Posted on 04/10/2004 3:50:16 PM PDT by RobFromGa
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:39:34 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Paraphrased sections are indented.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion
of the widespread hypocrisy and blatant bias of the leftist mainstream media.Los Angeles Times
December 5, 2001 Wednesday
Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize;
Sudan offered up the terrorist and data on his network. The then-president and his advisors didn't respond.
MANSOOR IJAZ
President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.
I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.
From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Sudan's president and intelligence chief.
President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.
Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.
The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.[Paraphrased section:]
Ijaz said that he's an American Muslim & a political supporter of bill clinton but he feels that clinton's and Berger's counter-terrorism policies helped Bin Laden rise from an ordinary man to a "Hydra-like monster."
February 1996: Ijaz said that Sudan's Bashir, realizing how Bin Laden was a cancerous problem that was growing, sent important/key intelligence officials to the US. Bashir told the US that he would arrest Bin Laden and then extradite him to Saudi Arabia, if possible. Another alternative would be to "baby-sit him" and -monitor all his activities and terrorist associates. But officials in Saudi officials didn't want Bin Laden back because they were afraid he would concoct a plot to overthrow them.
In May 1996, the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.
Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden's personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.[Paraphrased section:]
Some of these terrorists we could have had in our custody (or received intelligence data on) are now on the FBI's 22 most-wanted list of terrorists.
Mohamed Atta & Marwan Al-Shehhi - two of the men who flew the planes into the WTC -- prayed in the same Hamburg mosque as did Salim and Mamoun Darkazanli. The Sudanese had compiled intelligence data of both Atta and Al-Shehhi.
Timeline of US authorities refusing Sudan's intelligence data:
First in February 1996 (mentioned in previous paraphrased section)
Again in August 1996 when Ijaz suggested that Sudan's religious ideologue, Hassan Turabi, write directly to Clinton, which he did.
Again in April 1997, when Ijaz persuaded Bashir to invite the FBI to come to Sudan and view the data
Again in February 1998, when Sudan's intelligence chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, wrote directly to the FBI.
Gutbi had shown me some of Sudan's data during a three-hour meeting in Khartoum in October 1996. When I returned to Washington, I told Berger and his specialist for East Africa, Susan Rice, about the data available. They said they'd get back to me. They never did. Neither did they respond when Bashir made the offer directly. I believe they never had any intention to engage Muslim countries--ally or not. Radical Islam, for the administration, was a convenient national security threat.
And that was not the end of it.
[Paraphrased section:]
July 2000 (3 months before the USS Cole attack) -- Ijaz brought another offer to deal with Bin Laden, who was by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings. A senior counter-terrorism official from a close Arab ally [country unnamed] approached Ijaz with a proposal to hand over Bin Laden. This official told Ijaz that he was "fed up with antics and arrogance of U.S. counter-terrorism officials." [I would be $100 he was referring to the arrogant Dick Clarke!]
The unnamed Arab country was offering to bring Bin Laden to their own country, then extradite him to the U.S. provided that Clinton would make a state visit to their country to personally request Bin Laden's extradition.
But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer, letting it get caught up in internal politics within the ruling family--Clintonian diplomacy at its best. ["senior Clinton official" who sabotaged the offer = Dick Clarke again?]
Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.
------Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is chairman of a New York-based investment company.
Do you think it is any different now than it has been for the last 30 years?
We are armed now. We don't need to fear those bastards, we just need to defeat them. Remember 4 years ago, they were huddled in an apartment with Al Gore plotting against us. Now they plot with John Kerry.
The truth and God are on OUR side. We will win.
Where is this analysis?
Spot on!!!
If Clintoon hadn't been waging the dog of Lewinsky tail Osama would have left us alone. --- LOL
That's it!
We should have rounded up and interned every "Muslim-American youth." Can you imagine the howl of the lefties!
ML/NJ
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
The Washington Times
December 10, 2001, Monday, Final Edition
PART A; COMMENTARY; Pg. A17
Clinton legacy addendum
Mona Charen
His beaming smile made it to the front page for the first time in months. Alas for him it was only the front page of the Style section in The Washington Post. There he was, shovel in hand, laying the groundwork for his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.
But the groundwork for his place in history has already been laid - and no gleaming edifice of stone and glass will obscure it.
We have witnessed, in the days since September 11, new but unsurprising evidence of what a sociopath we had as our leader for eight years. And we have learned that his immaturity, shallowness and thermonuclear self-centeredness had consequences for the nation that were tragic and very nearly catastrophic.
While the sane world grieved at the savagery of the September 11 calamity, Mr. Clinton confided to a friend his regret. What? That he hadn't done more to protect the nation? That he underestimated the danger? No. He "regretted" that this tragedy hadn't happened on his watch, and that he had therefore lost an opportunity for "greatness." Even by the vanity standards applicable to movie stars and tenors, that qualifies as pathology.
But far more damning than his solipsistic response to the nation's anguish is the abundant evidence that he did almost nothing to protect us while he had the chance. In 1996, as Monsoor Ijaz relates in the Los Angeles Times, Sudan offered to extradite Osama bin Laden to the United States. The Clinton administration declined the offer.
Demonstrating the lawyerly folly of the administration's approach to international terror, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger explained that the United States feared it did not have the evidence to convict him in our courts. Even as late as 2000 - after the two African embassy bombings and well after it was known that bin Laden was behind the Khobar Towers attack - an Arab nation approached the Clinton White House through Mr. Ijaz, offering to collar bin Laden and eventually deliver him to the United States. The Arab nation, which Mr. Ijaz declined to name, also offered to give key information to the United States about Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah - the groups that taught bin Laden the terror ropes. Again the Clinton administration failed to act.
Even after the USS Cole was struck and nearly sunk in 2000, Mr. Clinton was too busy chasing the chimera of a grand Middle East peace to deal with those he knew had attacked us. Hoping for a secure place in history for William J. Clinton, he declined to do anything that might annoy or unsettle the Islamic world.
In fact, in each and every case in which U.S. targets came under terrorist attack during his tenure, Mr. Clinton did his best to respond feebly or not at all. After the first World Trade Center attack, reports Byron York in National Review, Mr. Clinton assigned the case to law enforcement. His own director of the CIA, James Woolsey, made repeated attempts to see Mr. Clinton to discuss (inter alia) intelligence reports linking the attack to al Qaeda, but the president declined to see him.
After the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, Mr. Clinton had Dick Morris take a poll. "We tested 'peacemaker' or 'toughness,' " Mr. York quotes Mr. Morris as recalling. The public preferred toughness. "So Clinton talked tough." But the FBI director, Louis Freeh, became so exasperated by Mr. Clinton's failure to raise the matter with Saudi officials that he actually asked former President George Bush to do so instead.
On the day he lobbed cruise missiles at Afghanistan and Sudan - three days after Monica Lewinsky testified before the grand jury - Mr. Clinton told the nation that "our battle against terrorism did not begin with the bombing of our embassies in Africa, nor will it end with today's strike." But it did. And the "strike" was a bust: Mr. Clinton hit a bunch of abandoned huts in Afghanistan and a possibly blameless pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum.
His aides complained that the press and even some Republicans labeled the action a "Wag the Dog" scenario, and this deterred Mr. Clinton from taking further action. But if Mr. Clinton had possessed one ounce of sincerity in his "battle" against terrorism, he would have been undeterred by mere public relations troubles. The disgraceful truth is that he was incapable of pursuing anything other than his own narrow self-interest - not even the welfare of the nation he swore to preserve, protect and defend.
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