Posted on 08/05/2002 9:52:38 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Time Magazine's "bombshell" report this weekend claiming the Bush White House shelved Clinton administration plans to attack al Qaeda and take out Osama bin Laden omitted one key detail: Clinton himself personally deep-sixed the same plans long before they reached the Bush team.
As recently as February, in a speech to a Long Island, New York business group, the ex- president described two separate bin Laden attack plans drawn up during the last two years of his administration by his national security and military teams - and explained why he decided not to pursue either one.
The first plan involved a "boots on the ground" assault by U.S. Special Forces on Khandahar of the kind Time says then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger wanted.
"I actually trained people to do this. We trained people," Clinton told the Long Island Association's Feb. 15 luncheon.
"But in order to do it we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat, maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval," he explained.
By Clinton's own account, in other words, it was he, and not the Bush administration, that put the kibosh on Berger's "boots-on-the- ground" plan. And he did so for reasons that don't sound particularly well founded in hindsight - fear of "illegally" violating the airspace of Afghanistan's neighbors.
Time also claims that in 2000, the ex-president had dispatched submarines to the northern Arabian Sea. There they waited, ready to attack bin Laden if his coordinates could be determined.
In fact, as Clinton revealed in the same speech six months ago, military planners had indeed determined bin Laden's whereabouts with enough certainty to develop a plan to take him out with a cruise missile attack.
But once again, the ex-president acknowledged, he pulled the plug on the operation - this time because he was afraid innocent Afghans would die in the same attack.
"The only place bin Laden ever went that we knew was occasionally he went to Khandahar, where he always spent the night in a compound that had 200 women and children," Clinton told the business group.
"So I could have, on any given night, ordered an attack that I knew would kill 200 women and children, that had less than a 50 percent chance of getting him," he explained, struggling to justify his failure to act.
It's likely that the Clinton White House had dozens of contingency plans to get bin Laden that were eventually rejected by the Bush administration.
But it's equally clear, by the ex-president's own words, that the plans with the best chance to succeed in decapitating al Qaeda before 9-11 were personally rejected by Clinton himself.
The fact is, the "Former Occupant of the Oval Office, 1993-2001", was scared to even attempt to take on Osama bin Ladin, as his earlier encounters had all ended badly for him. Danged Democrats got no idea how to prosecute a war. Draft dodgers are notoriously lacking in knowledge and experience with military tactics.
Pray for GW and the Truth
Jayne, my nomination for Quote of the Day.
Mansoor Ijaz, now a New York City-based investment banker who traveled to Sudan more than a half dozen times in the mid-1990s, says he repeatedly relayed offers from the Sudanese government to the Clinton White House to share intelligence on bin Laden. In one case, the president of Sudan offered to arrest and extradite bin Laden and turn over information about global terrorist networks, Ijaz says.
The Clinton administration declined to take him up on the offer, Ijaz has argued in a Los Angeles Times commentary, in the pages of the January issue of the magazine Vanity Fair, and on national television shows.
Exactly, but I decided not to include that phrase. (grin)
Absolutely! Clinton was a key factor in that the terrorists grew increasingly defiant because he was never serious about stopping terrorism. In fact he wasted millions of dollars on diversionary tactics against Bin Laden instead of taking him out when he had the opportunity to do so.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.