Posted on 11/09/2005 6:36:49 AM PST by conservativecorner
Clinton literally had Osama in his sights
Pentagon 'had images of his face,' yet ex-president refused to pull trigger
Posted: October 5, 2003
"We need to finish the job," former President Clinton last year advised President Bush concerning Osama bin Laden, who is still at large.
Of course, he's one to talk.
The only time Clinton got tough on bin Laden was in 1998, in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal, when he needed a big media distraction.
Twice in 2000, including one time after the USS Cole bombing, Clinton had bin Laden in his sights and failed to pull the trigger, according to a senior Pentagon official familiar with covert counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan at the time.
He said the CIA had equipped pro-U.S. factions on the ground in Afghanistan with high-tech surveillance gear from the Defense Department to track bin Laden.
They were armed with sniper rifles and shoulder-fired rocket launchers, the official explained, and had the OK to assassinate bin Laden on orders from U.S. intelligence back in Washington.
"There were surveillance systems brought in-country, and they were doing observations and watching some of the likely places bin Laden frequented, such as Tora Bora, and guest-houses in the area," said the official, who requested anonymity. "And we were viewing" the satellite images relayed from Afghanistan.
"Some of it was collaborative – some DOD, some CIA – but we were looking," he said. "And Clinton had opportunities to take him out and didn't take them."
"One was more a command-and-control issue – when they should have made a decision to shoot, but it never got out of country, because the bureaucracy of carrying [the order] back [to Afghanistan] through channels was too much, and the opportunity just disappeared," he said. "And then another one when Clinton said 'No.'"
The Pentagon official explained that Clinton feared the paid CIA recruits might hit innocent Afghans.
"There was actionable intelligence provided by that gear, by the optics," he said. "But once it went up the chain of command, it got into stuff like, 'How sure are you guys about that 6-5 guy in the middle of that group? It kind of looks like him, but how sure are you?'"
"Clinton didn't want to have an accidental shot kill innocent civilians," he added. "But everyone was pretty certain it was Osama bin Laden. We had images of his face."
Clinton certainly deserves his share of blame for failing to take out bin Laden when he had the chance.
However, that was before Sept. 11. Bin Laden did not attack and kill thousands of American civilians on American soil when Clinton was commander in chief. That happened on Bush's watch, and he essentially blew a prime opportunity to take out bin Laden when U.S. intelligence had a fix on him in his Tora Bora rats' nest. He blew it because he and his oil cronies were preoccupied with another opportunity – taking out the Caspian energy export pipeline-blocking Taliban in Kabul and Kandahar.
Sept. 11 should have been the last straw. Everyone counted on Bush to decapitate the al-Qaida leadership once and for all. He had a clear national mandate.
U.S. Central Command officers have told me that they had hoped for a narrowly defined and concentrated search-and-destroy mission against al-Qaida in Afghanistan – go in, get bin Laden, and get out. What they got instead was a broadly defined, long, complicated mission that has included Afghan proxy forces, humanitarian airlifts, regime change, nation building, economic development, and occupation – all the things that Bush's pal and special envoy in Kabul and now in Baghdad, "Unocal Zal" Khalilzad, had on his wish list for his native country, a list that became the White House's operating manual in Afghanistan. The plan was so comprehensive and complex that it virtually guaranteed finding bin Laden would slip down the priority list.
To be sure, presidents throughout history have been accused of putting business interests first, even ahead of national security. In the most recent example, Clinton was accused of being in the pocket of U.S. aerospace-defense contractors, such as Loral and Hughes, that were hungry for deals in Communist China, which has nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at American cities. He even had his own Caspian pipeline scandal. Millionaire Lebanese oil man Roger Tamraz gave the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection effort some $300,000 in exchange for White House access.
Tamraz was trying to get U.S. backing for the development of an alternate pipeline route from Azerbaijan to a Mediterranean port in Turkey – this one through Armenia, Azerbaijan's enemy. Despite warnings from a conscientious NSC aide, the White House hosted him at several events. The shady Tamraz got his access, if not his pipeline.
Sleazy as it was, the funds-for-access deal was not tied to an American war. And this is by no means just any war. This is an epic battle to protect your family and mine, where we live, from al-Qaida, the most dangerous and effective network of terrorists in the history of terrorism.
Intelligence Failure? Let's Go Back to Sudan
by Mansoor Ijaz and Timothy Carney
Washington Post
June 30, 2002
In early 1996, CIA director John Deutch convinced Secretary of State Warren Christopher to pull U.S. diplomats out of Sudan out of fear for their safety. His anxiety was based on intelligence that implicated the Sudanese government. Although the embassy wasn't formally shut down, it was vacated, and relations with Khartoum became severely strained.
Soon afterward, the CIA figured out that its analysis was wrong. A key source had either embellished or wholly fabricated information, and in early 1996 the agency scrapped more than 100 of its reports on Sudan.
Did the State Department then send its diplomats back? No. The bad intelligence had taken on a life of its own. A sense of mistrust lingered. Moreover, the embassyhad become a political and diplomatic football for policymakers and activists who wanted to isolate Khartoum until it halted its bloody civil war with the largely Christian south. To this day, the embassy is mostly unstaffed.
This episode is worth recounting now. Whether hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, judging the integrity of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, mediating a dispute between India and Pakistan, or contemplating the virtue of an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration has given great weight to the content of U.S. (and sometimes foreign) intelligence reports. As the United States wages war on terrorism and Congress re- organizes and bolsters U.S. intelligence agencies, the influence of intelligence on foreign and military policy will only grow.
But American policymakers have to be intelligent about using intelligence. The story of U.S. policy in Sudan shows how bad intelligence -- or good intelligence badly used -- can damage U.S. interests. In Sudan, it confused us about political Islam, hurt our ability to intervene in the 47-year-old Sudanese civil war, and in 1996 undermined our best chance ever to capture Osama bin Laden and strangle his organization, before he was expelled from Sudan and found his way to Afghanistan.
We write from experience. One of us, Carney, a retired career diplomat, was the last U.S. ambassador to Khartoum. The other, Ijaz, an American hedge-fund manager, played an informal role by carrying messages between Khartoum and Washington after the embassy was emptied.
Perhaps the most important intelligence failure in Sudan wasn't about protecting the safety of U.S. diplomats but about understanding the political environment throughout the Muslim world. This is one aspect of Sudan's cautionary tale: the danger of losing sight of politics while focusing on terror.
During the 1990s, some committed Muslims around the worldtried to forge a political movement to bridge the gap between the modern world and medieval scripture. But instead of engaging this movement, the United States lumped Islamic political groups together and viewed them all as dangerous. It clung to relationships with authoritarian regimes that felt threatened by Islamic groups and thus let well-organizedradicals dominate the Muslim world's reformist movement.
Khartoum was an important center of Islamic political activity. Sudan's National Islamic Front, led by the fiery, Sorbonne-educated Hassan Turabi, seized power in a 1989 coup. Turabi held annual conferences that attracted thousands of Muslim radicals to Khartoum to craft their vision for an Islamic utopia. Turabi described the conferences as venting sessions aimed at moderating extremist Islam's rhetoric. The U.S. government called them terrorist planning sessions and, rather than infiltrate and decipher their workings, demanded that Khartoum shut them down.
Turabi raised deep concerns among U.S. allies in Riyadh, Cairo, Asmara, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Kampala. Washington relied on their reading of events in Sudan, rather than on its own eyes and ears.
There were real grounds for concern. Sudan's new leaders expanded long-standing ties to Middle Eastern terrorist groups. Bin Laden and his followers arrived in 1991. The "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian later convicted of plotting to blow up New York landmarks, received his U.S. visa from Khartoum in 1993.
By late 1995, however, many Sudanese leaders began to wonder if their embrace of foreign Muslim radicals was self-defeating, both a threat to internal security and a barrier to the world at large. But when Sudan aided France in capturing the notorious terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal," U.S. analysts dismissed it as a sop to Western concerns rather than a change in Sudan's terrorism policy.
Bad intelligence included faulty accusations, as well as weak political analysis. False reports of plots against Americans prompted U.S. Ambassador Donald Petterson to threaten "the destruction of your [the Sudanese] economy" and "military measures that would make you pay a high price," according to his talking points. His successor, co-author Carney, delivered similar warnings in late 1995. The focus on false accusations distracted from U.S. calls for addressing the legitimate grievances of Sudan's embattled Southerners.
Poor intelligence also damaged U.S. counterterrorism policy in August 1998 when, in retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, American cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that Washington alleged was producing chemical weapons precursors. The Clinton White House didn't even have basic facts, such as who owned the plant. Instead, the president relied on unverifiable assertions about the firm's links to bin Laden.
The intelligence failure had roots in second-hand sources provided by anti-Khartoum allies in the region, particularly in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Egypt. If U.S. embassy staff had been left on the ground, firsthand reporting might have identified the right targets or averted a strike that ultimately strengthened sympathies for Islamic radicals bent on attacking the United States. This danger has arisen again recently, as the United States takes aim at remote, and sometimes wrong, targets in Afghanistan, relying on intelligence from often questionable sources.
The Sudan story also shows that politics can override and policymakers ignore good intelligence. By 1996, Khartoum's enthusiasm for an ideological Islamic state had waned. Pragmatists were prevailing over ideologues. In February 1996, as The Washington Post has reported, Khartoum tried to cooperate on counter-terrorism. Sudan's minister of state for defense (now its U.N. ambassador), Maj. Gen. Elfatih Erwa, secretly visited the United States to propose a trade -- bin Laden's extradition to Saudi Arabia in return for an easing of political and economic sanctions. Riyadh refused.
Three months later, after offering to hand bin Laden over to U.S. authorities, Sudan expelled him, asDeputy National Security Adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger had urged. In July, Sudan gave U.S. authorities permission to photograph two terror camps. Washington failed to follow up. In August, Turabi sent an "olive branch" letter to President Clinton through Ijaz. There was no reply.
In October, Gutbi Al-Mahdi, Sudan's newly appointed, Western-educated intelligence chief, showed sensitive intelligence on terrorists tracked through Khartoum to one of us, Ijaz, to pass on to the Clinton administration. By election day 1996, top Clinton aides, including Berger, knew what information was available from Khartoum and of its potential value to identify, monitor and ultimately dismantle terrorist cells around the world. Yet they did nothing about it.
A further change took place in Sudanese thinking in April 1997. The government dropped its demand that Washington lift sanctions in exchange for terrorism cooperation. Sudan's president, in a letter that Ijaz delivered to U.S. authorities, offered FBI and CIA counter-terrorism units unfettered and unconditional access to Khartoum's intelligence.
Sudan's policy shift sparked a debate at the State Department, where foreign service officers believed the United States should reengage Khartoum. By the end of summer 1997, they persuaded incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to let at least some diplomatic staff return to Sudan to press for a resolution of the civil war and pursue offers to cooperate on terrorism. A formal announcement was made in late September.
Two individuals, however, disagreed. NSC terrorism specialist Richard Clarke and NSC Africa specialist Susan Rice, who was about to become assistant secretary of State for African affairs, persuaded Berger, then national security adviser, to overrule Albright. The new policy was reversed after two days.
Overturning a months-long interagency process undermined U.S. counterterrorism efforts. In a final attempt to find a way of cooperating with U.S. authorities, Sudan's intelligence chief repeated the unconditional offer to share terrorism data with the FBI in a February 1998 letter addressed directly to Middle East and North Africa special agent-in-charge David Williams.But the White House and Susan Rice objected. On June 24, 1998, Williams wrote to Mahdi, saying he was "not in a position to accept your kind offer." The U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed six weeks later.
The Clinton administration modified its stance just before the USS Cole attack by sending FBI counterterrorism experts to Khartoum to look around. But it was all too little too late.
We're still living with the consequences of the U.S. policy and intelligence failure in Sudan. Khartoum offered us the best chance to engage radical Islamists and stop bin Laden early. If the United States is to account for the failures that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, we need to better understand our failures in Sudan. Solid intelligence that informs sound policy can produce the judiciousness that helps differentiate America from those who seek to destroy it.
WMD IN A HAYSTACK
Rolf Ekeus, living proof that not all Swedish arms inspectors are fools, may have been right.
by Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON POST
October 10, 2003
Ekeus headed the U.N. inspection team that from 1991 to 1997 uncovered not just tons of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq but a massive secret nuclear weapons program as well. This after the other Swede, Hans Blix, then director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had given Saddam Hussein a perfectly clean bill of health on being non-nuclear. Indeed, Iraq had a seat on the IAEA board of governors.
Ekeus theorizes that Hussein decided years ago that it was unwise to store mustard gas and other unstable and corrosive poisons in barrels, and also difficult to conceal them. Therefore, rather than store large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, he would adapt the program to retain an infrastructure (laboratories, equipment, trained scientists, detailed plans) that could "break out" and ramp up production when needed. The model is Japanese "just in time" manufacturing, where you save on inventory by making and delivering stuff in immediate response to orders. Except that Hussein's business was toxins, not Toyotas.
The interim report of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay seems to support the Ekeus hypothesis. He found infrastructure, but as yet no finished product.
As yet, mind you. "We are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapons stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone," Kay testified last week.
This is fact, not fudging. How do we know? Because Hussein's practice was to store his chemical weapons unmarked amid his conventional munitions, and we have just begun to understand the staggering scale of Hussein's stocks of conventional munitions. Hussein left behind 130 known ammunition caches, many of which are more than twice the size of Manhattan. Imagine looking through "600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordnance" -- rows and rows stretched over an area the size of even one Manhattan -- looking for barrels of unmarked chemical weapons.
And there are 130 of these depots. Kay's team has so far inspected only 10. The question of whether Hussein actually retained finished product is still open.
But the question of whether he was still in the WMD business is no longer open. "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities," Kay testified, "and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002" -- concealed, that is, from the hapless Hans Blix.
Kay's list is chilling. It includes a secret network of labs and safe houses within the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi foreign intelligence service; bioorganisms kept in scientists' homes, including a vial of live botulinum toxin; and my favorite, "new research on BW [biological weapons]-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin" -- all "not declared to the U.N."
I have been to medical school, and I have never heard of Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever. I don't know one doctor in 100 who has. It is a rare disease, and you can be sure that Hussein was not seeking a cure.
He was not after the Nobel in physiology (Yasser Arafat having already won the peace prize). He was looking for a way to turn these agents into killers. The fact that he was not stockpiling is relevant only to the question of why some prewar intelligence was wrong about Iraq's WMD program. But it is not relevant to the question of whether a war to preempt his development of WMD was justified.
The fact that Hussein may have decided to go from building up stocks to maintaining clandestine production facilities (may have: remember, Kay still has 120 depots to go through) does not mean that he got out of the WMD business. Otherwise, by that logic, one would have to say that until the very moment at which the plutonium from its 8,000 processed fuel rods is wedded to waiting nuclear devices, North Korea does not have a nuclear program.
Hussein was simply making his WMD program more efficient and concealable. His intent and capacity were unchanged.
Moreover, for those who care about the United Nations (I do not, but many administration critics have a weakness for legal niceties), Resolution 1441, unanimously passed by the Security Council, ordered Hussein to make a full accounting of his WMD program and to cooperate with inspectors, and warned that there would be no more tolerance for concealment or obstruction. Kay's finding of "dozens of WMD-related program activities" concealed from U.N. inspectors constitutes an irrefutable material breach of 1441 -- and an open-and-shut justification for the U.S. decision to disarm Saddam Hussein by force.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.