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of course clinton could have taken bin ladin from the sudanese

click to hear clinton admit he let bin ladin get away...

http://www.newsmax.com/clinton2.mp3

Bin Laden Arrest Offer Spurned as Clinton Met Lewinsky

At least two offers from the government of Sudan to arrest Osama bin Laden and turn him over to the U.S. were rebuffed by the Clinton administration in February and March of 1996, a period of time when the former president's attention was distracted by his intensifying relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

One of the offers took place during a secret meeting in Washington, the same day Clinton was meeting with Lewinsky in the White House just miles away.

On Feb. 6, 1996, then-U.S. Ambassador to the Sudan Tim Carney met with Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Osman Mohammed Taha at Taha's home in the capital city of Khartoum. The meeting took place just a half mile from bin Laden's residence at the time, according to Richard Miniter's book "Losing bin Laden."

During the meeting, Carney reminded the Sudanese official that Washington was increasingly nervous about the presence of bin Laden in Sudan, reports Miniter.

Foreign Minister Taha countered by saying that Sudan was very concerned about its poor relationship with the U.S.

Then came the bombshell offer:

"If you want bin Laden, we will give you bin Laden," Foreign Minister Taha told Ambassador Carney.

Still, with the extraordinarily fortuitous offer on the table, back in Washington President Clinton had other things on his mind.

A timeline of events chronicled in the Starr Report shows that during the period of late January through March 1996, Mr. Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was then at its most intense.

On Feb. 4, 1996, for instance - two days before Ambassador Carney's key meeting with the Sudanese Foreign Minister, the president was focused not on Osama bin Laden, but instead on the 23-year-old White House intern.

Their rendezvous that day included a sexual encounter followed by a leisurely chat between Clinton and Lewinsky, as the two "sat and talked [afterward] for about 45 minutes," according to the Starr Report.

Later in the afternoon that same day, as Sudanese officials weighed their decision to offer bin Laden to the U.S., Clinton found time to call Lewinsky "[to say] he had enjoyed their time together." If there were any calls from Clinton to the State Department or Khartoum that day, the records have yet to surface in published reports.

The Feb. 4 encounter with Lewinsky followed a period of intense contact detailed in the Starr report in interviews with the former White House intern, including a sexual encounter on Jan. 6, 1996, several sessions of phone sex during the week of Jan. 14 - 21, and another sexual encounter on Jan. 21.

Sudan's offer to the U.S. for bin Laden's extradition remained on the table for at least a month, and was reiterated by Sudanese officials who traveled to Washington as late as March 10, 1996.

On March 3, Sudan's Minister of State for Defense Elfatih Erwa met secretly with Ambassador Carney, another State Department official and the CIA's Africa bureau Director of Operations at an Arlington, Va., hotel, according to Miniter's book.

Erwa was handed a list of issues the U.S. wanted taken care of if relations were to improve. The list included a demand for information on bin Laden's terrorist network inside Sudan.

Erwa replied that he would have to consult with Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir about the list. When he returned for a March 10, 1996 meeting with the CIA's Africa bureau chief, "Erwa would be empowered to make an extraordinary offer," writes Miniter.

On instructions from its president, the government of Sudan agreed to arrest bin Laden and hand him over to U.S law enforcement at a time and place of the Clinton administration's choosing. "Where should we send him?" Erwa asked the CIA representative.

President Clinton has acknowledged being fully briefed on the Sudanese efforts to turn over the 9/11 mastermind, admitting that he made the final decision to turn the offer down.

"The Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again," Clinton confirmed during a February 2002 speech to a New York business group.

"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."

As chronicled in the Starr report, however, Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky proved to be a growing distraction around this time.

Two weeks before the secret meeting between Erwa, Carney and the CIA bureau chief, the president summoned Lewinsky to the White House to inform her that he "no longer felt right" about their relationship and it would have to be suspended until after the election.

Lewinsky explained, however, that Clinton's decision to put their relationship on hold did little to change its basic character, telling Starr's investigators, "There'd continue to be this flirtation when we'd see each other."

The Starr report noted, "In late February or March [1996], the president telephoned her at home and said he was disappointed that, because she had already left the White House for the evening, they could not get together."

The call, Lewinsky said, "sort of implied to me that he was interested in starting up again."

On March 10, 1996, as Sudanese Defense Minister Erwa was making his extraordinary offer for bin Laden's arrest to the CIA's Africa bureau chief, Clinton met with Lewinsky in the White House.

The Starr report:

"On March 10, 1996, Ms. Lewinsky took a visiting friend, Natalie Ungvari, to the White House. They bumped into the president, who said when Ms. Lewinsky introduced them, 'You must be her friend from California.' Ms. Ungvari was 'shocked' that the president knew where she was from."

Though there was no physical contact that day, three weeks later, on March 31, 1996, Clinton resumed his sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

It was around this time, the president later admitted, that he was involved in delicate negotiations to try to persuade Riyadh to take bin Laden, after refusing to accept his extradition to the U.S.

"I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have," Clinton admitted in the 2002 speech. "But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."

On April 7, 1996, Monica Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon. Around the same time, the administration's hunt for bin Laden finally seemed to begin in earnest. Just weeks after Clinton spurned Sudan's bin Laden offer, for instance, the CIA created a separate operational unit dedicated to tracking down bin Laden in Sudan.

But it happened too late to capture the 9/11 mastermind. On May 18, 1996, bin Laden boarded a chartered plane in Khartoum with his wives, children, some 150 al-Qaida jihadists and a cache of arms - and flew off to Jalalabad, Afghanistan.