Posted on 03/19/2003 12:29:24 PM PST by kattracks
When ex-President Bill Clinton missed a chance to launch a cruise missile attack targeting Osama bin Laden in November 1998, the mission was thought to have a 90 percent chance of success, Clinton's former Air Force aide said yesterday.
The estimate contradicts the ex-president's own claim that the attack likely would have failed because U.S intelligence did not have clear evidence of bin Laden's whereabouts at the time.
"We had - probably not a 100 percent guaranteed hit on Osama - but we had probably in the 90s - something we could count on," Lt. Col. Robert Patterson [USAF Ret.] told nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity.
In his book "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised National Security," Patterson reveals that National Security Advisor Sandy Berger couldn't reach Clinton in time to get approval for the cruise missile attack that likely would have killed the al-Qaeda chief.
In a speech last year, however, Mr. Clinton claimed that the chance for success of that mission was less than 50 percent. And, he insisted, "No one thought I should do that."
"I could have bombed or sent more missiles in," Clinton told a New York business group in February 2002. "As far as we knew, he never went back to his training camp. So 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."
"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."
"Now, after he murdered 3,100 of our people and others who came to our country seeking their livelihood you may say, 'Well, Mr. President, you should have killed those young women and children.' But at the time we didn't think he had the capacity to do that. And no one thought that I should do that - although I take full responsibility for it.
"You need to know that those are the two options I had. And there was less than a 50/50 chance that the intelligence was right that on this particular night he was in Afghanistan."
Lt. Col. Patterson also charges that Clinton was aware of an al-Qaeda plot to hijack airplanes and use them as flying bombs, something the ex-president has never acknowledged.
Recounting a 1996 episode in which he said Clinton had asked him to gather up several days' worth of Presidential Daily Briefings from his desk, Patterson recalled:
"I opened the PDB to rearrange the notes and noticed the heading 'Operation Bojinka.' I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons and another plot to put bombs on U.S. airliners. ... I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community, and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it."
Plans for Operation Bojinka were discovered during a 1995 raid by Philippine police on the apartment of Ramzi Yousef, an al-Qaeda operative with ties to Iraq who was convicted in 1997 of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Al-Qaeda
Clinton Scandals
"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."
Even today this military loather can only think of one way to accomplish a military objective: bombing.
Our military has shown time and time again, (when led by Republicans) that it has the capability to take out a target like that with a minimum of civilian casualties, even in a semi-hostage situation as this one was.
I guess the twin debacles represented by Mogadishu and the Carter-Iranian helicopter disaster have eliminated the risking of even one soldier's life, for any military action, from the menu of options that a Democratic President might choose from.
The knee-jerk reliance on bombing has cost us at least 3000 American civilians.
Somehow, that didn't seem to bother him so much in Waco.
I guess David Koresh's scalp was just more important to Clinton than Bin Laden's.
But Mr. President, that didn't seem to bother you when you were going after David Koresh down in Waco. Was that mission more important than getting bin Laden?
Absolutely. Great question.
Could be, could also be the time he spirited himself out of the White House to walk to the nearest McDonalds for a meal!
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