I figured we might as well have a thread to GATHER up all these links and stories we're posting on all these ABC threads!
Here's an interesting one found by Txsleuth listening to BOR radio show this morning.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1695809/posts?page=385#385
http://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=jordans&date=040721
Berger’s Bonfire
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Berger’s record of inattention and malfeasance--and, yes, "sloppiness"--is unshreddable.
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"[Lindsey's] nicknames have run the gamut from "the Enforcer" to "the Consigliere," the Sicilian word for a trusted counsel to a Mafia chieftain." --Time Magazine, March 23 1998 [1]
The astonishing admission of Samuel “Sandy” Berger, Bill Clinton’s longtime National Security Advisor, that he stuffed “code-word”-class secret documents into his pants, sneaked them out of a secure review room at the National Archives and “inadvertently” destroyed them is highly disquieting to those familiar with Berger’s background and activities in the Clinton Administration.
In particular, the Washington Post reports [2] that Berger purloined all draft revisions of a key critique of the government's response to the millennium terrorism threat, a document that detailed Administration knowledge – and inaction – regarding al Qaeda presence in the U.S. in 1999 and 2000. Stolen were crucial notes in the margins of these drafts which reveal the thinking and agendas of the Clinton Administration relating to the mounting terrorist threat.
Cui bono? And when the losses were discovered, why did the Archives staff notify Bruce Lindsey? Lindsey, whom Time Magazine called Clinton’s consigliere, is the brilliant legal tactician both Clintons can thank for their continued freedom.
Berger has an impressive resume, but not one that obviously qualified him as NSA. He entered White House service a millionaire lawyer and lobbyist with a career centered on expanding trade with China [3]. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh opined that “he was a public-relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press” [4]. Indeed, Clinton’s brilliant poll-meister, Dick Morris, noted Berger “seemed to work overtime at opposing tough measures against terror” [5], advising vetoes of legislation aimed at crippling Iranian terror funding and working to block antiterror sanctions. It was Berger who repeatedly rebuffed Sudanese offers to hand Osama bin Laden to the United States in a deal brokered by a $900,000 contributor to Democrat campaigns [6,7]. It was Berger who allowed bin Laden and his top lieutenants to escape to Afghanistan [8]. It was Berger whose calls Bill Clinton ducked in 1998 when bin Laden was briefly vulnerable to missile attack [9]. It was Berger who was singled-out by former UN Inspector Scott Ritter for the collapse of UN inspections efforts in Iraq [10]. It was Berger who helped broker the farcical antinuclear treaty with North Korea. It was Berger who ultimately admitted that the Clinton Administration had failed to develop a war plan to fight al Qaeda [11].
At the same time, it was Berger who was the go-to man in the Administration on matters regarding China policy in the years when Communist Chinese money was being funneled into Democrat Party coffers in exchange for policy concessions and strategic nuclear technology. It was Berger whom DNC Chairman Don Fowler approached for favors for George Chao-chi Chu, a Chinagate-linked John Huang crony described as having "unusual access to high-ranking Communist officials in China" who, like the just-exited chief-foreign-policy-advisor Berger, has current ties to John Kerry [12]. And it was Berger who the Energy Department approached with warnings of Chinese spying in Los Alamos, and who stonewalled the matter for three years [13].
The list goes on and on [14]: Berger was not just the malfeasant, poll-driven, cowardly hack at the helm of our national security apparatus who enabled the global metastasis of bloodthirsty jihad; he was not just one of the key people who roadblocked cooperation between law enforcement and foreign intelligence, stacking “Gorelick’s Wall” ever higher. In fact, as bagman for the Communist Chinese, Sandy Berger was himself likely one of the key beneficiaries of Gorelick’s Wall.
Viewed against his record, Berger’s theft and destruction of “code-word”-level secret documents – and “The Consigliere’s” stealthy involvement – is all too readily understood.
Scott Jordan
http://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=jordans&date=040420
The Gorelick Rosetta Stone
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Has 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick's famous memo provided the missing link between Chinagate and 9/11?
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Recall, too, that during the time of Ms. Gorelick's 1995 memo, the issue causing the most tension between the Reno-Gorelick Justice Department and Director Freeh's FBI was not counterterrorism but widely reported allegations of contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign from foreign sources, involving the likes of John Huang and Charlie Trie. -- The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, April 15, 2004
Hats off to the Wall Street Journal for a spectacular observation, perhaps the Rosetta Stone of postmillennial national security.
Let its boiled-down essence not escape your attention: the ongoing dividends of Chinagate may well have included 9/11.
And history may be repeating itself. Let me explain.
To set the stage, recall that Bill Clinton ensured his loyal minions populated the US Attorneys' offices nationwide when he fired every last US Attorney at the dawn of his Administration, then appointed his own. Next, as we have seen through Jamie Gorelick's startling memo[1], he saw to it that domestic law enforcement was blinded to foreign intelligence information. He then methodically offered up White House access and key strategic technologies to the highest bidder: China, and Indonesian/Chinese billionaire donors with close ties to China's dictatorial regime. Intriguingly, Clinton's Department of Justice's signature assault on Microsoft also appears to have been to the benefit of Indonesian/Chinese billionaires, who just happened to be the originating funders of the private venture fund which was the largest shareholder in lead plaintiff Netscape at the time[2]
With the declassification of former Deputy Attorney General Gorelick's memo, the picture comes into sharp focus: the Clinton Administration was not just:
o Inattentive towards terrorism;
o Impotent in its response to bin Laden's challenges;
o Burdened by petty bureaucratic squabbles and a thong-distracted Chief Executive, blocking urgently-needed intel initiatives[3];
...but also:
o Purposefully malfeasant in hamstringing the intelligence community even beyond Carter-era Church Commission strictures. "Gorelick's Wall" was not just a monument to political correctness and lawyer-think run amok, it was a strategic keystone of the Clinton Administration's wholesale auction of America's security, sovereignty and economy.
Yes, the economy, Clinton's vaunted economy, with its skyrocketing stock-market and spectacular 5.6% 1996 unemployment rate (which of course puts George W. Bush’s dismal 2004 5.6% unemployment rate to shame). This unstoppable economy screeched to an ignominious halt in the second half of 2000 as the tech sector imploded[4] - a multi-trillion-dollar evaporation of shareholder wealth driven in significant part by the DOJ's pursuit of tech bellwether Microsoft, which put a measurable damper on enthusiasm for big-cap technology stocks and funding for new tech ventures alike.
Follow the money. The legacy of that Administration is not just one of incompetence and inattention culminating in an innocence-crushing September morning once it was safely out of office. It is one of malevolent, calculated wholesaling of loyalty for political gain, with Gorelick's Wall providing cover by blinding law enforcement efforts that might have made a difference.
Still, Chinagate was exposed, and in a sane world it would have hit the political world like one of the Chinese ICBMs it facilitated. But Clinton was untouchable - immunized! - after the Lewinsky obstruction-of-justice mess fizzled like the captivating but comparatively feeble bottle-rocket it was. Today the damage extends far beyond the smoldering pits of lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. The world now stands on the cusp of decades of global turmoil in the face of emboldened and metastasized radical Islamism, most recently including al Qaeda’s successful gambit towards reestablishing Moorish dispensation in Andalusia[5].
Is Chinagate old news? Water under the bridge? Something for the 9/11 Commission's Democrat partisans to pooh-pooh and ignore as they recklessly paint their anti-Bush pastiche?
Not if you continue to mourn the thousands dead on that grim September morning. And not if you consider what other reflexively anti-Defense politician currently angling for the Presidency has financial ties to some of the same scandalous campaign donors as Bill Clinton: John Kerry is today's victorious campaign-donation choice of Chinagate's Huang-linked George Chao-Chi Chu, described as having "unusual access to high-ranking Communist officials in China" [6]. And that is old news, in a way: for in 1996 John Kerry received cash from Johnny Chung and Liu Chaoying, daughter of a powerful Chinese military official, for providing high-level access to Federal securities regulators. Kerry's cash came from transfers sent to Chung on orders from the chief of Chinese military intelligence[7].
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayana
Scott Jordan
How about a video with Tom Brokaw and how Clinton missed Bin Laden. Link thanks to Grampa Dave
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JuH1xwLUnbg
Khobar Towers
The Clinton administration left many stones unturned.
BY LOUIS J. FREEH
Sunday, June 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Ten years ago today, acting under direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the Saudi Hezbollah detonated a 25,000-pound TNT bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast wave destroyed Building 131 and grievously wounded hundreds of additional Air Force personnel. It also killed an unknown number of Saudi civilians in a nearby park.
The 19 Americans murdered were members of the 4,404th Wing, who were risking their lives to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. This was a U.N.-mandated mission after the 1991 Gulf War to stop Saddam Hussein from killing his Shiite people. The Khobar victims, along with the courageous families and friends who mourn them this weekend in Washington, deserve our respect and honor. More importantly, they must be remembered, because American justice has still been denied.
Although a federal grand jury handed up indictments in June 2001--days before I left as FBI director and a week before some of the charges against 14 of the terrorists would have lapsed because of the statute of limitations--two of the primary leaders of the attack, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Mughassil and Abdel Hussein Mohamed al-Nasser, are living comfortably in Iran with about as much to fear from America as Osama bin Laden had prior to Sept. 11 (to wit, U.S. marshals showing up to serve warrants for their arrests).
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008563
AT WAR
An Unheeded Warning
When al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, Bill Clinton shrugged.
BY RICHARD MINITER
From "Losing bin Laden"
Can be found on Opinion Journal (Wall Street Journal) at this link below:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004081
Previous Chapters...
The White House:
On a Saturday morning, a day after the World Trade Center explosion, there was no sense of crisis in the White House. The bombers of the Twin Towers had changed little in the routine of President Clinton. The sheer scale of the blast had not sunk in. The few presidential aides in the West Wing were casually dressed and focused on the president's economic policy. The few reporters hanging around the briefing room were there to cover the president's radio address, which would focus on his economic stimulus package. Later that day, Chelsea's friends would arrive from Little Rock to celebrate her 13th birthday; Hillary had planned a party on the second floor of the White House residence.
President Clinton sat in the Oval Office scribbling. He was preparing for his weekly radio address and, as usual, making last-minute revisions.
It was the 39th day of his presidency, and so far it wasn't going well. The president's military salute--a few fingers sheepishly and momentarily touching his forehead--was faulted. National Security Adviser Tony Lake went to see the president about the "salute issue" and they had practiced for a few minutes in the Oval Office. Now his military salute photographed well as he walked across the South Lawn to board Marine One, the presidential helicopter.
Yet few press complaints were so easily resolved.
Mr. Clinton had lost his second attorney-general nominee, Kimba Wood, when nanny-payment problems raised a red flag. The president's offhand remarks about Iraq and his subsequent "don't ask, don't tell" fudge on his controversial plan to integrate homosexuals into the military had also touched off rounds of critical newspaper stories. The Clinton administration--the first Democrats in the White House since 1981--seemed to be crumbling.
Now Mr. Clinton was trying to regain the initiative. He was finally ready to announce the details of his economic stimulus package, the centerpiece of his 1992 campaign. Then the World Trade Center was attacked. Should he depart from his plans and his script and say something about the headline-making attack on New York's tallest towers? At first, he couldn't decide.
New York's Gov. Mario Cuomo telephoned the president while the Twin Towers were still being evacuated. Messrs. Clinton and Cuomo had a difficult relationship. Mr. Clinton had spent much of 1991 wondering if the New York governor was going to challenge him in the Democratic presidential primaries, and much of 1992 trying to get Mr. Cuomo's full-throated support.
But this phone call was surprisingly simple: Mr. Cuomo simply wanted to brief the president and get his assurance that New York State would enjoy the full support of the federal government. Mr. Clinton must have quickly realized that this was a common kind of phone call that governors made after disasters. He had made a few of these calls himself. Perhaps this was the reason Mr. Clinton didn't seem to fully grasp that this disaster was not natural, but man-made. That it was terrorism.
Mr. Cuomo told Mr. Clinton that a bomb had most likely caused the World Trade Center blast--a conclusion that the Clinton White House still chose to consider "speculation." After conferring with his aides, the president asked his press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, to put out the cautious line that the New York authorities "have reason to believe it was a bomb but are not definite." This was a grudging admission of the obvious, but it gave Mr. Clinton time to decide whether to act.
Why was Mr. Clinton so anxious to discount the idea that the Twin Towers had been bombed? A bomb suggested a terrorist act. A terrorist act of this magnitude required a strong response. And strong action was politically dangerous if it misfired. So, from the day of the World Trade Center bombing until the last day of the Clinton administration, the president demanded absolute proof before acting against terrorists. Ambiguity suited his purposes.
To preserve that ambiguity, either Mr. Clinton ignored the overwhelming evidence that the towers were bombed or the White House staff failed to keep him fully informed. Perhaps the president had not yet been told that the FBI's top bomb expert believed that the World Trade Center was bombed or that the New York FBI investigation was proceeding on that basis. Or perhaps the president had not been told that the bomb was planted by terrorists, although the FBI had made that determination within hours.
The president knew that he would have to add something about the World Trade Center explosion to his Saturday radio address. But what? His staff had spent much of Friday working on the speech. Now, on Saturday morning, Mr. Clinton was doing some reworking of his own. Strangely, despite the mounting evidence, Mr. Clinton still wasn't willing to say that New York's tallest towers had been bombed.
While he worked on his speech, the president was told that FBI Director William Sessions was on the line. The president didn't relish this call either. Sessions, a Bush appointee, was plagued by petty scandals, and Mr. Clinton planned to replace him.
Mr. Clinton picked up the receiver. The director told the president that the FBI's New York office now felt confident that a bomb had caused the blast at the World Trade Center. The president probably wasn't listening very closely; he had come to see Mr. Sessions as a political time bomb, not a source of information about an actual bomb.
After a few minutes, Mr. Clinton hung up and went back to scribbling. He kept crossing out words and writing new ones--but "bomb" was not one of them. Mr. Clinton's radio address reflected his beliefs about the World Trade Center attack. He treated it like a disaster, a humanitarian crisis, like a twister in Arkansas, but not as an attack. Indeed, the bombing was a sideshow, a distraction from what the president really wanted to discuss--his economic agenda.
This would be Mr. Clinton's first and last extended speech on the plot to topple the Twin Towers. Frankly, this is surprising. How does a president shrug away a major terror attack with a few words in a radio address heard by a fraction of the American people? The president's speech clearly demonstrated that he did not sense the importance of the 1993 bombing. Because they reveal so much, Mr. Clinton's remarks on the attack follow in full:
"Good morning. Before I talk with you about our economic program this morning, I want to say a word to the good people of New York City and to all Americans who've been so deeply affected by the tragedy that struck Manhattan yesterday." This opening suggests that Mr. Clinton didn't want to shift away from his campaign-winning "it's the economy, stupid" theme, referring to the attack as a "tragedy," a sad event, not an aggressive act requiring a strong response.
Mr. Clinton continued: "A number of innocent people lost their lives. Hundreds were injured, and thousands were struck with fear in their hearts when an explosion rocked the basement of the World Trade Center. To their families, you're in the thoughts and prayers of my family and in the synagogues and churches last night; today and tomorrow, you will be remembered and thought of again and again." This is an admirable attempt at reassurance, reminiscent of President Bush's consoling words following the Sept. 11 attacks. But again, it misses the mark: these people were murdered, not struck by lightning.
The young president hammered away at his compassionate theme, anxious to leave no one out. "My thoughts are also with the police, the firefighters, the emergency response teams and the citizens whose countless acts of bravery averted even more bloodshed. Their reaction and their valor reminds us of how often Americans are at their best when we face the worst."
Next, Mr. Clinton came to the place where he had to report on his administration's actions and plans. These amounted to phone calls--and only phone calls. "I thank all the people who reached out to the injured and the frightened amid the tumult that shook lower Manhattan. Following the explosion, I spoke with New York's Governor Mario Cuomo and New York City Mayor David Dinkins to assure them that the full measure of federal law-enforcement resources will be brought to bear on this investigation." This was a pivotal decision, though Mr. Clinton did not seem to realize its full implications at the time. The terror attack would be treated as a criminal matter, not a threat to national security. This approach would hobble Clinton's war on terror for years.
Mr. Clinton expanded on the law-enforcement theme, signaling that terrorists need not fear an armed response. "Just this morning I spoke with FBI Director Sessions, who assured me that the FBI and the Treasury Department are working closely with the New York City police and fire departments. Working together we'll find out who was involved and why this happened. Americans should know we'll do everything in our power to keep them safe in their streets, their offices and their homes. Feeling safe is an essential part of being secure. And that's important to all of us."
Then, Mr. Clinton suddenly shifted the subject. "I also want to take this opportunity this morning to talk about another crucial aspect of our security, our economic security . . ."
As the president shifted to discuss his economic package, which consumed the bulk of his speech, his voice warmed up and slowed down. It was clear to listeners, certainly those in the press, where the president's real interests lay. Almost every contemporary press account of President Clinton's Saturday radio speech leads with the details of the president's economic package and the support that he was garnering around the country. And, of course, the bulk of the radio address was on Mr. Clinton's economic plan.
But note that his remarks on the bombing were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kind of things governors say after floods or tornadoes. Significantly, President Clinton said nothing about hunting down or punishing the perpetrators. Not even a ritualistic denunciation of "these cowardly acts" or a mention of the shock value of an attack on a skyscraping symbol of America.
Why were his words so thin? President Clinton believed that he had a historic opportunity to restore American prosperity and reposition the Democrats as the party of growth and hope. This was partly achieved over the next eight years, ironically with the help of a Republican-led Congress. Mr. Clinton also had an opportunity to transform his party on national-security issues--to overcome its 1960s-era hesitancy to use force and to remake it as a strong defender of freedom, justice and security. Instead, Mr. Clinton shrank back. He had an opportunity to stop an escalating wave of terror attacks, guided by Osama bin Laden, in the first weeks of his administration. But tragically for the nation, he didn't see it.
Of course, presidents are not clairvoyant. Yet at the time, the president's political opponents may have seen more clearly the pivotal role the World Trade Center bombing would play in American history. On the day after the bombing, the minority whip of the House, Newt Gingrich, said that the president should be "cautious" in cutting the defense budget, as Mr. Clinton planned to do. Citing the Twin Towers bombing, Mr. Gingrich said, "There's a very real requirement for human intelligence and military strength. Every time we have any display of weakness, any display of timidity . . . here are people on the planet eager to take advantage of us." These would prove to be prescient words--words, unfortunately, that Mr. Clinton did not heed.
Mr. Clinton's first historic opportunity to wage war on terrorism did not quickly drift away like a plume of smoke after the World Trade Center bombing. It lingered for days and weeks. Within days, evidence quickly accumulated that an Islamic terror cell, supported from abroad, had carried out the attack. There were front-page newspaper stories about the arrest of Mohammed Salameh and the presence of a network of dangerous Islamic radicals, with a hub in Jersey City. Yet the president appeared uninterested.
President Clinton did not visit the World Trade Center in 1993. Perhaps if he had, he might have understood the enormity of the damage. What might have happened if Mr. Clinton had seen the immense crater or talked to the family of Monica Smith?
Four days after the attack, Mr. Clinton was across the Hudson River in New Brunswick, N.J., discussing job-training programs. There, he urged the public not to "overreact" to the World Trade Center bombing. But he didn't cross the river and see the damage for himself.
It would have taken a few minutes, but Mr. Clinton did not bother.
Why didn't he go? One implausible rationale offered by Clinton officials is that unnamed New York officials urged the president to avoid the site. One senior Clinton official--through an anonymous quote in the Boston Globe--noted that "Clinton had a full schedule in New Jersey, with no opening for a visit to the site in Manhattan." Full schedule. The site in Manhattan. The sheer clinical distance of those words, days after the attack, speaks volumes.
Dick Morris, a former Clinton adviser, offers two more-likely explanations. Mr. Clinton saw himself as a comforter who needed to reassure an anxious public (in New Jersey, he urged Americans to "keep your courage up and go about your lives"), and he saw the attack as a criminal matter, not a terror strike. "In what is likely, in retrospect, to be judged the single greatest omission of his presidency, Clinton chose to treat the Trade Center attack as an isolated criminal act, devoid of serious foreign policy or military implications," writes Mr. Morris. President Clinton just didn't get it.
Over the next month, the president made four fateful decisions. He did not keep the bombing before the public with speeches and actions. He left the case in the hands of the FBI, which was headed by a man he did not trust and was waiting to fire. He treated the bombing as a law-enforcement matter, not a counterintelligence investigation, thus cutting the CIA out of the fight against terrorism. And he did not even meet with his handpicked CIA director to consider alternative approaches to combating international terrorism aimed at Americans. This ensured future victories for bin Laden.
Langley, Va.:
Frustration was growing at CIA headquarters. The Counter-Terrorism Center was kept away from the World Trade Center investigation--even though the CTC was designed to be the center of information on terrorist threats. The State Department, the FBI and the Secret Service had detailed personnel to the CTC to make sure that important information was shared, not hidden behind bureaucratic bulwarks. Indeed, one of the reasons that the deputy director of the CTC was an FBI official was to guarantee that information was shared among the institutions.
If the Clinton administration wanted to conduct a joint counterterrorism operation to discover the full breadth of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy and to take action against the perpetrators overseas, the CTC would have been the perfect vehicle. That is what it was designed to do. It also had a secret presidential "finding," written by President Reagan and still in force, that specifically authorized covert operations to smash terrorist cells.
But the FBI, with the president's tacit acceptance, was treating the World Trade Center attack as a law-enforcement matter. That meant that everything the FBI gathered, every lab-test result, every scrap of paper, every interview, every lead, every clue from overseas was theirs alone. No one outside of the FBI's New York office would see it for years.
How could the FBI keep the evidence from other terror-fighting agencies? This was actually standard procedure when the FBI conducted criminal cases, as opposed to strictly counterterrorism investigations. The bureau invoked rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. If the FBI shared the information with other federal agencies, then a judge could rule the evidence inadmissible in a court or require the government to share it with the accused terrorists, so that they could mount an effective legal defense. That would provide the accused terrorists with vital information about what the federal government knew and what it didn't. So Rule 6E was designed to prevent information sharing--and preserve the government's evidence for trial. "It is not that they [the FBI and CIA] don't get along--it's that they can't share information by legal statute" in criminal cases, said Christopher Whitcomb, an FBI veteran who worked on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation.
Jim Woolsey, the director of central intelligence, fumed. Any 24-year-old junior agent in the FBI's New York office knew more about the largest-ever terrorist attack on American soil than he did. "It was frustrating," Mr. Woolsey told me. "Nobody outside the prosecutorial team and maybe the FBI had access" to information about the case.
The CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center itself could only follow a few scattered scraps of intelligence. And even though the agency passed information on to the FBI, the CIA had no way of knowing if it was supplying the FBI with redundant data or vital clues.
As a result, both the CIA and the FBI missed several key connections between Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden. Yousef had stayed in bin Laden-owned guesthouses in Pakistan, both before and after the World Trade Center attack. When he was finally arrested in 1995, Yousef had several pictures of Osama bin Laden (posing with machine guns) in his baggage and a business card from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a relative of bin Laden's, in his wallet.
The CIA would not learn the full details of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing until the FBI made its evidence public--at the end of the first trial in 1996. And even then, the critical evidence was supplied to the CIA by an independent investigator, Laurie Mylroie, who told the author that she photocopied it and handed it to the agency.
New York:
The FBI worked quickly. On the same day as Mr. Clinton's speech, investigators found the differential housing from the bomb van. A vehicle identification number stamped on it allowed them to trace it to the leasing agency in New Jersey. The manager said one Arab man had stopped in to collect his $400 deposit. That man turned out to be Mohammed Salameh, who desperately needed the money to pay for a plane ticket. The few dollars Yousef had given him was for an infant's plane fare; without the money to upgrade the ticket he would be trapped. That was what Yousef wanted. This is how "expendables" are used.
The FBI arrested Salameh in a sting operation at the leasing office. His phone records and storage-unit keys connected the rest of the dots. But Yousef escaped, and the quick initial successes of the investigation masked missed clues of a wider conspiracy, including intriguing connections between bin Laden and the World Trade Center bombing.
For years, the New York FBI office knew about a growing network of Islamic extremists in the New York area, but until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the agents couldn't even open a full investigation. Again, bureaucracy got in the way. To begin an investigation--according to both the official Justice Department guidelines and various statutes passed by Congress--required that agents have evidence that a crime had been committed or was under way. Sometimes, supervisors would not approve an investigation even if there was evidence of criminal activity, if the crime seemed insignificant. In practical terms, that meant that the FBI could investigate terrorists after Americans were dead, but not before.
And in 1993, the idea of punishing small, seemingly insignificant crimes as a way of preventing larger ones had not yet taken hold. The FBI was aware that many Islamic radicals were training with weapons at Connecticut and Pennsylvania gun ranges. Indeed, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Mohammed Salameh, was identified as one of those participants. But arresting these men on weapons charges or investigating the wider purposes behind such "training" was shrugged off as a minor affair. Target shooting is not a crime, while owning a gun without a proper permit is a minor one. The FBI was also barred from monitoring the mosque in Jersey City where the World Trade Center bombers met, on the grounds of religious freedom. All of these internal, bureaucratic restrictions made life easier for bin Laden's cells, both inside and outside the United States.
Still, individual FBI agents valiantly tried to make a difference. A number of special agents knew that some Brooklyn and Jersey City residents--many from the same two mosques that were frequented by Salameh and other bombers--were taking their "vacations" in Afghanistan to wage jihad, even years after the Soviet Union had retreated. Some New York agents considered investigating these men for violating the Neutrality Act, which makes it a crime for an American citizen to fight in another nation's war. But, the agents soon discovered, most of the suspects were legal residents or illegal aliens, not citizens. The Neutrality Act did not apply to them. So, in most terrorism cases before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could do little to counter the growing network of militants training and arming themselves in its midst.
And no one at the FBI--at headquarters or in the New York office--realized that one of the FBI's most-trusted informants was a "double agent," working for both the Feds and Osama bin Laden.
An Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohammed received a U.S. visa in 1985. He later became a U.S. citizen and obtained a military security clearance. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of violent Islamic radicals and had been a very helpful source for both the CIA and the FBI. At the time, those agencies did not know why Mohammed was so well informed.
By 1987, Mohammed was working at the U.S. Army's warfare planning center at Fort Bragg, N.C. Part of his job was to lecture American soldiers about Muslim terrorists. He certainly knew his subject.
Mohammed did not mention that he was still an active member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. That terrorist group was run by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who soon became a top bin Laden deputy. Nor did Mohammed mention that he had played host and tour guide to Zawahiri on his two visits to America. Mohammed had also met Osama bin Laden many times in Khartoum and had trained bin Laden's bodyguards, according to his own admissions in court documents.
Concedes Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and a counterterrorism official at the State Department, "He was an active source for the FBI, a double agent."
The FBI had good reason to be suspicious of Mohammed--if its agents had been paying attention.
When Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, was gunned down by El Sayyid Nosair in 1990, the murder was treated as a hate crime, not terrorism. The New York City Police Department eventually uncovered enough evidence to indict Nosair. The FBI monitored the case but did not intervene. "I was in charge of bureau operations at the time," Buck Revell explained, "and I never received any information that the assassin of Meir Kahane was connected with any sort of organization that might have a terrorist agenda."
The FBI was in the dark because, tragically, the NYPD and the FBI's own special agents missed several important clues. In the course of the investigation of the Kahane murder, documents were seized from Nosair's apartment that, when finally translated years later, proved to be U.S. Army manuals--some marked "top secret"--that had been translated into Arabic by Mohammed. Since the police and the FBI had not yet translated the documents, they did not investigate exactly how Nosair came into possession of them. If they had, they would have learned that Nosair was introduced to Mohammed by a man named Khalid Ibrahim, who had run a fundraising operation for Osama bin Laden's various organizations since 1989. They also would have learned that Mohammed had conducted weapons training--sometimes using semiautomatic rifles--for Nosair, Ibrahim and Abouhalima. (Abouhalima drove the getaway car for the 1993 World Trade Center attack.)
Abouhalima was also tied to Ibrahim's Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, where money for bin Laden was raised. Finally, Abouhalima was a part-time driver for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was later convicted of "seditious conspiracy" in a wide-ranging plot to blow up the Holland Tunnel--when it was packed with rush-hour traffic--and other plans to destroy New York landmarks.
Indeed many of the World Trade Center bombers met each other though the blind cleric's mosque, a dark, dirty series of rooms located over a cheap Chinese restaurant in Jersey City. The mosque where the bombers met was called Masjid al-Salaam, the "mosque of peace."
But all of these connections eluded the FBI, in large part because the bureau did not translate Nosair's mysterious documents for several years and because of the bureaucratic barriers on their proposed investigations. Nor did the FBI fully investigate phone calls to Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations made by the World Trade Center bombers. So the terrorist conspiracy continued--under the nose of the FBI.
Meanwhile, Mohammed continued to work for bin Laden. He flew to Sudan to train bin Laden's personal bodyguard. According to U.S. District Court documents, he also taught small-unit tactics and helped survey several U.S. embassies in East Africa in late 1993, which would be bombed five years later. Those blasts would kill hundreds in a few fiery minutes.
Khartoum, Sudan:
Osama bin Laden, safe and unsuspected, heard the news of the World Trade Center bombing at his palatial house in the Riyadh section of Khartoum. He was thrilled and ordered that special prayer services of thanksgiving be held that night.
In some subsequent interviews, bin Laden claimed he didn't know Yousef. "Ramzi Yousef, after the World Trade Center bombing, became a well-known Muslim personality, and all Muslims know him. Unfortunately, I did not know him before the incident," bin Laden told ABC News in 1998. "America will see many youths who will follow Ramzi Yousef."
Bin Laden's claim that he didn't know of Yousef before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is probably another expedient lie. Certainly, Yousef traveled in circles of people who knew bin Laden before the bombing and worked alongside al Qaeda operatives after the bombing. And bin Laden does not appear to have personally known the Sept. 11 hijackers either. Today federal court indictments and an array of publicly available FBI documents list bin Laden's attacks on America. Nearly every such list includes the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Meanwhile, bin Laden was planning another attack, one far closer to home. As he celebrated the first World Trade Center bombing, bin Laden was waiting for a report from Abu Hafs, the commander of his military wing. Hafs had just returned from Mogadishu, Somalia.
Mr. Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe and author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery, 2003), from which this is excerpted. You can buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
Also from JAWBREAKER
The Attack on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda:
A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
By Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020901687.html?referrer=emailarticle
"In 2000, Berntsen had led a promising effort to work with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance "to capture a bin Laden lieutenant." But the operation was called off, for which he blasts CIA Director George Tenet and President Clinton for lacking "the will to wage a real fight against terrorists who were killing U.S. citizens." Berntsen was withdrawn and sent to a comfortable position as CIA station chief in a country in Latin America. After 9/11, Berntsen immediately began jostling to get to the center of the strike against al Qaeda. He got his wish and was one of the first senior CIA officials inserted into Afghanistan."
Yes, and if we get Hillary! in the White House in 2008 (shuddering at the thought...) then we get Co-President Bill back! This track record of his is EXACTLY the kind of "ammo" we need against the Democrats in 2008.
9/11 Hijackers Wanted To Avenge… Bosnia!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1697643/posts
The video also showed two of the 19 Islamists who took part in the attacks, Saudi nationals Hamza al-Ramdi and Wael el-Shemari. The men said that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya.
bttt
FACTS regarding Bill Clinton's legacy on terrorism.
This thread will get Hugh!
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.
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.
THANKS TONS, HOWLIN. MUCH APPRECIATED.
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.
I got a smarmy email from a Leftist business associate claiming that Bubba was actually tougher on terrorism than Bush.
Thank you again for the ammo. I can not wait to return fire.
Such a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing the degree of concern Clinton had as our President...
| “Aside from scandals and investigations, [former FBI Director Louis] Freeh says Clinton let down the American people and the families of victims of the 1996 Khobar Towers terror attack in Saudi Arabia. “After promising to bring to justice those responsible for the bombing that killed 19 and injured hundreds, Freeh says Clinton refused to personally ask Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to allow the FBI to question bombing suspects the kingdom had in custody — the only way the bureau could secure the interviews, according to Freeh. “Freeh writes in the book [My FBI], 'Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis’ reluctance to cooperate and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.' ” -- 60 Minutes, Oct. 6, 2005 |
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| Interview On Orange TV 7-15-2003: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher: "We didn't need to have 9-11. 9-11 happened because during the last administration Mr. Clinton didn't do his job. I was just talking to an ambassador from Sudan who tried to give us all of the records on bin Laden. He had all of the details of the entire terrorist network, and Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton personally turned it down -- wouldn't even let the FBI copy them!" Rep. Tom Feeney: "In fairness, they were busy building nuclear plants for North Korea." Rep. Rohrabacher: "Right. Precisely." |
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| "Remember, Osama Bin Laden was offered to the United States on a silver platter and the Clinton administration said no." -- Neal Boortz, 3-2-2004 HERE and: "A former CIA official told NBC News last week that [Clinton] White House orders to spare Bin Laden's life cut the chances of getting him in half. Once again, they viewed terrorism as a law enforcement problem, worrying about Bin Laden's rights instead of just unleashing the CIA to exterminate him." -- Boortz, 3-25-2004 HERE | |
| "I've been to Sudan. And I was in Khartoum and met with some of the higher- ranking people with the Sudanese government. They told me personally -- I had heard that before -- that they actually offered [him] up to the Clinton administration -- that is, Osama bin Laden -- if they wanted him." -- Sen. Richard Shelby of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to Chris Matthews 7-22-2004 | |
"At the time, 1996, [bin Laden] had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America." -- W.J. Clinton as quoted by Mansoor Ijaz in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times Dec 5, 2001 |
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| Peter M. Leitner, a senior strategic trade adviser at the Defense Department ... says the previous [Clinton] administration rubber-stamped the shipment of top-end military-related telecommunications equipment to Syria, which is on the FBI's list of sensitive countries that pose a threat to U.S. security. ... 'We're giving them spread-spectrum radios, which are almost impossible to break into. We're giving them fiber optics. We're giving them a high level of encryption. We're giving them computer networks that can't be tapped,' Leitner said. ... Leitner posits that the NSA wasn't able to detect the Islamic terrorists' plot because of the 'high quality of the communications gear that they've been acquiring over the last couple of years, thanks to the Clinton administration's decontrols on advanced telecommunications equipment.' " -- Paul Sperry, Sept. 12, 2001 | |
| "No president did more to ignore the mounting threat of Islamic terrorism than did Bill Clinton, and 3,000 people paid for his policies with their lives." -- Neal Boortz, 8-10-2005 |