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Mansoor Ijaz discusses the Clinton administration's failure to deal with Osama bin Laden
CNBC Business Center, CNBC News Transcripts | December 6, 2001 | ANCHOR: SUE HERERA

Posted on 05/17/2002 10:03:52 PM PDT by Wallaby

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

Mansoor Ijaz discusses the Clinton administration's failure to deal with Osama bin Laden and what Islamic Americans need to do in the current environment

ANCHOR: SUE HERERA
CNBC News Transcripts
Business Center (6:00 PM ET) – CNBC
December 6, 2001 Thursday


SUE HERERA, co-anchor:

Counterterrorism expert Mansoor Ijaz joins us now. He is chairman of Crescent Investment Management. He negotiated several offers from Sudan in 1996 and 1997 for the release of counterterrorism data that could have yielded al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists and then last year received an extradition order for bin Laden from Sudan.


They always said actions speak louder than words, and I have not yet been able to figure out which actions they were talking about, because when I brought them an opportunity to act, they didn't do anything.


Mansoor, it's always a pleasure to have you with us. Welcome back.

Mr. MANSOOR IJAZ (Crescent Investment Management): Thank you.

HERERA: In one of your pieces that you wrote in the Los Angeles Times, you basically say that Mr. Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunities to unravel increasingly organized extremists represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history. You were involved in some of those negotiations. Is your claim that they politicized the intelligence, or why do you think that it all fell apart and we're in this situation we're in now?

Mr. IJAZ: Well, I think there's no question anymore, after September 11th, that when we look back at the history of how we got here, that the Clinton administration did politicize intelligence. We have to keep in mind that the Sudan was an easy target for them. The reason is because if you look at the geography, to the north of the Sudan, you had Egypt; to the east of Sudan, you had Eritrea; to the south of Sudan, you had Ethiopia and Uganda. Egypt had a bone to pick because they wanted the three terrorists that had su--supposedly tried to assassinate their president at one point.

HERERA: Right.

Mr. IJAZ: And they wanted water rights, more water from the Nile River that flows all the way through the Sudan. Eritrea wanted to have Port Sudan as a port on the Red Sea that would be able to transmit the oil coming from the southern part of the Sudan. Uganda and Ethiopia were involved in funneling arms into the SPLA, which is this guerrilla group fighting in the south.

So there was no question that there was a lot of politicizing of the intelligence, and this is why I asked the Clinton administration over and over again, 'Why are we not sending our own people in there on the ground so that we get our own data, not relying on our neighbors to find out what's going on?'

HERERA: And what did they say? What did those administration officials tell you?

Mr. IJAZ: They always said actions speak louder than words, and I have not yet been able to figure out which actions they were talking about, because when I brought them an opportunity to act, they didn't do anything.

HERERA: Yeah. So you mentioned water and you mentioned oil, which are two things in many parts of the world that are key to survival. What role do you think oil, in particular, played in the scenario that you just laid out and in the scenario that we're--we find ourselves in now?

Mr. IJAZ: Yeah. Sudan's oil is very much like Saudi Arabia's oil; it's a very low-cost oil to get out of the ground. There was no question that there was a hot amount of interest to try and get that oil out, which meant the south wanted to hang on to it. It--it sort of propagated the civil war conflict in the Sudan, which gave Christian right-wing groups around the world an opportunity to fund the civil war and fuel it, while all this hotbed of terrorist activity that was going on in the Sudan kept on going.

And what I was trying to get the Clinton administration to understand was that the Sudanese had come to the conclusion themselves that whatever was going on there from '91 to '95 or '96 was no longer in their interests either because it had gone overboard. And when they pushed bin Laden out, they didn't just take all of those guys with them; they left it right there.

HERERA: Now we have the new prime minister. We have a situation where the--the situation is obviously fluid, given what's going on in Kandahar and in Afghanistan.

Mr. IJAZ: Yes.

HERERA: To--handicap the situation that you see now and where you--how you see the United States progressing.

Mr. IJAZ: The problem with the deal on Kandahar is the following. Mullah Omar is trying to stay free. That's the deal that he cut with the local tribesmen.

HERERA: Right.

Mr. IJAZ: That's not an acceptable solution for the United States. Then in the north, the new government that's coming in, the Northern Alliance, has the defense ministry and foreign ministry. And because they have these two key portfolios, it is very unclear whether the Northern Alliance will allow the government to fully function as a broad-based representative government in Afghanistan.

If that doesn't happen, then you have the possibility of a squeeze play between India and Afghanistan on either side of Pakistan, where the generals in Pakistan come to the conclusion that the Northern Alliance is not being straight with them; the Indians want to go to war with them anyway over Kashmir, and you have a real possibility that something could go wrong in Pakistan. And I think our defense planners are not paying attention to this possibility.

HERERA: Domestically, here at home, there's been a lot of controversy over the issue of profiling, with the attorney general...

Mr. IJAZ: Yes.

HERERA: ...under fire on some sides and being praised on others.

Mr. IJAZ: Yes.

HERERA: How do you think that's going to play out?

Mr. IJAZ: You know, as an American of the Islamic faith, I can only tell you that it is--it's sad to see that what--what is happening right now is happening. But we, as Americans of the Islamic faith, have an enormous and very special responsibility right now to police our own communities. We have to remember what America gave to us. We have to stand up and stand up for America's rights, the right that we have to ensure our liberty and our freedom. And that means that anyone who is out there that is under arrest or--they have to understand that what happened on September 11th was not an ordinary event. They have to understand that, whether we like it or not--I could even be picked up. And if I was picked up and put in a jail somewhere, I'd sit there as long as it took to go through the due process, because the time has come for us to be Americans first. This is a country in which there's separation of church and state, and we'd better learn that and we'd better understand what that means.

HERERA: On that note, Mansoor Ijaz. Mansoor, it's pleasure to have you with us.

Mr. IJAZ: Thank you. Appreciate it.

HERERA: Thanks so much.



TOPICS: Front Page News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: binladen; clinton
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
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To: Wallaby, Wphile,Freedom'sWorthIt, Afraidfortherepublic, homeschoolmama,cyn, muggs
But we, as Americans of the Islamic faith, have an enormous and very special responsibility right now to police our own communities

It is so GOOD to hear a Muslim say this...and he is RIGHT to come forward, as frequently and dedicatedly as he has, to tell the story of the clinton refusal to take bin laden when it would have been so much more simple....now we are in a WAR trying to find him because of what laden did due to clinton's refusal to nab him. Outrageous! WHY ISN't THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA PICKING UP ON THIS OUTRAGEOUS TIMELINE OF EVENTS REGARDING BIN LADEN AND THE SUDENESE????????????????????????

21 posted on 05/18/2002 8:02:09 AM PDT by Republic
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To: Republic;a history buff; Hamiltonian; dirtboy; Fred Mertz; T'wit; Romulus; Budge; Askel5
PREPARED TESTIMONY [EXCERPT] OF MANSOOR IJAZ MANAGING PARTNER CRESCENT EQUITY PARTNERS, LLC BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE SUBCOMMITTEE ON NEAR EASTERN AND SOUTH ASIAN AFFAIRS, NOVEMBER 2, 1999, TUESDAY

SUBJECT - "EXTREMIST MOVEMENTS: THREAT TO THE US"

…In an effort to combat the destructive forces being bred in these Iranian and Saudi-financed Madrassa schools, myself and concerned Americans with Pakistani roots have been building rural schools in Pakistan for the past five years through a private US-based philanthropy.

You may be surprised to know that $1,000 builds and operates a normal rural school teaching up to 30 students everything from the Koran to science and math to Urdu and English for a whole year. And, it only takes five years to make a child literate in our programs. But no matter how much we do, our program is only a microcosm of what needs to be done on a much larger scale throughout the region to combat the cancerous spread of extremism.

The young boys and girls of Pakistan and Afghanistan who face a life illiteracy and religious zealotry have not chosen this path voluntarily. To sit idly by and do nothing not only dooms them, in the end I fear it will doom us as well.Mr. Chairman, I would like to also briefly address the issue of developing intelligence liaisons with countries who support extremist and terrorist organizations that are directly at odds with American interests.

I offer as an example my 1996-97 efforts to effect a reconciliation between the militant Islamic government of the Sudan and U.S. authorities through intel-to-intel contacts before the U.S. bombed Sudan's Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in August 1998 under suspicions it was producing chemical weapons precursors.

In April 1997, I hand carried an offer by Sudanese strongman Omar Hassan El Bashir to U.S. authorities, including Congressional leaders, the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor, in which Bashir stated, "We extend an offer to the FBI's counterterrorism units and any other official delegations...to come to the Sudan and work with our External Intelligence Department in order to assess the data in our possession and help us counter the forces your government and ours seek to contain."

Jim Risen's October 27, 1999 expose in the New York Times is must reading on the internal divisions that occurred in our national security apparatus as well as distasteful efforts by senior administration officials to coordinate a cover-up of the dissension that surrounded the decision to bomb Al Shifa.

What would have happened, following Mr. Risen's timeline, if US authorities had responded to Bashir's April counterterrorism offer and sent the FBI into the Sudan for a good look around before US suspicions arose later in the summer that nerve gas agents were being developed at Al Shifa? The offer was unconditional.On two occasions, I met privately with Sudan's intelligence chief to explore the modus operandi for such interactions.

The reasoning behind my approach to Bashir was simple: if the Sudan was genuinely not harboring terrorists or fomenting radicalism after its 1996 decision to expel Osama bin Laden, the alleged Saudi mastermind of the embassy bombings, the only way to prove Khartoum' s complicity or innocence was to invite America' s premier institutions fighting global terrorism into the country for an unobstructed look. Had we responded, the Sudanese people could be assured America was holding true to its principle of innocent until proven guilty, while U.S. national security advisors would retain their options in dealing with signs of terrorist training camps, illicit chemical weapons factories or other problems associated with the surge in radical Islamic behavior. Equally important, ordinary Americans might not have to face angry Muslim radicals unless the evidence of guilt uncovered was compelling and condemnable not only by the U.S. but by other Muslim nations and the world community at large.

Why wasn't Bashir's offer acted on sooner? In fact, it is precisely this inaction by U.S. authorities that raises the deep skepticism pervading America's Muslims as well as many Muslims elsewhere about the true agenda in Washington for dealing with complex and unstable elements in the Islamic world.

The key to defusing radical Muslim behavior cannot be found by choosing its most vulnerable targets for missile practice.Rather, we should aim to raise up the Islamic world's most disaffected people so they are not as desperate to tear us down. We must resolve to engage rather than contain the elements of Islam we do not understand.

American Muslims can and should be foremost in assisting with this effort.

If we do not, we might find one day soon that terrorism on our soil was born of the unjust and indiscriminate policies we condoned through our complacency, inaction and ignorance.


22 posted on 05/18/2002 8:07:13 AM PDT by Wallaby
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To: Wallaby; doug from upland
Yesterday, Sean Hannity was interviewing Lanny Davis on his afternoon radio show. Hannity started to ask Davis to respond to Ijaz's charges. Davis refused to respond to anything that Ijaz said, intimating that he bears him some personal grudge (which he did not explain.) Ijaz better watch his back, because the Clintonistas apparently have no effective answer to his charges.
23 posted on 05/18/2002 8:09:05 AM PDT by aristeides
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To: Wallaby
time-pressured bump...will be back to read tomorrow...
24 posted on 05/18/2002 8:09:51 AM PDT by VOA
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To: Wallaby
Every single comment out of Rangel's mouth was partisan. He tried to steer the conversation away from the issue of the failure of the clinton administration to seriously go after OBL.
25 posted on 05/18/2002 8:14:18 AM PDT by OldFriend
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To: Wallaby
Any chance of Manzoor Ijaz getting on CNN? I want to see him and the congress-critters "discuss" the issues, seems that not enough of the public will hear from him otherwise.
26 posted on 05/18/2002 8:17:18 AM PDT by Burlem
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To: Wallaby
WHAT AND WHEN

by Tarzana Joe

THE MOST URGENT QUESTION THAT’S PLAGUING THIS POET IS "WHAT DID HE KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?" FOR THE PUNDITS ALL TELL US THE ENTIRE STORY HANGS ON THIS ONE INTEROGATORY.

WHEN DID HE KNOW (OH IT GIVES ME A SHIVER) THAT THE TAX CUT HE PROMISED HE’D NEVER DELIVER? AND DID HE KNOW THEN (THIS COULD LAND HIM IN JAIL) THAT HIS PARTNER DESIGNED A PLAN THAT WOULD FAIL? AND COULD HE HAVE KNOWN (I’M SO MAD I EXPECTORATE) THAT IT’S WRONG TO DECEIVE THE ENTIRE ELECTORATE? OH DID HE KNOW THEN (AND DOES HE KNOW NOW ) THAT IT’S WRONG TO TAKE CASH FROM A DONOR NAMED MAO? DID HE KNOW (AS WE LEARNED IN A LENGTHY REPORT) DID HE KNOW IT WAS WRONG TO TELL LIES TO A COURT? OH, SORRY (IT SEEMS THAT I GOT THE WRONG PRESIDENT) I WAS THINKING ABOUT THE PREVIOUS RESIDENT. THAT FELLOW WHO’S FRIENDS ARE NOW CARPING AND CROWING WHO SPEAK WITH AUDACITY BEYOND HUMAN KNOWING WHO SUGGEST WITH A WINK AND IMPLY WITH A WORD A CONCLUSION THEY SURELY MUST KNOW IS ABSURD. I’VE KNOW ALL ALONG AND THIS IS A FACT AND I SAY IT WITHOUT ANY MANNERS OR TACT YES, I SWEAR BY THE OWNER WHO CAN NOT BE NAMED SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST TOO LOW TO BE SHAMED.
Tarzanajoe@hotmail.com

27 posted on 05/18/2002 8:23:00 AM PDT by Burlem
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To: OldFriend
You got me on that one but I have seen him on FOX NEWS a lot over the past 8 months. He is articulate and seems to know a lots re: Arab background.
28 posted on 05/18/2002 8:27:47 AM PDT by blackbart1
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To: Wallaby
BTTT
29 posted on 05/18/2002 8:32:12 AM PDT by Amelia
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To: aristeides; Amelia;blackbart1;OldFriend;Burlem;Alamo-Girl;Uncle Bill; Betty Jo; VOA...
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

CONFRONTING THE STATES THAT SPONSOR TERRORISM" [EXCERPT]
MODERATOR: CONSTANZE STELZENMUELLER, DIE ZEIT
PANELISTS: RICHARD BUTLER, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS;
SOPHIA CLEMENT, FRENCH MINISTRY OF DEFENSE,
MANSOOR IJAZ, CRESCENT INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT, LLC;
RICHARD PERLE, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
November 30, 2001, noon


MR. IJAZ: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming and having us here. I've always admired Richard Perle because he has the capacity to provoke our thought processes and to help us to expand beyond where we may think we're able to go in protecting our national security interests here in the United States.


Now I got the president of the Sudan, in April of 1997, to give a counter- terrorism offer to the Clinton administration that compromised the sovereignty of his government. Please bring your FBI and CIA counter- terrorism units into the Sudan and have a look anywhere you want to go. It was an unobstructed offer. They were going to open their files, share the data, everything was available.
I come at this problem from a perspective of what I call hands-on experience. As an American of the Islamic faith, born and raised here in this country, I have worried for a very long time, and I will ask if you'll permit me to share with you an anecdote. I live in New York City. I live in a beautiful apartment that's on the 44th floor of a building where I have a wrap-around balcony and can see the entire city. Every morning when I wake up to get ready for work, I used to see these beautiful twin towers there.

On the morning of September 11th when I went in to get ready and came out, the first building was on fire. It's like you wipe your eyes and say, what is this? This can't be happening to us. I turned the TV on. I immediately ran out to the balcony to see, without windows, whether this was for real, and just as I went outside, the second airplane hit the building. I can tell you that it was an impulse reaction that I had. I fell to my knees, and the first two words out of my mouth were, "They're here."

The point of telling you that is that some of us, Richard Perle being among them, have known for a very long time that something bad could happen. The question that we have to ask ourselves is not just what we do out there, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran, or Sudan or Yemen or any other place, but also what do we have to do right here under our own feet. For me the real national security threat that we face is here. They're already here. They're like seeds that have been sown for years and years and years, just waiting around to figure out how and when to do what they want.

Now as a scientist and an engineer and as a Wall Street financier, I bring two very critical aspects of this problem, and why I put my life at risk to do the things that I am going to describe here in a few minutes. That is that as an engineer you think about experiments -- what's the problem, and how are you going to solve that problem. You have a purpose, you have procedures, you have the data, and you come to a conclusion somehow or another.

As a financier you have the very difficult task of having to worry about the bottom line every day. Pragmatism is what really is needed in this problem. There is no time, no more room to talk about theory any more. This is a real problem and we have to come up with real, pragmatic solutions.

Now if you think about the motivation, what drives people to think about how to solve these problems -- I come from a slightly different political persuasion than my friend Richard Perle, but I can tell you the speech that got me interested in finding a way to tackle Islamic fundamentalism and the root causes of what I call this militant Islamism that has taken root in different parts of the world, was a speech that President Clinton made in 1993 at a fundraiser in New York for Patrick Moynihan, in which he described America as a column, essentially, and at the bottom of that column we had an underclass that was growing and in that underclass you had people who were just losing hope, day after day after day. And the more of them that folded their tent and fell down, the greater the risk was that the entire column would topple over. Now if you take that statement about what the problem is in the United States and you extrapolate it to what we're dealing with today, these are not poor people. Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, as has been said many times today, are a bunch of rich, spoiled brats. They couldn't rise up against their fascist fathers, they couldn't rise up against their fascist governments, and then when they wanted to rise up against the fascist states in which many of them live, they said, the United States, they're protecting these guys. We are an open society, and that is why they came after us.

Now, from a procedural standpoint, when I decided to involve myself in these issues with hands-on efforts, the first thing I thought about was, what causes these people to do what they're doing? So I wanted to confront the visceral cause, which is corruption. In the Islamic world, with the exception of Turkey, and maybe today it's starting to get that way in Indonesia, you had massively corrupt governments in every single Islamic state. That corruption was breeding at the lower end of the society, all that underclass, if I may put it that way. They were all falling down. They were all saying, we give up. We can't do it any more. So they turned to what was left, and for them what was left was the Koran. What was left were the mullahs and the mosques. What was left were the madrassah schools that were like social welfare centers. That's all it was.

I'm going to lay out first what I felt the procedural process had to be, and then second I'm going to give you what were my data points. So how did I conduct this experiment in counter-terrorism. The second key procedure was understanding the psychology of the networks, going into the midst. Now because I'm a Muslim, it was much easier for me to go into those networks than it would have been for Richard Perle to go into those networks. Maybe Richard reads Arabic and knows the Koran, but certainly I could look at a guy like Hussan Thorabi (ph) in the Sudan and say, I read the same Koran you do. Where does it say that you can kill innocent people? It doesn't say that anywhere. He couldn't pull a surah out of the Koran and tell me that there was a difference between what he thought and what I thought.

Finally -- and this is probably most important and most relevant for me because I live with money all day long -- is unraveling the financial networks. Now the data in this goes like the following. In April of 1995, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto came to Washington. We held her up as a beacon of our American ideals, sent her back with her F-16 money back, or something like that. And what happens? They decide they want to do dirty arms deals. I then said, this is enough. The corruption in that society was starting to seep to such a level that even my grandmother, who lives in Lahore, God rest her soul, was paying more for a telephone bill than I pay in New York City.

Now who is responsible for that? Who was responsible for assuring the IMF and the World Bank and all the monies that were coming in would get paid back from these rates? Who made those paradigms? Yes, Benazir is the one who ensured that that money got in somehow or other, but we cannot alleviate ourselves of responsibility in that regard either.

Then I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June and October of 1996 about first how they were stealing the money systematically from the state coffers, and then what they were actually doing with it. And the idea was that if we remove a corrupt regime, if they cannot be held accountable by their own press, by their own systems and checks and balances, then by God we'd better do it from the outside. Because I'm of Pakistani origin, I took that task on unilaterally. Nobody asked me to, nobody said, go out and do this. I did this because I thought it was the right thing to do, because that would remove one layer of the problems that we're dealing with.

The second data point, and it started more or less simultaneously with the effort in Pakistan, was to unravel the networks of these Islamic fanatics. And for that I went to the Sudan because the Sudan at that time in this recent past history was organizing and holding these Islamic conferences and every nut group in the world would show up in Khartoum once a year, and they would all sit there and the United States thought that these guys were planning terrorist attacks against us. I went there and saw it for myself, and it turned out that these were actually pressure valves. This was a way to try and find a mechanism to let these guys pontificate and get all of that negative energy out of their systems and just relieve themselves of whatever anger they had. Then the Sudan made an extraordinary offer. In February 1996 they sent their intelligence people here to Washington. They offered to arrest bin Laden, extradite him to Saudi Arabia. We turned them down. In May of 1996 we deliver a threat to the government of the Sudan. If you do not stop planning terrorist attacks against the United States -- and I quote now from the non-paper that was delivered -- we will take measures that will make you pay a high price. That will include international isolation, the destruction of your economy, and military measures that will make you pay a high price.

So here we are, after they offer to help us resolve this problem on a terrorism level. Forget about slavery and human rights violations, all that other stuff. I'm not saying that I'm going to alleviate them of those problems. But our concern and the first concern was terrorism, Islamic extremism, and we had to unravel that network. And what do we do? Please ask Mr. bin Laden to leave. We don't care where he goes, but if he leaves, we will relieve you of sanctions. He left, we put more sanctions on the Sudan.

I went to the Sudan in July of 1996 and brought back from there within four or five months -- in the first visit I got Thorabi to write a letter to President Clinton, and in that letter he essentially offered an olive branch. Let's find a way to work together. I've got an idea of how to fix these guys, and we can share that data with you directly. That wasn't good enough either. I went back again. Now I got the president of the Sudan, in April of 1997, to give a counter- terrorism offer to the Clinton administration that compromised the sovereignty of his government. Please bring your FBI and CIA counter- terrorism units into the Sudan and have a look anywhere you want to go. It was an unobstructed offer. They were going to open their files, share the data, everything was available.

I'm telling you this now. This is all going to come out in the very near future exactly what was available at that time. Again, we looked the other way.

The point I'm trying to make here is that we had repeated opportunities to do this the right way, to unravel this network before it got so dangerous that it could do what they did to us on September 11th, and that should never, ever happen again in the United States of America. We'd better make sure that people who care about our country, whether they're Arabs or Muslims or Jews or Christians, Hindus, atheists -- it doesn't matter who they are, what they believe in. But when you stand up as an American, you'd better make sure this government had better never again, no government in this country, can ignore these kind of efforts that are made by governments abroad. To say, you know what, maybe we didn't get everything right. Maybe we didn't understand what it was that we're doing, and we're prepared to come clean, we're prepared to change our ways. We have to open that door as well.

Finally, in 1999 when the coup took place in Pakistan, there was a great deal of concern here in Washington about the ability of the Indians and the Pakistanis to communicate now. Where Nawaz Sharif had done a great job in bringing the Indian prime minister to Pakistan and Vajpayee had stood up and said, we accept Pakistan as a reality, and then Nouan sent his troops up to Kargil at the same time. Wonderful diplomacy, I remember.

So I tried to open a channel between India and Pakistan, and I went into India, talked to the Kashmiris. I talked to the Indians.

I then went into Pakistan and talked to them as well. And as I got to know the jihadi groups, all these groups that are fighting their war in Kashmir, as I got to know them, what I learned was that the system of financing this entire effort, that system was so intricate and so well oiled and so widespread, it was like looking at a spider web across the entire surface of the globe. And there was nothing that our modern systems could do to stop that.

I spent four months in Dubai just unraveling it piece by piece by piece to see how it all worked. Then we got the mujaheddin first to give a ceasefire, then we got the Indian government to extend and make that ceasefire almost a permanent ceasefire. The point I'm making to you is that again we had an opportunity to do something right and we couldn't get people here at a political level to understand the value of engaging these people. They're human beings after all. Yes, if they're prepared to destroy us or hurt us, we have to defend ourselves. But maybe we'd better next time go and have a look at what they are, who they are and what their problems are before we start lobbing cruise missiles and hitting them from afar.

With that data, the conclusion that I will come to is the following.

Essentially terrorism is a virus of the mind. You can't see it, you can't feel it, you can't touch it until it's too late. A lot of people here today said poverty is not the problem. But let me tell you where poverty is a problem. Poverty is a problem because it allows masses of people to be subjected to and opportunistically used for the game that people that Osama bin Laden want to play.

Pakistan is 140 million people. You think he went to Afghanistan just for the hell of it? He went there because he had a mass of people that he could get behind him had he had a little bit more time, and maybe even a little bit more money. That's where poverty plays in.

Second, we're going to need help in three critical areas from our allies in other parts of the world. Not our Western allies but our Islamic world allies. The first area is intelligence, and there Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and India -- India is the second largest Muslim country in the world; many of you may not know that. Has the second largest population of Muslims anywhere in the world. These countries have to help us unravel these networks.

Pakistan's ISI, in my judgment, has for a long time been a state institution within the state doing nothing but funding and encouraging the Arabization of the conflict in Kashmir. And it's that Arabization that caused the problems that we have in that part of the world today.

Second, we're going to need a lot of help in methods. There our friends in Turkey can be of enormous help to us. I have Turkish partners in my firm, and I can tell you that when you go to Turkey, you actually feel very safe. There's no terrorism there any more. There's nothing. It's a safe place. So we need to learn what their methods are.

Finally, we need to get Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries to deal with the issue of funding these radical nuts. There is no concept of religion, no wahabbi-ism, no Islam that I can imagine -- you know, my parents lived in Saudi Arabia for four years. There is nothing there that justifies any complicity on the part of the Saudi government, the Saudi royal family, or its extended members in allowing the financing of the jihad. There is no jihad that is worth what they have done in that part of the world.

I think we have to think about this problem as a combined effort.

Where are our failures and where are their failures? Our failures are not as clear as theirs, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to work together. Thank you very much.


30 posted on 05/18/2002 8:42:24 AM PDT by Wallaby
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To: Ken H
>you're older than dirt!

LOL. I discovered FR just a little before JimRob initiated the registration process, and some of my predecessors were just a bit slower to register and accept FR cookies.

31 posted on 05/18/2002 8:49:39 AM PDT by Wallaby
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To: Wallaby; plummz; fred mertz
On the aspirin factory, here is the Drudge Report Nov. 20, 2001 summary of the section on the aspirin-factory bombing in David Rose's article "The Osama Files" that appeared in the January 2002 Vanity Fair:

SOME OF THE MUKHABARAT’S FILES IDENTIFY INDIVIDUALS who played central roles in the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998; others chart the backgrounds and movements of al-Qaeda operatives who are said to be linked directly to the atrocities of September 11. Among those profiled:

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, another of those named on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list, who set the plot for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings rolling during two trips he made to Nairobi in the spring of 1998 from Khartoum, where he was apparently working for al-Qaeda. Rose writes that had the F.B.I. accepted al-Mahdi’s February offer, it might have foiled Mohammed’s plans by stepping in when he rented a villa in Kenya, gathered the bombers at the Hilltop Hotel in Nairobi, or helped stuff a pickup truck with TNT.

Two men carrying Pakistani passports and using the names Sayyid Iskandar Suliman and Sayyid Nazir Abbass, who arrived in Khartoum from Kenya a few days after the 1998 embassy bombings and rented an apartment overlooking the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. They appeared to be reconnoitering for a possible future attack and are believed to be members of al-Qaeda. They also stayed at the Hilltop Hotel in Nairobi—the base used by other members of the embassy-bombing conspiracy. Sudan arrested the two men and offered to extradite them for trial, but the U.S. did not respond, instead opting to bomb the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, which was found to have no connection to bin Laden but made vaccines and medicine and had contracts with the U.N.

The Rose article, which I have not found on the Web, details also all of Ijaz's charges. Ijaz was one of Rose's chief sources. I have a feeling we're going to be hearing a lot more now about Ijaz and Rose. This is going to be the Bush administration's answer to the Dems' irresponsible charges.

32 posted on 05/18/2002 8:55:37 AM PDT by aristeides
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To: Wallaby
One voice of truth and rationality in the wilderness of lies and distortions from the mainstream media.

As for the clinton administration......there are no words.

As when Gary Aldrich tried to alert us to the personal corruption of the clintons, he was marginalized by the media elites carrying the dirty water for the clinton's.

33 posted on 05/18/2002 10:06:03 AM PDT by OldFriend
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To: JohnHuang2
Thanks for the heads up...will give this one a mega ping..

Thanks, friend. There's almost too much information out there these days... it's difficult to keep up! :-)

34 posted on 05/18/2002 10:11:34 AM PDT by nutmeg
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To: JohnHuang2
Great interview! Thanks for the flag.
35 posted on 05/18/2002 1:39:59 PM PDT by Victoria Delsoul
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To: Wallaby
...because when I brought them (clinton) an opportunity to act, they didn't do anything.

bump

36 posted on 05/18/2002 1:46:24 PM PDT by JPJones
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To: JohnHuang2
Big Bump !!
37 posted on 05/18/2002 1:59:06 PM PDT by blackie
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To: Wallaby
Thanks for posting these great finds. Please put me on your ping list on future finds!

Great Job!

38 posted on 05/18/2002 5:23:39 PM PDT by Grampa Dave
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To: Wallaby
BC wants to level the poverty field-- what's the difference with BC and Mansoor then and now?-- taxes and prices are manipulated just as the American people and world markets are being played out by those who own world corporations. The focus of government is about money, and getting more-- they've ignored their prime directive.

It's not as simple, anymore, to think that when you pay a bill or buy something, that the profit is just about that company-- it's about what that company does with its influence. Someday, the US Army could bear the logo of some corporation, just as our city-owned stadiums bear the names of their sponsors. A separation of corporation and state, is just as necessary as the separation of Church and State. Hollywood has programmed the world to accept the Corporate State of the New World Order,-- except for the Nations of Islam and its poor followers who openly resist it, and hope to crush it. No wonder these people hate US.

39 posted on 05/18/2002 6:43:32 PM PDT by let freedom sing
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To: Wallaby; Askel5; Boyd; dirtboy; robbinsj
I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then

Methinks he was barkin' up the wrong tree.

http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/4438.html

.... The oil cooperation between China and Sudan began in 1995, which included cooperation under the economic aid by the Chinese government and mutually beneficial cooperation both undertaken by China Oil and Gas (Group) Corporation. The oil cooperation projects are progressing smoothly at present. They were completed and began to produce oil at the end of June 1999. The Khartoum, Oil Refinery jointly built by China and Sudan was completed and went into operation in May, 2000......

No wonder klintoon's fully politicized FBI went after Trafficante

CALLING FOR RESIGNATION OF SANDY BERGER
May 25, 1999

Mr. Speaker, the fact is Sandy Berger is our national security advisor. The fact is Sandy Berger was once China's chief lobbyist in America. The fact is now there is a hole in our national security so big we could throw Berger and all our secrets all the way to China nonstop. Beam me up.

I am not accusing Sandy Berger of any wrongdoing. But for the good of America, Sandy Berger should resign as our national security advisor. Sandy Berger is very close to China. In Washington, perception becomes reality.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back any secrets we have left.

40 posted on 05/18/2002 6:47:38 PM PDT by Hamiltonian
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