quote:

Originally posted by occrider To which he should have taken the opportunity to capture him and detain him while passing harsher anti-terrorism legislation that would enable courts to prosecute him. Clinton even admitted himself that that was his biggest mistake. All in all however, it was reported that 3 attempts at capturing Bin Laden were botched:

Well if you're referring to the last 2 attempts in the article, to me it seems the details were pretty murky, and the intelligence was pretty weak, at best. Though in hindsight I too feel that at least more should have been done.

But in regards to Sudan, again the intelligence was fairly poor on trying to indict Osama here in the States, which was why Clinton was pushing the Saudis to indict him (which of course they refused). His quote being the "greatest mistake" looks more to me like a reflection of regret in hindsight of 9/11 events and afterward, rather than a confession of guilt from botching a means of attaining the terrorist. With his limited resources, he simply couldn't do it at that time.

Don't get me wrong, Clinton has a multitude of problems to fess up on in regards to his attention on terrorism, but I just don't see this Sudan case being a very strong case against him.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

while we're on this subject

By MANSOOR IJAZ

Original Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion...6561dec05.story

President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.

I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.

From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Sudan's president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.

Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.

The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.

As an American Muslim and a political supporter of Clinton, I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then, that their counter-terrorism policies fueled the rise of Bin Laden from an ordinary man to a Hydra-like monster.

Realizing the growing problem with Bin Laden, Bashir sent key intelligence officials to the U.S. in February 1996.

The Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to "baby-sit" him--monitoring all his activities and associates.

But Saudi officials didn't want their home-grown terrorist back where he might plot to overthrow them.

In May 1996, the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.

Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden's personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.

Some of these men are now among the FBI's 22 most-wanted terrorists.

The two men who allegedly piloted the planes into the twin towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, prayed in the same Hamburg mosque as did Salim and Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian trader who managed Salim's bank accounts and whose assets are frozen.

Important data on each had been compiled by the Sudanese.

But U.S. authorities repeatedly turned the data away, first in February 1996; then again that August, when at my suggestion Sudan's religious ideologue, Hassan Turabi, wrote directly to Clinton; then again in April 1997, when I persuaded Bashir to invite the FBI to come to Sudan and view the data; and finally in February 1998, when Sudan's intelligence chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, wrote directly to the FBI.

Gutbi had shown me some of Sudan's data during a three-hour meeting in Khartoum in October 1996. When I returned to Washington, I told Berger and his specialist for East Africa, Susan Rice, about the data available. They said they'd get back to me. They never did. Neither did they respond when Bashir made the offer directly. I believe they never had any intention to engage Muslim countries--ally or not. Radical Islam, for the administration, was a convenient national security threat.

And that was not the end of it. In July 2000--three months before the deadly attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen--I brought the White House another plausible offer to deal with Bin Laden, by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings. A senior counter-terrorism official from one of the United States' closest Arab allies--an ally whose name I am not free to divulge--approached me with the proposal after telling me he was fed up with the antics and arrogance of U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

The offer, which would have brought Bin Laden to the Arab country as the first step of an extradition process that would eventually deliver him to the U.S., required only that Clinton make a state visit there to personally request Bin Laden's extradition. But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer, letting it get caught up in internal politics within the ruling family--Clintonian diplomacy at its best.

Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.

*

Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is chairman of a New York-based investment company.

for the record, Ijaz testified behind closed doors to the 9/11 comission and will soon be released in the report

quote:

Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Well if you're referring to the last 2 attempts in the article, to me it seems the details were pretty murky, and the intelligence was pretty weak, at best. Though in hindsight I too feel that at least more should have been done. But in regards to Sudan, again the intelligence was fairly poor on trying to indict Osama here in the States, which was why Clinton was pushing the Saudis to indict him (which of course they refused). His quote being the "greatest mistake" looks more to me like a reflection of regret in hindsight of 9/11 events and afterward, rather than a confession of guilt from botching a means of attaining the terrorist. With his limited resources, he simply couldn't do it at that time. Don't get me wrong, Clinton has a multitude of problems to fess up on in regards to his attention on terrorism, but I just don't see this Sudan case being a very strong case against him.

Yes however, with respect to the Saudi refusal, the Washington Post reported that:

quote:

Some U.S. diplomats said the White House did not press the Saudis very hard. There were many conflicting priorities in the Middle East, notably an intensive effort to save the interim government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres in Israel, which was reeling under its worst spate of Hamas suicide bombings. U.S. military forces also relied heavily on Saudi forward basing to enforce the southern "no fly zone" in Iraq.

With respect to US courts being unable to try him, some in the adminstration argued that he should have been treated as an "enemy combatant."

quote:

The Clinton administration was riven by differences on whether to engage Sudan's government or isolate it, which influenced judgments about the sincerity of the offer. In the Saudi-American relationship, policymakers diverged on how much priority to give to counterterrorism over other interests such as support for the ailing Israeli-Palestinian talks. And there were the beginnings of a debate, intensified lately, on whether the United States wanted to indict and try bin Laden or to treat him as a combatant in an underground war.

Some posed the possiblity of shooting down bin Laden's plane (an option a bit hasty at the time I would admit):

quote:

Resigned to bin Laden's departure from Sudan, some officials raised the possibility of shooting down his chartered aircraft, but the idea was never seriously pursued because bin Laden had not been linked to a dead American, and it was inconceivable that Clinton would sign the "lethal finding" necessary under the circumstances

But in the end, after Saudi Arabia had refused to take Bin Laden, and the administration had settled on expelling him from Sudan, why not simply bring him into the US, hold him until the courts fail to convict him, and then negotiate with whatever country that accepts him to limit his ability to conduct terrorism? Afghanistan would have assuredly negotiated because they wanted the pipeline deal with Unocal. But at the very least, why did the administration only ask about Bin Laden's funding after he was released?

quote:

"In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia,' " Erwa, the Sudanese general, said in an interview. "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.' " On May 15, 1996, Foreign Minister Taha sent a fax to Carney in Nairobi, giving up on the transfer of custody. His government had asked bin Laden to vacate the country, Taha wrote, and he would be free to go. Carney faxed back a question: Would bin Laden retain control of the millions of dollars in assets he had built up in Sudan? Taha gave no reply before bin Laden chartered a plane three days later for his trip to Afghanistan. Subsequent analysis by U.S. intelligence suggests that bin Laden managed to draw down and redirect the Sudanese assets from his new redoubt in Afghanistan.

I mean Bush has had too many fuckups to count, but this is indeed one big fuckup on the part of the Clinton administration.

http://www.library.cornell.edu/coll...st/ladnsudx.htm

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quote:

Originally posted by occrider Yes however, with respect to the Saudi refusal, the Washington Post reported that:

Hmmm, interesting...

quote:

With respect to US courts being unable to try him, some in the adminstration argued that he should have been treated as an "enemy combatant."

But would Clinton have had sufficient grounds for doing so? To be an "enemy combatant", wouldn't that require sufficient evidence in a time of war (or something along those lines)?

quote:

Some posed the possiblity of shooting down bin Laden's plane (an option a bit hasty at the time I would admit):

I agree it would have been too hasty. But at the very least, they should have tracked him much closer.

quote:

But in the end, after Saudi Arabia had refused to take Bin Laden, and the administration had settled on expelling him from Sudan, why not simply bring him into the US, hold him until the courts fail to convict him, and then negotiate with whatever country that accepts him to limit his ability to conduct terrorism? Afghanistan would have assuredly negotiated because they wanted the pipeline deal with Unocal. But at the very least, why did the administration only ask about Bin Laden's funding after he was released?

But again, what legal grounds would Clinton have in doing so at that time?

quote:

I mean Bush has had too many fuckups to count, but this is indeed one big fuckup on the part of the Clinton administration. http://www.library.cornell.edu/coll...st/ladnsudx.htm

Which brings me to a debate I'm having with another chap in a local city forum of mine - do you think Clinton really had a priority on Al Qaeda at all, esp. during his last coupla years as he and Clarke both claim? To be honest, I'm really not so sure anymore.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

quote:

Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Hmmm, interesting... But would Clinton have had sufficient grounds for doing so? To be an "enemy combatant", wouldn't that require sufficient evidence in a time of war (or something along those lines)?

Heh and how much evidence has Bush shown with respect to detainees? How long has it taken before any high courts could address the issue?

quote:

But again, what legal grounds would Clinton have in doing so at that time?

Even if he doesn't have the legal ground to do so, he can most certainly go ahead and do to gain some time or to isolate the terrorist cell for some period of time. Terrorists most certainly don't play the game fairly therefore we don't have to play the game fairly especially if it's for something as little as detaining him to buy us some time until courts determine we have to let him go. But I felt that at the very least, we could have negotiated with the Sudanese governemnt to remove all his assets.

quote:

Which brings me to a debate I'm having with another chap in a local city forum of mine - do you think Clinton really had a priority on Al Qaeda at all, esp. during his last coupla years as he and Clarke both claim? To be honest, I'm really not so sure anymore.

Meh ... I felt that he did an ok job. It seemed like a tit-for-tat system of making it a priority. He could have been more pro-active. I can't be certain any other President would have handled things differentely to be honest. I thought that after 1998 Clinton was making it more of a priority. It's difficult to really say.

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wonderful!!!

>JM<

quote:

Originally posted by occrider Heh and how much evidence has Bush shown with respect to detainees? How long has it taken before any high courts could address the issue?

Well I guess one could look at that comparison and say that Clinton has taken the moral high ground by NOT illegally detaining individuals without merit and supportive evidence, unlike Bush.

quote:

Even if he doesn't have the legal ground to do so, he can most certainly go ahead and do to gain some time or to isolate the terrorist cell for some period of time. Terrorists most certainly don't play the game fairly therefore we don't have to play the game fairly especially if it's for something as little as detaining him to buy us some time until courts determine we have to let him go. But I felt that at the very least, we could have negotiated with the Sudanese governemnt to remove all his assets.

I took another look at the Wa. Post article, specifically this quote from the beginning:

"The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture...

But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over, though to whom was ambiguous. In one formulation, Erwa said Sudan would consider any legitimate proffer of criminal charges against the accused terrorist. Saudi Arabia, he said, was the most logical destination."

http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2002/n...ks/100301a.html

So it seems that Sudan wasn't really offering to hand him over to the U.S. in the first place, but often hinted at Saudi Arabia, since Sudan maybe felt the Saudis had evidence against him (which I'm sure they probably did). But of course the Saudis turned them down, and since we had nothing concrete to hold him on, we were pretty much left with our hands tied.

If this scenario was true, I still think much more could have been done - like I said before, perhaps tracking bin Laden much more closely after his release from Sudan or something along those lines. Ahh, who knows.

But here's another interesting tidbit, which I'm not sure how it really fits in this story, but it came from Al Franken's book so take it with a grain of salt. At the beginning of this quote, Franken is referring to Sean Hannity:

quote:

"In 'Let Freedom Ring,' Hannity outlines a charge that he frequently makes both on television and on the radio: that Clinton let bin Laden slip from his grasp. He writes, It's truly astonishing, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and their liberal allies on Capitol Hill were offered Osama bin Laden by the Sudanese government, and they turned the offer down. They could have taken him into custody and begun unraveling his terrorist network almost six years ago. But they didn't. And now more than three thousand Americans have paid with their blood. That is astonishing. Hard to think of a more serious charge. You want to be damned sure you have that one locked down pretty tight before you put it in print. But knowing what we already know about Sean Hannity [referring to a previous chapter in the book, dedicated entirely to this guy] and the standards to which he holds himself, what are the chances that this whole charge is just baloney? His entire case comes from a guy named Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American who claims to have transmitted the offer as a middleman between the U.S. and Sudan. I got the story on Ijaz from former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and from Daniel Benjamin, past director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and now senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Berger only had to meet once with Ijaz to determine that he was an unreliable freelancer, pursuing his own financial interests. Ijaz was an investment banker with a huge stake in Sudanese oil. Ijaz had urged Berger to lift sanctions against Sudan. Why the sanctions? Because Sudan was and remains a notorious sponsor of terrorism, harboring Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda. Also, the Sudanese regime is the leading state sponsor of slavery and is considered by many to be genocidal. And totally untrustworthy. Ijaz, however, was arguing their case. As Benjamin said of Ijaz, 'Either he allowed himself to be manipulated, or he's in bed with a bunch of genocidal terrorists.' Ijaz said that Sudan was ready to hand over bin Laden. The U.S. does not conduct diplomacy through self-appointed private individuals. When the U.S. talked to Sudan, there was no such offer. The U.S. pursued every lead and tried to negotiate. Nothing. The story does have a happy ending. Ijaz now has a job as foreign affairs analyst for the Fox News Channel."

Ehh, who the hell knows.

quote:

Meh ... I felt that he did an ok job. It seemed like a tit-for-tat system of making it a priority. He could have been more pro-active. I can't be certain any other President would have handled things differentely to be honest. I thought that after 1998 Clinton was making it more of a priority. It's difficult to really say.

Agreed.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

quote:

Originally posted by occrider Yea I thought he was probably better. He raised taxes which was what should have been done, although I thought he should have raised them more and stopped the deficit spending sooner. If Bush had raised taxes after the second tax cuts and curbed spending than I probably would have thought that he would be a better manager ...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...bi_ge/greenspan

alan greenspan seems to have a different opinion, but you are probably the better economist... right?

quote:

Originally posted by rainbow_marble http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...bi_ge/greenspan alan greenspan seems to have a different opinion, but you are probably the better economist... right?

Are you blind? From my statement:

quote:

If Bush had raised taxes after the second tax cuts

Implies that I approved of the tax cuts as a temporary measure. My next statement:

quote:

and curbed spending

Implies that he should either raise taxes or reduce spending.

From what Greenspan says:

quote:

But he warned that rising deficits could become a problem over the next decade as Social Security (news - web sites) and Medicare costs escalate with the retirement of baby boomers. "Looking forward, fiscal policy is going to become a very critical issue on the agenda for macroeconomic policy," Greenspan told the House Financial Services Committee. Greenspan again supported a return to pay-as-you go policies that would require Congress to offset future increases in government spending or new tax cuts with cuts in other government programs or tax increases. The administration supports reinstituting the pay-as-you-go mechanism for spending but not for tax cuts, because it would complicate Bush's goal of making permanent the 2001 tax cuts. The cuts are due to expire in 2011.

I'm not a better economist than Greenspan, but apparentely I'm a better reader than you. Thanks!

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