The Able Danger scandal opened a bit wider this week with this New York Times story: "Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists." Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer corroborated allegations made last week by Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon that the Defense Department's "Able Danger" investigation had identified Mohammad Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers in 2000, but military lawyers blocked attempts by the Defense Department to share this information with other agencies.
This story has led to a renewed interest in the activities of the Clinton Administration during the 1990's, as they attempted to pursue a world-wide law enforcement approach to combating terror. Specifically, the new attention is being focused on the information and policies involving Osama Bin Laden.
Unfortunately, pegging down what actually occurred behind the Clinton Administration's closed doors is difficult.
This week, Clinton told New York magazine:
"I desperately wish that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole ... Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early. I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11, but it certainly would have complicated it.”
He certainly sounds pretty serious ... except for the fact that, at the time of the Cole attack, either Bin Laden himself or al Qaeda had already been tied to the "Black Hawk Down" attacks in Sudan, the first World Trade Center Bombing, and the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Those incidents passed with only cruise missile strikes launched in retaliation.
And courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com, here's Bill Clinton on Larry King Live, Sept. 3, 2002:
CLINTON: I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, "My God, a second plane has hit the tower," and I said, "Bin Laden did this." That's the first thing I said. He said, "How can you be sure?" I said, "Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this, and they wouldn't do it because they have a country and targets. Bin Laden did."
KING: Did you also think at the same time, "We came pretty close to getting him"?
CLINTON: Yeah. I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well-faced and I was full of regret that I didn't get him. I mean, I immediately thought that he'd done it. (emphasis added)
NewsMax.com also reported this statement made by Bill Clinton in February 2002:
"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan," Clinton explained to a Feb. 15 Long Island Association luncheon.
"He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again.
"They released him," the ex-president confirmed.
"At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have," Clinton explained. "But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan." (emphasis added)
Audio of Clinton's remarks can be found at the NewsMax archives by clicking here.
Unfortunately, other sources do not portray the former President as being "obsessed" with Osama Bin Laden. And many do not support Clinton's assertion that the US was anxious to have Bin Laden in custody.
NewsMax reported in December 2003 that a 2002 radio interview with former Clinton aid Mansoor Ijaz indicated that the US was never serious about extraditing Bin Laden:
"The FBI, in 1996 and 1997, had their efforts to look at terrorism data and deal with the bin Laden issue overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan," he told radio host Sean Hannity.
Richard Miniter, author of the book "Losing bin Laden," concurs, saying Rice played a key role in scuttling the deal that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Last month Miniter told World Magazine that while Sudan was anxious to turn bin Laden over to the U.S., Rice, who was then a member of Clinton's National Security Council, questioned Khartoum's credibility.
"Rice [cited] the suffering of Christians [in Sudan] as one reason that she doubted the integrity of the Sudanese offers," said Miniter. "But her analysis largely overlooked the view of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, who argued for calling Khartoum's bluff."
Interestingly, the official Clinton administration story is that it was Sudan, not the US, that was never serious about taking Bin Laden into custody or turning him over to anyone. Notra Trulock, writing for Accuracy in Media, says:
Did the Sudanese government offer to turn Bin Laden over the U.S. during these meetings, as its officials claim? Current and former administration officials say no. Richard Clarke in his book Against All Enemies labels such reports a "fable." In October 2002, CIA Director George Tenet told congressional investigators that the agency "has no knowledge of such an offer." And the 9/11 commission seems to have taken their word for it. In a report issued on the first day of the hearings, it concluded that "We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."
In coming to that conclusion, it appears that the commission has overlooked the testimony of one key player. Newsmax.com has an audiotape of President Bill Clinton telling an audience in February 2002 that "I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America." He said that he had "pleaded with the Saudis to take him," but they refused. Richard Miniter, in his book Losing Bin Laden, writes that Clinton told his dinner companions in late 2001 that turning down Sudan's offer in May 1996 was "the biggest mistake of my presidency."
Newsmax writes that it repeatedly offered the audiotape to the 9/11 commission. According to its account, "At no time did the commission express any interest in obtaining a copy of the recording, or request the original tape to verify its authenticity." No commissioner raised questions about Clinton's account during two days of public testimony. Clinton had originally offered to testify publicly, but now has agreed only to a closed-door appearance.
In a June 2003 article, NewsMax also reported that former Clinton National Security Adviser (and kleptomaniac) Sandy Burger disagreed with Clinton's explanation:
Responding to ex-President Clinton's bombshell confession last year that he turned down a bid by Sudan for warmer relations that would have included the release bin Laden to the U.S., Berger confirmed to WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg, "We pushed the Sudanese government to break its links to terrorist groups, including bin Laden, [and to] expel them."
The former national security advisor also confirmed Mr. Clinton's revelation that after the Sudanese agreed to expel the terrorist kingpin, the administration tried to broker a deal for his extradition to Saudi Arabia. "We did - we went to the Saudis to see whether or not they would take bin Laden," Berger explained adding, "They said no. "
But while confirming that Sudan was willing to release bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, the former national security advisor sharply disputed his old boss' claim that Sudan was also willing to turn the terrorist mastermind over to the U.S.
"The Sudanese never offered to give him to the United States," he insisted. "This is something I've gone back to check very carefully on. There's no - there's no - no one knows of any such offer."
Berger suggested instead that the Sudanese had fabricated the story of bin Laden's possible extradition to the U.S. to stay on the Bush administration's good side after the 9/11 attacks.
Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman made these remarks at an April 2002 Princeton University lecture:
Gellman explained that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) didn't begin devoting much attention to bin Laden until 1996. That's when its Counter Terrorism Center initiated a new unit of analysts exclusively focusing on the problem after "terrorism and al Quaeda, in particular, began a pretty rapid transformation, in the U.S. government's view, from a tactical nuisance to strategic threat."
That's also when the U.S. "had a tantalizing chance" to apprehend bin Laden, according to Gellman, who is serving this semester as a Ferris Professor of Journalism in the Council for the Humanities.
Anxious to have his nation removed from the U.S. list of states that sponsored terrorists, Sudan's president sent a confidante to initiate a secret channel in a meeting with two CIA case officers in the Hyatt Arlington Hotel, outside of Washington, D.C., Gellman said. There they said that the Sudan "might hand over bin Laden if asked nicely enough."
"It's not at all clear that (the offer) would have been carried out," said Gellman. "But what is clear is that the Clinton administration did not put that offer fully to the test."
Clinton's foreign policy experts, he explained, "were not inclined to take the offer seriously" and were more in favor of isolating Sudan rather than reforming that African nation. As far as bin Laden's native country, he noted, Clinton had at least four more pressing concerns about Saudi Arabia than the terrorist leader -- oil price stability, access to airbases, the isolation of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
"So when you got to Cabinet level and certainly head-of-government level contacts, bin Laden simply didn't come up.
This week, the New York Times confirmed the CIA's renewed interest in Bin Laden in 1996: "State Dept. Says it Warned About Bin Laden in 1996"
Gellman won a Pulitzer prize for his October 2001 Washington Post piece which was an early effort to explain US efforts to apprehend Bin Laden:
Though far from the central figure he is now, bin Laden had a high and rising place on the U.S. counterterrorism agenda. Internal State Department talking points at the time described him as "one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today" and blamed him for planning a failed attempt to blow up the hotel used by U.S. troops in Yemen in 1992.
"Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference," said a U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counterterrorism. "We probably never would have seen a September 11th. We would still have had networks of Sunni Islamic extremists of the sort we're dealing with here, and there would still have been terrorist attacks fomented by those folks. But there would not have been as many resources devoted to their activities, and there would not have been a single voice that so effectively articulated grievances and won support for violence."
Clinton administration officials maintain emphatically that they had no such option in 1996. In the legal, political and intelligence environment of the time, they said, there was no choice but to allow bin Laden to depart Sudan unmolested.
"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," said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then.
Three Clinton officials said they hoped -- one described it as "a fantasy" -- that Saudi King Fahd would accept bin Laden and order his swift beheading, as he had done for four conspirators after a June 1995 bombing in Riyadh. But Berger and Steven Simon, then director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council (NSC) staff, said the White House considered it valuable in itself to force bin Laden out of Sudan, thus tearing him away from his extensive network of businesses, investments and training camps.
"I really cared about one thing, and that was getting him out of Sudan," Simon said. "One can understand why the Saudis didn't want him -- he was a hot potato -- and, frankly, I would have been shocked at the time if the Saudis took him. My calculation was, 'It's going to take him a while to reconstitute, and that screws him up and buys time.' " (emphsis added)
But at the 2002 Princeton lecture, Gellman also said this:
The most important turning point under Clinton came in 1998, Gellman said, when the U.S. Embassy bombing transformed the U.S. policy literally overnight. "By the following day, Clinton had decided to kill Osama bin Laden," he said. "And for the last two-and-a-half years of his term in office, he devoted quite a bit of his time and resources to try and do that."
We can probably take that statement at face value, since Clinton authorized cruise missile strikes at what he thought was an al Qaeda munitions plant in Sudan, as well as an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, in 1998. But neither of these actions seems to reflect a man who was "obsessed" with getting Osama Bin Laden. History records that Clinton continued to only authorize actions which posed relatively little risk for the United States.
Even more troubling is the way that the 9/11 Commission handled the differences between Clinton's 2002 explanation and the denials of Clinton administration officials that Sudan was willing to cooperate with the US. Again, NewsMax.com reports:
In April 2004, Clinton testified before the Commission behind closed doors, where he was asked about his bombshell admission. According to 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey in an interview the next day, the ex-president at first tried to claim he'd been misquoted.
"He told us yesterday that that was a misquote," Kerrey told WDAY radio host Scott Hennen.
Hennen shot back: "I have heard it in his own voice! I have heard him say it. I have the tape of him saying just that."
"Really?" a stunned Kerrey responded. "Well, ship it to me. Because he said yesterday that he didn't have a recollection of that."
Kerrey's response indicated that 9/11 staffers hadn't shared the Clinton audiotape with the commissioners themselves - even though NewsMax had made the audio available to the panel months before.
When the final 9/11 report was released in July, the Commission revealed specific details of how Sudanese officials corroborated Clinton's taped admission.
"Sudan’s minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin Laden over to the United States," the report notes on page 109.
But even after hearing Erwa's testimony about the offer and Clinton's smoking gun audiotape, the 9/11 report declared flatly: "The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so."
Instead, the panel accepted Clinton's revised testimony, where he told the Commissioners he had misspoken during his February speech - based on media reports about the bin Laden offer that he'd only recently realized were untrue.
On page 480 the Commission explained:
"President Clinton, in a February 2002 speech to the Long Island Association, said that the United States did not accept a Sudanese offer and take Bin Laden because there was no indictment . . . But the President told us that he had 'misspoken' and was, wrongly, recounting a number of press stories he had read." (emphasis added)
A "hot potato" indeed.
So who is telling the truth here? Was Bill Clinton truthful when he told the 2002 luncheon meeting that Sudan was eager (and therefore able) to hand over Bin Laden to the United States, or are the other administration officials being truthful when they say that the Sudanese offer was not credible. Was Fatih Erwa being truthful when he corroborated Bill Clinton's statement? Or did Bill Clinton "revise" his story to dismiss the Sudanese claims and make sure that his version of events fell in line with the general Clinton administration version.
To give the Clinton administration the benefit of the doubt, it is worth pointing out that the US would have had difficulty prosecuting Osama Bin Laden in a court of law -- after all we had very little concrete "proof" of Osama's guilt. And there is no question that Osama, who possesses a certain knack for manipulating the Western press, would have played the victim in a most convincing fashion. It is certainly possible that the Administration would have failed to convict Bin Laden, or that his conviction would have started a firestorm of international condemnation from human rights activists. Both of those options were probably very unsettling to the Clinton administration.
The Saudis also had legitimate reasons to stay away from Bin Laden. Osama is a Saudi, and his family is wealthy and powerful. He probably would have been treated like a folk hero among his Saudi supporters, and it is worth remembering that one of Osama's primary goals is the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Saudi Arabia -- which would mean the ouster of the Saudi royal family.
All of this raises yet more questions about the content of the National Archives documents that Sandy Berger removed, destroyed, marked, or replaced in preparation for the 9/11 Commission hearings last year. It had been assumed that Berger's vandalism had been directed toward documents dealing with the "Millennium Bomber" incident, which was trumpeted as a successful effort by the Clinton administration to foil a terrorist plot, but upon further examination seemed to be predicated more on good luck than law enforcement efforts.
But the unfolding Able Danger scandal and the contradictory claims about the level of Sudanese involvement in 1996 certainly raise the possibility that Berger was digging for other things that might prove embarrassing to the Clinton administration. Nothing would sink Bill Clinton's legacy faster than documented evidence that he waffled and then ran from a certain opportunity to capture Bin Laden, or that his administration's lawyers kept information that should have led to the arrest or deportation of Mohammad Atta under wraps.
Those charges are hot potatoes that no one yet wants to handle.
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