Posted on 09/08/2006 9:58:02 AM PDT by Howlin
August 17, 2005
State Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.
In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.
The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to The New York Times, shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.
Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Two years after the State Department's warning, with Mr. bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, Al Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan.
Critics of the Clinton administration have accused it of ignoring the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden in the mid-1990's while he was still in Sudan, and they point to claims by some Sudanese officials that they offered to turn him over to the Americans before ultimately expelling him in 1996 under international pressure. But Clinton administration diplomats have adamantly denied that they received such an offer, and the Sept. 11 commission concluded in one of its staff reports that it had "not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."
The newly declassified documents do not directly address the question of whether Sudan ever offered to turn over Mr. bin Laden. But the documents go well beyond previous news and historical accounts in detailing the Clinton administration's active monitoring of Mr. bin Laden's movements and the realization that his move to Afghanistan could make him an even greater national security threat.
Several former senior officials in the Clinton administration did not return phone calls this week seeking comment on the newly declassified documents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/international/asia/17osama.html?ei=5090&en=2b945263d3848ee1&ex=1281931200&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=print
Video flashback: U.S. drone had Osama onscreen — in 2000 (Clinton missed Osama!)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1697791/posts
Youtube link
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JuH1xwLUnbg
Great stuff but sadly my friends on the left won't read it..too many words, too long and too many big words.
Simply amazing. Thanks for posting that. I need to order that book.
The Osama files by David Rose
[snip]
Bin Laden was expelled in May 1996. Despite this evidence of Sudan's willingness to cooperate, the U.S. appeared to have no interest in seeing what it could learn from Sudan. Mahdi Ibrahim Mohamed, now the information minister, went to Washington as Sudan's ambassador in February 1996. A long-standing Americophile, he had been educated in Michigan and California: "I like the country, I like the people. I went as ambassador for three years, with a positive view that America was open, free, open for dialogue.
What I found was a major surprise and disappointment." Mohammed spent three years trying to get a meeting with the State Department's assistant secretary for Africa, Susan Rice, only to find himself fobbed off on junior officials. He was no more successful in his efforts to see the National Security Council's Tony Lake, or his successor, Sandy Berger. The N.S.C. staff continued to accuse Sudan of harboring terrorists. Mohamed begged the officials to make a specific allegation, but they refused. "I said, 'Give me any information about any terrorists, any camps, as you believe it to be, and we will take it very seriously.' The response was 'Your government knows. You must know. We don't like to expose our sources."'
Ambassador Mohamed conveyed an open offer: the C.I.A. and F.B.I. could send a joint investigative team, which could travel freely throughout the country. "I used to say, 'Go anywhere, take a plane from Khartoum and say where you want to go once we're in the air."' It was not taken up. In February 1997, the offer was repeated in a letter from Presidental-Bashir to Clinton. Al-Bashir suggested "a mission tasked to investigate allegations that the government of Sudan trains or shelters terrorists," with "freedom of movement and contact and unrestricted choice of suspected terrorist sites." Clinton never replied.
It began to dawn on the Sudanese that one way of convincing America that they were serious about fighting terrorists was to offer U.S. investigators access to the Mukhabarat files on bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Frustrated in their efforts to invite America in through the front door, they resolved to try a back channel-the multimillionaire Pakistani-American businessman and fund manager Mansoor Ijaz. Then a big donor to the Democratic Party, Ijaz was on personal terms with Clinton, Berger, and A1 Gore. He was also fearful of the likely result of U.S. refusal to engage with Islamic regimes, such as Sudan: "As an American Muslim, I had a terrifying vision of what could go wrong. I wanted to do whatever I could to stop that happening."
As an investor, Ijaz was interested in Sudan's oil, but he also shared "a fundamental sense of injustice" at the way the country was being treated. From July 1996 until August 1997, he made six trips to Khartoum, meeting Dr. al-Turabi, President al-Bashir, the Mukhabarat chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, and other officials. He suceeded in convincing them that it was worth making a further effort to persuade the U.S. of Sudan's sincerity-partly by drawing America's attention to the intelligence on al-Qaeda.
His initiative produced its most dramatic result in a letter dated April 5, 1997, from President al-Bashir to Lee H. Hamilton, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
It stated, "We extend an offer to the F.B.I's Counter-terrorism units and any other official delegations which your government may deem appropriate, 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." (My italics.) According to Ijaz, Hamilton took the letter to both Madeleine Albright and Sandy Beger, neither of whom replied.
Ijaz also wrote memorandums on his mission for Sandy Berger, and in a series of conversations he spelled out exactly what the Sudanese offer meant. He told Berger, "That phrase [in the letter to Hamilton], 'to assess the data in our possession,' was an explicit reference to the data on bin Laden. The reference to 'the forces we seek to contain' was an explicit reference to the attempt to stop al-Qaeda spreading." Ijaz and his family had shared their Christmas dinner in the White House with the ain- tons. However good his access, he could not budge U.S. policy on Sudan.
The Sudanese did not give up. Beginning in the autumn of 1997, they made use of another private go-between, Janet McElligott, a lobbyist who had worked at the White House under George H. W Bush.
Like Ijaz before her, she assumed that rational statecraft would, in the end, prevail. In this she was mistaken. On February 5, 1998, her efforts helped produce perhaps the smokiest of all the smoking guns in this story: a letter direct from Gutbi al-Mahdi of the Mukhabarat to David Williams, chief of the F.B.I.'s Middle East and Africa desk. It read, "I would like to express my sincere desire to start contacts and cooperation between our service and the F.B.I. I would like to take this opportunity with pleasure to invite you to visit our country. Otherwise, we could meet somewhere else. Till then I remain, yours truly."
Eighteen days later, on February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden issued his blood- curdling fatwa from his hideout in Afghanistan, calling on all Muslims to kill Americans and Jews, adding that civilians were now to be regarded as targets. McElligott followed up the letter with a personal appeal: "I told them, 'You do realize bin Laden lived there and they have files on his main people?' There is simply no doubt the F.B.I. knew what was available. The guy I dealt with said, 'I'd give any- thing to go in there, but they'-meaning the State Department-'won't let us."' David Williams did not reply to al-Mahdi's letter for another four months.
"Unfortunately," he wrote on June 24, "I am not currently in a position to accept your kind invitation." He hoped "future circumstances" might allow it, but for now the offer had to be rejected. Six. Weeks after that, Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network succeeded in exploding two pick- up trucks at the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. They were reduced to piles of bloody rubble in which 224 people lay dead or dying.
[/Snip]
Very long, but worth keeping.
Oh yes they do. See the copies of letters in "the Osama files"
Thanks for the ping. The pro Islamofascists of the Clintoon Administration allowed Ben Laden to survive to kill 3000 innocent Americans on 9/11.
The link below documents that reality.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JuH1xwLUnbg
I bet that he is just amazed at the FREE PASS he has gotten on this issue. That's a big reason why Slick and his apologists are just livid over ANYTHING that could refocus the public on the responsibility that Slick and his psychophants have for leaving President Bush the national security MESS (that President Bush inherited).
Maybe, just maybe, this ABC documentary (even if edited big time) will return the focus of Clinton's willful neglect of our national security needs to the public eye.
Clinton: I Wanted to Bomb Khandahar
http://www.newsmax.com/scripts/showinside.pl?a=2002/2/15/145708&s=lh
THANKS TONS, HOWLIN. MUCH APPRECIATED.
Clarke was nervous about such a mission because he continued to fear that Bin Ladin might leave for someplace less accessible. He wrote Deputy National Security Advisor Donald Kerrick that one reliable source reported Bin Ladin's having met with Iraqi officials, who "may have offered him asylum." Other intelligence sources said that some Taliban leaders, though not Mullah Omar, had urged Bin Ladin to go to Iraq. If Bin Ladin actually moved to Iraq, wrote Clarke, his network would be at Saddam Hussein's service, and it would be "virtually impossible" to find him. Better to get Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, Clarke declared. 134 Berger suggested sending one U-2 flight, but Clarke opposed even this. It would require Pakistani approval, he wrote; and "Pak[istan's] intel[ligence service] is in bed with" Bin Ladin and would warn him that the United States was getting ready for a bombing campaign: "Armed with that knowledge, old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad."135 Though told also by Bruce Riedel of the NSC staff that Saddam Hussein wanted Bin Ladin in Baghdad, Berger conditionally authorized a single U-2 flight. Allen meanwhile had found other ways of getting the information he wanted. So the U-2 flight never occurred. 136
(Bolded for additional emphasis)
OMG ... it does take you there
Remember the ONLY ones commenting on that report so far are the Dems
So does this mean that the movie's website has been hacked into and rerouted to the DNC? (sorry to be so computer illiterate)
I suppose it's conceivable the RATs didn't do this, and just a moonbat hacker did. Regardless, what does it matter that Frists office is ticked? Frist isn't going to say anything public about the Stalinists success at media censorship.
Frist and the republicans are as useless as tits on a boar.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1177555/posts
Berger rejected four plans to kill or capture bin Laden
THE WASHINGTON TIMES ^ | July 24, 2004 | James G. Lakely
Posted on 07/23/2004 11:12:30 PM PDT by neverdem
President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, rejected four plans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, worrying once that if the plans failed and al Qaeda launched a counterattack, "we're blamed."
According to the September 11 commission's 567-page report, released Thursday, Mr. Berger was told in June 1999 that U.S. intelligence agents were confident about bin Laden's presence in a terrorist training camp called Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan.
Mr. Berger's "hand-written notes on the meeting paper," the report says, showed that Mr. Berger was worried about injuring or killing civilians located near the camp.
Additionally, "If [bin Laden] responds" to the attack, "we're blamed," Mr. Berger wrote.
The report also says that Richard Clarke, Mr. Berger's expert on counterterrorism, presented that plan to get bin Laden because he was worried about the al Qaeda leader's "ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
These revelations come as Mr. Berger is under investigation by the Justice Department for smuggling several copies of classified documents that dealt with the Clinton administration's anti-terror policies out of the National Archives.
Commission Co-chairman Lee Hamilton said Thursday, however, that the missing documents Mr. Berger has acknowledged taking doesn't affect "the integrity" of the final report.
According to the report, the first plan of action against bin Laden presented to Mr. Berger was a briefing by CIA Director George J. Tenet on May 1, 1998. Mr. Berger took no action, the report says, because he was "focused most" on legal questions.
And we all believe him, don't we? /s
BS! It's alleged that they contain margin notes by BillyBubba.
No. The ABC site has abc.com in the addy. something like www.abc.com/pathto9/11
what it does is cause anyone entering pathto9/11 in a search engine list that site.
I heard Tony Snow report there was nothing new and Roberts said the same, although he did add that Democrats were using selective reporting. But he didn't disagree, neither of them disagreed, with the overall assessment.
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