Clinton Denies Taped Bin Laden Admission, Blames 'Misquote'

During his private interview with the 9/11 Commission on Thursday, ex-President Bill Clinton denied that he told a New York business group in 2002 that he turned down an offer from Sudan for Osama bin Laden's extradition to the U.S., according to 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey.

"Bill Clinton said yesterday that, that was a misquote," Kerrey told WDAY Fargo, North Dakota radio host Scott Hennen, in an interview set for broadcast on Monday.

A transcript of the exchange between Hennen and Kerrey was read on the air by national radio host Sean Hannity late Friday. It shows that the 9/11 Commission was unaware that Clinton's bombshell admission that he spurned the bin Laden offer had been recorded by NewsMax.

After Kerrey said Clinton had denied the quote, Hennen said, "But wait a minute - I heard it in his own voice. I've heard him say it. I have the tape of him saying just that."

"Really?" said a perplexed Kerrey. "Well, then - ship it to me, because Clinton said yesterday [in private 9/11 testimony] that he didn't have a recollection of that."

Clinton made the bombshell admission to the Long Island Association on Feb. 15, 2002. Though the LIA videotaped his appearance, the group has refused requests for copies from NBC News, Fox News and NewsMax.

Though NewsMax has the only publicly available recording of Clinton's remarks that day, they were also reported by Newsday the next day.

We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again.

They released him. At the time, 1996, he 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.

So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan. [End of Excerpt]

To hear ex-President Clinton make the admission that he denied making to the 9/11 Commission, Click Here.

On Tenet's Watch, Politics Have Trumped Intelligence-Gathering at the CIA
Posted Dec. 10, 2001
By Reed Irvine

Those who wonder why President George W. Bush has kept George Tenet on as director of central intelligence have been given reason to question Tenet's suitability for that position, in addition to his failure to pay attention to the advance warning that Osama bin Laden was thinking about crashing planes into U.S. buildings. The Drudge Report has provided a preview of an article by David Rose in the next issue of Vanity Fair charging that our government refused to accept information about bin Laden and his terrorist network that the Sudanese intelligence agency, Mukhabarat, was trying to give us for five years, right up to a few weeks before Sept. 11.

Rose's article puts a lot of the blame for this on the State Department and the CIA. He says senior FBI officials wanted to accept the Mukhabarat offers to share their files with us but were prevented from doing so. He quotes Timothy M. Carney, a career Foreign Service officer who was our ambassador to Sudan from 1995-97, the period when the offer first was made, as saying, "The fact is they were opening the doors and we weren't taking them up on it. The U.S. failed to reciprocate Sudan's willingness to engage us on some serious questions of terrorism. We can speculate that this failure had serious implications, at least for what happened to the U.S. embassies in 1998. In any case, the U.S. lost access to a mine of material on bin Laden and his organization."

The Sudanese were in a good position to know. Bin Laden made the Sudan his base until 1996 when his military mole in the United States, Ali Mohamed, helped move him and his entourage to Afghanistan. Carney attributed the refusal to accept the Sudanese files to the "politicization" of U.S. intelligence. Since the Sudan's information didn't fit the conventional wisdom at the State Department and the CIA, it was not accepted. The Vanity Fair article says that conventional wisdom was influenced by CIA reports that were "wildly inaccurate."

Tenet, who succeeded John Deutch as director of central intelligence in 1997, must bear much of the responsibility for what Carney describes as "worse than a crime." He came to the CIA from the Clinton White House. Prior to that he had served as a majority staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is famous at the CIA for having introduced the sewing of "diversity quilts" and celebrating "Gay Pride Day." But what probably gives him his lock on his job is his role in naming the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Va., after the president's father.

Just as the FBI and CIA filed and forgot the 1995 plan of Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Murad, two of bin Laden's followers, to crash planes into buildings, their holdover directors Louis Freeh and Tenet did not insist on getting the Sudan's files on bin Laden. Rose notes that after a joint FBI-CIA team had conducted a lengthy investigation in the Sudan and decided that they were not harboring terrorists, a request for the files was made last summer. He doesn't say if there was time to analyze those files before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Rose discusses information that we might have acquired if Tenet and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had been willing to allow our intelligence analysts to see what the Sudan had to offer. The files identified individuals who played important roles in the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. They probably included Ali Mohamed, the Egyptian Jihad member who had been a U.S. Army sergeant. Besides helping move bin Laden to Afghanistan, he helped case our embassy in Kenya for the bombing. Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, who knew him at Fort Bragg, had tried unsuccessfully to have him investigated, court-martialed and deported, but the FBI was under the illusion that Mohamed was working for them. He is now awaiting sentencing for his role in the embassy bombings.

After Sept. 11, we heard a lot about how the CIA and the FBI had been hampered in their efforts to combat terrorism because legislation had made it hard for them to hire informants with unsavory records. Nothing was heard about the rejection of the Sudan's offer to provide detailed information concerning the al-Qaeda network — who they were, where they were and what they were doing. Hat's off to Rose for getting the story and to Vanity Fair for publishing it.

Reed Irvine is president of Accuracy in Media, a press watchdog group in Washington and writes frequently on politics and national-security issues.

September 05, 2003

Much known, little done

By Richard Miniter

Part four of an exclusive four-part series of excerpts.

President Clinton's first opportunity to defeat Osama bin Laden came late in the afternoon of March 3, 1996, in an Arlington, Virginia, hotel suite. It was the first attempt by the Clinton Administration to deal decisively with the arch-terrorist. It lasted less than 30 minutes.

Sudan's then?Minister of State for Defense Elfatih Erwa flew in for a secret meeting with Timothy M. Carney, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and David Shinn, Director of East African Affairs at the State Department. Both Carney and Shinn were State Department veterans. Also present was a middle-aged man who was a member of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (Africa division) at the time and is still active with the agency today. . . . The CIA believed, and its representative told Erwa at the time, that some 200 al Qaeda terrorists were holed up in Sudan. (The actual number, the author learned in Khartoum in 2002, was as high as 583. . . .)

Five days later, Erwa again met with the CIA operative. This time, the two State Department officials were not present. Erwa and the CIA officer were alone as they decided the fate of Osama bin Laden.

Sudan offered to arrest and turn over bin Laden at this meeting, according to Erwa. He brought up bin Laden directly. "Where should we send him?" he asked. This was the key question. When Sudan turned over the infamous Carlos the Jackal to French intelligence in 1994, the CIA covertly provided satellite intelligence that allowed Sudanese intelligence to capture him on a pretext and escort him to the VIP lounge at the Khartoum airport. There, he was met by armed members of French intelligence and flown to Paris in a special plane. Would the CIA pick up bin Laden in Khartoum and fly him back to Washington,D.C.? Or would bin Laden go to a third country?

The CIA officer was silent. It was obvious to Erwa that a decision had not yet been made. Or perhaps his offer was not quite believed. Yet, the Sudanese official was still hoping for a repeat of the French scenario. Finally, the CIA official spoke. "We have nothing we can hold him on," he carefully said. Erwa was surprised by this, but he didn't let on. He was still hoping for a repeat of the French scenario, a silent and quick operation to seize bin Laden and bring him to justice. . . .

Sudan's files on bin Laden and his network were extensive. Sudan had dossiers on all of bin Laden's financial transactions, every fax he sent (the Mukhabarat had even bugged his fax machines), and every one of bin Laden's terrorist associates and his dubious visitors. If Sudan's surveillance was as good as Erwa claimed, bin Laden's entire global terrorist network would be laid bare. And the CIA would be able to track the movements of his foot soldiers and lieutenants across the Middle East.

There were good reasons to believe that Sudan was serious about taking action against bin Laden. . . . His terrorist activities had isolated Sudan from the United States and much of the developed world. Sudan's internal politics were moving against the terror master too. President Bashir was in the midst of a power struggle against Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist leader. Bin Laden supported Turabi with cash and a potential armed cadre of Muslim militants. If Bashir could rid himself of bin Laden, he could simultaneously restart Sudan's relationship with the United States and vanquish his chief internal political rival.

Over the next few months and years, Sudan would repeatedly try to provide its voluminous intelligence files on bin Laden to the CIA, the FBI, and senior Clinton Administration officials — and would be repeatedly rebuffed through both formal and informal channels. This was one of the greatest intelligence failures of the Clinton years — the result of orders that came from the Clinton White House.

As the Clinton Administration was weighing whether to seize bin Laden or take the opportunity to obtain valuable intelligence on his global network, the CIA's own intelligence on bin Laden was shockingly poor.

Human intelligence on al Qaeda was virtually nonexistent. Washington Times investigative reporter Bill Gertz uncovered a memo written only a few months after Sudan offered its intelligence on bin Laden. The July 1, 1996, CIA memo was marked "TOP SECRET UMBRA," meaning only the case officers, analysts, and officials specifically cleared to read the documents marked "UMBRA" could have access to this sensitive document. The July 1996 memo reveals how ignorant America was about its emerging nemesis. "We have no unilateral sources close to bin Laden, nor any reliable way of intercepting his communications," the report said. "We must rely on foreign intelligence services to confirm his movements and activities."

This frank report reveals that as early as 1996 — five years before the September 11 attacks — the CIA and other senior policymakers knew about bin Laden-related intelligence failures. When it came to rectifying the cause of these failures, however, little was done.

Richard Miniter is the author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror." The excerpts are from that book.

CIA director James Woolsey's attempts to gain funding for "translators who spoke or read Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and the other languages of the great 'terrorist belt.'" Senate Appropriations Subcommittee chairman Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona) was the chief roadblock

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Sudan had dossiers on all of bin Laden's financial transactions, every fax he sent (the Mukhabarat [Sudanese intelligence] had even bugged his fax machines), and every one of bin Laden's terrorist associates and his dubious visitors...

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Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Bill Clinton's bin Laden Legacy

FrontPage Magazine has a four-part series of excerpts from Richard Minter's recent book Losing bin Laden (which FPM sells for $20 here).

In Clinton AWOL in the War on Terror, Minter tells of a high-level meeting that occurred in the wake of he attack on the USS Cole:

[Counter-terrorism czar Richard] Clarke had no doubts about whom to punish. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had compiled thick binders of bin Laden and Taliban targets in Afghanistan, complete with satellite photographs and GPS bomb coordinates - the Pentagon's "target decks." The detailed plan was "to level" every bin Laden training camp and compound in Afghanistan as well as key Taliban buildings in Kabul and Kandahar. "Let's blow them up," Clarke said. . . . Around the table, Clarke heard only objections - not a mandate for action.

Janet Reno and George Tenet weren't sure that they had enough evidence to determine who carried out the attack. (Where were they when Clinton bombed the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant and the abandoned al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan?) Madeline Albright thought an attack would upset chances of negotiating with the Taliban to turn over bin Laden. (Where was she when Sudan offered to turn him over?) William Cohen, as Minter recalls, said that the Cole attack "was not sufficient provocation" to justify military retaliation. Other objections were raised, and in the end nothing was done.

No Hablo Arabic: Clinton's Failure on CIA Translators tells of CIA director James Woolsey's attempts to gain funding for "translators who spoke or read Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and the other languages of the great 'terrorist belt.'" Senate Appropriations Subcommittee chairman Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona) was the chief roadblock:

Mr. Woolsey and Mr. DeConcini came to viscerally dislike each other. The senator told the author that he lost faith in Woolsey when he defended the secret construction of a $300 million National Reconnaissance Office headquarters in Northern Virginia. When Woolsey privately warned the senator against speaking publicly about sensitive intelligence information, Mr. DeConcini was outraged. He said he phoned both Clinton and [National Security Advisor Tony] Lake, threatening to demand Woolsey's resignation on the floor of the U.S. Senate unless Woolsey apologized. Mr. Woolsey never apologized, and Mr. DeConcini never forgave him.

Clinton could have made the difference:

Some might be tempted to blame Mr. DeConcini alone. To be sure, without congressional approval, it would be illegal for the CIA to shift even one dollar from one part of its estimated $30 billion budget to hire translators. But DeConcini called the president at least once and National Security Advisor Tony Lake many times, and never received a definitive response on whether hiring Arabic translators for the CIA was a presidential priority. With no such assurance, DeConcini felt confident in rejecting it. A Democratic senator does not lightly defy a Democratic president over a relatively small spending measure needed for national security, DeConcini insisted. But if Clinton wasn't interested, DeConcini would not be defying the president. The senator would have a free hand to thwart Woolsey.

Another of Richard Clarke's attempts to fight the war on terror is blocked in Clinton's Phony War on Terrorism. He proposed a covert ops mission that would involve launching helicopters from a carrier in the Indian Ocean to send a small Special Forces detachment to a camp where Osama bin Laden would be present. George Tenet and Joint Chiefs chairman General Henry H. Shelton demanded alternate proposals, the latter insisting on a huge overt operation:

Rather than oppose the operation directly, the general fell back on a favorite Pentagon tactic: counteroffer with a proposed operation so large that the president and his senior staff would back down. This is a time-honored technique for killing ideas that the Pentagon opposes. Without giving away his motivation, Shelton explained his reasoning to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. "The greatest risk is that you would have a helicopter or a [special-operations] aircraft that would encounter mechanical problems over those great distances, or you have an accident. You want to have the capability if that happens to go in and get them, which means a combat search-and-rescue capability, and if you want to send those people in, you have to have an air-refueling operation." At that point, thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen would be involved, as well as several ships and dozens of aircraft. That was far from the small, surgical operation Clarke and others had in mind.

So, in the spring and summer of 1998, the Clinton Administration was deadlocked. Tenet had essentially vetoed covert operations to seize bin Laden. Clinton might have wanted to get bin Laden, but he didn't want to overrule the Pentagon to do it. Neither could the president stomach sending thousands of troops into harm's way, as General Shelton proposed.

How Clinton Kept Bin Laden Free explains Clinton's first opportunity to nab bin Laden. In 1994 Sudan had apprehended veteran assassin Carlos "The Jackal" and extradited him to France. Two years later, then-Minister of State for Defense Elfatih Erwa sought to engineer such an operation involving bin Laden - and with good reason:

[bin Laden's] terrorist activities had isolated Sudan from the United States and much of the developed world. Sudan's internal politics were moving against the terror master, too. President Bashir was in the midst of a power struggle against Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist leader. Bin Laden supported Turabi with cash and a potential armed cadre of Muslim militants. If Bashir could rid himself of bin Laden, he could simultaneously restart Sudan's relationship with the United States and vanquish his chief internal political rival.

Erwa initially met with US ambassador to Sudan Timothy M. Carney, State Department director of East African Affairs David Shinn, and an official from the CIA's Directorate of Operations. In a followup meeting with only the CIA operative present, Erwa was told that the US government wasn't interested. "'We have nothing we can hold him on,' he carefully said."

Sudan couldn't even provoke any interest in its intelligence on bin Laden:

Sudan had dossiers on all of bin Laden's financial transactions, every fax he sent (the Mukhabarat [Sudanese intelligence] had even bugged his fax machines), and every one of bin Laden's terrorist associates and his dubious visitors...

Over the next few months and years, Sudan would repeatedly try to provide its voluminous intelligence files on bin Laden to the CIA, the FBI, and senior Clinton Administration officials - and would be repeatedly rebuffed through both formal and informal channels. This was one of the greatest intelligence failures of the Clinton years - the result of orders that came from the Clinton White House.

Some of these only have a few more details but, I want to make sure I don't leave anything out.

I thought Susan Rice said that it DIDN'T HAPPEN, AT ALL!!!

*****

Susan Rice, then senior director for Africa on the National Security Council, remembers being intrigued with but deeply skeptical of the Sudanese offer. And unlike Mr. Berger and Mr. Simon, Ms. Rice argued that mere expulsion from Sudan was not enough.
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"We wanted them to hand him over to a responsible external authority," she said. "We didn't want them to just let him disappear into the ether."

*****

Saudis Balked at Accepting U.S. Plan

WASHINGTON The government of Sudan, using a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in custody in Saudi Arabia, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
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The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at hotel in Arlington, Virginia, on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later.
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Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept Mr. bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture.
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Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan. From there, he is thought to have planned and financed the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the near-destruction of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen last year and the devastation in New York and Washington on Sept. 11.
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"Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference," said a U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counterterrorism.
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"We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11. We would still have had networks of Sunni Islamic extremists of the sort we're dealing with here, and there would still have been terrorist attacks fomented by those folks. But there would not have been as many resources devoted to their activities, and there would not have been a single voice that so effectively articulated grievances and won support for violence."
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Clinton administration officials maintain emphatically that they had no such option against Mr. bin Laden in 1996. In the legal, political and intelligence environment then, they said, there was no choice but to allow him to leave Sudan unmolested.
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"In the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution, so to bring him here is to bring him into the justice system," said Samuel Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then. "I don't think that was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him some place where justice is more" - he paused a moment, then continued - "streamlined."
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Three officials in the Clinton administration said they hoped - one described it as "a fantasy" - that the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, would order Mr. bin Laden's swift beheading, as he had done for four conspirators after a June 1995 bombing in Riyadh.
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But Mr. Berger and Steven Simon, then director for counterterrorism for the National Security Council, said the White House considered it valuable in itself to force Mr. bin Laden out of Sudan, thus tearing him away from his extensive network of businesses, investments and training camps.
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Conflicting policy agendas on several other fronts contributed to the missed opportunity to capture Mr. bin Laden, according to a dozen participants.
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The Clinton administration was riven by differences on whether to engage Sudan's government or isolate it, a situation that influenced judgments about the sincerity of the offer. In the Saudi-American relationship, policymakers diverged on how much priority to give to counterterrorism over other interests, such as support for the ailing Israeli-Palestinian talks and enforcement of the no-flight zone in Iraq.
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And there were the beginnings of debate, intensified lately, on whether the United States wanted to indict and try Mr. bin Laden or to treat him as a combatant in an underground war.
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The Sudanese offer had its roots in a dinner at the Khartoum home of Sudan's foreign minister, Ali Othman Taha. It was Feb. 6, 1996, the last night in the country for the U.S. ambassador, Timothy Carney, before evacuating the U.S. Embassy on orders from Washington. Paul Quaglia, then the CIA station chief in Khartoum, had led a campaign to pull out all Americans after he and his staff came under aggressive surveillance and twice had to fend off attacks, one with a knife and one with claw hammers.
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Mr. Carney and David Shinn, then chief of the State Department's East Africa desk, considered the security threat "bogus," as Mr. Shinn described it. Washington's dominant decision-makers on Sudan had lost interest in engagement, preparing plans to isolate and undermine the regime.
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One factor in Washington's hostility was an intelligence tip that Sudan planned to assassinate President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, the most visible administration critic of Khartoum. Most U.S. analysts came to believe later that it had been a false alarm.
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On Feb. 6, 1996, Mr. Taha, the foreign minister, asked Mr. Carney and Mr. Shinn what his country could do to dissuade Washington from the view, expressed not long before by Madeleine Albright, then the chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations, that Sudan was responsible for "continued sponsorship of international terror."
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Mr. Carney and Mr. Shinn had a long list. Mr. bin Laden, as they both recalled, was near the top. Mr. Taha mostly listened. He raised no objection to the request for Mr. bin Laden's expulsion, though he did not agree to it that night. On March 3, 1996, Sudan's defense minister, Major General Elfatih Erwa, arrived at the Hyatt Arlington. Mr. Carney and Mr. Shinn were waiting for him, but the meeting was run by covert operatives from the CIA's Africa division. In a document dated March 8, 1996, the Americans spelled out their demands. Titled "Measures Sudan Can Take to Improve Relations with the United States," it asked for six things. Second on the list - just after an angry enumeration of attacks on the CIA station in Khartoum - was Osama bin Laden.
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"Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and passport data on mujahidin that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan," the document demanded.
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During the next several weeks, General Erwa raised the stakes. The Sudanese security services, he said, would happily keep close watch on Mr. bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over, though to whom was ambiguous.
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Susan Rice, then senior director for Africa on the National Security Council, remembers being intrigued with but deeply skeptical of the Sudanese offer. And unlike Mr. Berger and Mr. Simon, Ms. Rice argued that mere expulsion from Sudan was not enough.
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"We wanted them to hand him over to a responsible external authority," she said. "We didn't want them to just let him disappear into the ether."
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Mr. Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were briefed, colleagues said, on efforts to persuade the Saudi government to take Mr. bin Laden.
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The Saudi idea had some logic, since Mr. bin Laden had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, denouncing the House of Saud as corrupt. Riyadh had expelled Mr. bin Laden in 1991 and stripped him of his citizenship in 1994, but it wanted no part of jailing or executing him, apparently fearing a backlash from militant opponents of the government.
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Some American diplomats said the White House did not press the Saudis very hard.
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Resigned to Mr. bin Laden's departure from Sudan, some officials raised the possibility of shooting down his chartered aircraft, but the idea was never seriously pursued because Mr. bin Laden had not been linked to a dead American, and it was inconceivable that Mr. Clinton would sign the "lethal finding" necessary under the circumstances.
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"In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia,'" General Erwa said in an interview. "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.'" On May 15, 1996, Mr. Taha, the foreign minister, sent a fax to Mr. Carney in Nairobi, giving up on the transfer of custody. Sudan's government had asked Mr. bin Laden to leave the country, Mr. Taha wrote, and he would be free to go.
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Mr. Carney faxed back a question: Would Mr. bin Laden retain his access and control to the millions of dollars of assets he had built up in Sudan?
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Mr. Taha gave no reply before Mr. bin Laden chartered a plane three days later for his trip to Afghanistan.
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Subsequent analysis by U.S. intelligence suggests that Mr. bin Laden managed to access the Sudanese assets from his new redoubt in Afghanistan.

Intelligence Failure? Let's Go Back to Sudan

by Timothy Carney

June 30, 2002

In early 1996, CIA director John Deutch convinced Secretary of State Warren Christopher to pull U.S. diplomats out of Sudan out of fear for their safety. His anxiety was based on intelligence that implicated the Sudanese government. Although the embassy wasn't formally shut down, it was vacated, and relations with Khartoum became severely strained.

Soon afterward, the CIA figured out that its analysis was wrong. A key source had either embellished or wholly fabricated information, and in early 1996 the agency scrapped more than 100 of its reports on Sudan.

Did the State Department then send its diplomats back? No. The bad intelligence had taken on a life of its own. A sense of mistrust lingered. Moreover, the embassyhad become a political and diplomatic football for policymakers and activists who wanted to isolate Khartoum until it halted its bloody civil war with the largely Christian south. To this day, the embassy is mostly unstaffed.

This episode is worth recounting now. Whether hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, judging the integrity of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, mediating a dispute between India and Pakistan, or contemplating the virtue of an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration has given great weight to the content of U.S. (and sometimes foreign) intelligence reports. As the United States wages war on terrorism and Congress re- organizes and bolsters U.S. intelligence agencies, the influence of intelligence on foreign and military policy will only grow.

But American policymakers have to be intelligent about using intelligence. The story of U.S. policy in Sudan shows how bad intelligence -- or good intelligence badly used -- can damage U.S. interests. In Sudan, it confused us about political Islam, hurt our ability to intervene in the 47-year-old Sudanese civil war, and in 1996 undermined our best chance ever to capture Osama bin Laden and strangle his organization, before he was expelled from Sudan and found his way to Afghanistan.

We write from experience. One of us, Carney, a retired career diplomat, was the last U.S. ambassador to Khartoum. The other, Ijaz, an American hedge-fund manager, played an informal role by carrying messages between Khartoum and Washington after the embassy was emptied.

Perhaps the most important intelligence failure in Sudan wasn't about protecting the safety of U.S. diplomats but about understanding the political environment throughout the Muslim world. This is one aspect of Sudan's cautionary tale: the danger of losing sight of politics while focusing on terror.

During the 1990s, some committed Muslims around the worldtried to forge a political movement to bridge the gap between the modern world and medieval scripture. But instead of engaging this movement, the United States lumped Islamic political groups together and viewed them all as dangerous. It clung to relationships with authoritarian regimes that felt threatened by Islamic groups and thus let well-organizedradicals dominate the Muslim world's reformist movement.

Khartoum was an important center of Islamic political activity. Sudan's National Islamic Front, led by the fiery, Sorbonne-educated Hassan Turabi, seized power in a 1989 coup. Turabi held annual conferences that attracted thousands of Muslim radicals to Khartoum to craft their vision for an Islamic utopia. Turabi described the conferences as venting sessions aimed at moderating extremist Islam's rhetoric. The U.S. government called them terrorist planning sessions and, rather than infiltrate and decipher their workings, demanded that Khartoum shut them down.

Turabi raised deep concerns among U.S. allies in Riyadh, Cairo, Asmara, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Kampala. Washington relied on their reading of events in Sudan, rather than on its own eyes and ears.

There were real grounds for concern. Sudan's new leaders expanded long-standing ties to Middle Eastern terrorist groups. Bin Laden and his followers arrived in 1991. The "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian later convicted of plotting to blow up New York landmarks, received his U.S. visa from Khartoum in 1993.

By late 1995, however, many Sudanese leaders began to wonder if their embrace of foreign Muslim radicals was self-defeating, both a threat to internal security and a barrier to the world at large. But when Sudan aided France in capturing the notorious terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal," U.S. analysts dismissed it as a sop to Western concerns rather than a change in Sudan's terrorism policy.

Bad intelligence included faulty accusations, as well as weak political analysis. False reports of plots against Americans prompted U.S. Ambassador Donald Petterson to threaten "the destruction of your [the Sudanese] economy" and "military measures that would make you pay a high price," according to his talking points. His successor, co-author Carney, delivered similar warnings in late 1995. The focus on false accusations distracted from U.S. calls for addressing the legitimate grievances of Sudan's embattled Southerners.

Poor intelligence also damaged U.S. counterterrorism policy in August 1998 when, in retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, American cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that Washington alleged was producing chemical weapons precursors. The Clinton White House didn't even have basic facts, such as who owned the plant. Instead, the president relied on unverifiable assertions about the firm's links to bin Laden.

The intelligence failure had roots in second-hand sources provided by anti-Khartoum allies in the region, particularly in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Egypt. If U.S. embassy staff had been left on the ground, firsthand reporting might have identified the right targets or averted a strike that ultimately strengthened sympathies for Islamic radicals bent on attacking the United States. This danger has arisen again recently, as the United States takes aim at remote, and sometimes wrong, targets in Afghanistan, relying on intelligence from often questionable sources.

The Sudan story also shows that politics can override and policymakers ignore good intelligence. By 1996, Khartoum's enthusiasm for an ideological Islamic state had waned. Pragmatists were prevailing over ideologues. In February 1996, as The Washington Post has reported, Khartoum tried to cooperate on counter-terrorism. Sudan's minister of state for defense (now its U.N. ambassador), Maj. Gen. Elfatih Erwa, secretly visited the United States to propose a trade -- bin Laden's extradition to Saudi Arabia in return for an easing of political and economic sanctions. Riyadh refused.

Three months later, after offering to hand bin Laden over to U.S. authorities, Sudan expelled him, asDeputy National Security Adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger had urged. In July, Sudan gave U.S. authorities permission to photograph two terror camps. Washington failed to follow up. In August, Turabi sent an "olive branch" letter to President Clinton through Ijaz. There was no reply.

In October, Gutbi Al-Mahdi, Sudan's newly appointed, Western-educated intelligence chief, showed sensitive intelligence on terrorists tracked through Khartoum to one of us, Ijaz, to pass on to the Clinton administration. By election day 1996, top Clinton aides, including Berger, knew what information was available from Khartoum and of its potential value to identify, monitor and ultimately dismantle terrorist cells around the world. Yet they did nothing about it.

A further change took place in Sudanese thinking in April 1997. The government dropped its demand that Washington lift sanctions in exchange for terrorism cooperation. Sudan's president, in a letter that Ijaz delivered to U.S. authorities, offered FBI and CIA counter-terrorism units unfettered and unconditional access to Khartoum's intelligence.

Sudan's policy shift sparked a debate at the State Department, where foreign service officers believed the United States should reengage Khartoum. By the end of summer 1997, they persuaded incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to let at least some diplomatic staff return to Sudan to press for a resolution of the civil war and pursue offers to cooperate on terrorism. A formal announcement was made in late September.

Two individuals, however, disagreed. NSC terrorism specialist Richard Clarke and NSC Africa specialist Susan Rice, who was about to become assistant secretary of State for African affairs, persuaded Berger, then national security adviser, to overrule Albright. The new policy was reversed after two days.

Overturning a months-long interagency process undermined U.S. counterterrorism efforts. In a final attempt to find a way of cooperating with U.S. authorities, Sudan's intelligence chief repeated the unconditional offer to share terrorism data with the FBI in a February 1998 letter addressed directly to Middle East and North Africa special agent-in-charge David Williams.But the White House and Susan Rice objected. On June 24, 1998, Williams wrote to Mahdi, saying he was "not in a position to accept your kind offer." The U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed six weeks later.

The Clinton administration modified its stance just before the USS Cole attack by sending FBI counterterrorism experts to Khartoum to look around. But it was all too little too late.

We're still living with the consequences of the U.S. policy and intelligence failure in Sudan. Khartoum offered us the best chance to engage radical Islamists and stop bin Laden early. If the United States is to account for the failures that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, we need to better understand our failures in Sudan. Solid intelligence that informs sound policy can produce the judiciousness that helps differentiate America from those who seek to destroy it.

Clinton's Phony War on Terrorism

By Richard Miniter
Washington Times | September 5, 2003

This is part three of a four-part excerpt from Richard Miniter's new book Losing Bin Laden, which is available for $20 from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore. Read parts one and two.

Clinton Administration counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke helped develop a daring covert-operation plan. Helicopters launched from an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean would deposit Special Forces near a bin Laden camp. Hours before dawn, using night-vision scopes, the commandos would surprise bin Laden's guards and kill or capture the arch-terrorist. But the plan had to run a bureaucratic obstacle course.

The first hurdle was cleared in the spring of 1998. In the middle of "Monica-gate," Clinton signed a secret memorandum of notification — informally called a "finding" — that explicitly allowed the CIA and other U.S. armed forces to take actions that might lead to bin Laden's death. Before the finding was signed, the military and the CIA were supposed to avoid any action that might, conceivably, result in the death of bin Laden or other targeted persons. Unfortunately, the finding was not a death warrant. Clinton's order did not overturn a long-standing ban on political assassinations. The legal distinction was Clintonesque: Bin Laden could be killed accidentally, but not on purpose. So, a covert team could accidentally shoot bin Laden in the crossfire, but not aim at him. At least inside America's increasingly rule-laden intelligence services, this was seen as a major bureaucratic step forward. Operatives no longer had to avoid actions that might set off a chain of events that might possibly result in bin Laden's death. If bin Laden was killed, the covert team would have little to fear from military or Justice Department lawyers. Ordinarily, if a covert operation turned lethal, a federal criminal investigation could be launched.

The next bureaucratic hurdle was bigger: What if bin Laden was taken alive? CIA analysts considered that possibility remote — they believed that bin Laden would "martyr" himself rather than be taken a prisoner. But if bin Laden was captured, the policy was that he would be put on trial. Moving along a parallel track, the FBI and a New York U.S. Attorney had been preparing charges against bin Laden since January 1998. Bin Laden was accused of murdering Americans in Somalia in 1993 and in Riyadh in 1995, among other offenses. The secret charges were formally handed up by a grand jury sometime in the spring of 1998. The indictment was sealed and remained secret for months. But it was in force. Now, by summer 1998, the second hurdle was cleared. The Justice Department had a plan for putting bin Laden on trial.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Special Forces Command and CIA planners continued to draft a detailed operations plan. All of the elements were in place for a bold covert operation to take bin Laden, dead or alive. But it was the plan, not bin Laden, that was soon killed.

The problem was the CIA, Clarke told the author. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet asked that the plan be extensively revised, touching off another months-long cycle of meetings, drafts, and consultations. Tenet's stated reasons sounded as if he was either repeating or anticipating White House objections. Bin Laden and his band often traveled with their wives and children, raising the risk of unintended civilian deaths. That would be unacceptable to the president. (Of course, bin Laden had no qualms about civilian deaths.) Tenet wanted better safeguards for non-combatants.

Yet another concern came from the Pentagon: U.S. military casualties. Once a firefight began, it would be very difficult to extract wounded or trapped soldiers. If the mission went sour, dozens of Americans would be dead and bin Laden might escape. The military wanted a war without casualties or risks. The planners went back to the drawing board.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry H. Shelton, opposed a small Special Forces operation. Rather than oppose the operation directly, the general fell back on a favorite Pentagon tactic: counteroffer with a proposed operation so large that the president and his senior staff would back down. This is a time-honored technique for killing ideas that the Pentagon opposes. Without giving away his motivation, Shelton explained his reasoning to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. "The greatest risk is that you would have a helicopter or a [special-operations] aircraft that would encounter mechanical problems over those great distances, or you have an accident. You want to have the capability if that happens to go in and get them, which means a combat search-and-rescue capability, and if you want to send those people in, you have to have an air-refueling operation." At that point, thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen would be involved, as well as several ships and dozens of aircraft. That was far from the small, surgical operation Clarke and others had in mind.

So, in the spring and summer of 1998, the Clinton Administration was deadlocked. Tenet had essentially vetoed covert operations to seize bin Laden. Clinton might have wanted to get bin Laden, but he didn't want to overrule the Pentagon to do it. Neither could the president stomach sending thousands of troops into harm's way, as General Shelton proposed.

America was at war with bin Laden. But on America's side it was a phony war, while America's adversaries were waging a real one.

September 23, 2003

Miniter responds

By Richard Miniter

Denial is more than a river in Egypt. It runs through the Clinton administration's Sudan policy.

As the media attention on my book "Losing bin Laden" grows and it climbs the New York Times bestseller list, some former Clinton officials have emerged to deny the undeniable. (See Op-Ed at left.) They deny that Sudan ever offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to American justice, they deny that Sudan ever offered to share its intelligence files on bin Laden's terror network, and they offer excuses for President Clinton's failure to retaliate following bin Laden's attack on the USS Cole (which killed 17 sailors). Since the facts and the on-the-record accounts of senior Clinton officials are against them, they are reduced to parsing words and obfuscatory statements. That's unfortunate. The point of examining Mr. Clinton's flawed war on terror is not to condemn the former president, but to learn from his successes and his setbacks and apply those lessons to the current phase of America's war on terror.

In that spirit, let's examine the record and see how well those denials hold up.

mArresting bin Laden. They write nearby that "no offer was ever conveyed to any senior official in Washington." Does Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor, count as a senior official in Washington? Here is what Mr. Berger told the Washington Post's Barton Gellman: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." If there was no offer, just what offer was the FBI evaluating and opposing? Or is Mr. Berger telling tall tales?

Other senior Clinton officials are on the record debating the merits of taking bin Laden into custody from Sudan. Susan Rice, an assistant secretary of state under Mr. Clinton, told the Village Voice: "They [the Sudanese] calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer."

You can't doubt the sincerity of an offer that doesn't exist. Perhaps the Clinton administration overlooked that Sudan had handed over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, to the French. He now sits in a French prison, while bin Laden is free. As Ambassador Timothy Carney argued in 1996, even if the offer wasn't serious, why not call Sudan's bluff? If Sudan failed to deliver, then the skeptics are proven right. If Sudan did hand bin Laden over, then Mr. Clinton would strike a blow against international terrorism.

And, of course, Sudan did make good on its word to expel bin Laden from that country in May 1996 — at the Clinton administration's request. If Sudan could expel bin Laden, why couldn't it arrest him?

Sudan's intelligence files. Some Clinton administration officials deny that Sudan offered to provide its intelligence files on bin Laden. In my research, I've uncovered letters by senior Sudanese officials, including one from that nation's president, addressed to President Clinton, top Clinton officials and senior members of Congress expressly offering those files. Besides, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced in September 1997 that she was sending a team to Sudan to re-engage Sudan on terrorism issues. They planned to examine those files. That promising initiative was overturned by the White House six days later. Whose fault was that?

The USS Cole. They admit that "al Qaeda was a prime suspect," but say more investigation was needed to prove bin Laden guilty. They ignore that the CIA had traced phone calls from the attackers to a house in Yemen and from that house to bin Laden's satellite phone, and traced $5,000 sent to the terrorists from bin Laden. Yes, the investigation was ongoing, but that should have been enough. They forget that America's enemies are not in a court of law, but are waging war on us. And, even if they weren't sure that bin Laden was behind the attack, there was blood on his hands. Bin Laden's network killed 59 Americans in the Clinton years. The retaliation plan developed by the Clinton administration would have smashed all of his terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — less than a year before September 11.

After September 11, some Clinton officials admitted their mistakes. Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, told the Boston Globe: "Clearly, not enough was done. We should have caught this. Why this happened, I don't know . . . We should have prevented this." Nancy Soderberg, a member of Clinton's National Security Council, added: "In hindsight, it wasn't enough, and anyone involved in policy would have to admit that."

Madeleine Albright recently told Bill O'Reilly, "do you think we're so stupid that, if somebody had offered us Osama bin Laden, we would haven't taken it?"

Madam Secretary, that is now for the American people to judge.

Richard Miniter is the author of the New York Times bestseller "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery, Sept. 2003) and a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe in Brussels.

March 23, 2004, 8:55 a.m.

A Dick Clarke Top Seven

Questions for commissioners.

Mansoor Ijaz

Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar in four successive administrations, testifies in front of the 9/11 Commission on Wednesday. But what should have been a serious inquiry into how a loosely knit gang of Islamic fanatics could rise to become one of history's most lethal and effective global terrorist organizations now promises to become a political spectacle.

At the height of the presidential campaign season, Clarke has made irresponsible and untrue allegations that the Bush White House was indifferent to the threat posed by al Qaeda in the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Whether his charges are the result of a momentary lapse in judgment in an otherwise distinguished civil-service career, or the hallmark of personal ego and greed in trying to sell a book while settling scores with a Bush White House that demoted him, the 9/11 commissioners cannot be deterred in their task to find out the truth about what happened on his watch to America's counterterrorism efforts.

The 9/11 commissioners have a thankless job of asking tough questions that nobody wants to ask. There will be a broad set of questions asked Tuesday and Wednesday of the various witnesses who appear. But when Clarke goes under oath, there will be a need to get down to specifics because the devil of understanding how 9/11 became possible is in the details of what Clarke did or did not do.

If I were a 9/11 commissioner, there are seven very pointed areas of inquiry I would enter into with Clarke to understand exactly how the intelligence failures and policy missteps evolved:

1. Sudan's offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Mr. Clarke, we know from news reports and the testimony of a former U.S. ambassador that a meeting took place at an Alexandria, Virginia, hotel in February 1996 between Sudan's minister of defense, El Fatih Erwa, Ambassador Timothy Carney, a career State Department officer, and a CIA official with oversight responsibility for African affairs. During that meeting, Erwa offered to have Osama bin Laden extradited to Saudi Arabia (an offer which President Clinton has admitted to and also said that the Saudi government declined when asked), and barring that, to have Sudan essentially baby-sit him with U.S. guidance (which we also turned down). Is it true that a second meeting took place a few weeks later in which Erwa and the CIA officer met alone? What can you tell us about that meeting? Did Erwa make an offer, however vague or oblique, to permit the United States to have access to bin Laden in a manner similar to the capture of Carlos the Jackal that Sudan orchestrated with France? If the CIA case officer received this offer, did he pass it up the chain of command and did you at the NSC see or review any notes of that meeting? If he did not, was this a result of the poor state of relations between CIA and the White House or just a bureaucratic snafu? How do you assess President Clinton's own view that the administration chose not to bring bin Laden to the United States because there were insufficient legal grounds for doing so? Why would he make such a claim if there were never any offer in the first place?

2. Sudan's counterterrorism offer. Mr. Clarke, in April 1997, a private U.S. citizen brought an unconditional offer from Sudan's president to cooperate on the intelligence data about various terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, to the vice chairman of this commission, the Honorable Lee Hamilton. On September 28, 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced after a five-month interagency review that the U.S. was sending a high-level team of diplomats back to Sudan to pressure the Islamist government there to stop harboring terrorists, and to have a look at Sudan's intelligence files on those terrorists it had harbored in previous years, including several of the 9/11 hijackers and several of the planners for the 1998 U.S.-embassy bombings. That decision was overturned on October 1, 1997. What role did you play in the reversal of that decision? Were you ever approached by Susan E. Rice, the former director of African affairs at the National Security Council and assistant secretary of state for East Africa, to assist her in making a case to Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger in overturning the Albright decision? If so, what were her reasons, and why did you agree with her assessment, if you did? Please tell us whether any officials other than you, Mr. Berger, and Ms. Rice were involved in that decision.

3. Iraq and al Qaeda — the Sudan connection. Mr. Clarke, are you aware of a February 1998 correspondence from Sudan's intelligence chief to FBI Regional Director for East Africa David Williams in which again an offer to share terrorism data was made by Sudan without conditions? Are you aware that bin Laden's chief deputy in Sudan made a trip to Baghdad to visit with Iraqi intelligence officials at about the same time in February 1998? If not, why not? How do you reconcile your categorical statement in a recent 60 Minutes interview that there was no relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq — ever, I believe is how you put it — with the fact that bin Laden's chief deputy was visiting Baghdad at the same time you were receiving repeated offers to explore Sudan's intelligence files?

4. The U.S. embassy bombings. Mr. Clarke, once the U.S. embassies had been attacked in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, Sudan's intelligence chief again contacted the FBI in a handwritten note that has been published, and offered to turn over to U.S. custody two of the key suspects who had taken up residence in an apartment overlooking the U.S. embassy in Khartoum. Why did the United States not pursue their extradition immediately? Were you aware of the offer? If not, why not? If so, why did you not, in your role as counterterrorism coordinator, make sure the FBI was given all support necessary from the White House to gain their extradition?

5. Retaliation: bombing the al-Shifa plant in Khartoum. Mr. Clarke, you then recommended bombing Sudan's al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant as the best response to the embassy attacks. Can you recount the evidence that led you to believe al-Shifa was producing nerve agents, and the evidence you had of its ownership and financing by bin Laden? Can you again help us to rectify your categorical statement now that there was no relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime, ever, when you previously argued that Iraq and Sudan were cooperating on the development of chemical and biological weapons at a pharmaceutical plant you claimed was owned and financed by bin Laden?

6. The United Arab Emirates offers help on capturing bin Laden. Mr. Clarke, press reports indicate that the government of the United Arab Emirates, for its own reasons, was interested in helping the United States get bin Laden out of Afghanistan during the summer of 2000. It is our understanding that you were involved in a similar effort already in late 1999 and that the effort failed for a number of different reasons before a second attempt was made to revive it. First, can you tell us precisely what is the nature of your relationship with the UAE ruling family? Are you aware of any threats that were made against the family by al Qaeda leaders during that period of time? Did you relay any U.S. intelligence on the nature of those threats to UAE officials at that time? Did any UAE official, including members of the ruling family responsible for defense and national-security affairs, make an assessment or an offer to find a way to get bin Laden out of Afghanistan? If so, did it involve the construction of an Afghan Development Fund for the Taliban regime in return for bin Laden's transfer to the UAE? Was onward extradition of bin Laden from the UAE to the United States ever discussed with you? Did you ever make the president aware that such a possibility to get bin Laden out of Afghanistan existed? Was it your view at that time that armed CIA predator drones, which would presumably identify and kill senior al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, were the most efficient tools available to the United States for dealing with the threat posed by al Qaeda?

7. Did al Qaeda get nuclear assistance from Pakistan? A Pakistani national, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, has now admitted to selling nuclear hardware and other materials for the construction of nuclear devices to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. The White House in which you worked was warned about Pakistan's nuclear black-market enterprise in August of 2000, and again in September 2000. You clearly had suspicions about the North Korean relationship very early on. Other troubling aspects of Pakistan's nuclear program were brought to Mr. Berger's attention as early as February 1996. Can you tell us today whether al Qaeda was able to get its hands on sufficient nuclear materials to be able to build a radiological device? Do you believe al Qaeda possesses a functional nuclear device? Did the Clinton administration have sufficient evidence to confront Pakistan's military regime about the illicit nuclear activities of its scientists? Why did you not act on the intelligence you had to stop Dr. Khan's network earlier?

Factual answers to these questions, minus the political bluster and ad-hominem attacks aimed at scoring points with a potential future employer, would go a long way in restoring Richard Clarke's severely damaged credibility as an observer and participant in some of history's most important events. Our future generations deserve better than to watch catfights between grown adults charged with nothing less than providing for their safety and security.

Just tell us the truth, Mr. Clarke.

— Mansoor Ijaz is chairman of Crescent Investment Management in New York. He negotiated Sudan's offer of counterterrorism assistance on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to the Clinton administration in 1997 and coauthored the blueprint for the ceasefire in Kashmir in the summer of 2000.

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