Posted on 05/21/2003 1:46:34 PM PDT by Paul Atreides
Former Attorney General Janet Reno is being wrongly blamed for ex-President Clinton's decision not to bomb Osama bin Laden's compound in Khandahar, Afghanistan, and the ex-president is apparently willing to let her take the fall.
Based on information from former FBI agent Jack Cloonan, ABC News reported Wednesday that "federal agents seeking bin Laden had developed a plan to have a plane fly in and attack a compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the terror leader was believed to have been holed up back in 1998 - three years before the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
"But when the plan went up the chain of command for approval, it was killed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno," the network claimed. "They came to the decision that this plan was probably too dangerous, that the loss of life on the ground would have been significant," Cloonan said. "There was concern that people around the bin Laden compound would be killed."
Cloonan's story jibes in most respects with ex-President Clinton's own account of the episode, which he detailed for a New York business group last year.
But the ex-president's version differs from Cloonan's in one important respect. At the time, Clinton admitted that it was he - and not Reno - who gave the order to pull the plug on the operation, saying he took "full responsibility" for the decision.
In remarks reported exclusively by NewsMax.com after his Feb. 15, 2002, address to the Long Island Association, Clinton said:
"Now, if you look back - in the hindsight of history, everybody's got 20/20 vision - the real issue is should we have attacked the al-Qaeda network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan.
"Here's the problem. Before September 11 we would have had no support for it - no allied support and no basing rights. So we actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this. We trained people.
"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. And we would have had to do a refueling stop. ...
"So for all those reasons the military recommended against it. There was a high probability that it wouldn't succeed.
"Now I had one other option," Clinton continued. "I could have bombed or sent more missiles in. 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 200 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." [End of Transcript]
Though NewsMax.com reported Clinton's bombshell remarks hours after he delivered them, ABC News as well as all other mainstream news outlets declined to cover the story.
Contacted by ABC News about the allegation that the decision was hers, ex-Attorney General Reno declined to comment.
I thought you were from another state.
Somezheimer's Disease is where I only forget important things like birthdays and anniversaries. Unimportant things like the dimensions for Forbes Field remain intact.
Well imagine that.
It all depends on how full of beans her bowl is that she is holding.
Don't carry Bill's water on this one, shaky lady.
It's always somebody else's fault...
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