Posted on 01/11/2002 7:16:54 AM PST by Jean S
How do you know that? Are you privy to the information that the government had on Bin Laden at the time?
Not exactly. However, I've read quite a bit about the subject. The highest reaches of the government discussed and debated the offer. Nobody was of the opinion that there would be a chance in Heck that they'd get a conviction in a US court. In their wildest fantasies, some hoped that Saudi Arabia would accept him from the Sudan, quickly arrest and execute him. (The Saudis are a fun bunch of guys, after all.) The Saudis declined to touch him with a thousand-foot pole, however. So the US government accept the plan of bin Laden leaving Sudan, figuring at least that his terrorist network would be disrupted. Unfortunately, he was able to take his money with him, which made it easier for him to re-establish his network.
Allowing him to escape Sudan may have been an error in judgment (or in tactics), but it was far from treason. And terrorism was not on the back burner.
This epitomizes the problem of having one so lawyerly in the Oval Office. Yes, we've had lawyers there before, but Clinton took legalisms to the final frontier. Some lawyers parse words in a contract such as "inveterate" or "preliminary." Clinton parsed words like "alone" and "is." He built his entire line of defense on anything he was ever accused of by using the tools of lawyerly obfuscation (and, failing that, intimidation, blackmail, and Arkancide.) He was never able to state, "On the night in question, I was not in the same state as Paula Jones. I was in Utah, and I have the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir as alibi witnesses." No, with Billy boy, it was always a misunderstanding, an unremembering, a half-truth, or an irrelevant truth used to hide a relevant crime. (A guy leaves the house, fills the car with gas, visits his mistress and comes home 90 minutes later. When asked where he was, he truthfully replies, "I filled the car with gas." With Clinton, what was omitted was always more important and more incriminating than what was said.)
So, with bin Laden, the notion of proof was too strong a burden. In war, the standard drops to somewhere below "preponderance of evidence" and not too much above "I have a hunch it's bin Laden." Clinton never got that. George W. Bush got it right away.
He finally settled *after* he had *won* in court, while Jones was appealing. What a great sense of timing!
Why is it that Conservatives always find they have to qualify themselves. Just say it. What is the point of, "See, someone else said it, not just me" ?
Are you sure you have the time-line right? The Sudanese offers to the US occurred in '96, not '98. By that time, as you know, bin Laden had moved to Afghanistan.
In any event, that's not really the point. Did the Clinton Administration fail to break the back of international terrorism? Certainly. Could they have broken its back? Probably not.
To beat al Qaeda, one would have to anticipate its every move. The Clinton Administration, and other Western governments, thwarted many terrorist attempts. (There was the guy who was caught trying to bring explosives into the US at Port Angeles, WA; there was the plot to blow up the Pope in the Phillippines; there were others.) But they, and the Bush Administration that followed, apparently did not anticipate every threat.
The FBI and the CIA are at fault, too. Yes, they answer to the President...to a degree. But Louis Freeh was famously hostile to the Clinton Admin. He fought lie-detector tests on FBI agents, as he was arguing in favor of such tests on CIA agents. Had FBI agents been subjected to lie-detector tests early on, Robert Hanssen might have been caught much earlier. And some of the intelligence that he gave to the Russians apparently made its way to al Qaeda.
The CIA? Why didn't they go to the President, requesting funds for more Pashtun-speaking agents? Because that wasn't the way they were thinking.
The Bush team failed to act on the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, issued in January of last year. They shelved it, and vowed to begin their own (redundant) study a few months later.
When the Hart-Rudman report came out, the press greeted it with a big yawn...and then got back to the business of ferreting out every last tidbit of the Marc Rich pardons, or the rumored White House vandalism, or Chandra Levy. They failed to give it due consideration.
The whole of Western society failed to grasp the threat of international terrorism and take it seriously. That all changed, forever, on Sept. 11. But it's an irrational reading of recent history to pin it all (or most of it!) on one man.
(Apologies for the length of this rant.)
Cops know that they have to come down hard on cop-killers or they will all be targets. A President (i.e. Head of State) is, and always has been, something of a symbolic figure. One President not responding seriously to an attempt to kill a former President basically announced symbolically that America was an open target with no self-respect. I think it all escalated quite naturally from that moment.
I didn't make those connections then, because I was not paying much attention to world affairs at that point. But I can at least claim to have always despised Clinton. Sometimes by maintaining a well-grounded assumption that everything a scoundrel does is likely to be wrong you can get the big picture right even if you miss all the details of his schemes and shams. That's what those who rebuke us as "Clinton-haters" don't get. Who got more right about the last two presidential terms? I would suspect it was the biased, prejudicial Clintonphobes who figured out from the start that the bum was no good.
They delivered Carlos the Jackal. Why not bin Laden?
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