penned a column on how "Mr. Clinton can be held culpable for not doing enough when he was commander in chief to combat the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon."

Much about American politics was transformed on Sept. 11, but one familiar feature has proven durable amid the most jarring of events: Bill Clinton's ability to provoke an argument, particularly among critics on the right. The conservative critique has been joined by some centrist voices and several news reports questioning whether Clinton was sufficiently vigilant about terrorism.

When Clinton was in office, much of the criticism had a decidedly different thrust. In August 1998, when he ordered missile strikes in an effort to kill Osama bin Laden, there was widespread speculation -- from such people as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) -- that he was acting precipitously to draw attention away from the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, then at full boil. Some said he was mistaken for personalizing the terrorism struggle so much around bin Laden. And when he ordered the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House after domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City, some Republicans accused him of hysteria.

The latest wave of critics can rest assured their arrows are striking the target. Now that he is an ex-president, Clinton is seeing more anti-Clinton material than ever, while channel surfing and hearing criticism against him on cable television. The former president, said several people who have spoken with him, is by turns offended at the attacks and bewildered by how, in his view, his foes will home in on the anti-Clinton angle on any event, no matter how horrific or solemn. If he or Al Gore had been president on Sept. 11, he has noted acidly, Republicans would never have offered the support that Democrats have given President Bush.

The criticism also has Clinton confidants back in an old role: practicing damage control and pointing fingers back at their accusers. This time, news events and recent history are combining into a particularly acrid debate -- the outcome of which could weigh heavily on Clinton's legacy. Within days of the attacks, Clinton national security and political advisers were holding regular conference calls discussing how aggressively to "push back" against the attacks. Initial reluctance has given way as the criticism has increased.

"It is obscene that Republicans who hate President Clinton are using this tragedy to launch further attacks against him," said Jennifer Palmieri, a former Clinton spokeswoman now with the Democratic National Committee. "I would hope the gravity of the task before us would enable these partisans to rise above their obsession with Clinton, but I guess not."

On the substance of the criticism, Clinton's main defenders are former White House officials who were themselves partners in critical decisions about how to confront terrorism, and specifically to take on bin Laden.

They bristle at suggestions that Clinton was complacent about terrorism. They note that the federal budget on anti-terror activities tripled during Clinton's watch, to about $6.7 billion. After the effort to kill bin Laden with missiles in August 1998 failed -- he had apparently left a training camp in Afghanistan a few hours earlier -- recent news reports have detailed numerous other instances, as late as December 2000, when Clinton was on the verge of unleashing the military again. In each case, the White House chose not to act because of uncertainty that intelligence was good enough to find bin Laden, and concern that a failed attack would only enhance his stature in the Arab world.

Clinton's team is even more dismissive of what it regards as the 20-20 hindsight of some critics. These people maintain Clinton should have adapted Bush's policy promising that regimes that harbor terrorism will be treated as severely as terrorists themselves, and threatening to evict the Taliban from power in Afghanistan unless leaders meet his demands to produce bin Laden and associates. But Clinton aides said such a policy -- potentially involving a full-scale war in central Asia -- was not plausible before politics the world over became transformed by one of history's most lethal acts of terrorism.

"I don't recall anyone inside or outside the administration, including noted foreign policy experts like Rush Limbaugh, suggesting that at the time," said John D. Podesta, Clinton's final White House chief of staff.

Clinton's former national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, praised the Bush White House's handling of the crisis, saying they are taking advantage of new opportunities to assemble international coalitions and enlisting governments adjacent to Afghanistan to help collect intelligence and, presumably, stage military attacks. There is little prospect, he said, that Pakistan would have helped the United States wage war against bin Laden or the Taliban in 1998, even after such outrages as the bombing of U.S. embassies overseas.

"We are in a new world, with the entire world mobilized, particularly the front-line states, which are engaged here in ways that were inconceivable before September 11," Berger said.

But Berger takes offense at the idea that he or others were little concerned about terrorism on their watch. "This was an urgent priority for the Clinton administration, and the intelligence community specifically engaged in an intensive effort directed at bin Laden and [his al Qaeda network] across a range of fronts," Berger said. While declining to discuss the specifics of planned military missions, he added, "these efforts ultimately depend upon having the kind of specific intelligence on which to take decisive action with high confidence of success. That never crystalized."

While Clinton and some aides have been publicly supportive of Bush, others are fighting fire with fire. The government managed to foil an apparent conspiracy for widespread terrorist attacks during celebrations at the start of 2000. Alarm bells should have been ringing across the government, some Clintonites maintain, when a suspected Islamic extremist was detained in Minnesota in August after exhibiting unusual behavior at a flight training school. Around the same time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has said that the administration had "lots of signs" that terrorists were planning attacks but that the information was not specific enough to act upon.

"These guys were in power for nine months before September 11," said one former senior official on Clinton's team. "If someone wants to have a debate about the past, you have to note that we stopped the millennium bombings; they did not stop this."

In August 1998, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) praised Clinton's missile strikes repeatedly as "exactly the right thing to do," though he did say the attacks should be "the beginning of a campaign and not simply a one-time activity."