History Forum / General / British History / February 2006

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize

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.

http://www.infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/Clinton_let_bin_laden.htm