Posted on 09/27/2006 12:17:59 PM PDT by LSUfan
- CONVICTED LIAR
- IMPEACHED PRESIDENT
- INFIDELITY IN MARRIAGE W/MONICA
That is all that anyone will remember!
Yemenis authorities did not allow the FBI to interrogate the Cole suspects
Read your 911 Commission Report again.
Chapter 6.3
Investigating the attacks
Page 192 - 195
"Teams from the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigation Sevice and th CIA were immediately sent to Yeman to investigate the attack."
(Remember the Path to 911...Talks about O'Neill problems with the Amb. of Yeman. True.)
"On the day of the Cole Attack, a list of suspects was assembled that included al Queda's affiliate Egyptian Islamic Jihad. US counterterrorism officals told us they immedialtely assumed that al Queda was responsible. But the Deputy DCI McLaughlin explained to us, it was not enough for the attack to smell, look and taste like an al Queda operation. To make a case, the CIA needed not just a guess but to link to someone known to be an al Queda operative.....
....Within the first weeks after the attack, the Yemenis found and arrested both Budawi and Quso but did not let the FBI team participate in the interrogations. The CIA described initial Yemeni support after the Cole as "slow and inadequate."
President Clinton, Secretary Albright and DCI Tenet all intervened to help. Because the information was secondhand, the US team could not make its own assessment of its reliability.
.....the Yemenis provided strong evidence connecting Cole attack to al Queda during the second half of November, identifying individual operative whom the United States knew were apart of al Queda. During December, the US was able to corroborate this evidence but the US did not have evidence about Bin Ladin's personal involvement in the attacks until Nashiri and Khallad were captured in 2002 and 2003.
Considering a Response
The Cole attack prompted renewed consideration of what could be done about al Queda. According to Clark, Berger upbraided DCI Tenet so sharply after the Cole attack - repeatly demanding to know why the US had to put up with such attacks - Tenet walked out of the meeting of the principals.
(That was in the Path of 911...True.)
President Clinton told us that before he could launch futher attacks on al Queda in Afghanistan, or deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban threatening strikes if they did not immediately expel Bin Ladin, the CIA or the FBI had to be sure enough that they would be "willing to stand up in public and say, we believe that he [Bin Ladin] did this." He said he was very frustrated that he could not get a definitive enough answer to do something about the Cole attack.
...Similarly, Berger recalled that to go to war, a president needs to be able to say that his senior intelligence and law enforcement officers have concluded who is responsible. He recalled that the intelligence agencies had a strong suspicions, but had reached "no conclusion by the time we left office that it was al Queda."
....On November 25, Berger and Clarke wrote to President Clinton that although the FBI and CIA investigations had not reached a formal conclusion, they believed the investigations would soon conclude that the attacks had been carried out by a large cell who senior members belonged to al Queda.
....Nearly a month later, on December 21, the CIA made another presentation to the small group of principals on the investigation team's findings. The CIA briefing slides said their "Preliminary Judgement" was that Bin Ladin's al Queda group "supported the attack" on the Cole, based on strong circumstantial evidence tying key perpetrators of the attack to al Queda. The CIA listed the key suspects, including Nashiri. In Addition the CIA detailed the timeline of the operation, from the mid-1999 presentations, to the failed attack on the USS Sullivan's on Jan 3, 2000, through a meeting held by the operatives the day before the attack.
The slides said that so far the CIA had "no definitive answer on [the] crucial question of outside direction of the attack - how and by whom."...
....This, President Clinton and Burger told us, was not the conclusion they needed in order to go to war or deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban treatening war. The election was not the issue, President Clinton added. There was enough time. If the agencies had given him definitive answer, he said, he would have sought a UN Sec Council ultimatum and given the Taliban one, two or three days before taking further action against both al Queda and the Taliban.
BUT HE DID NOT THINK IT WOULD BE RESPONSIBLE FOR A PRESIDENT TO LAUNCH AN INVASION OF ANOTHER COUNTRY JUST BASED ON "PRELIMINARY JUDGEMENT."
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/pdf/sec6.pdf
It would have been out-of-character for candidate Bush to respond to the Cole bombing anyway. He didn't want to politicize it, and he made the right decision to leave it alone. I remember there were some FReepers angry at the time that Bush didn't respond.
Clinton actually did what the terrorists wanted, and spent the entire last 4 months trying to convince Barak to hand Jerusalem over to Arab terrorists.
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