Posted on 09/08/2006 9:58:02 AM PDT by Howlin
Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?
Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:
1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.
2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.
3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.
4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.
6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.
7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.
8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.
9. Did not take an opportunity to take into custody two al Qaeda operatives involved in the East African embassy bombings. In another little scoop, I am able to show that Sudan arrested these two terrorists and offered them to the FBI. The Clinton administration declined to pick them up and they were later allowed to return to Pakistan.
10. Ordered an ineffectual, token missile strike against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.
12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.
15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.
16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.
From the article Q and A with Richard Miniter located in the article Clinton’s Loss? at National Review Online
Just for a trip down memory lane. We are all familiar with the left throwing up the August 6th, 2001 PDB, but did you know?
“The following is the text of an item from the Presidential Daily Brief received by President William J. Clinton on December 4, 1998. Redacted material is indicated in brackets.
SUBJECT: Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks
1. Reporting [-] suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sadiq ‘Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gama’at al-Islamiyya (IG) saying that, as of late October, the IG had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of Bin Ladin, but that the operation was on hold.A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options-perhaps including an aircraft hijacking.
IG leader Islambuli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during the “next couple of weeks” to free ‘Abd al-Rahman and the other prisoners, according to what may be a different source.
The same source late last month said that Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport. [-]
2. Some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training, according to various sources, but no group directly tied to Bin Ladin’s al-Qa’ida organization has ever carried out an aircraft hijacking.Bin Ladin could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft.Accord-ing to [-] the IG in October obtained SA-7 missiles and intended to move them from Yemen into Saudi Arabia to shoot down an Egyptian plane or, if unsuccessful, a US military or civilian aircraft.
A [-] in October told us that unspecified “extremist elements” in Yemen had acquired SA-7s. [-]
3. [-] indicate the Bin Ladin organization or its allies are moving closer to implementing anti-US attacks at unspecified locations, but we do not know whether they are related to attacks on aircraft. A Bin Ladin associate in Sudan late last month told a colleague in Kandahar that he had shipped a group of containers to Afghanistan. Bin Ladin associates also talked about the movement of containers to Afghanistan before the East Africa bombings.
In other [-] Bin Ladin associates last month discussed picking up a package in Malaysia. One told his colleague in Malaysia that “they” were in the “ninth month [of pregnancy].”
An alleged Bin Ladin supporter in Yemen late last month remarked to his mother that he planned to work in “commerce” from abroad and said his impending “marriage,” which would take place soon, would be a “surprise.”"Commerce” and “marriage” often are codewords for terrorist attacks. [-]
So what did this mean. Well from the 911 Commission Report we know that there was a small effort to tighten security at airport, especially JFK and others. But the report goes on to tell us what happened in the days afterward.
“The intelligence community could learn little about the source of the information. Later in December and again in early January 1999, more information arrived from the same source, reporting that the planned hijacking had been stalled because two of the operatives, who were sketchily described, had been arrested near Washington, D.C. or New York. After investigation, the FBI could find no information to support the hijack threat; nor could it verify any arrests like those described in the report. The FAA alert at the New York area airports ended on January 31, 1999.113
On December 17, the day after the United States and Britain began their Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq, the Small Group convened to discuss intelligence suggesting imminent Bin Ladin attacks on the U.S. embassies in Qatar and Ethiopia. The next day, Director Tenet sent a memo to the President, the cabinet, and senior officials throughout the government describing reports that Bin Ladin planned to attack U.S. targets very soon, possibly over the next few days, before Ramadan celebrations began. Tenet said he was “greatly concerned.”114
With alarms sounding, members of the Small Group considered ideas about how to respond to or prevent such attacks. Generals Shelton and Zinni came up with military options. Special Operations Forces were later told that they might be ordered to attempt very high-risk in-and-out raids either in Khartoum, to capture a senior Bin Ladin operative known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian-who appeared to be engineering some of the plots-or in Kandahar, to capture Bin Ladin himself. Shelton told us that such operations are not risk free, invoking the memory of the 1993 “Black Hawk down” fiasco in Mogadishu.115
The CIA reported on December 18 that Bin Ladin might be traveling to Kandahar and could be targeted there with cruise missiles. Vessels with Tomahawk cruise missiles were on station in the Arabian Sea, and could fire within a few hours of receiving target data.116
On December 20, intelligence indicated Bin Ladin would be spending the night at the Haji Habash house, part of the governor’s residence in Kandahar. The chief of the Bin Ladin unit, “Mike,” told us that he promptly briefed Tenet and his deputy, John Gordon. From the field, the CIA’s Gary Schroen advised: “Hit him tonight-we may not get another chance.” An urgent teleconference of principals was arranged.117
The principals considered a cruise missile strike to try to kill Bin Ladin. One issue they discussed was the potential collateral damage-the number of innocent bystanders who would be killed or wounded. General Zinni predicted a number well over 200 and was concerned about damage to a nearby mosque. The senior intelligence officer on the Joint Staff apparently made a different calculation, estimating half as much collateral damage and not predicting damage to the mosque. By the end of the meeting, the principals decided against recommending to the President that he order a strike. A few weeks later, in January 1999, Clarke wrote that the principals had thought the intelligence only half reliable and had worried about killing or injuring perhaps 300 people. Tenet said he remembered doubts about the reliability of the source and concern about hitting the nearby mosque. “Mike” remembered Tenet telling him that the military was concerned that a few hours had passed since the last sighting of Bin Ladin and that this persuaded everyone that the chance of failure was too great.118
Some lower-level officials were angry. “Mike” reported to Schroen that he had been unable to sleep after this decision. “I’m sure we’ll regret not acting last night,” he wrote, criticizing the principals for “worrying that some stray shrapnel might hit the Habash mosque and ‘offend’ Muslims.” He commented that they had not shown comparable sensitivity when deciding to bomb Muslims in Iraq. The principals, he said, were “obsessed” with trying to get others-Saudis, Pakistanis, Afghan tribals-to “do what we won’t do.” Schroen was disappointed too. “We should have done it last night,” he wrote. “We may well come to regret the decision not to go ahead.”119 The Joint Staff’s deputy director for operations agreed, even though he told us that later intelligence appeared to show that Bin Ladin had left his quarters before the strike would have occurred. Missing Bin Ladin, he said, “would have caused us a hell of a problem, but it was a shot we should have taken, and we would have had to pay the price.”
Schroen was right, they should have taken the shot, and this is the composit that the film protrayed with Sandy Berger slamming the phone down after informing them he didn’t have the authority. Yet, even with the “artistic license” we can see that - such as when the Predator had Bin Laden in it’s sites there was hemming and hawing and indecision abounding under Clinton.
In the military as in all dangerous work you learn one lesson - hesitation will get you killed. We learned that all too well on 9/11.
http://www.macsmind.com/wordpress/2006/09/08/presidential-daily-brief-to-clinton-warned-of-hijackings/
* January 25, 1993: Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani, fired an AK-47 into cars waiting at a stoplight in front of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Virginia, killing two CIA employees.
* February 26, 1993: Islamic terrorists try to bring down the World Trade Center with car bombs. They failed to destroy the buildings, but killed 6 and injured over 1000 people.
* March 12, 1993: Car bombings in Mumbai, India leave 257 dead and 1,400 others injured.
* July 18, 1994: Bombing of Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, kills 86 and wounds 300. The bombing is generally attributed to Hezbollah acting on behalf of Iran.
* July 19, 1994: Alas Chiricanas Flight 00901 is bombed, killing 21. Generally attributed to Hezbollah.
* July 26, 1994: The Israeli Embassy is attacked in London, and a Jewish charity is also car-bombed, wounding 20. The attacks are attributed to Hezbollah.
* December 11, 1994: A bomb explodes on board Philippine Airlines Flight 434, killing a Japanese businessman. It develops that Ramzi Yousef planted the bomb to test it for the larger terrorist attack he is planning.
* December 24, 1994: In a preview of September 11, Air France Flight 8969 is hijacked by Islamic terrorists who planned to crash the plane in Paris.
* January 6, 1995: Operation Bojinka, an Islamist plot to bomb 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean, is discovered on a laptop computer in a Manila, Philippines apartment by authorities after a fire occurred in the apartment. Noted terrorists including Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed are involved in the plot.
* June 14—June 19, 1995: The Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, in which 105 civilians and 25 Russian troops were killed following an attack by Chechan Islamists.
* July—October, 1995: Bombings in France by Islamic terrorists led by Khaled Kelkal kill eight and injure more than 100.
* November 13, 1995: Bombing of OPM-SANG building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia kills 7
* November 19, 1995: Bombing of Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan kills 19.
* January 1996: In Kizlyar, 350 Chechen Islamists took 3,000 hostages in a hospital. The attempt to free them killed 65 civilians and soldiers.
* February 25 - March 4, 1996: A series of four suicide bombings in Israel leave 60 dead and 284 wounded within 10 days.
* June 11, 1996: A bomb explodes on a train traveling on the Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya Line of the Moscow Metro, killing four and unjuring at least 12.
* June 25, 1996: The Khobar Towers bombing, carried out by Hezbollah with Iranian support. Nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed and 372 wounded.
* February 24, 1997: An armed man opens fire on tourists at an observation deck atop the Empire State Building in New York City, United States, killing a Danish national and wounding visitors from several countries. A handwritten note carried by the gunman claims this was a punishment attack against the "enemies of Palestine".
* November 17, 1997: Massacre in Luxor, Egypt, in which Islamist gunmen attack tourists, killing 62 people.
* January 1998: Wandhama Massacre - 24 Kashmiri Pandits are massacred by Pakistan-backed Islamists in the city of Wandhama in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
* February 14, 1998: Bombings by Islamic Jihadi groups at an election rally in the Indian city of Coimbatore kill about 60 people.
* August 7, 1998: Al Qaeda bombs U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 225 people and injuring more than 4,000.
* August 31 – September 22, 1998: Russian apartment bombings kill about 300 people, leading Russia into Second Chechen War.
* December 1998: Jordanian authorities foil a plot to bomb American and Israeli tourists in Jordan, and arrest 28 suspects as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots.
* December 14, 1998: Ahmed Ressam is arrested on the United States–Canada border in Port Angeles, Washington; he confessed to planning to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots.
* December 24, 1998: Indian Airlines Flight 814 from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India is hijacked by Islamic terrorists. One passenger is killed and some hostages are released. After negotiations between the Taliban and the Indian government, the last of the remaining hostages on board Flight 814 are released in exchange for release of 4 terrorists.
* January 2000: The last of the 2000 millennium attack plots fails, as the boat meant to bomb USS The Sullivans sinks.
* August 8, 2000: A bomb exploded at an underpass in Pushkin Square in Moscow, killing 11 people and wounding more than 90.
* August 17, 2000: Two bombs exploded in a shopping center in Riga, Latvia, injuring 35 people.
* October 12, 2000: AL Qaeda bombs USS Cole with explosive-laden speedboat, killing 17 US sailors and wounding 40, off the port coast of Aden, Yemen.
..a sharp Border crossing guard who detected explosives at the Canadian border. In the United States in 1999, remember the first WTC Bombing took place in 1993. Since she was doing her job as a Border Agent and the discovery made headlines after the threats we all endure FOR MONTHS leading up to Y2K......if this incident was reported to Jamie Corelick before the press, does anyone seriously think it would have world news?
Doogle
Khobar Towers
The Clinton administration left many stones unturned.
BY LOUIS J. FREEH
Sunday, June 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Ten years ago today, acting under direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the Saudi Hezbollah detonated a 25,000-pound TNT bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast wave destroyed Building 131 and grievously wounded hundreds of additional Air Force personnel. It also killed an unknown number of Saudi civilians in a nearby park.
The 19 Americans murdered were members of the 4,404th Wing, who were risking their lives to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. This was a U.N.-mandated mission after the 1991 Gulf War to stop Saddam Hussein from killing his Shiite people. The Khobar victims, along with the courageous families and friends who mourn them this weekend in Washington, deserve our respect and honor. More importantly, they must be remembered, because American justice has still been denied.
Although a federal grand jury handed up indictments in June 2001--days before I left as FBI director and a week before some of the charges against 14 of the terrorists would have lapsed because of the statute of limitations--two of the primary leaders of the attack, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Mughassil and Abdel Hussein Mohamed al-Nasser, are living comfortably in Iran with about as much to fear from America as Osama bin Laden had prior to Sept. 11 (to wit, U.S. marshals showing up to serve warrants for their arrests).
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008563
AT WAR
An Unheeded Warning
When al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, Bill Clinton shrugged.
BY RICHARD MINITER
From "Losing bin Laden"
Can be found on Opinion Journal (Wall Street Journal) at this link below:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004081
Previous Chapters...
The White House:
On a Saturday morning, a day after the World Trade Center explosion, there was no sense of crisis in the White House. The bombers of the Twin Towers had changed little in the routine of President Clinton. The sheer scale of the blast had not sunk in. The few presidential aides in the West Wing were casually dressed and focused on the president's economic policy. The few reporters hanging around the briefing room were there to cover the president's radio address, which would focus on his economic stimulus package. Later that day, Chelsea's friends would arrive from Little Rock to celebrate her 13th birthday; Hillary had planned a party on the second floor of the White House residence.
President Clinton sat in the Oval Office scribbling. He was preparing for his weekly radio address and, as usual, making last-minute revisions.
It was the 39th day of his presidency, and so far it wasn't going well. The president's military salute--a few fingers sheepishly and momentarily touching his forehead--was faulted. National Security Adviser Tony Lake went to see the president about the "salute issue" and they had practiced for a few minutes in the Oval Office. Now his military salute photographed well as he walked across the South Lawn to board Marine One, the presidential helicopter.
Yet few press complaints were so easily resolved.
Mr. Clinton had lost his second attorney-general nominee, Kimba Wood, when nanny-payment problems raised a red flag. The president's offhand remarks about Iraq and his subsequent "don't ask, don't tell" fudge on his controversial plan to integrate homosexuals into the military had also touched off rounds of critical newspaper stories. The Clinton administration--the first Democrats in the White House since 1981--seemed to be crumbling.
Now Mr. Clinton was trying to regain the initiative. He was finally ready to announce the details of his economic stimulus package, the centerpiece of his 1992 campaign. Then the World Trade Center was attacked. Should he depart from his plans and his script and say something about the headline-making attack on New York's tallest towers? At first, he couldn't decide.
New York's Gov. Mario Cuomo telephoned the president while the Twin Towers were still being evacuated. Messrs. Clinton and Cuomo had a difficult relationship. Mr. Clinton had spent much of 1991 wondering if the New York governor was going to challenge him in the Democratic presidential primaries, and much of 1992 trying to get Mr. Cuomo's full-throated support.
But this phone call was surprisingly simple: Mr. Cuomo simply wanted to brief the president and get his assurance that New York State would enjoy the full support of the federal government. Mr. Clinton must have quickly realized that this was a common kind of phone call that governors made after disasters. He had made a few of these calls himself. Perhaps this was the reason Mr. Clinton didn't seem to fully grasp that this disaster was not natural, but man-made. That it was terrorism.
Mr. Cuomo told Mr. Clinton that a bomb had most likely caused the World Trade Center blast--a conclusion that the Clinton White House still chose to consider "speculation." After conferring with his aides, the president asked his press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, to put out the cautious line that the New York authorities "have reason to believe it was a bomb but are not definite." This was a grudging admission of the obvious, but it gave Mr. Clinton time to decide whether to act.
Why was Mr. Clinton so anxious to discount the idea that the Twin Towers had been bombed? A bomb suggested a terrorist act. A terrorist act of this magnitude required a strong response. And strong action was politically dangerous if it misfired. So, from the day of the World Trade Center bombing until the last day of the Clinton administration, the president demanded absolute proof before acting against terrorists. Ambiguity suited his purposes.
To preserve that ambiguity, either Mr. Clinton ignored the overwhelming evidence that the towers were bombed or the White House staff failed to keep him fully informed. Perhaps the president had not yet been told that the FBI's top bomb expert believed that the World Trade Center was bombed or that the New York FBI investigation was proceeding on that basis. Or perhaps the president had not been told that the bomb was planted by terrorists, although the FBI had made that determination within hours.
The president knew that he would have to add something about the World Trade Center explosion to his Saturday radio address. But what? His staff had spent much of Friday working on the speech. Now, on Saturday morning, Mr. Clinton was doing some reworking of his own. Strangely, despite the mounting evidence, Mr. Clinton still wasn't willing to say that New York's tallest towers had been bombed.
While he worked on his speech, the president was told that FBI Director William Sessions was on the line. The president didn't relish this call either. Sessions, a Bush appointee, was plagued by petty scandals, and Mr. Clinton planned to replace him.
Mr. Clinton picked up the receiver. The director told the president that the FBI's New York office now felt confident that a bomb had caused the blast at the World Trade Center. The president probably wasn't listening very closely; he had come to see Mr. Sessions as a political time bomb, not a source of information about an actual bomb.
After a few minutes, Mr. Clinton hung up and went back to scribbling. He kept crossing out words and writing new ones--but "bomb" was not one of them. Mr. Clinton's radio address reflected his beliefs about the World Trade Center attack. He treated it like a disaster, a humanitarian crisis, like a twister in Arkansas, but not as an attack. Indeed, the bombing was a sideshow, a distraction from what the president really wanted to discuss--his economic agenda.
This would be Mr. Clinton's first and last extended speech on the plot to topple the Twin Towers. Frankly, this is surprising. How does a president shrug away a major terror attack with a few words in a radio address heard by a fraction of the American people? The president's speech clearly demonstrated that he did not sense the importance of the 1993 bombing. Because they reveal so much, Mr. Clinton's remarks on the attack follow in full:
"Good morning. Before I talk with you about our economic program this morning, I want to say a word to the good people of New York City and to all Americans who've been so deeply affected by the tragedy that struck Manhattan yesterday." This opening suggests that Mr. Clinton didn't want to shift away from his campaign-winning "it's the economy, stupid" theme, referring to the attack as a "tragedy," a sad event, not an aggressive act requiring a strong response.
Mr. Clinton continued: "A number of innocent people lost their lives. Hundreds were injured, and thousands were struck with fear in their hearts when an explosion rocked the basement of the World Trade Center. To their families, you're in the thoughts and prayers of my family and in the synagogues and churches last night; today and tomorrow, you will be remembered and thought of again and again." This is an admirable attempt at reassurance, reminiscent of President Bush's consoling words following the Sept. 11 attacks. But again, it misses the mark: these people were murdered, not struck by lightning.
The young president hammered away at his compassionate theme, anxious to leave no one out. "My thoughts are also with the police, the firefighters, the emergency response teams and the citizens whose countless acts of bravery averted even more bloodshed. Their reaction and their valor reminds us of how often Americans are at their best when we face the worst."
Next, Mr. Clinton came to the place where he had to report on his administration's actions and plans. These amounted to phone calls--and only phone calls. "I thank all the people who reached out to the injured and the frightened amid the tumult that shook lower Manhattan. Following the explosion, I spoke with New York's Governor Mario Cuomo and New York City Mayor David Dinkins to assure them that the full measure of federal law-enforcement resources will be brought to bear on this investigation." This was a pivotal decision, though Mr. Clinton did not seem to realize its full implications at the time. The terror attack would be treated as a criminal matter, not a threat to national security. This approach would hobble Clinton's war on terror for years.
Mr. Clinton expanded on the law-enforcement theme, signaling that terrorists need not fear an armed response. "Just this morning I spoke with FBI Director Sessions, who assured me that the FBI and the Treasury Department are working closely with the New York City police and fire departments. Working together we'll find out who was involved and why this happened. Americans should know we'll do everything in our power to keep them safe in their streets, their offices and their homes. Feeling safe is an essential part of being secure. And that's important to all of us."
Then, Mr. Clinton suddenly shifted the subject. "I also want to take this opportunity this morning to talk about another crucial aspect of our security, our economic security . . ."
As the president shifted to discuss his economic package, which consumed the bulk of his speech, his voice warmed up and slowed down. It was clear to listeners, certainly those in the press, where the president's real interests lay. Almost every contemporary press account of President Clinton's Saturday radio speech leads with the details of the president's economic package and the support that he was garnering around the country. And, of course, the bulk of the radio address was on Mr. Clinton's economic plan.
But note that his remarks on the bombing were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kind of things governors say after floods or tornadoes. Significantly, President Clinton said nothing about hunting down or punishing the perpetrators. Not even a ritualistic denunciation of "these cowardly acts" or a mention of the shock value of an attack on a skyscraping symbol of America.
Why were his words so thin? President Clinton believed that he had a historic opportunity to restore American prosperity and reposition the Democrats as the party of growth and hope. This was partly achieved over the next eight years, ironically with the help of a Republican-led Congress. Mr. Clinton also had an opportunity to transform his party on national-security issues--to overcome its 1960s-era hesitancy to use force and to remake it as a strong defender of freedom, justice and security. Instead, Mr. Clinton shrank back. He had an opportunity to stop an escalating wave of terror attacks, guided by Osama bin Laden, in the first weeks of his administration. But tragically for the nation, he didn't see it.
Of course, presidents are not clairvoyant. Yet at the time, the president's political opponents may have seen more clearly the pivotal role the World Trade Center bombing would play in American history. On the day after the bombing, the minority whip of the House, Newt Gingrich, said that the president should be "cautious" in cutting the defense budget, as Mr. Clinton planned to do. Citing the Twin Towers bombing, Mr. Gingrich said, "There's a very real requirement for human intelligence and military strength. Every time we have any display of weakness, any display of timidity . . . here are people on the planet eager to take advantage of us." These would prove to be prescient words--words, unfortunately, that Mr. Clinton did not heed.
Mr. Clinton's first historic opportunity to wage war on terrorism did not quickly drift away like a plume of smoke after the World Trade Center bombing. It lingered for days and weeks. Within days, evidence quickly accumulated that an Islamic terror cell, supported from abroad, had carried out the attack. There were front-page newspaper stories about the arrest of Mohammed Salameh and the presence of a network of dangerous Islamic radicals, with a hub in Jersey City. Yet the president appeared uninterested.
President Clinton did not visit the World Trade Center in 1993. Perhaps if he had, he might have understood the enormity of the damage. What might have happened if Mr. Clinton had seen the immense crater or talked to the family of Monica Smith?
Four days after the attack, Mr. Clinton was across the Hudson River in New Brunswick, N.J., discussing job-training programs. There, he urged the public not to "overreact" to the World Trade Center bombing. But he didn't cross the river and see the damage for himself.
It would have taken a few minutes, but Mr. Clinton did not bother.
Why didn't he go? One implausible rationale offered by Clinton officials is that unnamed New York officials urged the president to avoid the site. One senior Clinton official--through an anonymous quote in the Boston Globe--noted that "Clinton had a full schedule in New Jersey, with no opening for a visit to the site in Manhattan." Full schedule. The site in Manhattan. The sheer clinical distance of those words, days after the attack, speaks volumes.
Dick Morris, a former Clinton adviser, offers two more-likely explanations. Mr. Clinton saw himself as a comforter who needed to reassure an anxious public (in New Jersey, he urged Americans to "keep your courage up and go about your lives"), and he saw the attack as a criminal matter, not a terror strike. "In what is likely, in retrospect, to be judged the single greatest omission of his presidency, Clinton chose to treat the Trade Center attack as an isolated criminal act, devoid of serious foreign policy or military implications," writes Mr. Morris. President Clinton just didn't get it.
Over the next month, the president made four fateful decisions. He did not keep the bombing before the public with speeches and actions. He left the case in the hands of the FBI, which was headed by a man he did not trust and was waiting to fire. He treated the bombing as a law-enforcement matter, not a counterintelligence investigation, thus cutting the CIA out of the fight against terrorism. And he did not even meet with his handpicked CIA director to consider alternative approaches to combating international terrorism aimed at Americans. This ensured future victories for bin Laden.
Langley, Va.:
Frustration was growing at CIA headquarters. The Counter-Terrorism Center was kept away from the World Trade Center investigation--even though the CTC was designed to be the center of information on terrorist threats. The State Department, the FBI and the Secret Service had detailed personnel to the CTC to make sure that important information was shared, not hidden behind bureaucratic bulwarks. Indeed, one of the reasons that the deputy director of the CTC was an FBI official was to guarantee that information was shared among the institutions.
If the Clinton administration wanted to conduct a joint counterterrorism operation to discover the full breadth of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy and to take action against the perpetrators overseas, the CTC would have been the perfect vehicle. That is what it was designed to do. It also had a secret presidential "finding," written by President Reagan and still in force, that specifically authorized covert operations to smash terrorist cells.
But the FBI, with the president's tacit acceptance, was treating the World Trade Center attack as a law-enforcement matter. That meant that everything the FBI gathered, every lab-test result, every scrap of paper, every interview, every lead, every clue from overseas was theirs alone. No one outside of the FBI's New York office would see it for years.
How could the FBI keep the evidence from other terror-fighting agencies? This was actually standard procedure when the FBI conducted criminal cases, as opposed to strictly counterterrorism investigations. The bureau invoked rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. If the FBI shared the information with other federal agencies, then a judge could rule the evidence inadmissible in a court or require the government to share it with the accused terrorists, so that they could mount an effective legal defense. That would provide the accused terrorists with vital information about what the federal government knew and what it didn't. So Rule 6E was designed to prevent information sharing--and preserve the government's evidence for trial. "It is not that they [the FBI and CIA] don't get along--it's that they can't share information by legal statute" in criminal cases, said Christopher Whitcomb, an FBI veteran who worked on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation.
Jim Woolsey, the director of central intelligence, fumed. Any 24-year-old junior agent in the FBI's New York office knew more about the largest-ever terrorist attack on American soil than he did. "It was frustrating," Mr. Woolsey told me. "Nobody outside the prosecutorial team and maybe the FBI had access" to information about the case.
The CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center itself could only follow a few scattered scraps of intelligence. And even though the agency passed information on to the FBI, the CIA had no way of knowing if it was supplying the FBI with redundant data or vital clues.
As a result, both the CIA and the FBI missed several key connections between Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden. Yousef had stayed in bin Laden-owned guesthouses in Pakistan, both before and after the World Trade Center attack. When he was finally arrested in 1995, Yousef had several pictures of Osama bin Laden (posing with machine guns) in his baggage and a business card from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a relative of bin Laden's, in his wallet.
The CIA would not learn the full details of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing until the FBI made its evidence public--at the end of the first trial in 1996. And even then, the critical evidence was supplied to the CIA by an independent investigator, Laurie Mylroie, who told the author that she photocopied it and handed it to the agency.
New York:
The FBI worked quickly. On the same day as Mr. Clinton's speech, investigators found the differential housing from the bomb van. A vehicle identification number stamped on it allowed them to trace it to the leasing agency in New Jersey. The manager said one Arab man had stopped in to collect his $400 deposit. That man turned out to be Mohammed Salameh, who desperately needed the money to pay for a plane ticket. The few dollars Yousef had given him was for an infant's plane fare; without the money to upgrade the ticket he would be trapped. That was what Yousef wanted. This is how "expendables" are used.
The FBI arrested Salameh in a sting operation at the leasing office. His phone records and storage-unit keys connected the rest of the dots. But Yousef escaped, and the quick initial successes of the investigation masked missed clues of a wider conspiracy, including intriguing connections between bin Laden and the World Trade Center bombing.
For years, the New York FBI office knew about a growing network of Islamic extremists in the New York area, but until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the agents couldn't even open a full investigation. Again, bureaucracy got in the way. To begin an investigation--according to both the official Justice Department guidelines and various statutes passed by Congress--required that agents have evidence that a crime had been committed or was under way. Sometimes, supervisors would not approve an investigation even if there was evidence of criminal activity, if the crime seemed insignificant. In practical terms, that meant that the FBI could investigate terrorists after Americans were dead, but not before.
And in 1993, the idea of punishing small, seemingly insignificant crimes as a way of preventing larger ones had not yet taken hold. The FBI was aware that many Islamic radicals were training with weapons at Connecticut and Pennsylvania gun ranges. Indeed, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Mohammed Salameh, was identified as one of those participants. But arresting these men on weapons charges or investigating the wider purposes behind such "training" was shrugged off as a minor affair. Target shooting is not a crime, while owning a gun without a proper permit is a minor one. The FBI was also barred from monitoring the mosque in Jersey City where the World Trade Center bombers met, on the grounds of religious freedom. All of these internal, bureaucratic restrictions made life easier for bin Laden's cells, both inside and outside the United States.
Still, individual FBI agents valiantly tried to make a difference. A number of special agents knew that some Brooklyn and Jersey City residents--many from the same two mosques that were frequented by Salameh and other bombers--were taking their "vacations" in Afghanistan to wage jihad, even years after the Soviet Union had retreated. Some New York agents considered investigating these men for violating the Neutrality Act, which makes it a crime for an American citizen to fight in another nation's war. But, the agents soon discovered, most of the suspects were legal residents or illegal aliens, not citizens. The Neutrality Act did not apply to them. So, in most terrorism cases before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could do little to counter the growing network of militants training and arming themselves in its midst.
And no one at the FBI--at headquarters or in the New York office--realized that one of the FBI's most-trusted informants was a "double agent," working for both the Feds and Osama bin Laden.
An Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohammed received a U.S. visa in 1985. He later became a U.S. citizen and obtained a military security clearance. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of violent Islamic radicals and had been a very helpful source for both the CIA and the FBI. At the time, those agencies did not know why Mohammed was so well informed.
By 1987, Mohammed was working at the U.S. Army's warfare planning center at Fort Bragg, N.C. Part of his job was to lecture American soldiers about Muslim terrorists. He certainly knew his subject.
Mohammed did not mention that he was still an active member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. That terrorist group was run by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who soon became a top bin Laden deputy. Nor did Mohammed mention that he had played host and tour guide to Zawahiri on his two visits to America. Mohammed had also met Osama bin Laden many times in Khartoum and had trained bin Laden's bodyguards, according to his own admissions in court documents.
Concedes Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and a counterterrorism official at the State Department, "He was an active source for the FBI, a double agent."
The FBI had good reason to be suspicious of Mohammed--if its agents had been paying attention.
When Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, was gunned down by El Sayyid Nosair in 1990, the murder was treated as a hate crime, not terrorism. The New York City Police Department eventually uncovered enough evidence to indict Nosair. The FBI monitored the case but did not intervene. "I was in charge of bureau operations at the time," Buck Revell explained, "and I never received any information that the assassin of Meir Kahane was connected with any sort of organization that might have a terrorist agenda."
The FBI was in the dark because, tragically, the NYPD and the FBI's own special agents missed several important clues. In the course of the investigation of the Kahane murder, documents were seized from Nosair's apartment that, when finally translated years later, proved to be U.S. Army manuals--some marked "top secret"--that had been translated into Arabic by Mohammed. Since the police and the FBI had not yet translated the documents, they did not investigate exactly how Nosair came into possession of them. If they had, they would have learned that Nosair was introduced to Mohammed by a man named Khalid Ibrahim, who had run a fundraising operation for Osama bin Laden's various organizations since 1989. They also would have learned that Mohammed had conducted weapons training--sometimes using semiautomatic rifles--for Nosair, Ibrahim and Abouhalima. (Abouhalima drove the getaway car for the 1993 World Trade Center attack.)
Abouhalima was also tied to Ibrahim's Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, where money for bin Laden was raised. Finally, Abouhalima was a part-time driver for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was later convicted of "seditious conspiracy" in a wide-ranging plot to blow up the Holland Tunnel--when it was packed with rush-hour traffic--and other plans to destroy New York landmarks.
Indeed many of the World Trade Center bombers met each other though the blind cleric's mosque, a dark, dirty series of rooms located over a cheap Chinese restaurant in Jersey City. The mosque where the bombers met was called Masjid al-Salaam, the "mosque of peace."
But all of these connections eluded the FBI, in large part because the bureau did not translate Nosair's mysterious documents for several years and because of the bureaucratic barriers on their proposed investigations. Nor did the FBI fully investigate phone calls to Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations made by the World Trade Center bombers. So the terrorist conspiracy continued--under the nose of the FBI.
Meanwhile, Mohammed continued to work for bin Laden. He flew to Sudan to train bin Laden's personal bodyguard. According to U.S. District Court documents, he also taught small-unit tactics and helped survey several U.S. embassies in East Africa in late 1993, which would be bombed five years later. Those blasts would kill hundreds in a few fiery minutes.
Khartoum, Sudan:
Osama bin Laden, safe and unsuspected, heard the news of the World Trade Center bombing at his palatial house in the Riyadh section of Khartoum. He was thrilled and ordered that special prayer services of thanksgiving be held that night.
In some subsequent interviews, bin Laden claimed he didn't know Yousef. "Ramzi Yousef, after the World Trade Center bombing, became a well-known Muslim personality, and all Muslims know him. Unfortunately, I did not know him before the incident," bin Laden told ABC News in 1998. "America will see many youths who will follow Ramzi Yousef."
Bin Laden's claim that he didn't know of Yousef before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is probably another expedient lie. Certainly, Yousef traveled in circles of people who knew bin Laden before the bombing and worked alongside al Qaeda operatives after the bombing. And bin Laden does not appear to have personally known the Sept. 11 hijackers either. Today federal court indictments and an array of publicly available FBI documents list bin Laden's attacks on America. Nearly every such list includes the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Meanwhile, bin Laden was planning another attack, one far closer to home. As he celebrated the first World Trade Center bombing, bin Laden was waiting for a report from Abu Hafs, the commander of his military wing. Hafs had just returned from Mogadishu, Somalia.
Mr. Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe and author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery, 2003), from which this is excerpted. You can buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
Also from JAWBREAKER
The Attack on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda:
A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
By Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020901687.html?referrer=emailarticle
"In 2000, Berntsen had led a promising effort to work with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance "to capture a bin Laden lieutenant." But the operation was called off, for which he blasts CIA Director George Tenet and President Clinton for lacking "the will to wage a real fight against terrorists who were killing U.S. citizens." Berntsen was withdrawn and sent to a comfortable position as CIA station chief in a country in Latin America. After 9/11, Berntsen immediately began jostling to get to the center of the strike against al Qaeda. He got his wish and was one of the first senior CIA officials inserted into Afghanistan."
Yes, and if we get Hillary! in the White House in 2008 (shuddering at the thought...) then we get Co-President Bill back! This track record of his is EXACTLY the kind of "ammo" we need against the Democrats in 2008.
Somebody needs to get a copy of the letter that the Clinton Ambassador to Yeman wrote about what "didn't happen"---that Rush was reading earlier----and post it here.
With the imminent return of the degenerate democrats to power, we might ought to be making CD copies of the data, before the revisionist leftists make it impossible to endanger the degenerate lefts' worship of a lying, rapist-in-chief SinkEmperor.
BTW, Howlin, what are the chances I could get ahold of a CD copy of this movie via snailmail since I don't have a means to record it at my house this weekend while I'm on the road?
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.
By 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.
http://www.infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/Clinton_let_bin_laden.htm
9/11 Hijackers Wanted To Avenge… Bosnia!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1697643/posts
The video also showed two of the 19 Islamists who took part in the attacks, Saudi nationals Hamza al-Ramdi and Wael el-Shemari. The men said that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya.
bttt
Good find!
I agree with that 100 percent. It was a freak accident that that guy was caught; it wasn't any sort of a concerted effort on the Clinton administration's part.
That's what this thread is for, I hope!
I am desperately trying, with the help of Vinnie, to get my DVD recorder hooked up; if I can get it done, I'll be glad to send you one.
And if I can't, I'm sure somebody else will!
Bosnia, Mr. Clinton's "war?"
Now that is interesting!
Do they know yet when that video was made?
I will gladly reimburse for any and all expenses incurred. Thanks so much.
FACTS regarding Bill Clinton's legacy on terrorism.
This thread will get Hugh!
I haven't seen a precise date yet. I'll ping you if it comes to light.
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.