Posted on 04/13/2004 3:51:37 PM PDT by ALOHA RONNIE
NEVER FORGET
...FoX News Foreign Affairs Expert MONSOOR IJAZ told TONY SNOW on FoX News Radio last night that he has been given a May 7th Date to testify before the 9/11 Commission IN PRIVATE.
...MONSOOR IJAZ will be testifying about the 3 Offers he brokered with the Sudan during the 1990's to bring OSAMA bin LADEN here durng the 1990's ...that were refused by the CLINTON White House. MONSOOR IJAZ first told the American People about this on the FoX News Channel the day after the 9/11 Attacks that came here because OSAMA didn't.
...We have been calling here on Freerepublic.com and all over National Tallk Radio/TV ever since for 9/11 Investigators to have MONSOOR IJAZ testify about this ..IN PUBLIC.
...MONSOOR IJAZ is asking for us to bombbard the 9/11 Commission to call for it to have him testify IN PUBLIC.
...After our getting this close after 2 1/2 long years ...we're almost there. Keep those cards and letters a-coming, my fellow Freepers.
NEVER FORGET
Same here. They are fluffing us off with auto responses. Probably not even reading what we are sending.
Democratic Fund-Raiser Pursues Agenda on Sudan
By David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 29 1997; Page A01
The Washington Post
by Mansoor Ijaz
LOS ANGELES TIMES
December 5, 2001
Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize
Sudan offered up the terrorist and data on his network. The then-president and his advisors didn't respond President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.
I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.
From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Sudan's president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.
Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.
The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.
As an American Muslim and a political supporter of Clinton, I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then, that their counter-terrorism policies fueled the rise of Bin Laden from an ordinary man to a Hydra-like monster.
Realizing the growing problem with Bin Laden, Bashir sent key intelligence officials to the U.S. in February 1996.
The Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to "baby-sit" him--monitoring all his activities and associates.
But Saudi officials didn't want their home-grown terrorist back where he might plot to overthrow them.
In May 1996, the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.
Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden's personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.
Some of these men are now among the FBI's 22 most-wanted terrorists.
The two men who allegedly piloted the planes into the twin towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, prayed in the same Hamburg mosque as did Salim and Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian trader who managed Salim's bank accounts and whose assets are frozen.
Important data on each had been compiled by the Sudanese.
But U.S. authorities repeatedly turned the data away, first in February 1996; then again that August, when at my suggestion Sudan's religious ideologue, Hassan Turabi, wrote directly to Clinton; then again in April 1997, when I persuaded Bashir to invite the FBI to come to Sudan and view the data; and finally in February 1998, when Sudan's intelligence chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, wrote directly to the FBI.
Gutbi had shown me some of Sudan's data during a three-hour meeting in Khartoum in October 1996. When I returned to Washington, I told Berger and his specialist for East Africa, Susan Rice, about the data available. They said they'd get back to me. They never did. Neither did they respond when Bashir made the offer directly. I believe they never had any intention to engage Muslim countries--ally or not. Radical Islam, for the administration, was a convenient national security threat.
And that was not the end of it. In July 2000--three months before the deadly attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen--I brought the White House another plausible offer to deal with Bin Laden, by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings. A senior counter-terrorism official from one of the United States' closest Arab allies--an ally whose name I am not free to divulge--approached me with the proposal after telling me he was fed up with the antics and arrogance of U.S. counter-terrorism officials.
The offer, which would have brought Bin Laden to the Arab country as the first step of an extradition process that would eventually deliver him to the U.S., required only that Clinton make a state visit there to personally request Bin Laden's extradition. But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer, letting it get caught up in internal politics within the ruling family--Clintonian diplomacy at its best.
Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.
Senator Gorton, what do you make about of what Ted Olson said about you and your fellow commissioners doing to much television, going on the media. He's surprised at that.
SLADE GORTON (R) 9/11 COMMISSION: I would divide Ted's comments into two. First, his the description of the wall and the fact that it came into existence in the 1970s and 1980s, through several administration, both Republicans and Democrat was entirely correct. It was created by a statute, it was created by court decisions, not by the desire of the people in the Department of Justice.
And as a consequence, it lasted a year into the current administration, until 9/11 persuaded Congress to pass the PATRIOT Act and the courts to change their minds. So he's right about that.
So, it was wrong to attack individuals, especially a member of the commission, for creating something that was not their creation, but was required by an outside force.
JAMES THOMPSON, 9/11 COMMISSIONER - Aaron Brown CNN
One of the commissioners asking questions today was Jim Thompson, the former Republican Governor of Illinois and we are pleased that he joins us tonight from Chicago. Governor, good evening to you.
JAMES THOMPSON, 9/11 COMMISSIONER: Good evening, Aaron.
BROWN: I saw you sitting next to Commissioner Lehman when he said some very real changes are coming down the track. Can you give us a sense of at least your own view of how extensive those changes have to be and I suppose the money question here is do we need, in your mind at least, do we need a domestic intelligence gathering agency?
THOMPSON: Well, here's the dilemma and it's a real one for all of us on the commission and I think a real one for the president and his administration, for the Congress and for the American people.
In my view and I suspect some of my fellow commissioners share this view, George Tenet at the CIA and Robert Mueller at the FBI are two of the best people that have happened to the federal government in a long, long time, and if we could be assured that they would be in charge of those agencies forever no changes because both men are instituting real reforms at their institutions.
But they won't be there forever and we don't know who the next director of the CIA will be or the next director of the FBI will be and so we have to look at structural changes.
But if we do that and if, for example, we recommended the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency that would probably take five years to get up and running and where would the people come from who would be employed?
From the FBI probably, from the CIA, and so we'd start all over again with the same people in a different bureaucracy with a different committee of Congress overseeing it and with a track record yet to be established, so this is far from an easy question and I don't think we're through considering the issue yet.
BROWN: But it obviously has to be considered.
THOMPSON: It has to be considered because there's no question there were failures at the FBI and failures at the CIA before 9/11. Now that doesn't mean that we could have prevented 9/11 had there been no failures.
We'll never know, I suspect, the answer to the question of whether 9/11 could be prevented and we need to avoid the blame game. We need to at least focus on what lessons we can learn from the death of these 3,000 people or they will have died in vain.
BROWN: And I wanted to ask you about the blame game stuff and whether we're past that in these hearings, not so much today but certainly yesterday. For those of us who really want this commission to do it great, it was an uncomfortable day I thought of finger pointing and it's their fault, no it's theirs, no I didn't say that, yes, he did.
First of all how do you square some of that and, secondly, are we past that point?
THOMPSON: Well, you know, I think as much blame came from the witnesses pointing at each other as came from the commission.
BROWN: Yes, absolutely.
THOMPSON: That's the first answer and, secondly, I think sometimes when you tune into the hearings you're probably mistaking the personality and the witness questioning techniques or the cross- examination techniques, if you like, of various members of the commission, some of whom are lawyers, some of whom are former prosecutors or defense lawyers.
It doesn't necessarily indicate what we're thinking or where we're going to end up with our conclusions. My guess is, my best hope is that when this is all over the commission will have a unanimous report, five Democrats, five Republicans agreeing unanimously on what happened on September 11 and where we go from here, what the future holds for the intelligence services of this nation and how we can lessen the odds of having 9/11 happen again. And, if we have a unanimous report, it won't be a partisan one.
BROWN: Just one more quick one here.
THOMPSON: Sure.
BROWN: And, actually it was the witnesses and not the commissioners that made me uncomfortable yesterday. Up the road in Wisconsin, Congressman Sensenbrenner today strongly suggested that one of the commission members resign over a conflict of interest. Do you have a feeling on the appropriateness of that? THOMPSON: Yes, you know, I like Congressman Sensenbrenner but I think he's wrong on this one. Jamie Gorelick recused herself from having anything to do with this issue of the wall that's created between prosecutors and intelligence services.
In point of fact, that wall grew up 20 years ago in the Reagan administration. It continued under the first Bush administration. It continued under the Clinton administration and it continued into this Bush administration where it was finally torn down by the Patriot Act, which President Bush and John Ashcroft pushed.
So, she's not taking part in these things that are at issue, just like a number of us are not taking part in matters where we have a conflict. My law firm represents American Airlines, so I recused myself a year ago on the issue of airline security. I won't take part in that part of the report.
And so, I think Commission Gorelick who is a person of great integrity and has been a valuable member of this commission should stay on the commission and participate in our final report.
BROWN: Governor, we know you've had a long day. It included some travel. We appreciate you time as always. Thank you, sir.
A Thursday morning bump. . .:^)
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