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Monday October 16, 2000; 11:08 PM EDT

The Clinton administration was complicit in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole last Thursday, when a bomb blast ripped a gaping hole in the state-of-the-art destroyer as it was about to refuel in the port of Aden, Yemen, leaving 17 American sailors dead and another 37 wounded. That was the charge leveled by defense expert and military reporter Col. David Hackworth Monday night, in a heated debate on the Fox News Channel over whether military cutbacks over the last eight years have left the U.S. fleet vulnerable to just such an attack. "Complicity starts at the top of the chain of command, with the president," Hackworth told FNC's "Hannity & Colmes," "and works down through the secretary of defense, to all the admirals and generals to the very skipper of that ship." "Everyone knew that port was a hotbed - it was Club Med for terrorists," said Hackworth, who is also the most-decorated combat veteran of the post-World War II era. His debating partner, House Armed Service's Committee member Robert Andrews, D-N.J., tried to defend the administration - saying that Hackworth was "second-guessing our men in the field." But the old soldier would have none of it. "It's not a matter of second-guessing, it's a matter of fact," Hackworth responded. "Osama bin Laden and his gang, a month before, announced that 'We're gonna spill some American blood in the Middle East.' It's a fact that the intelligence community has known for several months that an American ship was going to go down. Why did we send a ship there?" Hackworth answered his own question: "We sent a ship there, according to [Naval Operations Chief Admiral Vern] Clark, simply because, he said, we had no oilers to refuel that ship at sea." Hackworth said the Navy's inability to refuel at sea was a direct result of declining military readiness during the Clinton-Gore years. "We go to the point of readiness. Admiral Clark, the chief of naval operations, said, 'Look, we had to go there because we couldn't refuel at sea cause we don't have any tankers, any oilers.' So as a result of that, why don't we have any oilers? Why didn't the chiefs of the United States Navy sound off?" "We've got this argument going on between Bush and Gore," said Hackworth. "Bush says readiness sucks. Gore says everything's peachy keen. All of the brass are sitting there with their mouths shut. But now we don't have enough oilers to refuel that ship and we lose those people because our readiness is not squared away?" Hackworth confirmed that 22 of the Navy's refueling tankers have been placed in mothballs since 1993, and that the overall fleet had declined from 435 ships to 311 during the Clinton-Gore years. Rep. Andrews had no explanation for why the administration had mothballed the oilers, complaining only that "partisanship should stop at the water's edge." "That ship that was taken out of the Middle East was part of a battle fleet," Hackworth responded. "They stripped it from the battle fleet, they said go all by yourself, stop at Aden, get some refueling, and then go up in the Gulf. And that shows you how stretched our United States Navy and our total military really is." "It's a national disgrace and somebody should hang," said Hackworth, who then looked at Andrews and added, "and it should start right with you congressfolks."