In an astonishing journalistic oversight, "60 minutes" correspondent Leslie Stahl declined to confront Clarke with a stunning CIA videotape broadcast by NBC News last Tuesday that showed bin Laden walking through his compound out in the open and only lightly guarded.
Filmed by a Predator drone, the video was transmitted back to the CIA in real time, a technological feat that gave the Clinton White House more than enough time to launch cruise missiles from submarines stationed in the Arabian Sea, where they had been deployed for just that purpose.

But if Clarke knows why the ex-president failed to pull the trigger, he isn't saying. Nor did Stahl ask him about Clinton's admission a year after he left office that he turned down Sundan's offer to arrest bin Laden five years before the attacks.

Why didn’t Clinton kill Osama when he had the chance? Because he was playing golf and could not be bothered to be briefed by the CIA until it was too late!

21 posted on 03/22/2004 2:27:19 AM PST by Pontiac (Ignorance of the law is no excuse, ignorance of your rights can be fatal.)

Let this be a lesson for the next time R's take control back from D's: NO HOLDOVERS.

At the very least fire them all...then consider each as one of many applicants to get their old job back.

22 posted on 03/22/2004 2:30:12 AM PST by blanknoone (Give Kerry enough nuance, and he will hang himself.)

September 11, 2003, 11:45 a.m.
Clinton’s Loss?
How the previous administration fumbled on bin Laden.

A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Richard Miniter is a Brussels-based investigative journalist. His new book, Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror has just been released by Regnery. He spoke to NRO early today about the run-up to the war on terror.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What did the Clinton administration know about Osama bin Laden and when did they know it?

Richard Miniter: One of the big myths about the Clinton years is that no one knew about bin Laden until Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the bin Laden threat was recognized at the highest levels of the Clinton administration as early as 1993. What's more, bin Laden's attacks kept escalating throughout the Clinton administration; all told bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of 59 Americans on Clinton's watch.

President Clinton learned about bin Laden within months of being sworn into office. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake told me that he first heard the name Osama bin Laden in 1993 in relation to the World Trade Center attack. Lake briefed the president about bin Laden that same year.

In addition, starting in 1993, Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla.) repeatedly wrote to President Clinton and warned him and other administration officials about bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists. McCollum was the founder and chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and had developed a wealth of contacts among the mujihedeen in Afghanistan. Those sources, who regularly visited McCollum, informed him about bin Laden's training camps and evil ambitions.

Indeed, it is possible that Clinton and his national-security team learned of bin Laden even before the 1993 World Trade Center attack. My interviews and investigation revealed that bin Laden made his first attack on Americans was December 1992, a little more than a month after Clinton won the 1992 election. His target was 100 U.S. Marines housed in two towering Yemen hotels. Within hours, the CIA's counterterrorism center learned that the Yemen suspected a man named Osama bin Laden. (One of the arrested bombing suspects later escaped and was detained in a police sweep after al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in 2000.) Lake says he doesn't remember briefing the president-elect about the attempted attack, but that he well might have.

So it is safe to conclude that Clinton knew about the threat posed by bin Laden since 1993, his first year in office.

Lopez: What exactly was U.S. reaction to the attack on the USS Cole?

Miniter: In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the blast. The USS Cole was almost sunk. In any ordinary administration, this would have been considered an act of war. After all, America entered the Spanish-American war and World War I when our ships were attacked.

Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had ordered his staff to review existing intelligence in relation to the bombing of the USS Cole. After that review, he and Michael Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, were convinced it was the work of Osama bin Laden. The Pentagon had on-the-shelf, regularly updated and detailed strike plans for bin Laden's training camps and strongholds in Afghanistan.

At a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Attorney General Janet Reno, and other staffers, Clarke was the only one in favor of retaliation against bin Laden. Reno thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it. Tenet wanted to more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was. Albright was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims, and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process. Cohen, according to Clarke, did not consider the Cole attack "sufficient provocation" for a military retaliation. Michael Sheehan was particularly surprised that the Pentagon did not want to act. He told Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

Instead of destroying bin Laden's terrorist infrastructure and capabilities, President Clinton phoned twice phoned the president of Yemen demanding better cooperation between the FBI and the Yemeni security services. If Clarke's plan had been implemented, al Qaeda's infrastructure would have been demolished and bin Laden might well have been killed. Sept. 11, 2001 might have been just another sunny day.

Lopez: When the World Trade Center was first bombed in '93, why was it treated at first as a criminal investigation?

Miniter: The Clinton administration was in the dark about the full extent of the bin Laden menace because the president's decision to treat the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a crime. Once the FBI began a criminal investigation, it could not lawfully share its information with the CIA — without also having to share the same data with the accused terrorists. Woolsey told me about his frustration that he had less access to evidence from the World Trade Center bombing — the then-largest ever foreign terrorist attack on U.S soil — than any junior agent in the FBI's New York office.

Why did Clinton treat the attack as a law-enforcement matter? Several reasons. In the first few days, Clinton refused to believe that the towers had been bombed at all — even though the FBI made that determination within hours. He speculated a electrical transformer had exploded or a bank heist went bad.

More importantly, treating the bombing as a criminal matter was politically advantageous. A criminal matter is a relatively tidy process. It has the political benefit of insulating Clinton from consequences; after all, he was only following the law. He is not to blame if the terrorists were released on a "technicality" or if foreign nations refuse to honor our extradition requests. Oh well, he tried.

By contrast, if Clinton treated the bombing as the act of terrorism that it was, he would be assuming personal responsibility for a series of politically risky moves. Should he deploy the CIA or special forces to hunt down the perpetrators? What happens if the agents or soldiers die? What if they try to capture the terrorists and fail? One misstep and the media, Congress, and even the public might blame the president. So Clinton took the easy, safe way out, and called it a crime.

Lopez: Bill Clinton was actually offered bin Laden? Could you set the scene a little and clue us in on why, for heavens sakes, he would not take advantage of such opportunities?

Miniter: On March 3, 1996, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney, Director of East African Affairs at the State Department, David Shinn, and a member of the CIA's directorate of operations' Africa division met with Sudan's then-Minister of State for Defense Elfatih Erwa in a Rosslyn, Virginia hotel room. Item number two on the CIA's list of demands was to provide information about Osama bin Laden. Five days later, Erwa met with the CIA officer and offered more than information. He offered to arrest and turn over bin Laden himself. Two years earlier, the Sudan had turned over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal to the French. He now sits in a French prison. Sudan wanted to repeat that scenario with bin Laden in the starring role.

Clinton administration officials have offered various explanations for not taking the Sudanese offer. One argument is that an offer was never made. But the same officials are on the record as saying the offer was "not serious." Even a supposedly non-serious offer is an offer. Another argument is that the Sudanese had not come through on a prior request so this offer could not be trusted. But, as Ambassador Tim Carney had argued at the time, even if you believe that, why not call their bluff and ask for bin Laden?

The Clinton administration simply did not want the responsibility of taking Osama bin Laden into custody. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is on the record as saying: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." Even if that was true — and it wasn't — the U.S. could have turned bin Laden over to Yemen or Libya, both of which had valid warrants for his arrest stemming from terrorist activities in those countries. Given the legal systems of those two countries, Osama would have soon ceased to be a threat to anyone.

After months of debating how to respond to the Sudanese offer, the Clinton administration simply asked Sudan to deport him. Where to? Ambassador Carney told me what he told the Sudanese: "Anywhere but Somalia."

In May 1996 bin Laden was welcomed into Afghanistan by the Taliban. It could not have been a better haven for Osama bin Laden.

Steven Simon, Clinton's counterterrorism director on the National Security Council thought that kicking bin Laden out of Sudan would benefit U.S. security since "It's going to take him a while to reconstitute, and that screws him up and buys time." Buys time? Oh yeah, 1996 was an election year and team Clinton did not want to deal with bin Laden until after it was safely reelected.

Lopez: This amazes me every time I hear it: You write, "When a small plane accidentally crashed into the White House lawn in 1994, West Wing staffers joked that it was [Jim] Woolsey trying to see the president..." How could the CIA director have that bad a relationship with his president? And this, after the first WTC attack. Did no one in the West Wing get it?

Miniter: Never once in his two-year tenure did CIA director James Woolsey ever have a one-on-one meeting with Clinton. Even semiprivate meetings were rare. They only happened twice. Woolsey told me: "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn't exist."

One of the little scoops in the book is the revelation that Clinton froze Woolsey out because the CIA director refused to put a friend of Bill on the agency's payroll. This account was confirmed by both Woolsey and the Clinton's consigliore Bruce Lindsey.

Considering the Justice Department's experience with Webster Hubbell, another Friend of Bill, Woolsey's decision may have done the CIA a great deal of good. But Clinton's pique did not make America any safer from bin Laden.

Another Clinton intelligence failure involved a refusal to help the CIA hire more Arabic language translators. In 1993, Woolsey learned that the agency was able to translate only 10 percent of its Arabic intercepts and badly wanted more translators. But Sen. Dennis DeConcini refused to approve the funds unless Clinton phoned him and said it was a presidential priority. Despite entreaties, Clinton never phoned the Democratic senator and the CIA didn't get those translators for years.

Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?

Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:

1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.

2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.

3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.

4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.

6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.

7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.

8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.

9. Did not take an opportunity to take into custody two al Qaeda operatives involved in the East African embassy bombings. In another little scoop, I am able to show that Sudan arrested these two terrorists and offered them to the FBI. The Clinton administration declined to pick them up and they were later allowed to return to Pakistan.

10. Ordered an ineffectual, token missile strike against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.

11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.

12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.

15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.

16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.

Lopez: You sorta defend Clinton against "wag the dog" criticisms in regard to that infamous August 1998 (Monica times) bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and some bin Laden strongholds in Afghanistan. That wasn't the problem, was it — that we fired then?

Miniter: Certainly the timing is suspicious. The day before the East African-embassy bombings, Monica Lewinsky had recanted her prior affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Clinton. The sex scandals kicked into overdrive.

Still, the president wasn't doing too much in combating bin Laden because of his sex scandals — he was doing too little. He should have launched more missile strikes against bin Laden and the hell with the political timing. Besides, after the East African-embassy bombings, any president would have been negligent not to strike back. If he had not, it would be open season on Americans. He would have been as ineffectual as Carter was during the Tehran hostage crisis. Indeed, this was the mistake made following the attack on the USS Cole.

But Clinton was distracted by sex and campaign-finance scandals and his political support was already heavily leveraged to get him through those scandals. If he fought bin Laden more vigorously, the leftwing of the Democratic party might have deserted him — which could have cost him the White House.

Instead Clinton's token, ineffectual missile strikes that only emboldened bin Laden. He believed that America was too intimidated to fight back — and was free to plan one of the most-murderous terrorist attacks in history.

Lopez: How did George Tenet perform during the Clinton years vis-à-vis al Qaeda/bin Laden?

Miniter: Tenet seemed to take a too legalistic view of CIA operations. He was risk-averse, wanting almost absolute certainty before recommending action, focused on safeguards against error and unintended consequences. Tenet seemed more concerned with not getting in trouble rather than relentlessly pursuing results to safeguard Americans against terrorism, the focus of a warrior.

Each time U.S. intelligence pinpointed bin Laden, Tenet was against a missile strike on the grounds that the information was "single threaded" — a pet phrase of the director which means single source. The predator was armed and fitted with video cameras mostly to overcome Tenet's objections to taking out bin Laden.

Lopez: Madeline Albright — frequently called upon expert nowadays — what's her record vis-à-vis al Qaeda?

Miniter: Albright always insisted that diplomatic efforts would best yield results on bin Laden. Even after the Cole bombing, Albright urged continued diplomatic efforts with the Taliban to turn him over, even though that effort had been going on for two years with no progress. Two simple facts should have made Albright aware that the Taliban would never turn over bin Laden: Osama had married off one of his sons to Mullah Omar's daughter. The Taliban weren't about to surrender a member of the family — especially one that commanded thousands of armed fighters who helped maintain Omar's grip on power.

Lopez: What exactly is the Iraq-al Qaeda connection?

Miniter: Osama bin Laden's wealth is overestimated. He had been financially drained during his years in Sudan and financing terrorist operations in dozens of countries, including training camps, bribes, etc., requires a large, constant cash flow. Saddam Hussein was unquestionably a generous financier of terrorism. Baghdad had a long history of funding terrorist campaigns in the bin Laden-allied region that straddles Iran and Pakistan known as Beluchistan. Documents found in Baghdad in April 2003 showed that Saddam funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden since the 1990s. Saddam openly funded the Iraqi Kurdish Group and its leader, Melan Krekar, admitted that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan. George Tenet testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq had provided training in forging documents and making bombs. Farouk Harazi, a senior officer in the Iraqi Mukhabarat reportedly offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq. Salah Suleiman, an Iraqi intelligence operative, was arrested in October 2000 near the Afghan border, apparently returning from a visit to bin Laden. One of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Abdul Rahman Yasin, reportedly fled to Baghdad in 1994. Iraq ran an extensive intelligence hub in Khartoum; Sudanese intelligence officers told me about dozens of meeting between Iraqi Intel and bin Laden. Tellingly, reports that Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague several times in 2000 and 2001 have not been disproved. I have far more on this in Appendix A of Losing bin Laden.

Lopez: What most surprised you to learn about the Clinton years and terrorism?

Miniter: Three things:

1) That the Sept. 11 attacks were planned in May 1998 in the Khalden Camp in southeastern Afghanistan, according to American and British intelligence officers I interviewed. In other words, the 9/11 attacks were planned on Clinton's watch.

2) The sheer number of bin Laden's attacks on Americans during the Clinton years.

3) And how much senior Clinton-administration officials knew about bin Laden and how little they did about it.

Lopez: This sounds like this could all be right-wing propaganda. How can you convince readers otherwise?

Miniter: Most of my best sources were senior Clinton officials, including both of his national-security advisers, his first CIA director, Clinton's counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, Madeline Albright, and others. Plus, I interviewed scores of career federal officials. None of them are card-carrying members of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

And, while I shine the light on Clinton's shortcomings in dealing with bin Laden, I also give credit where it is due. Chapter nine is all about one of the greatest (and least-known) Clinton victories over bin Laden — the successful thwarting of a series of plots to murder thousands of Americans on Millennium night, 1999.

If anyone has any doubts about the credibility of this book, they should read the acknowledgements, which list many of my sources. Or peruse the more than 15,000 words of footnotes, that allow the reader to see exactly where information is coming from. Or examine the intelligence documents reproduced in Appendix B. Or pick a page at random and read it. Any fair-minded reader will see a carefully constructed and balanced account that attempts to lay out the history of Clinton and bin Laden.

23 posted on 03/22/2004 2:30:58 AM PST by kcvl

January 26, 1998

The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.

Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.

Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Sincerely,

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

24 posted on 03/22/2004 2:39:38 AM PST by kcvl

Bill Clinton's failure on terrorism

By Caspar W. Weinberger

Richard Miniter's new book, "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror," tells the sad, infuriating history of the number of opportunities President Clinton had to capture and imprison or kill the terrorist Osama bin Laden. Instead, we are still hunting. Bin Laden is still at large and alive enough to sponsor and concoct the details of the worst attack on America in our history — the destruction of the World Trade Center and the bombing of the Pentagon. What other horrors he is planning we do not know, simply because he is still uncaptured.

That reality is the sickening part of this remarkably well-researched and -sourced new book. Mr. Miniter — part of the reporting team that broke the "The Road to Ground Zero" story in the Jan. 6, 2002 London Sunday Times — has told how many real, actual and missed opportunities the Clinton administration had to capture and defang bin Laden. Why in the world would any U.S. administration not accept any and all offers to help dispose of one of the most vicious and well-financed terrorist leaders?

For several reasons, as the author points out.

The Clinton foreign policy was to get re-elected. Therefore, anything that might be controversial had to be avoided. So, from the beginning to the end of the administration, the Clintons "demanded absolute proof before acting against terrorists." This high bar guaranteed inaction. At the beginning of his term, after the attack of Feb. 26, 1993, Mr. Clinton refused to admit that the World Trade Center had been bombed. Later, he referred to it only as "regrettable" and "treated the disaster. . . like a twister in Arkansas." Earlier, he had "urged the public not to 'overreact' to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."

That attitude was typical of the Clintonites. The president did not want to hear about bad news — such as our terrible losses in October 1993, when Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu, Somalia, or the even more terrifying losses in New York. That would require a strong response which might upset some of the strange group of advisors and officials Mr. Clinton had collected. So it was with all the other missed opportunities to get bin Laden. CIA Director James Woolsey rarely had any meetings with Mr. Clinton. The president never supported Mr. Woolsey's urgent request for Arabic-language translators for the CIA in 1994. A separate feud between Mr. WoolseyandSen.Dennis DeConcini, Arizona Democrat, was allowed to run its course without direction by the Clinton White House, which further set back the CIA director's appeal for Arabic translators. So, as the author concludes, "a bureaucratic feud and President Clinton's indifference kept America blind and deaf as bin Laden plotted."

The Sudanese would offer to let the U.S. see their intelligence files and all the data they had gathered about bin Laden and the associates who had visited him in Sudan, "and would be repeatedly rebuffed through both formal and informal channels. This was one of the greatest intelligence failures of the Clinton years as the result of orders that came from the Clinton White House." Had the Clinton administration accepted and examined these files, countless terrorists could have been tracked. Sudan's offer to arrest bin Laden and deliver him to U.S. officials was likewise refused.

The Clinton Administration did try to get Saudi Arabia to accept bin Laden from Sudan, but the Saudi government apparently had as difficult a time as Mr. Clinton in making up its mind. The issue finally resolved itself thus: "The Clinton Administration refused to work with the government of Sudan," and so all the Sudanese efforts to help us by cooperating in the capture and delivery of bin Laden failed. Nothing more happens — even after Mr. Clinton won re-election in November 1996.

This is the long sad story of the Clinton Administration's blind refusal to accept offer after offer to deliver one of the world's terrorist leaders before and after his minions killed thousands in various terrorist attacks. The book is climaxed by a documented recital of the links between bin Laden's al Qaeda units and Iraq that should convince all but the most extreme Bush-haters that these links exist and continue. In all of this, we should try to remember and be grateful for the brilliant military achievements of our forces in overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

There have always been disputes within administrations. What is important is to contrast the methods President Reagan used to resolve these differences with Mr. Clinton's indecisiveness. If Mr. Reagan had so feared taking any kind of position that might become controversial or might injure his chances for re-election, as Mr. Clinton did every day, we would never have won the Cold War. "Losing bin Laden" is a valuable history that should serve as a training manual in how not to run a foreign policy.

Caspar W. Weinberger, a former Secretary of Defense, is chairman of Forbes.

25 posted on 03/22/2004 2:43:40 AM PST by kcvl

I'd like to know who it was that Woolsey refused to put on the CIA payroll.

But Sen. Dennis DeConcini refused to approve the funds unless Clinton phoned him and said it was a presidential priority.

That's about the time DeConcini went to TheWashington Post and blew the cover on the still-under-construction NRO Building.

26 posted on 03/22/2004 2:44:55 AM PST by leadpenny

Clarke has no hidden agenda, nah.

27 posted on 03/22/2004 2:50:21 AM PST by hershey

Losing Bin Laden
How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror
By Richard Miniter
Regnery Publishing
HC, 317 pg. US$27.95
ISBN: 0-8952-6074-3

Bill Clinton's sins of omission

By Carol Devine-Molin
web posted December 8, 2003

"Early in the Clinton administration, it would have been comparatively easy to smash bin Laden's emerging network. Instead the arch-terrorist's strength, reach, and lethality were allowed to relentlessly build over the course of the eight Clinton years" – Richard Miniter

It's impossible to adequately comprehend the whys and wherefores of this current "war on terror" until one grapples with the blatant mistakes of the Clinton years. And that is precisely what investigative journalist Richard Miniter has accomplished in his bestseller entitled, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror. Miniter is well equipped to examine the subject at hand, having been "a member of the award-winning Sunday Times (of London) team whose four-part series traced the secret war between Clinton and bin Laden". He's also written for a variety of topnotch publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and National Review.

The author's "on the record" interviews were from an impressive array of former Clinton administration officials including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisors Tony Lake and Sandy Berger, Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke, CIA Director James Woolsey, current CIA Director George Tenet, and Clinton pollster and political advisor Dick Morris. Miniter also spoke with myriad bureaucrats, terrorism experts and politicos such as Senator Richard Shelby, Congressman Bill McCollum, Ambassador Tim Carney, Ambassador Joe Wilson, CIA Station Chiefs Milt Bearden and Bill Piekney, scholars Michael Ledeen and Laurie Mylroie, international businessman Mansoor Ijaz, and others too numerous to cite here. All-in-all, Miniter produced an exceptionally well documented tome.

Miniter's treatise is nothing less than stunning as he methodically exposes Osama bin Laden's dirty little fingerprints on a host of terror assaults that specifically targeted American citizens and assets, both here and abroad, throughout the 1990s. Clinton's inability to effectively tackle bin Laden time and time again is bound to leave many readers emotionally exhausted. The key question is this -- could Clinton have averted September 11th? The answer is probably, if he had the wherewithal to respond to terror attacks as a national security threat. Mind you, that would have required Clinton to conceptualize al-Qaida strikes as "warfare" rather than criminal acts that constitute a "law enforcement" matter. However, Clinton was not up to the challenge. He was not a president who successfully embraced the role of "commander-in-chief", and that made all the difference. Miniter indicates that Clinton "was addicted to cautious half-measures and perhaps a lingering distrust of the US military".

As Edmund Burke averred, "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." I don't doubt for a second that Bill Clinton wanted only to bring his personal best to the presidency. But given Clinton's limitations, he was bound to experience difficulties in a wartime milieu. Author Richard Miniter found that because of Clinton's personal foibles and character flaws, he was reluctant to take political risks and often exhibited paralysis in decision making. Therefore, "Clinton responded [to terrorism] only with brave words, empty gestures, meaningless cruise-missile strikes, and halfhearted covert operations". Certainly, this is in direct contrast to the ways of President Bush, who is well capable of decisive action.

During the Clinton presidency, Osama bin Laden publicly declared war on America and western civilization on several occasions. In the decade leading-up to 9/11/01, al-Qaida and its affiliates made good on their threats against America as illustrated by the following episodes of terrorism examined in Miniter's book: The assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in NYC (1990), The Goldmore and Aden Hotels in Yemen (1992), the Twin Towers, NYC (1993), the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia (1993), the Saudi National Guard office in Riyadh, which employed about 100 Americans (1994), Project Bojinka, which plotted to bring down American commercial aircraft, and severely damaged a Philippine Airlines aircraft, killing one, in a "practice run" (1995), the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen (2000).

Chapter Six of Miniter's book entitled, "The Friend of Bill", was rather interesting if you're a fan of cable's Fox News Channel and appreciate the commentary of terrorism expert Mansoor Ijaz, which I certainly do. He's an international financier, a brilliant and extremely likeable fellow who engages in "private diplomacy" in his travels. Ijaz frequently shuttles to the Islamic world making pivotal contacts not only for business purposes, but to implement a larger goal inspired by his father. Apparently, Ijaz has the heartfelt desire to save Pakistan from radical Islam – he seeks to establish schools that develop careers for Pakistani youth and break the stronghold of madrassas that promote terrorism.

According to Miniter, Ijaz "developed the CARAT computer system that enabled his clients, institutional and private investors, to make hundreds of millions of dollars. As a result, within four years of leaving a Harvard-MIT graduate program, he was worth millions". As a major contributor to the Democratic Party, and someone who had raised over $900,000 in party donations, Ijaz naturally had the ear of Bill Clinton during the 1990s. As an unofficial conduit, "Citizen Ijaz" utilized his high-level contacts in Sudan to open a channel with the Clinton administration, thereby funneling word that Sudan was willing to provide intelligence on Osama bin Laden and fully cooperate with US counterterrorism efforts. The Sudanese leaders were reportedly distressed that their repeated attempts to have their voices heard by Clinton officials went nowhere, and they had hoped that Ijaz could intervene on their behalf.

Of course the Sudanese had a larger agenda. They were intent on distancing themselves from terrorism in order to facilitate the lifting of US and UN sanctions, which would then make foreign investments in Sudan possible. Ijaz was well aware that Sudan extended olive branches to the US on several occasions, but Ijaz was shocked by the magnitude of the offers. In a "bombshell" revelation, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir told Ijaz the following: "Are you aware that I sent General Fatih Erwa to Washington to discuss bin Laden's extradition to Saudi Arabia? Then al-Bashir explained, Sudan made an offer to send bin Laden to the United States. Neither offer was accepted". In other words, the Sudanese government was ready to serve up Osama bin Laden on a platter to the Clinton administration, if they wanted him. Amazingly, there wasn't an affirmative response from the US.

Mansoor Ijaz continued to advise the administration of Sudan's offer of "unconditional assistance on terrorism", and even spoke directly to President Clinton about this, yet all was ignored on an official level. Author Richard Miniter asks, "What if President Clinton had accepted any one of these variant offers and America's intelligence services had received the Sudanese intelligence files [on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida associates in Sudan] in 1997?"

It could have changed the course of history.

Carol Devine-Molin is a regular contributor to several online magazines.

28 posted on 03/22/2004 2:53:51 AM PST by kcvl

To: GiovannaNicoletta

State's Saddamists
By Kenneth R. Timmerman

State Department holdovers appointed during the Clinton administration have been sabotaging efforts to build an Iraqi opposition force capable of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, according to top Iraqi opposition leaders, current and former State Department officials and congressional staff. Led by Frank Ricciardone, the State Department special coordinator for transition in Iraq, the Clinton officials have blocked more than $40 million in direct aid to the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) since October 1998, when a broad bipartisan coalition in Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act aimed at toppling Saddam.

After President Bush took office, Ricciardone and his supporters at State tried to ingratiate themselves with Republican decisionmakers during long lunches and in private meetings, say informed critics, all the while continuing to undermine the INC.

Ricciardone's efforts were all the more troubling to diplomats in the region, given outspoken support for the Iraqi opposition during the last two years from Ambassadors Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, who now have been nominated for the No. 2 posts at Defense and State, respectively.

"It's absolutely critical to straighten this out quickly because people inside Iraq think we have tremendous support from the Bush administration, and this has raised their expectations," says Francis Brooke, an INC adviser in Washington. "In fact, what's happening is that three or four low-level Clinton holdovers have been blocking everything we're trying to do."

The $40 million in State Department economic support was supposed to have been used to help the INC consolidate its political structure, expand recruitment and carry out clandestine operations inside Iraq. Instead, says Sharif Ali Hussein, an INC spokesman in Washington, "We can't even make a phone call, let alone send people into Iraq."

By admittedly blocking the State Department funds, Ricciardone and his aides also blocked INC access to a separate $97 million draw-down account at the Pentagon created to train and equip an Iraqi opposition army. Under the legislation - which was signed into law by President Clinton in October 1998 and actively supported by Wolfowitz and Armitage - the Pentagon could provide goods and services to the INC but not cash. "The State Department funds were supposed to pay the travel and living expenses for people coming from overseas for DoD [Department of Defense] training," said Brooke. "We keep putting in draw-down requests, and they keep stonewalling."

The first $8 million of economic-support funds were appropriated by Congress in the fiscal 1999 budget. Of that amount, the INC received just $267,000 - not to help it train military personnel, but to hire American consultants to polish up the grant proposals Ricciardone and his aides insisted they submit to the State Department.

A second $8 million grant in fiscal 2000 similarly was waylaid, with a scant $850,000 going to the INC. Ricciardone and his aides acknowledge having blocked $25 million in fiscal 2001 money. This despite a hailstorm of complaints from leaders of both parties in Congress. They are angry that the bulk of the money has gone to high-priced Washington consultants chosen by the State Department through an opaque process that some see as a series of insider deals.

Records obtained by Insight show some $3.2 million was paid out to Quality Support Inc. of Landover, Md., to organize conferences, set up an office in London and provide administrative services to the INC. Another $215,000 went to Burson-Marsteller for public relations. The Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank in favor with the Clinton administration, was given a grant to conduct policy seminars. Separate grants to gather evidence for potential war-crimes prosecution of Saddam Hussein was awarded to the Human Rights Alliance, a group run by Kathryn Porter, the outspoken spouse of former congressman John Porter, and to the London-based group Indict.

"The INC had problems with its bookkeeping," said a State Department official working under Ricciardone who spoke to Insight on condition of anonymity. "Until just recently, they had no legal standing. We had to get them incorporated before they could receive funds under the program. That's why the money had to be paid out through consultants," he tells Insight.

The legal nitpicking by Ricciardone and Iraq desk officers Rebecca J. King, Kathy Allegrone, Sherri G. Kraham and Filo Dibble is absurd even on its face, say critics. Just five years ago, the INC was not an exile group but a government in charge of liberated areas in northern Iraq. Between 1992 and 1996, the INC conducted two successive parliamentary elections - the first free elections since the 1958 revolution.

Then, in August 1996, the Clinton administration let the plug be pulled, allowing Saddam to invade the north under the very noses of U.S. peacekeepers and drive the INC into exile. Hundreds of INC officials and sympathizers were rounded up by Saddam's security forces and still are missing. At least 96 were executed on the spot. Another 6,000 fled to Turkey, eventually making their way to the United States.

"I was sitting there on the border, counting refugees," recalls Ricciardone, who was a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Turkey at the time. "So this is a mission I believe in. I really want to see these programs go forward. But the INC has to be businesslike," he told Insight.

Ricciardone says he "can't recall" how the State Department happened to select Quality Support to run the Iraqi programs. Others were not so cautious. "This was a no-compete contract hot-wired to a minority business that was a recognized State Department vendor," said one official who worked on the project.

According to Ricciardone and others in his office interviewed by Insight, it was the fact that the INC was not incorporated that led them to ask Quality Support in early 1998 to set up an office for the INC in London, the heart of the Iraqi exile community. But documents obtained by Insight show that Quality Support didn't file its own incorporation documents in London until June 29, 1999, and used the office it had just rented for the INC as its legal address.

The INC already had an office in London and didn't need big-dollar U.S. consultants to rent another one. But Quality Support found the INC's warehouse on the outskirts of London unsuitable and quickly moved to an 18th-century town house at 17 Cavendish Square, a swank neighborhood within spitting distance of the U.S. Embassy and Hyde Park.

Quality Support brought over Americans to staff the office - travel agents, computer programmers, even an Iraqi Kurd from Montana ("as if there weren't enough Iraqis in London," quipped an INC activist). They paid $200 per square foot for the cushy digs at Cavendish Square, more than double the going rate in central London. The bill to U.S. taxpayers: $114,000 for just the eight months from May through December 1999, according to contract documents obtained by Insight. The benefit to the INC and to U.S. policy goals: zero.

Quality Support founder and President Wayne M. Gatewood refused to comment on this story despite repeated phone calls. But Ricciardone and his staff were quick to defend him. "Quality Support was audited and actually returned money to us at the end of its contract," one of Ricciardone's deputies tells Insight. The State Department declined to provide the audit.

In a conference organized at Ricciardone's behest, Quality Support brought 300 Iraqi exiles to New York for a "national assembly" in October 1999 that cost U.S. taxpayers $2.1 million, or $7,000 per head. Why did it cost so much? For one thing, Quality Support insisted on buying all the tickets through its own travel agent at well above the going rates.

A few examples: One INC member, whose name Insight agreed not to publish, offered to buy his own round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to New York for $344 to attend the conference. Quality Support refused, insisting on overnighting him a full-fare ticket that cost U.S. taxpayers $1,800. INC members in London offered to buy tickets for less than $500, but Quality Support turned them down, giving the business to its own travel agent. Those tickets cost an average of $2,000 each. The micromanaging by Ricciardone's State Department aides so alienated some members of the opposition that they stayed away, convinced that no good would come of it.

By comparison, the INC organized a successful conference in London with 60 participants who came in from all over the world for $55,000, or less than $1,000 per person.

At one point, the expenses racked up by Gatewood and his assistant, Lydia M. Miller, became so excessive even Ricciardone's State Department aides became alarmed. "Generally, we have been funding approximately 20 travelers per month" between Quality Support headquarters in the Washington area and London, the State Department's Kraham faxed her colleague Allegrone in London in September 1999. "If we want to further reduce this that would cut some expenses."

In 1999 alone, Quality Support billed U.S. taxpayers $249,412 for office space and $639,000 for staffing and nonitemized "office support," according to internal documents obtained by Insight. One bill included a $142,359 "handling charge," or commission. Another billed taxpayers $218,000 for a so-called lobbying mission at the United Nations in New York.

"Quality Support's mandate was to pile up money on the street and burn it," INC adviser Brooke tells Insight.

But why? The short answer is politics: The Clinton administration preferred the appearance of keeping Saddam Hussein "in his box" to the risk of openly confronting him. But it also was personalities, say insiders. The INC's most prominent spokesman, Ahmad Chalabi, just rubbed Ricciardone and other Clinton-administration officials the wrong way.

The Iraqi and his plans to reinsert Iraqi opposition fighters inside the country and lay the groundwork for a popular insurgency against Saddam also flamed out with the U.S. Central Command's commander, Marine Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, and with the top Middle East advisers at the Clinton White House, Kenneth Pollock and CIA analyst Ellen Laipson, who feared another Bay of Pigs fiasco. Faced with an overwhelming bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting the INC, say insiders, Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose to accept legislation funding Iraqi opposition activities while doing everything in their power to frustrate them.

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey believes his successors shifted away from supporting the opposition in 1995 in favor of a military coup against Saddam. "John Deutch came back from a White House meeting with [George] Tenet and said: `Bring me the head of Saddam,'" Woolsey tells Insight. Former CIA officer Warren Marek, who was on the ground in northern Iraq when the White House pulled the plug on the INC in 1996, agrees. "Clinton's National Security Council got this idea of an officer on a white horse capable of pulling off a coup."

But Saddam has shown an uncanny ability to sense coup plotters before they even start to move. When he crushed a CIA-backed coup plot in mid-1996, he also dealt a devastating blow to U.S. credibility.

Despite the setbacks, Chalabi remains confident: "We have officers all over the United States begging to join our military forces. I told them only 30 percent would qualify for training." Chalabi and other INC officials say they are ready to insert newly trained INC operatives into Iraq, initially on intelligence missions.

The INC plans to hold a London conference on Iraqi war crimes in the next few weeks, to step up its military training program, to launch satellite-TV broadcasts and to distribute food and medicine into areas under Saddam's control.

But none of that will happen until there's a change at the State Department. "The INC is changing its program so that it's no longer what we initially agreed to," complained a Ricciardone aide. "We have serious questions. They can't even give us a list of employees and what they do!"

Ricciardone tells Insight, "I'm disappointed in the INC." While not disputing the facts presented here, he accuses the group of shoddy bookkeeping and of going behind his back to members of Congress and the press to win support. "After this, I'm not sure I'll be able to trust them again."

29 posted on 03/22/2004 3:03:59 AM PST by kcvl

I have a feeling we may get some further insight into Clarke's background and motives when Imus has the former FBI Agent and terrorism expert on this morning. His name is Libscomb and I'm not sure what time he will be on. He was not originally scheduled and in the past he has always told it like it is.

30 posted on 03/22/2004 3:12:26 AM PST by leadpenny

Chris Whitcomb, and he'll be on in a few minutes.

31 posted on 03/22/2004 3:22:16 AM PST by leadpenny

[The quote about the president approving a bin Laden strike only to be thwarted by the CIA director is under the section titled “The Battle Intensifies” slightly over half way through this long article]

December 30, 2001
Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Inside the White House situation room on the morning terrorism transformed America, Franklin C. Miller, the director for defense policy, was suddenly gripped by a staggering fear: "The White House could be hit. We could be going down."

The reports and rumors came in a torrent: A car bomb had exploded at the State Department. The Mall was in flames. The Pentagon had been destroyed. Planes were bearing down on the capital.

The White House was evacuated, leaving the national security team alone, trying to control a nation suddenly under siege and wondering if they were next. Mr. Miller had an aide send out the names of those present by e-mail "so that when and if we died, someone would know who was in there."

Somewhere in the havoc of the moment, Richard A. Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism chief, recalled the long drumbeat of warnings about terrorists striking on American soil, many of them delivered and debated in that very room. After a third hijacked jet had sliced into the Pentagon, others heard Mr. Clarke say it first: "This is Al Qaeda."

An extensive review of the nation's antiterrorism efforts shows that for years before Sept. 11, terror experts throughout the government understood the apocalyptic designs of Osama bin Laden. But the top leaders never reacted as if they believed the country was as vulnerable as it proved to be that morning.

Dozens of interviews with current and former officials demonstrate that even as the threat of terrorism mounted through eight years of the Clinton administration and eight months of President Bush, the government did not marshal its full forces against it.

The defensive work of tightening the borders and airport security was studied but never quite completed. And though the White House undertook a covert campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden, the government never mustered the critical mass of political will and on-the-ground intelligence for the kind of offensive against Al Qaeda it unleashed this fall.

The rising threat of the Islamic jihad movement was first detected by United States investigators after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The inquiry into that attack revealed a weakness in the immigration system used by one of the terrorists, but that hole was never plugged, and it was exploited by one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. And President Bill Clinton's own pollster told him the public would rally behind a war on terrorism. But none was declared.

By 1997, the threat of an Islamic attack on America was so well recognized that an F.B.I. agent warned of it in a public speech. But that same year, a strategy for tightening airline security, proposed by a vice- presidential panel, was largely ignored.

In 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the country with explosives, a secret White House review recommended a crackdown on "potential sleeper cells in the United States." That review warned that "the threat of attack remains high" and laid out a plan for fighting terrorism. But most of that plan remained undone.

Last spring, when new threats surfaced, the Bush administration devised a new strategy, which officials said included a striking departure from previous policy — an extensive C.I.A. program to arm the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That new proposal had wound its way to the desk of the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and was ready to be delivered to the president for final approval on Monday, Sept. 10.

The government's fight against terrorism always seemed to fall short.

The Sept. 11 attack "was a systematic failure of the way this country protects itself," said James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence. "It's aviation security delegated to the airlines, who did a lousy job. It's a fighter aircraft deployment failure. It's a foreign intelligence collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a visa and immigration policy failure."

The Clinton administration intensified efforts against Al Qaeda after two United States Embassies in Africa were bombed in 1998. But by then, the terror network had gone global — "Al Qaeda became Starbucks," said Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official — with cells across Europe, Africa and beyond.

Even so, according to the interviews and documents, the government response to terrorism remained measured, even halting, reflecting the competing interests and judgments involved in fighting an ill-defined foe.

The main weapon in President Clinton's campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants was cruise missiles, which are fired from thousands of miles away. While that made it difficult to hit Mr. bin Laden as he moved around Afghanistan, the president was reluctant to put American lives at risk.

But a basic problem throughout the fight against terrorism has been the lack of inside information. The C.I.A. was surprised repeatedly by Mr. bin Laden, not so much because it failed to pay attention, but because it lacked sources inside Al Qaeda. There were no precise warnings of impending attacks, and the C.I.A. could not provide an exact location for Mr. bin Laden, which was essential to the objective of killing him.

At the F.B.I., it was not until last year that all field offices were ordered to get engaged in the war on terrorism and develop sources. Inside the bureau, the seminars and other activities that accompanied these orders were nicknamed "Terrorism for Dummies," a stark acknowledgment of how far the agency had not come in the seven years since the first trade center attack.

"I get upset when I hear complaints from Congress that the F.B.I. is not sharing its intelligence," said a former senior law enforcement official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. "The problem is that there isn't any to share. There is very little. And the stuff we can share is not worth sharing."

Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency said that they had some success in foiling Al Qaeda plots, but that the structure of the group made it difficult to penetrate. "It is understandable, but unrealistic, especially given our authorities and resources, to expect us to be perfect," said Bill Harlow, a C.I.A. spokesman.

The reasons the government was not more single-minded in attacking Al Qaeda will be examined exhaustively and from every angle by Congress and others in the years ahead.

In an era of opulence and invincibility, the threat of terrorism never took root as a dominant political issue. Mr. bin Laden's boldest attack on American property before Sept. 11 — the embassy bombings — came in the same summer that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was engulfing President Clinton. A full fight against terrorism might have meant the sacrifice of money, individual liberties and, perhaps, lives — and even then without any guarantee of success.

Mr. Clarke, until recently the White House director of counterterrorism, warned of the threat for years and reached this conclusion: "Democracies don't prepare well for things that have never happened before."

The First Warning
A Horrible Surprise At the Trade Center

On Feb. 26, 1993 — a month after Bill Clinton took office, having vowed to focus on strengthening the domestic economy "like a laser" — the World Trade Center was bombed by Islamic extremists operating from Brooklyn and New Jersey. Six people were killed, and hundreds injured.

Today, American experts see that attack as the first of many missed warnings. "In retrospect, the wake-up call should have been the 1993 World Trade Center bombing," said Michael Sheehan, counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department in the last years of the Clinton presidency.

The implications of the F.B.I.'s investigation were disturbingly clear: A dangerous phenomenon had taken root. Young Muslims who had fought with the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in the 1980's had taken their jihad to American shores.

The F.B.I. was "caught almost totally unaware that these guys were in here," recalled Robert M. Blitzer, a former senior counterterrorism official in the bureau's headquarters. "It was alarming to us that these guys had been coming and going since 1985 and we didn't know."

One of the names that surfaced in the bombing case was that of a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden, F.B.I. officials say. Mr. bin Laden, they learned, was financing the Office of Services, a Pakistan-based group involved in organizing the new jihad. And it turned out that the mastermind of the trade center attack, Ramzi Yousef, had stayed for several months in a Pakistani guest house supported by Mr. bin Laden.

But if the first World Trade Center bombing raised the consciousness of some at the F.B.I., it had little lasting resonance for the White House. Mr. Clinton, who would prove gifted at leading the nation through sorrowful occasions, never visited the site. Congress tightened immigration laws, but the concern about porous borders quickly dissipated and the new rules were never put in effect.

Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman who was budget director and later chief of staff during Mr. Clinton's first term, said senior aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Mr. Panetta said. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies. That approach, which called for grand jury indictments, created its own problems.

The trade center investigation produced promising leads that pointed overseas. But Mr. Woolsey said in an interview that this material was not shared with the C.I.A. because of rules governing grand jury secrecy.

The C.I.A. faced its own obstacles, former agency officials say. In the wake of the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the agency virtually abandoned the region, leaving it with few sources of information about the rising radical threat.

Looking back, George Stephanopoulos, the president's adviser for policy and strategy in his first term, said he believed the 1993 attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

He added: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"

Two years later, however, terrorism moved to the forefront of the national agenda when a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

President Clinton visited Oklahoma City for a memorial service, signaling the political import of the event. "We're going to have to be very, very tough in dealing with this," he declared in an interview.

Mr. Panetta said that plans to reorganize the government's counterterrorism efforts were quickly revived. Senior officials recognized that the United States remained vulnerable to terrorism. The bombing proved to be the work of two Americans, both former soldiers, but if Oklahoma City could be hit, an attack by terrorists of any stripe could "happen at the White House," Mr. Panetta said.

Two months after the bombing, Mr. Clinton ordered the government to intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf battles among them.

But it did put Mr. bin Laden, who had set up operations in Sudan after leaving Afghanistan in 1991, front and center.

Diplomacy and Politics
A Growing Effort Against bin Laden

As Mr. Clinton prepared his re-election bid in 1996, the administration made several crucial decisions. Recognizing the growing significance of Mr. bin Laden, the C.I.A. created a virtual station, code-named Alex, to track his activities around the world.

In the Middle East, American diplomats pressed the hard-line Islamic regime of Sudan to expel Mr. bin Laden, even if that pushed him back into Afghanistan.

To build support for this effort among Middle Eastern governments, the State Department circulated a dossier that accused Mr. bin Laden of financing radical Islamic causes around the world.

The document implicated him in several attacks on Americans, including the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had stayed on their way to Somalia. It also said Mr. bin Laden's associates had trained the Somalis who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu in 1993.

Sudanese officials met with their C.I.A. and State Department counterparts and signaled that they might turn Mr. bin Laden over to another country. Saudi Arabia and Egypt were possibilities.

State Department and C.I.A. officials urged both Egypt and Saudi Arabia to accept him, according to former Clinton officials. "But both were afraid of the domestic reaction and refused," one recalled.

Critics of the administration's effort said this was an early missed opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda. Mr. Clinton himself would have had to lean hard on the Saudi and Egyptian governments. The White House believed no amount of pressure would change the outcome, and Mr. Clinton risked spending valuable capital on a losing cause. "We were not about to have the president make a call and be told no," one official explained.

Sudan obliquely hinted that it might turn Mr. bin Laden over to the United States, a former official said. But the Justice Department reviewed the case and concluded in the spring of 1996 that it did not have enough evidence to charge him with the attacks on American troops in Yemen and Somalia.

In May 1996, Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden, confiscating some of his substantial fortune. He moved his organization to Afghanistan, just as an obscure group known as the Taliban was taking control of the country.

Clinton administration officials counted it as a positive step. Mr. bin Laden was on the run, deprived of the tacit state sponsorship he had enjoyed in Sudan.

"He lost his base and momentum," said Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser in his second term.

In July 1996, shortly after Mr. bin Laden left Sudan, Mr. Clinton met at the White House with Dick Morris, his political adviser, to hone themes for his re-election campaign.

The previous month, a suicide bomber had detonated a truck bomb at a military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Days later, T.W.A. Flight 800 had exploded off Long Island, leaving 230 people dead in a crash that was immediately viewed as terrorism.

Mr. Morris said he had devised an attack advertisement of the sort that Senator Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, might use against Mr. Clinton and had shown it to a sampling of voters. Seven percent of those who saw it said they would switch from Mr. Clinton to Mr. Dole.

"Out of control. Two airline disasters. One linked to terrorism," the advertisement said. "F.A.A. asleep at the switch. Terror in Saudi Arabia." Mr. Morris said he told Mr. Clinton that he could neutralize such a line of attack by adopting tougher policies on terrorism and airport security. He said his polls had found support for tightening security and confronting terrorists. Voters favored military action against suspected terrorist installations in other countries. They backed a federal takeover of airport screening and even supported deployment of the military inside the United States to fight terrorism.

Mr. Morris said he tried and failed to persuade the president to undertake a broader war on terrorism.

Mr. Clinton declined repeated requests for an interview, but a spokeswoman, Julia Payne, said: "Terrorism was always a top priority in the Clinton administration. The president chose to get his foreign policy advice from the likes of Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright and not Dick Morris."

On July 25, Mr. Clinton announced that he had put Vice President Al Gore at the head of a commission on aviation safety and security. Within weeks, the panel had drafted more than two dozen recommendations. Its final report, in February 1997, added dozens more.

Among the most important, commission members said, was a proposal that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. share information about suspected terrorists for the databases maintained by each airline. If a suspected terrorist bought a ticket, both the airline and the government would find out.

Progress was slow, particularly after federal investigators determined that the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 resulted from a mechanical flaw, not terrorism. The commission's recommendation languished — until Sept. 11, when two people already identified by the government as suspected terrorists boarded separate American Airlines flights from Boston using their own names.

That morning, no alarms went off. The system proposed by the Gore commission was still not in place. The government is now moving to share more information with the airlines about suspected terrorists.

"Unfortunately, it takes a dramatic event to focus the government's and public's attention, especially on an issue as amorphous as terrorism," said Gerry Kauvar, staff director of the commission and now a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.

Focusing on Al Qaeda
A Clearer Picture, A Disjointed Fight

As Mr. Clinton began his second term, American intelligence agencies were assembling a clearer picture of the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which was making substantial headway in Afghanistan.

A few months earlier, the first significant defector from Al Qaeda had walked into an American Embassy in Africa and provided a detailed account of the organization's operations and ultimate objectives.

The defector, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, told American officials that Mr. bin Laden had taken aim at the United States and other Western governments, broadening his initial goal of overthrowing Saudi Arabia and other "infidel" Middle Eastern governments.

He said that Al Qaeda was trying to buy a nuclear bomb and other unconventional weapons. Mr. bin Laden was also trying to form an anti-American terrorist front that would unite radical groups. But Mr. Fadl's statements were not widely circulated within the government. A senior official said their significance was not fully understood by Mr. Clinton's top advisers until his public testimony in 2000.

The war against Al Qaeda remained disjointed. While the State Department listed Mr. bin Laden as a financier of terror in its 1996 survey of terrorism, Al Qaeda was not included on the list of terrorist organizations subject to various sanctions released by the United States in 1997.

The F.B.I.'s counterterrorism experts, who were privy to Mr. Fadl's debriefings, were growing increasingly concerned about Islamic terrorism. "Almost all of the groups today, if they chose, have the ability to strike us in the United States," John P. O'Neill, a senior F.B.I. official involved in counterterrorism, warned in a June 1997 speech.

The task, Mr. O'Neill said, was to "nick away" at terrorists' ability to operate in the United States. (Mr. O'Neill left the F.B.I. this year for a job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on Sept. 11.)

As Mr. O'Neill spoke in Chicago, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. was homing in on a Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.

The National Security Agency began eavesdropping on telephone lines used by Al Qaeda members in the country. On several occasions, calls to Mr. bin Laden's satellite phone in Afghanistan were overheard. The F.B.I. and C.I.A. searched a house in Kenya, seizing a computer and questioning Wadih El-Hage, an American citizen working as Mr. bin Laden's personal secretary.

American officials counted the operations as a success and believed they had disrupted a potentially dangerous terrorist cell. They were proved wrong on Aug. 7, 1998, when truck bombs were detonated outside the United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring more than 5,000.

Stunned by the plot's ambition and precision, Mr. Clinton vowed to punish the perpetrators, who were quickly identified as Al Qaeda adherents. "No matter how long it takes or where it takes us," the president said, "we will pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and justice is done."

The political calculus, however, had changed markedly since the president's triumph in the fall of 1996, and Mr. Clinton was in no position to mount a sustained war against terrorism.

His administration was weighed down by a scandal over his relationship with a White House intern. Mr. Clinton was about to acknowledge to a grand jury that his public and private denials of the affair had been misleading. Republicans depicted every foreign policy decision as an attempt to distract voters.

Thirteen days after the embassy bombings, President Clinton nonetheless ordered cruise missile strikes on a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that officials said was linked to Mr. bin Laden and chemical weapons.

But the volley of cruise missiles proved a setback for American counterterrorism efforts. The C.I.A. had been told that Mr. bin Laden and his entourage were meeting at the camp, but the missiles struck just a few hours after he left. And the owner of the pharmaceutical factory came forward to claim that it had nothing to do with chemical weapons, raising questions about whether the Sudan strike had been in error.

The Clinton administration stood by its actions, but several former officials said the criticism had an effect on the pursuit of Al Qaeda: Mr. Clinton became even more cautious about using force against terrorists.

Unfortunately, the quarry was becoming more dangerous. In the two years since leaving Sudan, Mr. bin Laden had built a formidable base in Afghanistan. He lavished millions of dollars on the impoverished Taliban regime and in exchange was allowed to operate a network of training camps that attracted Islamic militants from all over the world. In early 1998, just as he declared war on Americans everywhere in the world, he cemented an alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a ruthless and effective group whose leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was known for his operational skills.

The Battle Intensifies
Struggling to Track 'Enemy No. 1'

In the years after the embassy bombings, the Clinton administration significantly stepped up its efforts to destroy Al Qaeda, tracking its finances, plotting military strikes to wipe out its leadership and prosecuting its members for the bombings and other crimes. "From August 1998, bin Laden was Enemy No. 1," Mr. Berger said.

The campaign had the support of President Clinton and his senior aides. But former administration officials acknowledge that it never became the government's top priority.

When it came to Pakistan, for example, American diplomats continued to weigh the war on terrorism against other pressing issues, including the need to enlist Islamabad's help in averting a nuclear exchange with India.

Similarly, a proposal to vastly enhance the Treasury Department's ability to track global flows of terrorist money languished until after Sept. 11. And American officials were reluctant to press the oil-rich Saudis to crack down on charities linked to radical causes.

Still, the fight against Al Qaeda gained new, high-level attention after the embassy attacks, present and former officials say. Between 1998 and 2000, the "Small Group" of the Cabinet-rank principals involved in national security met almost every week on terrorism, and the Counterterrorism Security Group, led by Mr. Clarke, met two or three times a week, officials said.

The United States disrupted some Qaeda cells, and persuaded friendly intelligence services to arrange the arrest and transfer of Al Qaeda members without formal extradition or legal proceedings. Dozens were quietly sent to Egypt and other countries to stand trial.

President Clinton also ordered a more aggressive program of covert action, signing an intelligence order that allowed him to use lethal force against Mr. bin Laden. Later, this was expanded to include as many as a dozen of his top lieutenants, officials said.

On at least four occasions, Mr. Clinton sent the C.I.A. a secret "memorandum of notification," authorizing the government to kill or capture Mr. bin Laden and, later, other senior operatives. The C.I.A. then briefed members of Congress about those plans.

The C.I.A. redoubled its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden's movements, stationing submarines in the Indian Ocean to await the president's launch order. To hit Mr. bin Laden, the military said it needed to know where he would be 6 to 10 hours later — enough time to review the decision in Washington and program the cruise missiles.

That search proved frustrating. Officials said the C.I.A. did have some spies within Afghanistan. On at least three occasions between 1998 and 2000, the C.I.A. told the White House it had learned where Mr. bin Laden was and where he might soon be.

Each time, Mr. Clinton approved the strike. Each time, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, called the president to say that the information was not reliable enough to be used in an attack, a former senior Clinton administration official said.

In late 1998, according to former officials, intelligence agents reported that Abu Hafs, a Mauritanian and an important figure in Al Qaeda, was staying in Room 13 at the Dana Hotel in Khartoum.

With such specific information in hand, White House officials wanted Abu Hafs either killed or, preferably, captured and transferred out of Sudan to a friendly state where he could be interrogated, the former officials said.

The agency initially questioned whether it could accomplish such a mission in a hostile, risky environment like Sudan, putting it in the "too hard to do box," one former official said. An intelligence official disputed this account, saying the C.I.A. made "a full-tilt effort in a very dangerous environment."

Eventually, the C.I.A. enlisted another government to help seize Abu Hafs, a former official said, but by then it was too late. The target had disappeared.

Officials said the White House pushed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop plans for a commando raid to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. But the chairman, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and other senior Pentagon officers told Mr. Clinton's top national security aides that they would need to know Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts 12 to 24 hours in advance.

Pentagon planners also considered a White House request to send a hunter team of commandos, small enough to avoid detection, the officer said. General Shelton discounted this option as naïve, the officer said.

White House officials were frustrated that the Pentagon could not produce plans that involved a modest number of troops. Military planners insisted that an attack on Al Qaeda required thousands of troops invading Afghanistan. "When you said this is what it would take, no one was interested," a senior officer said.

A former administration official recently defended the decision not to employ a commando strike. "It would have been an assault without the kind of war we've seen over the last three months to support it," the official said. "And it would have been very unlikely to succeed."

Clinton administration officials also began trying to choke off Al Qaeda's financial network. Shortly after the embassy bombings, the United States began threatening states and financial institutions with sanctions if they failed to cut off assistance to those who did business with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In 1999 and early 2000, some $255 million of Taliban-controlled assets was blocked in United States accounts, according to William F. Wechsler, a former White House official.

Mr. Wechsler said the search for Al Qaeda's assets was often stymied by poor cooperation from Middle Eastern and South Asian states.

The United States, too, he added, had problems. "Few intelligence officials who understand the nuances of the global banking system" were fluent in Arabic. While the C.I.A. had done a "reasonably good job" analyzing Al Qaeda, he wrote, it was "poor" at developing sources within Mr. bin Laden's financial network. The F.B.I., he argued, had similar shortcomings.

Senior officials were frustrated by the C.I.A.'s inability to find hard facts about Al Qaeda's financial operations.

Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had amassed considerable detail about the group's finances, and that information was used in the broad efforts to freeze its accounts after Sept. 11.

At the State Department, officials reacted sharply to the assault on the embassies. Michael Sheehan, the department's former counterterrorism coordinator, said that after the bombings, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright met with her embassy security director every morning and became increasingly focused on efforts to protect her employees and installations.

But to Mr. Sheehan, the response was inadequate. He believed that terrorism could be contained only if Washington devised a "comprehensive political strategy to pressure Pakistan and other neighbors and allies into isolating not only Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but the Taliban and others who provide them sanctuary," he said, and that did not happen. There were competing priorities. "Our reaction was responsive, almost never proactive," he said.

'We Were Flying Blind'
An Arrest, a Review And New Obstacles

The arrest of Ahmed Ressam was the clearest sign that Osama bin Laden was trying to bring the jihad to the United States.

Mr. Ressam was arrested when he tried to enter the United States in Port Angeles, Wash., on Dec. 14, 1999. Inside his rental car, agents found 130 pounds of bomb-making chemicals and detonator components.

His arrest helped reveal what intelligence officials later concluded was a Qaeda plot to unleash attacks during the millennium celebrations, aimed at an American ship in Yemen, tourist sites and a hotel in Jordan, and unknown targets in the United States.

"That was a wake-up call," a senior law enforcement officer said, "not for law enforcement and intelligence, but for policy makers." Just as the embassy bombings had exposed the threat of Al Qaeda overseas, the millennium plot revealed gaping vulnerabilities at home.

"If you understood Al Qaeda, you knew something was going to happen," said Robert M. Bryant, who was the deputy director of the F.B.I. when he retired in 1999. "You knew they were going to hit us, but you didn't know where. It just made me sick on Sept. 11. I cried when those towers came down."

A White House review of American defenses in March 2000 found significant shortcomings in nearly a decade of government efforts to improve defenses against terrorists at home. The F.B.I. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, it said, should begin "high tempo, ongoing operations to arrest, detain and deport potential sleeper cells in the United States."

The review called for the government to greatly expand its antiterrorism efforts inside the United States, creating an additional dozen joint federal-local task forces like the one that had been set up in New York.

The review identified particular weaknesses in the nation's immigration controls, officials said. The government remained unable to track foreigners in the United States on student visas, despite a 1996 law passed after the first World Trade Center bombing that required it to do so.

In June 2000, after the millennium plot was revealed, the National Commission on Terrorism recommended that the immigration service set up a system to keep tabs on foreign students. Academic institutions opposed the recommendation, fearing that a strict reporting requirement might alienate prospective foreign students, according to government officials. Nothing changed.

As the commission was completing its work, the Sept. 11 hijackers began entering the United States. One of the 19 hijackers, Hani Hanjour, who had traveled on a student visa, failed to show up for school and remained in the country illegally.

The F.B.I. had some problems of its own. It had no intelligence warning of an attack on Los Angeles International Airport, which investigators eventually learned was Mr. Ressam's intended target.

Beginning in 1997, senior officials at the bureau had begun to rethink their approach to terrorism, viewing it now as a crime to be prevented rather than solved. But it was the millennium plot that revealed how ill equipped the bureau was to radically shift its culture, former officials say.

It lacked informers within terrorist groups. It did not have the computer and analytical capacity for integrating disparate pieces of information.

"We did not have any actionable intelligence," one senior official said. "We were flying blind."

In March 2000, Dale L. Watson, the F.B.I.'s assistant director for counterterrorism, started a series of seminars with agents who headed the bureau's 56 field offices. Each field office was required to establish a joint terrorism task force with local police departments, modeled after the arrangement begun in New York in the mid-1980's. Field office chiefs were also told to hire more Arabic translators and develop better sources of information.

Mr. Watson said that the meetings were a centerpiece of efforts to shore up the bureau's counterterrorism work that had begun several years earlier. The meetings, he said, were "designed to bring every office, no matter how small, to the same top terrorism capacities resident in our larger offices like New York."

The F.B.I. renewed its push on Capitol Hill for money to create a computer system that would allow various field offices to share and analyze information collected by agents. Until late last year, Congress had refused to pay for the project.

Without the analytical aid of a computer system, Mr. Bryant said, the bureau's counterterrorism program would be hobbled, particularly if the goal was to avert a crime. "We didn't know what we had," he said. "We didn't know what we knew."

Overseas, the Clinton administration searched for new ways to obtain the intelligence needed to attack Mr. bin Laden. In September 2000, an unarmed, unmanned spy plane called the Predator flew test flights over Afghanistan, providing what several administration officials called incomparably detailed real-time video and photographs of the movements of what appeared to be Mr. bin Laden and his aides.

The White House pressed ahead with a program to arm the Predator with a missile, but the effort was slowed by bureaucratic infighting between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. over who would pay for the craft and who would have ultimate authority over its use. The dispute, officials said, was not resolved until after Sept. 11.

On Oct. 12, an explosive-laden dinghy piloted by two suicide bombers exploded next to the American destroyer Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. Intelligence analysts linked the bombing to Al Qaeda, but at a series of Cabinet-level meetings, Mr. Tenet of the C.I.A. and senior F.B.I. officials said the case was not conclusive.

Mr. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism director, had no doubts about whom to punish. In late October, officials said, he put on the table an idea he had been pushing for some time: bombing Mr. bin Laden's largest training camps in Afghanistan.

With the administration locked in a fevered effort to broker a peace settlement in Israel, an election imminent and the two- term Clinton administration coming to a close, the recommendation went nowhere. Terrorism was not raised as an issue by either Vice President Al Gore or George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign.

In October 2000, the administration took another shot at killing Mr. bin Laden. When Mr. Berger called the president to tell him the effort had failed, he recalled, Mr. Clinton cursed. "Just keep trying," he said.

The New Team
Seeing the Threat But Moving Slowly

As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning.

According to both of them, he said that terrorism — and particularly Mr. bin Laden's brand of it — would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined.

A month later, with the administration still getting organized, Mr. Tenet, whom President Bush had asked to stay on at the C.I.A., warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda remained "the most immediate and serious threat" to security. But until Sept. 11, the people at the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything, have been less preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.

At the C.I.A., according to former Clinton administration officials, Mr. Tenet's actions did not match his words. For example, one intelligence official said, the C.I.A. station in Pakistan remained understaffed and underfinanced, though the C.I.A. denied that.

In March, the White House's Counterterrorism Security Group began drafting its own strategy for combating Al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke was still nominally in charge, but Bush aides were on the way to approving Mr. Clarke's recommendation that his group be divided into several new offices.

Mr. Bush's principals did not formally meet to discuss terrorism in late spring when intercepts from Afghanistan warned that Al Qaeda was planning to attack an American target in late June or perhaps over the July 4 holiday.

They did not meet even after intelligence analysts overheard conversations from a Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that Mr. bin Laden's agents might be plotting to kill Mr. Bush at the European summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, in late July.

Administration officials say the president was concerned about the growing threat and frustrated by the halfhearted efforts to thwart Al Qaeda. In July, Ms. Rice said, Mr. Bush likened the response to the Qaeda threat to "swatting at flies." He said he wanted a plan to "bring this guy down."

The administration's draft plan for fighting Al Qaeda included a $200 million C.I.A. program that, among other things, would arm the Taliban's enemies. Clinton administration officials had refused to provide significant money and arms to the Northern Alliance, which was composed mostly of ethnic minorities. Officials feared that large-scale support for the rebels would involve the United States too deeply in a civil war and anger Pakistan.

President Bush's national security advisers approved the plan on Sept. 4, a senior administration official said, and it was to be presented to the president on Sept. 10. (However, the leader of the Northern Alliance was assassinated by Qaeda agents on Sept. 9.) Mr. Bush was traveling on Sept. 10 and did not receive it.

The next day his senior national security aides gathered shortly before 9 a.m. for a staff meeting. At roughly the same moment, a hijacked Boeing 767 was plowing into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

This article was reported by Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. and written by Ms. Miller.

32 posted on 03/22/2004 3:24:05 AM PST by kcvl

Another reason why this president was wrong to keep any Clinton holdover in any administration position and why he should smack down the rinos and stop trying to be friends with people he knows are democrats.

33 posted on 03/22/2004 3:26:02 AM PST by rabidralph (Fear the Turtle.)

This is coordinated, that is sure. That Clarke is getting lubricated -- or his family -- is given Team Clinton MO -- almost certain. "Lubricated" means paid for his efforts.

34 posted on 03/22/2004 3:30:01 AM PST by bvw

1996 TWA 800 Coverup

35 posted on 03/22/2004 3:30:02 AM PST by maggief

TIME TO FIGHT BACK!

Clinton was a TRAITOR to the United States.

36 posted on 03/22/2004 3:30:53 AM PST by Stallone (Guess who Al Qaeda wants to be President?)

Your statement reminds me of something I mentioned to my wife yesterday. They trot out this guy Clarke to bash President Bush yet I cannot recall seeing or hearing of any interviews with the author who wrote about Clinton golfing and doing nothing. Also, if this is so damn important, than how come these guys don't come out and screem it from the rooftops!

37 posted on 03/22/2004 3:32:34 AM PST by 7thson (I think it takes a big dog to weigh a 100 pounds.)

To: Howlin; Ed_NYC; MonroeDNA; widgysoft; Springman; Timesink; dubyaismypresident; Grani; coug97; ...

Clinton Would Have Likely Prevented 9/11 Attacks

Whatever Clarke's smoking? Find out if he's sharing...

Just damn.

If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...

38 posted on 03/22/2004 3:33:19 AM PST by mhking (Terrorists are vulnerable to silver bullets....and any other bullets.)

Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke said Sunday that President Clinton would have been more likely to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks than President Bush, because he took the threat posed by al Qaeda more seriously.

And to prove it, clinton did nothing for 8 years except lob a few missiles.

I like how they describe this guy as a "terrorism czar". I guess that explains why he's hawking a book instead of actually working in the government.

39 posted on 03/22/2004 3:33:21 AM PST by <1/1,000,000th%

The Dems would be funny except for the fact that half of the voters are stupid enough to believe them.

40 posted on 03/22/2004 3:34:34 AM PST by Samwise (In the battle between Good and Evil, Evil often wins unless Good is very, very careful. --Spock)

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