Another mistaken 'conceptzia'
[WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER CLINTON]

by Laurie Mylroie
Jerusalem Post
December 4, 2002

The Clinton administration "spun" America's terrorist problem when it re-emerged in February 1993, with the bombing of the World Trade Center, one month into Bill Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI believed that was a "false flag" operation run by Iraq, working with and hiding behind Islamic militants.

But Clinton did not want to hear it (he thought he took care of the problem slyly if the FBI was correct when he hit Iraqi intelligence headquarters several months later). So his administration claimed a new terrorism had emerged, consisting of "loose networks" of Islamic militants, unsupported by states.

hillary talks:ON TERROR
(reinstalling the clintons in the White House has one advantage over suicide)

(viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE)

Al-Qaida has struck again, or so it seems. "A virtual enemy," as a Clinton administration official describes it, al-Qaida is everywhere and anywhere. It is no less a threat than it was a year ago, according to CIA director George Tenet although the Taliban are defeated; al-Qaida's leadership is dead or on the run; and more than 3,000 others have been detained. "You see it in Bali. You see it in Kuwait," Tenet affirmed. And now, presumably, we saw it in Mombasa.

US government officials recently stated that missiles shot at an Israeli passenger plane were linked to a failed al-Qaida attack on an American fighter jet in Saudi Arabia. But does this idea that al-Qaida is acting alone really make sense? Not at all.

The Clinton administration "spun" America's terrorist problem when it re-emerged in February 1993, with the bombing of the World Trade Center, one month into Bill Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI believed that was a "false flag" operation run by Iraq, working with and hiding behind Islamic militants.

But Clinton did not want to hear it (he thought he took care of the problem slyly if the FBI was correct when he hit Iraqi intelligence headquarters several months later). So his administration claimed a new terrorism had emerged, consisting of "loose networks" of Islamic militants, unsupported by states.

Israel might have recognized this for the dangerous misconception it was, were it not for the unrealistic expectations that set in regarding the "peace process" when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. Already then, a new "conceptzia" had begun to blur Western vision.

"Conceptzia" was the term coined by the Agranat Commission to describe the intelligence failure that led to the surprise of the Yom Kippur War. As a friend at Tel Aviv University explained, "It is much more than a mistake." It is a fundamentally flawed understanding of events that prevents one from seeing what is before his eyes.

The new conceptzia is easy to explain. By the mid-1990s, the notion had taken hold that the US had decisively defeated Iraq in 1991 (in fact, many, including prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, were appalled when the US ended the war with Saddam in power).

Then following Iraq's defeat, so the conceptzia goes, a new threat emerged the spread of Islamic militants after the 1992 collapse of the communist regime in Afghanistan. Thus, the two threats, Iraq and the spread of Islamic militancy, are separated in time and space.

BUT THE Gulf War never really ended. The two phenomena the ongoing war with Iraq and the spread of Islamic militancy existed at the same time, the 1990s, and in the same space, the Sunni Muslim Middle East. Did they merge?

That is an important question, which almost no one asks. But it would seem they did. Consider Egypt, a key member of the anti-Iraq coalition. Without Egyptian backing, the Arab League would never have voted to support Iraq's ouster from Kuwait, as it did in August 1990.

Egypt seemed to have beaten back its post-Afghanistan Islamic challenge by 1997. On November 17, however, more foreign tourists were killed in one day in an attack at Luxor than were killed during Egypt's entire post-Afghan Islamic insurgency.

The attack occurred as the first crisis over UNSCOM ended. More crises would follow, as Saddam deliberately moved to end weapons inspections. When the next crisis began in early 1998, Egypt, through the Arab League, took a strong position that it not be resolved by force. No major terrorist attack has occurred in Egypt since.

What happened at Luxor? If Iraqi intelligence joins with an indigenous militant group, isn't the ensuing attack likely to be far more lethal than what that group might do on its own? Of course. Recently, I discussed this with the distinguished historian Bernard Lewis, who concurred. The subtle hints that Iraq was involved in Luxor were missed by those who jumped to the conclusion the militants had struck again, but not by the Egyptians.

A major debate rages in Washington as to whether Iraq supports al-Qaida. As Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland wrote, "The links become clear with a little digging. You miss them only if you have a strong need not to know." The attacks on tourists in Bali and Mombasa come as momentum builds for war with Iraq. As one US official, part of the new Bush team, noted, their main purpose is "to divert us from the war on Iraq.... Terrorism is an instrument of state, not a wildcat NGO."
The conceptzia needs urgent reexamination. If Israel accepts and endorses an erroneous explanation for this terrorism, that will only increase the risk more will follow.

3 Strikes and You're Out: The New York Times is "Wrong" Again

Horror: it is claimed the mass graves are near Saddam's Tharthar palace

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Have your say

'Mass graves litter Iraq'

By Steve Boggan in Baghdad, Evening Standard

17 April 2003

An Iraqi colonel in the Iraqi internal security service today claims he has damning evidence directly linking Saddam Hussein to a series of horrific crimes against humanity.

	More on the war
	" Free newsflash " Galleries: War in pictures " Talk about rebuilding Iraq " Comment and opinion " War -in depth " Appeal: Help the victims of war " Video: Footage from Iraq

He has testified in chilling detail to witnessing thousands of innocent men, women and children being murdered by Saddam's henchmen and buried in mass desert graves.

United Nations investigators are set to launch an immediate investigation into the colonel's claims of Kurds and Shi'ite muslims being herded into the graves before being either shot or buried alive.



Other stories:



'Mass graves litter Iraq' UN considers lifting sanctions Virgin to fly in Iraq supplies France left out of 'stabilising' force Bush aide: I think Saddam's dead Our job is still only half done

Drawing comparisons with Nazi extermination of the Jews, the officer told the Evening Standard that Kurds were packed 200 at a time into trucks and driven to the Al Anbar desert west of Baghdad or desert areas near Tharthar, north-west of the capital. They had been told they were to be "relocated", but those who survived the journey were murdered.

Thousands of Shias, too, were buried in the same two areas, the colonel said. Tharthar, north-west of Baghdad, is where Saddam built a "green palace" with an artificial lake so he could go fishing.

The UN High Commission for Human Rights has numerous reports of unsolved disappearances of Kurds and Shias dating back 20 years. The officer, who wants to remain anonymous, has offered to help investigators and says other officers are prepared to come forward.

He sought no money for his testimony. "I saw thousands killed and buried in mass graves," he said. "Some were lined up and machine-gunned before being covered with sand. Others were just buried alive."

While there is no proof of these claims so far, they could justify Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq. The colonel was a member of Al-Amn al-'Amm, the force responsible for policing political activity, from 1982 to 1999. The Standard has seen his service identification.

During the Eighties, he said, the Kurds of northern Iraq where slaughtered wholesale. "Saddam had a programme of telling villagers they were being relocated south," he said. "We would take trucks that would normally hold 12 to 15 people and put in 200 with no water or ventilation.

"Many would die on the way. Survivors were driven to Al Anbar or Tharthar and buried alive in vast holes dug in the ground. I saw thousands of people - men, women and children - die this way."

After the Shi'ite uprisings in the south following the first Gulf War, Saddam ordered his intelligence services, the Republican Guard and the Al-Amn al-'Amm to round up all Shia males between 20 and 40.

"We took thousands from Shia areas in Kerbala, Najaf, Basra, Mosul, Kut, Babylon and from Saddam City in Baghdad and they were bused into the desert. Then they were shot and buried.

"At one base in Muhaywir [in the northern part of the Al Anbar desert], I saw a line of men maybe 3km long. One officer would ask each man his name and before he could reply another would shoot him in the back of the head." The colonel also told of thousands of political executions. "We had permission to kill anyone," he said. "We had a thousand ways of killing and all were used."

People were killed for the slightest criticism of Saddam, or for making a joke. "We would take people to the police station and give them a drink laced with sodium fluoroacetate or thallium, poisons for killing rats. Then we would let them go. Later, they would die and no one knew it was us.

"Many officers hated Saddam and hated what we had to do. But if we refused, we and every member of our families would have been killed.

"Believe me, the British and Americans have done us a great service getting rid of Saddam."

Karim Jhezroaui, UN human-rights co-ordinator in Iraq, asked yesterday for details of the colonel's claims.

"We have many reports of Kurds and Shias being killed and details of many disappearances," he said. "We will cross-check these claims with the ones we already have."

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New York Times Chairman/Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. admits to Brian Lamb:

"Times dropped ball during Holocaust by failing to connect the dots"
Times was able to endorse clinton by separating clinton's "policies" from "the man" [i.e., by failing to connect the dots!]


by Mia T, November 30, 2001

alpractice and/or malfeasance by "compartmentalization" redux...
It appears that The New York Times doesn't learn from its mistakes. Will it take The Times another 50 years to understand/admit that by having endorsed for reelection a "documentably dysfunctional" president with "delusions" -- its own words -- it must bear sizeable blame for the 9-11 horror and its aftermath ?
(Note, by the way, the irony of Sulzberger's carefully worded rationalization of the clinton endorsements, pointing to clinton "policies," not achievements, (perhaps understanding, at last, that clinton "achievements" -- when legal -- were more illusory than real--perhaps understanding, at last, that The Times' Faustian bargain was not such a good deal after all).).
If we assume that the clintons were the proximate cause of 9-11 --- a proposition not difficult to demonstrate-- it then follows that The New York Times must, indeed, bear sizeable blame for the 9-11 horror and its aftermath.

Yet More

CNNs of Commission, Rapist Demagogues and 9/11

by Mia T, 4/9/99, updated 4/19/03

Sins of omission and commission are not circumscribable... and CNN's shameless revisionist efforts will not make them so.


the movie

Nothing demonstrates this principle of unboundedness better than the clinton rapes.

You will recall that the protectors of the impeached rapist rapidly became the protectors of marauding Milosevic rapist-guerrillas. Had the protectors of the impeached rapist denounced the Milosevic rapists, they would have thrown a monkey wrench into the Senate's show-trial deus ex machina of choice, willful ignorance. And so the rape of Albanian women by Milosevic thugs went virtually unreported... and unopposed.

This dynamic became especially clear when the protected. i.e, the rapist, became the protector. Whereas bill clinton took every opportunity to demagogue the Bosnia rapes, he never once mentioned the rapes that occurred in Kosovo. This seeming inconsistency evaporates when one realizes that during the intervening period clinton was fingered as the serial rapist of Juanita Broaddrick, 19-year-old Eileen Wellstone, an as-yet-unnamed, drugged 14-year-old, and others.

Analogous behavior by the rapist provides additional inferential evidence of this dynamic: clinton, the unabashed Balkanizer, had no problem denouncing Milosevic's Balkanizing. clinton, the brazen thug, had no problem denouncing Milosevic's thuggery. Yet clinton, the about-to-be-outed closet rapist, was mum on the Milosevic rapes.

--a senator to Henry Hyde
But even as Clinton fails to grasp the scandal's metabolism he understands all too well its most significant byproduct. You can see it in his eyes.
Once reflecting a Machiavellian confidence,
they now dart back and forth reflexively,
searching futilely for approval,
attempting desperately to dispel his own certain knowledge
that his moral authority is gone. . .
forever.
Mia T
It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts.
Is this the part of wise men,
engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty?
Are we disposed to be the number of those
who, having eyes, see not,
and having ears, hear not,
the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation?
For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost,
I am willing to know the whole truth;
to know the worst, and to provide for it.
Patrick Henry
In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
Theodore Roethke

Q ERTY6₍_{clinton was an utter failure}₎
DEATH BY MISREPORT: 4^TH-ESTATE MALFEASANCE AND 9/11

REALITY CHECK _bump!

The Real Danger of a Fake President:
Post-9/11 Reconsideration of The Placebo President

by Mia T, 1.06.02

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...

US missed three chances to seize Bin Laden

Just look around this chamber. We have members from virtually every racial, ethnic, and religious background. And America is stronger for it. But as we have seen, these differences all too often spark hatred and division, even here at home. . . This is not the American way. We must draw the line. Without delay, we must pass the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And we should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

bill clinton, State of Union Speech, January 27, 2000

"I'm sorry, but the president is one of the crudest men I have ever encountered in government service," says one female agent. "He has no respect for women."
Among the comments clinton made in presence of Secret Service agents:

. Frequent speculation on the oral sex skills of women the president saw or met in receiving lines;
. References to the size of a woman's breasts, legs or figure;
. Sexual jokes.

After the Monica Lewinsky story broke, however, clinton toned down his rhetoric and behavior in front of his Secret Service agents, but those who guarded the president say enough of them saw and heard things which could be damaging to clinton.

"It depends on who Ken Starr calls," says one ex-agent. "The people who are on the job today are not necessarily the ones who know the most."
Turnover In clinton's Secret Service Detail 'Highest That Anyone Can Remember'

In the months that follow, reporters drop the issue. Feminists say little or nothing. Rape crisis center workers acknowledge that Broaddrick's case, including her reluctance to come forward, is typical of victims of sexual assault. But they decline to speak against clinton. Some cite the federal funding they receive as a result of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed into law by clinton.
Why does the press continue to ignore the Juanita Broaddrick story?

Richard Gere stunned fellow liberals Monday by suggesting that President Bush is doing a better job of fighting AIDS than President Bill Clinton did.
Introduced by Sharon Stone at a fund-raiser at Cipriani 42nd Street for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the "Chicago" star hailed Bush for his State of the Union proposal to contribute $15 billion toward the AIDS battle in Africa and the Caribbean. Gere then addressed the track record of Bush's predecessor in the White House.
"I'm sorry, Sen. [Hillary] Clinton, but your husband did nothing about AIDS for eight years," Gere said.
GERE TAKES ON BILL, NY Daily News | 2/5/03

The Placebo President:
How a Rapist can be a Policy Feminist

placebo effect n.

A beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patient's expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself.

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

Sylvia Plath

The placebo effect immediately came to mind as I listened to Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution,debunk the following pernicious spin intended to save clinton.
To wit: A proven felon and utter reprobate can remain president; clinton can be a failed human being but a good president.
The error in these statements arises, says Steele, from the belief that virtuousness is separate from personal responsibility so that one's virtuousness as an individual is determined by one's political positions on issues rather than on whether or not in one's personal life there is a consistency and a responsibility.
Steele's contention is that this compartmentalization, rather than being the amazing advantage the clintons would have us believe, in fact, spills toxicity into, corrupts, the culture.
If mere identification with good policies is what makes one virtuous then those policies become, what Steele calls, iconographic, that is to say they just represent virtuousness. They don't necessarily do virtuous things.
If clinton's semantic parsing strips meaning from our words, clinton's iconographic policies strip meaning from our society, systematically deconstructing our society as a democracy. . .
I would take Shelby Steele's thesis one step further. I maintain that iconographic policy functions like a placebo, producing a real, physiological and social effects.
The placebo effect is, after all, the brain's triumph over reality. Expectation alone can produce powerful physiological results. The placebo effect was, at one time, an evolutionary advantage: act now, think later
bill clinton is the paradigmatic Placebo President. Placebo is Latin for "I shall please." And please he does doling out sham treatments, iconographs, with abandon. To please, to placate, to numb, to deflect. Ultimately to showcase his imagined virtue. Or to confute his genuine vice.
clinton will dispense sugar pills (or bombs) at the drop of a high-heeled shoe... or at the hint of high treason...
clinton's charlatanry mimics that of primitive medicine. Through the 1940s, doctors had little effective medicine to offer so they deliberately attempted to induce the placebo response.
The efficaciousness of today's medicines does not diminish the power of the placebo. A recent review of placebo-controlled studies found that placebos and genuine treatments are often equally effective. If you expect to get better, you will.
Which brings me back to the original question: Can clinton be a failed human being but a good president?
Clearly he cannot. These two propositions are mutually exclusive. clinton's fundamental failure is a complete lack of integrity. He has violated his covenant with the American people.
Because clinton has destroyed his moral authority as a leader, he can no longer function even as a quack; the placebo effect is gone.
And so the Placebo President must now go, too.

Epilogue

September 11 changed a lot of things for me, Bill [O'Reilly]. I will say this, before September 11, I was definitely mildly myopic in terms of my political agenda. If you were Democrat you were probably right, and if you were a Republican you were probably wrong. Everything changed for me that day...
My entire worldview changed. If you would have told me September 9 that I would have been at the world series game filming George Bush throwing out the first pitch with my 6-year-old son crying, I never would have believed you, but I was. Because my whole worldview changed.
ROSIE O'DONNELL

April 28, 2003, 8:45 a.m.
The Clinton Intel Record
Deeper failures revealed.

By Mansoor Ijaz

he unearthing of documents directly linking Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization to Saddam Hussein this weekend may have hermetically sealed the Bush administration's case that dismantling Iraq's Baathist enterprise was in part necessary to undo terrorism's dynamic duo. But closing that case may reopen a Pandora's box for ex-Clinton administration officials who still believe their policy prescriptions protected U.S. national interests against the growing threat of terrorism during the past decade.

The London Telegraph's weekend revelations raise deeply disturbing questions about the extent and magnitude to which President Clinton, his national-security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, and senior terrorism and State Department officials -- including Assistant Secretary of State for East Africa, Susan Rice -- politicized intelligence data, relied on and even circulated fabricated evidence in making critical national-security decisions, and presided over a string of intelligence failures during the months leading up to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Analysis of documents found in the rubble of Iraq's intelligence headquarters show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Iraqi military and intelligence officials sought out al Qaeda leaders, not the other way around, and ultimately met with bin Laden on at least two occasions. They also show that channels of communication between al Qaeda and Iraq were created much earlier and were wider ranging in scope than previously thought.

The timing of the meetings sheds important new light on how grave the Clinton administration's intelligence failures may have been.

On February 19, 1998, about six months prior to the attacks in Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi, Iraqi intelligence officials set in motion a plan to bring a senior and trusted bin Laden aide to Baghdad from Khartoum. One of the key Mukhabarat intelligence documents shows that a recommendation was made for "…the deputy director general to bring the [bin Laden] envoy to Iraq because we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden." The meetings took place in March 1998.

The initial program to have the terror talks last for one week was extended to two because of the success in whatever nefarious plans were being hatched. The meetings also laid the groundwork for Iraq's former intelligence chief, Farouk Hijazi, arrested last Friday in Iraq, to meet with bin Laden in December 1998 in Afghanistan. Press reports also chronicled an earlier meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden in Sudan in 1994.

Baghdad, however, was not the only game in town. While Saddam was busy trying to find a formula for embracing and employing al Qaeda's budding global terror network to attack U.S. interests, Sudan was busy trying to alert Western intelligence officials -- including those at the National Security Council, the State Department's Terrorism Bureau, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency -- of the dangers still lurking in Khartoum's sandblasted neighborhoods after bin Laden's May 1996 expulsion.

A brief chronology demonstrates how compelling the Sudan's offer to turn over terrorism data might have been in thwarting attacks on U.S. citizens and assets overseas, and how mendacious a narrow clique of Clinton officials were in not taking advantage of those efforts.

OCTOBER 27, 1996. In a confidential memorandum I wrote to Sandy Berger to follow up on the August 1996 meeting he and Susan Rice (then a National Security Council official) had called me to the White House for to discuss U.S.-Sudan relations, I recounted events of my first meeting with the new Sudanese intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Gutbi al-Mahdi, just days earlier -- a meeting whose consequence even I did not fully grasp at the time:

…the purpose of my meeting [with al-Mahdi] was to see if we could glean any insights into the data Sudan has on those who have been attending the Popular Arab & Islamic Conference meetings convened by [Sudan's theological leader Hassan] Turabi. As you recall, during our August meeting, I told you I thought this data could be invaluable in genuinely assessing terrorism risk from Sudan and neighboring countries… His [al-Mahdi's] central contention is that Sudan is prepared to share data on those people attending the conferences and belonging to banned groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Jamaah Islamiyah, and others, if we are prepared to genuinely engage and incent the Sudan away from its present course. He complained bitterly about repeated efforts to communicate with the administration, which are as I understand it, being blocked at very low levels because of what he called "blind spots."He showed me some files in which the data seemed pretty compelling -- names, bio data like dates and places of birth, passport copies to show nationality, recent travel itineraries in some cases and a brief description of each individual to delineate which groups they claim loyalties to. In short, it seemed to me everything we discussed in August was available. Strongly suggest we test the Sudanese on the data, perhaps even try to get at the data on an unconditional basis…

Berger's secretary, Kris, confirmed he had received and read the memo. Berger's reply: We'll evaluate this after the election. Election day came and went. No action was taken.

APRIL 5, 1997. Sudan's president, Omar Hassan El Bashir, delivered to me a final, unconditional political offer, addressed to Rep. Lee Hamilton, to invite FBI and CIA officials to go to Khartoum and evaluate Sudanese intelligence data on terrorists that had lived in or passed through Sudan. The offer went without a reply even as Hamilton repeatedly queried Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and others about what was wrong with the offer and why it was not being evaluated more seriously. Correspondence in my files fully documents these events.

SEPTEMBER 28, 1997. Sudan's April policy shift to make cooperation on terrorism issues unconditional sparked a heated debate at the State Department, where foreign-service officers believed the U.S. should take a new approach to Khartoum, and lobbied the incoming Secretary of State -- still untainted by her politicized and yet-to-be-confirmed staff -- to have a fresh look. On September 28, after four months of deliberate and exhaustive interagency reviews, Sec. Albright announced that up to eight U.S. diplomats would return to Sudan to pressure its Islamic government to stop harboring Arab terrorists, and furthermore, to gather intelligence on terrorist groups operating out of Sudan -- including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

OCTOBER 1, 1997. As the reengagement policy was taking shape, Rice, the incoming Assistant Secretary for East Africa, informally confronted the same foreign-service officers who had recommended returning diplomats to Sudan to Albright and vowed that the new policy directive would not stand. On October 1, State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin sheepishly announced an abrupt reversal of the September 28 Albright decision. Rice was confirmed by the Senate on October 9, 1997. To this day, neither Berger nor Albright nor Rice have explained to the American people why a deliberative decision of the U.S. government, made through interagency review, was overturned in such a cavalier fashion by a narrow clique of Clinton advisers when Sudan's April offer to cooperate on terrorism issues had been made unconditionally.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1997 and DECEMBER 5, 1997. On the very day Rice was delivering testimony for her Senate confirmation, Sudan's ambassador to the U.S., Mahdi Ibrahim, met with David Williams, special agent in charge of the FBI's Middle East and North Africa Department. Faced with the growing prospect that political reconciliation was impossible with forces at the National Security Council and State Department lined up adamantly against Sudan, Ibrahim decided to take matters directly to the intelligence community and discuss how the FBI could take advantage of Sudan's offer to cooperate independently of the administration. A second, and critically important, meeting took place on December 5.

FEBRUARY 5, 1998. On the basis of those two FBI meetings in Washington, Sudan's intelligence chief, al-Mahdi, made a final, almost desperate attempt to reach out to U.S. intelligence officials in order to turn over data on the people and evidence of their planning against U.S. targets in the region. He wrote officially to Williams "…with reference to your meeting with Ambassador Mahdi Ibrahim on Sept. 12 and Dec. 5 1997, I would like to express my sincere desire to start contacts and cooperation between our service and the FBI…" The letter was sent at the very moment that Iraq was reaching out to al Qaeda leaders resident in Khartoum. Did al-Mahdi know something serious was amiss in the radical Islamist community he was closely monitoring? Apparently so. He would later recount to Vanity Fair correspondent David Rose in a January 2002 expose that had the FBI come to Khartoum in February 1998 to analyze the data on terrorists Khartoum was actively monitoring, the U.S. embassy bombings would probably not have occurred.

FEBRUARY 19, 1998. Iraqi intelligence plans the trip of a senior al Qaeda operative and trusted bin Laden aide to visit Baghdad.

MARCH 1998. The al Qaeda operative visits Baghdad for two weeks. The visit sets the stage for Farouk Hijazi to travel to bin Laden's Afghanistan hideouts in December 1998.

JUNE 24, 1998. Theoretically, the February Sudanese offer to the FBI should have been evaluated on merits that did not take the Clinton administration's political viewpoint on Sudan into consideration, particularly since it differed from President Bashir's April offer at a political level, in that it was made at an intelligence-to-intelligence level. After all, the U.S. executive branch is not supposed to interfere with the FBI's job. Or so we thought. On June 24, Williams finally replied to al-Mahdi "… I am not currently in a position to accept your kind invitation. I am hopeful that future circumstances might allow me to visit with you…." Future circumstances was code, as I found out later from career officials at State involved in the discussions at the time, for a point at which the politicizing that had come to characterize Clinton administration terrorism policies would end. Blockages created by State's East Africa department under Rice, and by Berger at the National Security Council, remained as both vehemently argued against allowing FBI delegations to visit Khartoum under any circumstances.

U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed six weeks later. Cruise-missile attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan, based on faulty and inaccurate intelligence, followed and ignited the fires burning inside radical Islam's criminal core. As we now know, planning for the September 11 attacks on America began soon thereafter.

I believe that as we continue to unravel the spaghetti strings that bound al Qaeda and Saddam's regime together in the coming months, we are going to learn that Iraq provided expertise, financial, logistical and intelligence support to al Qaeda terrorists in an unprecedented manner. The terrorists, emboldened by their state sponsorship, were able to then carry out their suicide missions almost with impunity.

The silence of Clinton officials charged with the responsibility of securing U.S. interests around the world, when faced with this compelling timeline of facts, is still deafening. The American people deserve candid answers for the difficult questions posed by their actions in addressing the growing threat of terrorism, and failing repeatedly to respond to meaningful offers of assistance from the very nations who because of their sponsorship of terrorism, best understood those who rose up to attack us.

-- Mansoor Ijaz, chairman of Crescent Investment Management in New York and an NRO contributor, negotiated as a private citizen the Sudan's offer to share intelligence data on al Qaeda, bin Laden, and other terrorist groups with the Clinton administration in April 1997.

hillary talks:ON TERROR
(reinstalling the clintons in the White House has one advantage over suicide)

(viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE)

missus clinton's REAL virtual office update
http://hillarytalks.blogspot.com
http://virtualclintonlibrary.blogspot.com
http://demmemogate.blogspot.com
http://www.hillarytalks.us
http://www.hillarytalks.org
fiendsofhillary.blogspot.com
fiendsofhillary.us
fiendsofhillary.org
fraudsofhillary.com

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Another mistaken 'conceptzia'
[WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER CLINTON]

Author and Expert on Saddam Hussein to Deliver 1998-99 Roemer Memorial Lecture on World Affairs

'Mass graves litter Iraq'

An Iraqi colonel in the Iraqi internal security service today claims he has damning evidence directly linking Saddam Hussein to a series of horrific crimes against humanity.

Another mistaken 'conceptzia'[WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER CLINTON]

Author and Expert on Saddam Hussein to Deliver 1998-99 Roemer Memorial Lecture on World Affairs

'Mass graves litter Iraq'

An Iraqi colonel in the Iraqi internal security service today claims he has damning evidence directly linking Saddam Hussein to a series of horrific crimes against humanity.

Another mistaken 'conceptzia'
[WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER CLINTON]