Posted on 11/30/2001 11:07:57 PM PST by HAL9000
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Clinton administration rejected Sudanese intelligence offers that would have yielded key information on Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network and might have stopped the Sept. 11 attack and the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, Vanity Fair magazine said on Friday.According to an article by British journalist David Rose appearing in the magazine next week, the Sudanese intelligence organization Mukhabarat offered information on many of the 22 men now on the U.S. government's most wanted list, including Osama bin Laden himself.
Also on the list are Ayman al-Zawahiri (founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now bin Laden's doctor) and Muhammad Atef (bin Laden's military commander who was reportedly killed earlier this month).
From the fall of 1996 until just weeks before the Sept. 11 attack, numerous overtures were made by the Sudanese that were refused by the State Department, the magazine said.
"The fact is, they were opening the doors, and we weren't taking them up on it," said Tim Carney, the last U.S. ambassador to Sudan, whose posting ended in 1997.
"The United States failed to reciprocate Sudan's willingness to engage us on some serious questions of terrorism," Carney said. "We can speculate that this failure had serious implications -- at least for what happened at the U.S. embassies in 1998. In any case, the U.S. lost access to a mine of material on bin Laden and his organization." Carney said the Sudan information did not fit with conventional wisdom at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency so it was disregarded again and again.
EMBASSY BOMBINGS PREVENTABLE
Former Mukhabarat Director General Gutbi al-Mahdi said that U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 would have been prevented if the FBI had taken information provided in 1996.
"They had very little information at that time; they were shooting in the dark," al-Mahdi said. "Had they engaged with Sudan, they could have stopped a lot of things."
Al-Mahdi noted that the Sudanese had intelligence service on the entire bin Laden "clique."
"We had a lot of information; who they are, who are their families, what is their education," al-Mahdi said. "We knew what they were doing in the country, what is their relationship with Osama bin Laden. And (had) photographs of all them."
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her assistant secretary for Africa, Susan Rice, had no comment on the report, the magazine said.
The magazine said the Clinton administration was hesitant to use the Sudanese information because it had accused Sudan of sponsoring terrorism. Sudan expelled bin Laden in May, 1996 after a U.S. request.
It wasn't until the summer of 2001 that Sudan was given a clean bill of health by a joint CIA-FBI team that investigated whether the country was harboring terrorists. A few weeks prior to the Sept. 11 attack, the Bush administration requested Sudan's information on al-Qaeda.
As late as 1995, bin Laden had not been judged important enough by the CIA or FBI or for anyone to mention him to former U.S. Ambassador Don Petterson, who said bin Laden's name never came up in conversations with the Sudanese. Petterson finished his Khartoum posting around the end of 1995, according to the article.
"My recollection is that when I made representations about terrorist organizations Osama bin Laden did not figure," Petterson said. "We in Khartoum were not really concerned about him."
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