US missed three chances to seize Bin Laden

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton turned down at least three offers involving foreign governments to help to seize Osama Bin Laden after he was identified as a terrorist who was threatening America, according to sources in Washington and the Middle East.

Clinton himself, according to one Washington source, has described the refusal to accept the first of the offers as "the biggest mistake" of his presidency.

The main reasons were legal: there was no evidence that could be brought against Bin Laden in an American court. But former senior intelligence sources accuse the administration of a lack of commitment to the fight against terrorism.

When Sudanese officials claimed late last year that Washington had spurned Bin Laden's secret extradition from Khartoum in 1996, former White House officials said they had no recollection of the offer. Senior sources in the former administration now confirm that it was true.

An Insight investigation has revealed that far from being an isolated incident this was the first in a series of missed opportunities right up to Clinton's last year in office. One of these involved a Gulf state; another would have relied on the assistance of Saudi Arabia.

In early 1996 America was putting strong pressure on Sudan's Islamic government to expel Bin Laden, who had been living there since 1991. Sources now reveal that Khartoum sent a former intelligence officer with Central Intelligence Agency connections to Washington with an offer to hand over Bin Laden — just as it had put another terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, into French hands in 1994.

At the time the State Department was describing Bin Laden as "the greatest single financier of terrorist projects in the world" and was accusing Sudan of harbouring terrorists. The extradition offer was turned down, however. A former senior White House source said: "There simply was not the evidence to prosecute Osama Bin Laden. He could not be indicted, so it would serve no purpose for him to have been brought into US custody."

A former figure in American counterterrorist intelligence claims, however, that there was "clear and convincing" proof of Bin Laden's conspiracy against America.

In May, 1996, American diplomats were informed in a Sudanese government fax that Bin Laden was about to be expelled — giving Washington another chance to seize him. The decision not to do so went to the very top of the White House, according to former administration sources.

They say that the clear focus of American policy was to discourage the state sponsorship of terrorism. So persuading Khartoum to expel Bin Laden was in itself counted as a clear victory. The administration was "delighted".

Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered.

Barely a month later, on June 25, a 5,000lb truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 American servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected.

Clinton is reported to have admitted how things went wrong in Sudan at a private dinner at a Manhattan restaurant shortly after September 11 last year. According to a witness, Clinton told a dinner companion that the decision to let Bin Laden go was probably "the biggest mistake of my presidency".

Clinton could not be reached for comment yesterday, but a
former senior White House official acknowledged that the Sudan episode had been a "screw-up".

A second offer to get Bin Laden came unofficially from Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American millionaire who was a donor to Clinton's election campaign in 1996. On July 6, 2000, he visited John Podesta, then the president's chief of staff, to say that intelligence officers from a Gulf state were offering to help to extract Bin Laden.

Details of the meeting are confirmed in an exchange of e-mails between the White House and Ijaz, which have been seen by The Sunday Times. According to Ijaz, the offer involved setting up an Islamic relief fund to aid Afghanistan in return for the Taliban handing over Bin Laden to the Gulf state. America could then extract Bin Laden from there.

The Sunday Times has established that after a fierce internal row about the sincerity of the offer, the White House responded by sending Richard Clarke, Clinton's most senior counterterrorism adviser, to meet the rulers of the United Arab Emirates. They denied there was any such offer. Ijaz, however, maintained that the White House had thereby destroyed the deal, which was to have been arranged only through unofficial channels. Ijaz said that weeks later on a return trip to the Gulf he was taken on a late-night ride into the desert by his contact who told him that Clarke's front-door approach had upset a delicate internal balance and blown the deal. "Your government has missed a major opportunity," he recalls being told.

Senior former government sources said that Ijaz's offer had been treated in good faith but, with the denial of the UAE government, there was nothing to suggest it had credibility.

A third more mysterious offer to help came from the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, then led by Prince Turki al-Faisal, according to Washington sources. Details of the offer are still unclear although, by one account, Turki offered to help to place a tracking device in the luggage of Bin Laden's mother, who was seeking to make a trip to Afghanistan to see her son. The CIA did not take up the offer.

Richard Shelby, the leading Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said he was aware of a Saudi offer to help although, under rules protecting classified information, he was unable to discuss the details of any offer. Commenting generally, he said: "I don't believe that the fight against terrorism was the number one goal of the Clinton administration. I believe there were some lost opportunities."

E-mail from Dick

CLINTON'S PRIORITY: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS OVER FIGHTING TERROR

By Dick Morris

Last month, President Bush shut down three U.S.-based "charities" accused of funneling money to Hamas, a terrorist organization that last year alone was responsible for at least 20 bombings, two shootings and a mortar attack that killed 77 people.

These "charities" - The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Global Relief Foundation and the Benevolence International Foundation - raised $20 million last year alone.

But the information on which Bush largely relied to act against these charities was taped nine years ago, in 1993. FBI electronic eavesdropping had produced compelling evidence that officials of Hamas and the Holy Land Foundation had met to discuss raising funds for Hamas training schools and establishing annuities for suicide bombers' families - pensions for terrorists.

Why didn't Clinton act to shut these people down? In 1995 and 1996, he was advised to do just that. At a White House strategy meeting on April 27, 1995 - two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing - the president was urged to create a "President's List" of extremist/terrorist groups, their members and donors "to warn the public against well-intentioned donations which might foster terrorism."

On April 1, 1996, he was again advised to "prohibit fund-raising by terrorists and identify terrorist organizations," specifically mentioning the Hamas. Inexplicably, Clinton ignored these recommendations. Why? FBI agents have stated that they were prevented from opening either criminal or national-security cases because of a fear that it would be seen as "profiling" Islamic charities.

While Clinton was politically correct, the Hamas flourished. Clinton did seize any bank accounts of the terrorist groups themselves, but his order netted no money since neither al Qaeda nor bin Laden were obliging enough to open accounts in their own names.

Liberals felt that the civil rights of suspected terrorists were more important than cutting off their funds.

George Stephanopoulos, the ankle bracelet that kept Clinton on the liberal reservation, explains in his memoir "All Too Human" that he opposed the proposal to "publish the names of suspected terrorists in the newspapers" with a "civil liberties argument" and by pointing out that Attorney General Janet Reno would object. So five years later - after millions have been given to terrorist groups through U.S. fronts - the government is finally blocking the flow of cash. Political correctness also doomed a separate recommendation to require that drivers' licenses and visas for noncitizens expire simultaneously so that illegal aliens pulled over in traffic stops could be identified and (if appropriate) deported. Stephanopoulos cited "potential abuse and political harm to the president's Hispanic base," and said that he'd killed the idea by raising "the practical grounds of prohibitive cost."

Had Clinton adopted this recommendation, Mohammed Atta might have been deported after he was stopped for driving without a license three months before be piloted an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center.

Nothing so illustrates the low priority of terrorism in Clinton's first term than the short shrift he gave the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Six people were killed and 1,042 injured; 750 firefighters worked for one month to contain the damage. But Clinton never visited the site. Several days after the explosion, speaking in New Jersey, he actually "discouraged Americans from overacting" to the Trade Center bombing.

Why this de-emphasis of the threat? In Sunday's New York Times, Stephanopoulos explains that the 1993 attack "wasn't a successful bombing. . . . It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"

In sharp contrast, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over the WTC- bombing trial, noted that the attack caused "more hospital casualties than any other event in domestic American history other than the Civil War."

But Stephanopoulos was just the hired help. Clinton was the president and commander- in-chief. For all of his willingness to act courageously and decisively - against the advice of his liberal staff - on issues like deficit reduction and welfare reform, he was passive and almost inert on terrorism in his first term. > > It wasn't until 1998 that Clinton finally got around to setting up a post of Counter Terrorism Coordinator in the National Security Council. Everything was more important than fighting terrorism.

Political correctness, civil liberties concerns, fear of offending the administration's supporters, Janet Reno's objections, considerations of cost, worries about racial profiling and, in the second term, surviving impeachment, all came before fighting terrorism.

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