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Banned
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv
.......Your research seems inaccurate again.
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When was it inaccurate, the last time?
I'm sorry....I still don't see anything to support your "on a platter, twice" statement, and neither did the 9/11 Commission report, or the reporting on this, last year, of this reporter:
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/in...gewanted=print
August 17, 2005
State Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.
In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.
The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to The New York Times, ,b>shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.</b>
Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Two years after the State Department's warning, with Mr. bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, Al Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan.
Critics of the Clinton administration have accused it of ignoring the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden in the mid-1990's while he was still in Sudan, and they point to claims by some Sudanese officials that they offered to turn him over to the Americans before ultimately expelling him in 1996 under international pressure. <h3>But Clinton administration diplomats have adamantly denied that they received such an offer, and the Sept. 11 commission concluded in one of its staff reports that it had "not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."
The newly declassified documents do not directly address the question of whether Sudan ever offered to turn over Mr. bin Laden.</h3> But the documents go well beyond previous news and historical accounts in detailing the Clinton administration's active monitoring of Mr. bin Laden's movements and the realization that his move to Afghanistan could make him an even greater national security threat.
Several former senior officials in the Clinton administration did not return phone calls this week seeking comment on the newly declassified documents.
Adam Ereli, a spokesman for the State Department, said the documents should be viewed in the context of what was happening globally in 1996, rather than in the hindsight of events after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In 1996, Mr. Ereli said, "the question was getting him out of Sudan."
"The priority was to deny him safe haven, period, and to disrupt his activities any way you could," he continued. "There was a lot we didn't know, and the priority was to keep him on the run, keep him on guard, and try to maximize the opportunities to nail him."
Before the East Africa bombings in 1998, however, Mr. bin Laden "wasn't recognized then as the threat he is now," Mr. Ereli said. "Yes, he was a bad guy, he was a threat, but he was one of many, and by no means of the prominence that he later came to be."
The State Department assessment, written July 18, 1996, <h3>after Mr. bin Laden had been expelled from Sudan and was thought to be relocating to Afghanistan,</h3> said Afghanistan would make an "ideal haven" for Mr. bin Laden to run his financial networks and attract support from radicalized Muslims. Moreover, his wealth, his personal plane and many passports "allow him considerable freedom to travel with little fear of being intercepted or tracked," and his public statements suggested an "emboldened" man capable of "increased terrorism," the assessment said.
While a strategy of keeping Mr. bin Laden on the run could "inconvenience" him, the assessment said, "even a bin Laden on the move can retain the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motive and wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost world-wide."
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the declassified material released to his group "says to me that the Clinton administration knew the broad outlines in 1996 of bin Laden's capabilities and his intent, and unfortunately, almost nothing was done about it."
Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, was highly critical of President Clinton during his two terms in office. The group has also been critical of some Bush administration actions after the Sept. 11 attacks, releasing documents in March that detailed government efforts to facilitate flights out of the United States for dozens of well-connected Saudis just days after the attacks.
Michael F. Scheuer, who from 1996 to 1999 led the Central Intelligence Agency unit that tracked Mr. bin Laden, said the State Department documents reflected a keen awareness of the danger posed by Mr. bin Laden's relocation.
"The analytical side of the State Department had it exactly right - that's genius analysis," he said in an interview when told of the declassified documents. But Mr. Scheuer, who wrote a book in 2004 titled "Imperial Hubris," under the pseudonym "Anonymous," that was highly critical of American counterterrorism strategies, said <b>many officials in the C.I.A.'s operational side thought they would have a better chance to kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan than they did in Sudan because the Sudan government protected him.
"The thinking was that he was in Afghanistan, and he was dangerous, but because he was there, we had a better chance to kill him," Mr. Scheuer said.</b> "But at the end of the day, we settled for the worst possibility - he was there and we didn't do anything."
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<b>Marv....and Ustwo.....you post as if you have been spending too much time with Hannitized "ditto heads", or whatever the minions of Hannity and Rush call themselves. In the real world, Tenet, Clinton, and Richard Clarke all say the same thing....the "platter" offer from Sudan, never happened, and the 9/11 Commission could find no proof that it did, either. This is an example of why there can be no discussion on these threads. I offer statments from the actual folks who were there, and you offer "spin", repeated over and over and over.....by newsmax.com, Hannity, Rush....etc. The contrast is startlingly obvious....and the "closed loop" isn't the source of my opinions. There is no validity to the idea that Clinton was offered "Bin Laden on a platter", ever. We also did not live in an age of "pre-emption", until 9/11 "changed everything".....Remember, that on September the eleventh....(Insert terror comment here:________ !!!!)</b>
Quote:
https://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affai..._10172002.html
Written Statement for the Record of the
Director of Central Intelligence
Before the
Joint Inquiry Committee
17 October 2002
.....<b>The Early Years: Terrorist Financier (1986-1996)</b>
The first rule of warfare is "know your enemy." My statement documents our knowledge and analysis of Bin Ladin, from his early years as a terrorist financier to his leadership of a worldwide network of terrorism based in Afghanistan.....
...........<b>Taliban Sanctuary Years: Becoming a Strategic Threat</b>
Beginning in January 1996, we began to receive reports that Bin Ladin planned to move from Sudan. Confirming these reports was especially difficult because of the closure in February of the US Embassy as well as the CIA station in Khartoum for security reasons.
<h3>* We have read the allegations that, around this time, the Sudanese Government offered to surrender Bin Ladin to American custody.
* Mr. Chairman, CIA has no knowledge of such an offer.</h3>
Later in 1996, it became clear that he had moved to Afghanistan. From that safehaven, he defined himself publicly as a threat to the United States. In a series of declarations, he made clear his hatred for Americans and all we represent........
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Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in625205.shtml
Clinton Was 'Obsessed' With Osama
NEW YORK, June 21, 2004
........<i>President Clinton says he was "obsessed" with bin Laden during his time in office and denies he refused opportunities to capture the al Qaeda leader.</i>
Clinton: To the best of my knowledge it is not true that we were ever offered him by the Sudanese even though they later claimed it. I think it's total bull. Mr. Absurabi, the head of the Sudanese government was a buddy of bin Laden's. They were business partners together. There was no way in the wide world this guy who was in business with bin Laden in Sudan was going to give him up to us.....
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Quote:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLIT...on.transcript/
Clinton discusses foreign policy, security threats
Saturday, July 10, 2004 Posted: 1933 GMT (0333 HKT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former President Bill Clinton sat down with CNN's Christiane Amanpour to talk about foreign policy during his presidency and today's security challenges. Here is a transcript of that interview....
....AMANPOUR: You mentioned what you could or might have been able to do. <b>Sometime in 1996 you spoke to a group of people in Long Island about this whole issue of Sudan, was Sudan ...
CLINTON: That was in 2001 ...</b>
AMANPOUR: OK. Was Sudan asked to extradite [bin Laden]? Did you miss the opportunity to have him extradited?
CLINTON: And I miss ... what I said there was wrong. What I said was in error. I went back now and did all this research for my book and I said that we were told we couldn't hold him, implying that we had a chance to get him and didn't. That's not factually accurate.
Here's what is factually accurate. In 1996 and before then, when we found out about bin Laden, we had first thought he was a financier of terrorism but not a ringleader. In the beginning. When he took up residence in Sudan after having been ejected from Saudi Arabia, it is true that at some point during that period, there was some discussion in the Justice Department casting a doubt on how long we could hold him ... on the question of had he committed, or did we have evidence that he committed, an offense against the United States.
But that was never part of the question about whether we could get him. When he left, the idea that the Sudanese offered to hand him over to us is just absurd. The idea that they told us when he was leaving, and he was landing in the Gulf and we could get him at another airport, is absurd, and the idea that they tried to give him to us instead of giving him to Afghanistan is just not true. I have now gone back and reconstructed all the records, read all the documents, and that is just not true.........
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/23/po...l?pagewanted=1
March 23, 2004
Ex-Bush Aide Sets Off Debate as 9/11 Hearing Opens
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and JUDITH MILLER
WASHINGTON, March 22 — As the White House opened an aggressive personal attack against its former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, a furious debate broke out on Monday about the credibility of his assertion that President Bush pushed him the day after the Sept. 11 attacks to see if there was a link with Saddam Hussein.
The White House dismissed the accusations, described in a new book by Mr. Clarke, by casting him as a disgruntled, politically motivated job seeker and a "best buddy" of a top adviser to Senator John Kerry. But Mr. Clarke defended his account, and several allies rallied to his defense.
One ally, Mr. Clarke's former deputy, Roger Cressey, backed the thrust of one of the most incendiary accusations in the book, about a conversation that Mr. Clarke said he had with Mr. Bush in the White House Situation Room on the night of Sept. 12, 2001. Mr. Clarke said Mr. Bush pressed him three times to find evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The accusation is explosive because no such link has ever been proved.
"I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything," Mr. Clarke writes that Mr. Bush told him. "See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."
When Mr. Clarke protested that the culprit was Al Qaeda, not Iraq, Mr. Bush testily ordered him, he writes, to "look into Iraq, Saddam," and then left the room.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, responded at a White House briefing on Monday that Mr. Bush did not remember having the conversation, and that there were no records that placed the president in the Situation Room at the time.
Mr. Clarke countered in a telephone interview on Monday that he had four witnesses, including Mr. Cressey, who is a partner with Mr. Clarke in a consulting company that advises on cybersecurity issues. In an interview, Mr. Cressey said the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, also witnessed the exchange. Administration officials said Ms. Rice had no recollection of it.
Mr. Cressey cast Mr. Bush's instructions to Mr. Clarke less as an order to come up with a link between Mr. Hussein and Sept. 11, and more as a request to "take a look at all options, including Iraq." He backed off Mr. Clarke's suggestion that the president's tone was intimidating. "I'm not going to get into that," Mr. Cressey said. "That is Dick's characterization."
Mr. Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," also asserts that the administration did not heed warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks, and then neglected the threat of Al Qaeda as it turned its attention to Saddam Hussein.
Another ally of Mr. Clarke, Thomas R. Maertens, confirmed the outlines of Mr. Clarke's critique of the White House. Mr. Maertens, who served as National Security Council director for nuclear nonproliferation on both the Clinton and Bush White House staffs, said that Mr. Clarke had repeatedly tried to warn senior officials in the Bush administration about the growing threat of Al Qaeda.
"He was the guy pushing hardest, saying again and again that something big was going to happen, including possibly here in the U.S.," Mr. Maertens said Monday from his home in Minnesota. But Mr. Maertens said that the Bush White House was reluctant to believe a holdover from the previous administration.
"They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration," Mr. Maertens said. "So anything they did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it. And it's disgusting to see the administration now putting a full-court smear on Clarke — for being right."
Mr. Clarke also charges in his book that Mr. Bush waged "an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq" that strengthened Islamic terrorist movements around the world, and has left the nation more vulnerable to future attacks.
His book is the first by a former administration member to challenge the president directly on what Mr. Bush considers his greatest electoral strength, national security. It is arriving in book stores not only during a presidential campaign, but in the same week that Mr. Clarke and Clinton and Bush administration officials are to publicly testify before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Clarke said last week that he was prepared to testify that Clinton administration officials repeatedly warned members of the incoming Bush administration in late 2000 about the threat posed by Al Qaeda.
In the hearings, which begin on Wednesday, the panel will call as witnesses four high-ranking officials from the Bush and Clinton administrations: Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; his predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; and his predecessor, William S. Cohen.
The angry White House response to Mr. Clarke, which was authorized by Mr. Bush, reflects the administration's fears over the book's potential political damage. In a daylong assault on Monday, administration officials portrayed Mr. Clarke, a secretive, combative terrorism expert who spent more than three decades working in the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations, as a bitter former employee who had been denied the No. 2 position in the Department of Homeland Security and who was now trying to help the Kerry campaign.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, noted that Mr. Clarke was in charge of counterterrorism at the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 2000 attack on the American destroyer Cole, and "I didn't notice that they had any great success dealing with the terrorist threat."
Mr. McClellan told reporters: "He conveniently writes a book and releases it in the heat of a presidential campaign. We know that his best buddy is Senator Kerry's principal foreign policy adviser." Mr. McClellan was referring to Rand Beers, Mr. Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser.
Clearly, Mr. McClellan said, "this is more about politics and a book promotion than it is about policy."
Mr. Clarke fired back that the White House attacks were an effort to divert attention from the substantive information in his book, including his impression that Ms. Rice, as the new national security adviser in early 2001, had not heard of Al Qaeda. (Administration officials disputed the claim about Ms. Rice.)
"This is the way the Bush administration deals with people, with ad hominem attacks, and trying to suppress the truth," Mr. Clarke said by telephone from New York. He added that he had been friends for 25 years with Mr. Beers, "and I'm not going to run away from him just because he's John Kerry's national security adviser."
Administration officials said Mr. Clarke, who was on Ms. Rice's staff, was kept on after the Clinton administration because she wanted to maintain continuity in counterterrorism policy.
Mr. Clarke, they said, proved to be almost obsessive — a description he applies to himself in the book — about attacking Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and impatient that many of his ideas, like forging a closer alliance with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan, were not adopted.
But administration officials said that throughout his tenure in the Bush administration, Mr. Clarke appeared to be generally supportive of the president's policies, and never brought to Ms. Rice a broad critique of either the administration's approach to terrorism or its plan for invading Iraq.
Sean McCormack, Ms. Rice's spokesman, said that Mr. Clarke ate lunch with Ms. Rice in her West Wing office after he had left the administration, a month or two before the attack on Iraq, and gave none of the warnings he gave in the book.
Quote:
<b>from Richard A. Clarke in his book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, page 142:</b>
"In recent years <b>Sudanese intelligence officials and Americans friendly to the Sudan regime have invented a fable about bin Laden's final days in Khartoum.</b> In the fable the Sudanese government offers to arrest bin Laden and hand him over in chains to FBI agents, but Washington rejects the offer because the Clinton Administration does not see bin Laden as important or does and cannot find anywhere to put him on trial.
"The only slivers of truth in this fable are that a) the Sudanese government was denying its support for terrorism in the wake of the U.N. sanctions, and b) the [Counterterrorism Security Group] had initiated informal inquiries with several nations about incarcerating bin Laden, or putting him on trial. There were no takers. Nonetheless, had we been able to put our hands on him then we would have gladly done so...<b>The facts about the supposed Sudanese offer to give us bin Laden are that [National Islamic Front leader Hasan al-]Turabi was not about to turn over his partner in terror to us and no real attempt to do so ever occurred."</b>
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In addition to Mr. Cressey, at least two other former officials with knowledge of what occurred in the Situation Room that day also backed up the thrust of Mr. Clarke's account, though one of the two challenged Mr. Clarke's assertion that Mr. Bush's demeanor and that of other senior White House officials was intimidating.
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington for this article and Judith Miller from New York. Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting from Washington.
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Quote:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200406220008
Tue, Jun 22, 2004 5:41pm EST
......This false claim originated in a 2002 article by the right-wing news site NewsMax.com that distorted a 2002 statement by Clinton. Lanny J. Davis, former White House special counsel to Clinton, pointed out that Hannity was lying, but Hannity persisted.
From the June 21 edition of FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes:
HANNITY: Here's what bothers me. Is Bill Clinton gave a speech and he said "I couldn't take him [Osama bin Laden] for legal reasons, so I tried to get Saudi Arabia to take him but it was too hot a potato." He admitted to the Sudan offer.
DAVIS: No. That's a lie.
HANNITY: He offered it. It's not a lie. I have the tape, Lanny.
DAVIS: It is.
HANNITY: Lanny, I have the tape of the speech.
DAVIS: And I've heard tape. You've played it for me. He never refused, never refused to take Osama bin Laden.
HANNITY: How can he offer -- "I asked Saudi Arabia to take him but it was too hot a potato" -- how can he offer bin Laden to them if he doesn't have him?
The truth is that Clinton never offered Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. Hannity distorted a remark Clinton made in a speech to the Long Island Association's annual luncheon on February 15, 2002, in which Clinton said that he "pleaded with the Saudis" to accept Sudan's offer to hand bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. Sudan never offered bin Laden to the United States. Hannity's mention of "the tape" is a reference to a video of this speech. NewsMax.com <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.newsmax.com/cgi-bin/showinside.pl?a=2002/8/10/230919">obtained</a> a video of the speech in 2002 and began hyping the supposed Clinton "admission" (see <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/4/20/112336.shtml">transcript</a> and listen to the <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.newsmax.com/clinton2.mp3">audio</a>). In fact, Clinton did not "admit" to the Sudan offer in that speech or anywhere else. Here's the relevant portion of Clinton's remarks to the Long Island Association:
CLINTON: So we tried to be quite aggressive with them [Al Qaeda]. We got -- well, Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. 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 dealing with them again. They released him. 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. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, during his June 20 <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/18/60minutes/main624848.shtml">interview</a> on 60 Minutes with CBS anchor Dan Rather, Clinton categorically denied that such an offer was made: "'There was a story which is factually inaccurate that the Sudanese offered bin Laden to us,' says Mr. Clinton. 'As far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence of that.'"
No one involved in the 1996 negotiations apart from former officials of Sudan -- a country that the U.S. State Department has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism every year since 1993 -- has verified the claim that Sudan offered bin Laden to the United States. In light of this lack of evidence, the 9-11 Commission <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing8/staff_statement_5.pdf">"Staff Statement No. 5,"</a> issued in March, rejected the Sudanese claim:
Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer. We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim.
Sudan did offer to expel Bin Ladin to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him. U.S. officials became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March 1996. The evidence suggests that the Saudi government wanted Bin Ladin expelled from Sudan, but would not agree to pardon him. The Saudis did not want Bin Ladin back in their country at all.
Nonetheless, Hannity picked up the claim in his book, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.harpercollins.com/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0060582510">Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism</a> (released in February by ReganBooks), and he repeats it regularly on Hannity & Colmes (cf. 12/19/03, 3/23/04, 3/26/04, 4/19/04).
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Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in624848.shtml
Clinton's Fight Against Terrorism
June 20, 2004
<b>60 Minutes:</b>....The commission’s final report is expected to be released next month. Rather asked Mr. Clinton what his response was to commission member and former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey’s comment that he had “let pass opportunities to arrest or kill the al Qaeda leadership.”
<b>Mr. Clinton:</b>“I don't believe that is true. There was a story which is factually inaccurate that the Sudanese offered bin Laden to us,” says Mr. Clinton. “As far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence of that.” .......
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Quote:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_...tatement_5.pdf
Bottom of page 3 to top of page 4:
Diplomacy
Staff Statement No. 5
.....Since 1979 the Secretary of State has had the authority to name State Sponsors of
Terrorism, subjecting such countries to significant economic sanctions. Sudan was so
designated in 1993. In February 1996, for security reasons, U.S. diplomats left
Khartoum. International pressure further increased as the regime failed to hand over
three individuals involved in a 1995 attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni
Mubarak. The United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on the regime.
Diplomacy had an effect. In exchanges beginning in February 1996, Sudanese officials
began approaching U.S. officials, asking what they could do to ease the pressure. During
the winter and spring of 1996, Sudan’s defense minister visited Washington and had a
series of meetings with representatives of the U.S. government. To test Sudan’s
willingness to cooperate on terrorism the United States presented eight demands to their
Sudanese contact. The one that concerned Bin Ladin was a request for intelligence
information about Bin Ladin’s contacts in Sudan.
These contacts with Sudan, which went on for years, have become a source of
controversy. Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to
the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer.<h3>We
have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim.</h3>
Sudan did offer to expel Bin Ladin to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him.
U.S. officials became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March 1996. The
evidence suggests that the Saudi government wanted Bin Ladin expelled from Sudan, but
would not agree to pardon him. The Saudis did not want Bin Ladin back in their country
at all.
U.S. officials also wanted Bin Ladin expelled from Sudan. They knew the Sudanese
were considering it. The U.S. government did not ask Sudan to render him into U.S.
custody.
According to Samuel Berger, who was then the deputy national security adviser, the
interagency Counterterrorism and Security Group (CSG) chaired by Richard Clarke had a
hypothetical discussion about bringing Bin Ladin to the United States. In that discussion
a Justice Department representative reportedly said there was no basis for bringing him to
the United States since there was no way to hold him here, absent an indictment. Berger
adds that in 1996 he was not aware of any intelligence that said Bin Ladin was
responsible for any act against an American citizen. No rendition plan targeting Bin
Ladin, who was still perceived as a terrorist financier, was requested by or presented to
senior policymakers during 1996.
Yet both Berger and Clarke also said the lack of an indictment made no difference.
Instead they said the idea was not worth pursuing because there was no chance that
Sudan would ever turn Bin Ladin over to a hostile country. If Sudan had been serious,
Clarke said, the United States would have worked something out.
However, the U.S. government did approach other countries hostile to Sudan and Bin
Ladin about whether they would take Bin Ladin. One was apparently interested. No
handover took place.
Under pressure to leave, Bin Ladin worked with the Sudanese government to procure safe
passage and possibly funding for his departure. In May 1996, Bin Ladin and his
associates leased an Ariana Airlines jet and traveled to Afghanistan, stopping to refuel in
the United Arab Emirates. Approximately two days after his departure, the Sudanese
informed the U.S. government that Bin Ladin had left. It is unclear whether any U.S.
officials considered whether or how to intercept Bin Ladin......
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Quote:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200408120011
Thu, Aug 12, 2004 6:02pm EST
.........On the August 11 edition of the Rush Limbaugh Show, radio host Rush Limbaugh repeated one of the favorite discredited accusations of fellow conservative radio host Sean Hannity.
From the August 11 edition of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show:
LIMBAUGH: [Former President Bill] Clinton was offered [Osama] bin Laden two or three times, turned him down. Turned down Sudan. Sudan offered it. So Clinton wasn't serious about it [terrorism].
As Media Matters for America has noted, the false claim originated in an August 11, 2002, article on the right-wing news website NewsMax.com that blared the headline "Clinton Admits: I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer," distorting a speech Clinton made in 2002. While he did acknowledge in a July 8 interview with CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour that he mistakenly implied that the United States was offered bin Laden in that 2002 speech, at no point did Clinton say that Sudan offered bin Laden to the United States in the speech.
The bipartisan 9-11 Commission found (pdf) "no reliable evidence to support" the claim that Sudan offered bin Laden to the United States and determined (pdf) that, based on Clinton's testimony, in "wrongly recounting a number of press stories he had read," Clinton had "misspoken" in his 2002 speech. Clinton further refuted the allegation in a June 20 interview on CBS's 60 Minutes when he said: "There was a story which is factually inaccurate that the Sudanese offered bin Laden to us. ... As far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence of that."
Limbaugh has made the claim at least once before; on May 16 (RUSH 24/7 subscription required), he said, "Remember, the Sudanese government offered to hand Clinton Osama bin Laden's head on a silver platter, and Clinton didn't want him."
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[/quote]
Quote:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report...t.pdf#page=497
Page 480
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 Ladin because there was no indictment. President Clinton speech to the Long Island Association, Feb. 15, 2002 (videotape of speech). But the President told us that he had “misspoken” and was, wrongly, recounting a number of press stories he had read. After reviewing this matter in preparation for his Commission meeting, President Clinton told us that Sudan never offered to turn Bin Ladin over to the United States. President Clinton meeting (Apr. 8, 2004). Berger told us that he saw no chance that Sudan would have handed Bin Ladin over and also noted that in 1996, the U.S. government still did not know of any al Qaeda attacks on U.S. citizens. Samuel Berger interview (Jan. 14, 2004).
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Apr1.html
Berger Is Likely to Face Fine
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 2, 2005; Page A08
The Justice Department said yesterday there was no evidence that former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger was trying to conceal information when he illegally took copies of classified terrorism documents out of the National Archives in 2003.....
.....Noel L. Hillman, chief of the Justice Department's public integrity section, said Berger "did not have an intent to hide any of the content of the documents" or conceal facts from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he did hide the document copies in his coat jacket as he left the archives after two visits in September and October 2003. "As a former high-ranking government official, he knew and understood that what he did was wrong," Hillman said.....
.......Hillman noted that Berger only had copies of the documents -- not the originals -- and so was not charged with the more serious crime of destroying documents.....
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Quote:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...ws/clarke.html
<B>Interview With Richard Clarke:</B><I>President Clinton's national coordinator for counterterrorism, he is currently President Bush's special adviser for cyberspace security. In this interview he talks about the attributes that made John O'Neill stand apart in the world of counterterrorism, sketches Al Qaeda's threat and how it came into focus for U.S. intelligence, and discusses some of John O'Neill's battles, including the USS Cole investigation. This interview was conducted March 20, 2002.</I>
.....<B>Let's talk a little bit about 1996 and the CIA. O'Neill was involved in helping set up Station Alex -- the mission to track bin Laden, the money, his base of operations and such. Why was this important, and what did it achieve?</B>
There was a lot of pressure on the CIA from the White House to do more about bin Laden in the 1995-1996 time frame. At the time, bin Laden had a lot of his operations based in Sudan. But Sudan was not some place where the CIA could easily set up a large operation, so they created what they called a virtual station. Rather than having it in Sudan, it was in Virginia. It was not in CIA headquarters, so it wouldn't be part of all of that culture.
The FBI decided that they would be a part of the station. They would contribute FBI agents to a joint CIA/FBI effort to figure out where this network was. Who was bin Laden? Where did the money come from? Where did the money go? Where did the people come from who were trained at these camps? Where did they go after they were trained? It was a joint FBI/CIA project.
<B>And the success of it?</B>
The success of it was that it proved that there was a huge network. <B>Prior to that activity, beginning in 1996, 1997, we thought there might have been a widespread bin Laden network. We couldn't prove it.</B> What this did, it started taking a string, pulling it and pulling it, then finding the spread of the web, more and more people, in more and more countries. We were able, over the course of about 18 months, to go from thinking there was a bin Laden network, to seeing it in 56 countries. .......
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