🚀 go-pugleaf

Rod & BJ wrote:
> 
> "Jim Sibert" <sibertfj@gte.net> wrote in message
> news:3CE489AB.DE76D192@gte.net...
> > I think the Top Ten Conservative Idiots list deserves recognition and
> should
> > be a must read for all secondary  education students.
> 
> Could be a valuable tool to teach how half truths, spin and possibly an
> occasional lie can be all bundled up together in a "newsletter". Could also
> be a valuable testing or measuring tool for brain rot since a steady diet of
> the "Top Ten Conservative Idiots list" surely would. Not to mention that the
> hyperbolic routine insults and name calling further deteriorate intelligent
> public discource.

Care to point out any of the spin and lies you believe exist?

> >Any idea on how the
> > Bush camp is going to spin the latest development on all of the
> information
> > he had prior to 9/11/01.
> > Jim
> 
> The Art Bell crowd is obviously alive and apparently doing well........The
> Dems have also done quite well catering to America's lowest of low IQ point
> wise...Those that believe that FDR sat on his hands while Pearl harbor was
> bombed or that indeed JFK was killed by 1000 different theories and that
> area 51 has aliens will be having a great day.... albeit demonstrating proof
> that public education does not always provide a education or teach critical
> thinking skills.
> 
> Since Osama has been linked to the 1993 WTC bombing, involved with the
> Somalia debacle, the 1998 African embassy bombings and the bombing of the
> Cole. As well as many other failed and/or aborted attempts world wide and
> was well known to have many active training camps and through money and
> force had great influence with the Taliban. He would and was a topic of
> interest and discussion in the whitehouse and was a known threat. However
> that is a far cry from having direct or even indirect knowledge of the "who,
> what and when" of the then looming WTC bombing.....Not to mention that Bush
> and his team had only been in office 7-8 months with a very full plate of
> activities and concerns world wide. However it is a valid question to wonder
> why did Clinton give Osama a 8 yr pass to terrorize America? Soggy

In '96, Sudan Offered to Arrest bin Laden  
Barton Gellman Washington Post Service 
Thursday, October 4, 2001 
Saudis Balked at Accepting U.S. Plan 

http://www.infowars.com/saved%20pages/terrorists/IHT_sudan.html
 
WASHINGTON The government of Sudan, using a back channel direct from its
president to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States,
offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place
him in custody in Saudi Arabia, 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 hotel in Arlington,
Virginia, on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort
10 weeks later. 

Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept Mr. bin Laden, and lacking a
case to indict him in U.S. courts, the Clinton administration finally
gave up on the capture. 

Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan. From
there, he is thought to have planned and financed the bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the near-destruction of
the American destroyer Cole in Yemen last year and the devastation in
New York and Washington on Sept. 11. 

"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 Sept. 11. 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 against Mr. bin Laden in 1996. In the legal, political and
intelligence environment then, they said, there was no choice but to
allow him to leave Sudan unmolested. 

"In the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution, so to
bring him here is to bring him into the justice system," said Samuel
Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then. "I don't think
that was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him some place
where justice is more" - he paused a moment, then continued -
"streamlined." 

Three officials in the Clinton administration said they hoped - one
described it as "a fantasy" - that the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, would
order Mr. bin Laden's swift beheading, as he had done for four
conspirators after a June 1995 bombing in Riyadh. 

But Mr. Berger and Steven Simon, then director for counterterrorism for
the National Security Council, said the White House considered it
valuable in itself to force Mr. bin Laden out of Sudan, thus tearing him
away from his extensive network of businesses, investments and training
camps. 

Conflicting policy agendas on several other fronts contributed to the
missed opportunity to capture Mr. bin Laden, according to a dozen
participants. 

The Clinton administration was riven by differences on whether to engage
Sudan's government or isolate it, a situation that 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 enforcement of the no-flight zone in Iraq. 

And there were the beginnings of debate, intensified lately, on whether
the United States wanted to indict and try Mr. bin Laden or to treat him
as a combatant in an underground war. 

The Sudanese offer had its roots in a dinner at the Khartoum home of
Sudan's foreign minister, Ali Othman Taha. It was Feb. 6, 1996, the last
night in the country for the U.S. ambassador, Timothy Carney, before
evacuating the U.S. Embassy on orders from Washington. Paul Quaglia,
then the CIA station chief in Khartoum, had led a campaign to pull out
all Americans after he and his staff came under aggressive surveillance
and twice had to fend off attacks, one with a knife and one with claw
hammers. 

Mr. Carney and David Shinn, then chief of the State Department's East
Africa desk, considered the security threat "bogus," as Mr. Shinn
described it. Washington's dominant decision-makers on Sudan had lost
interest in engagement, preparing plans to isolate and undermine the
regime. 

One factor in Washington's hostility was an intelligence tip that Sudan
planned to assassinate President Bill Clinton's national security
adviser, Anthony Lake, the most visible administration critic of
Khartoum. Most U.S. analysts came to believe later that it had been a
false alarm. 

On Feb. 6, 1996, Mr. Taha, the foreign minister, asked Mr. Carney and
Mr. Shinn what his country could do to dissuade Washington from the
view, expressed not long before by Madeleine Albright, then the chief
U.S. delegate to the United Nations, that Sudan was responsible for
"continued sponsorship of international terror." 

Mr. Carney and Mr. Shinn had a long list. Mr. bin Laden, as they both
recalled, was near the top. Mr. Taha mostly listened. He raised no
objection to the request for Mr. bin Laden's expulsion, though he did
not agree to it that night. On March 3, 1996, Sudan's defense minister,
Major General Elfatih Erwa, arrived at the Hyatt Arlington. Mr. Carney
and Mr. Shinn were waiting for him, but the meeting was run by covert
operatives from the CIA's Africa division. In a document dated March 8,
1996, the Americans spelled out their demands. Titled "Measures Sudan
Can Take to Improve Relations with the United States," it asked for six
things. Second on the list - just after an angry enumeration of attacks
on the CIA station in Khartoum - was Osama bin Laden. 

"Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and
passport data on mujahidin that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan,"
the document demanded. 

During the next several weeks, General Erwa raised the stakes. The
Sudanese security services, he said, would happily keep close watch on
Mr. bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the
government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over,
though to whom was ambiguous. 

Susan Rice, then senior director for Africa on the National Security
Council, remembers being intrigued with but deeply skeptical of the
Sudanese offer. And unlike Mr. Berger and Mr. Simon, Ms. Rice argued
that mere expulsion from Sudan was not enough. 

"We wanted them to hand him over to a responsible external authority,"
she said. "We didn't want them to just let him disappear into the
ether." 

Mr. Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were briefed,
colleagues said, on efforts to persuade the Saudi government to take Mr.
bin Laden. 

The Saudi idea had some logic, since Mr. bin Laden had issued a fatwa,
or religious edict, denouncing the House of Saud as corrupt. Riyadh had
expelled Mr. bin Laden in 1991 and stripped him of his citizenship in
1994, but it wanted no part of jailing or executing him, apparently
fearing a backlash from militant opponents of the government. 

Some American diplomats said the White House did not press the Saudis
very hard. 

Resigned to Mr. 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 Mr. bin Laden had not been linked to
a dead American, and it was inconceivable that Mr. Clinton would sign
the "lethal finding" necessary under the circumstances. 

"In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't
let him go to Somalia,'" General Erwa said in an interview. "We said he
will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.'" On May 15, 1996, Mr.
Taha, the foreign minister, sent a fax to Mr. Carney in Nairobi, giving
up on the transfer of custody. Sudan's government had asked Mr. bin
Laden to leave the country, Mr. Taha wrote, and he would be free to go. 

Mr. Carney faxed back a question: Would Mr. bin Laden retain his access
and control to the millions of dollars of assets he had built up in
Sudan? 

Mr. Taha gave no reply before Mr. bin Laden chartered a plane three days
later for his trip to Afghanistan. 

Subsequent analysis by U.S. intelligence suggests that Mr. bin Laden
managed to access the Sudanese assets from his new redoubt in
Afghanistan. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Here's another one ...

Wednesday, December 26, 2001 
Did Clinton miss shot at bin Laden? 
Former Christiansburg resident stirs up controversy. 
By JEN McCAFFERY
THE ROANOKE TIMES 

http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/news/story123493.html 
 
A 1979 Christiansburg High School graduate is at the center of a
firestorm over whether the Clinton administration missed a chance to
capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.

Mansoor Ijaz, now a New York City-based investment banker who traveled
to Sudan more than a half dozen times in the mid-1990s, says he
repeatedly relayed offers from the Sudanese government to the Clinton
White House to share intelligence on bin Laden. In one case, the
president of Sudan offered to arrest and extradite bin Laden and turn
over information about global terrorist networks, Ijaz says.

The Clinton administration declined to take him up on the offer, Ijaz
has argued in a Los Angeles Times commentary, in the pages of the
January issue of the magazine Vanity Fair, and on national television
shows.

He blames the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on what he says were the
Clinton administration's foreign policy failures.

Ijaz, the son of Pakistani immigrants, has become a fixture on national
television shows since Sept. 11. His late father was a physics professor
at Virginia Tech and his mother still lives in Shawsville.

"Four thousand Americans lost their lives as a result of a single-minded
pursuit of a single policy," Ijaz, 40, said in a phone interview Friday.
"Our approach was 'contain and control.' It was the same policy from
Indonesia to ... Afghanistan. Well, it blew up on September 11."

Clinton's former National Security Advisor, Samuel "Sandy" Berger,
called Ijaz's allegations "ludicrous and irresponsible."

"We were trying to get bin Laden with everything we had, including
firing 60 cruise missiles at him in August 1998," Berger said in a phone
interview Friday. Clinton ordered an attack on terrorist camps in
Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was thought to be
linked to bin Laden and suspected of manufacturing chemical weapons.

Former Clinton administration officials don't dispute that Sudan - which
is on the State Department's list of terrorist nations - sent messages
that officials were seeking better relations with the United States. But
they do dispute whether the Sudanese ever offered to arrest bin Laden.
They have also questioned the veracity of the Sudanese government and of
Ijaz himself, arguing that he had business interests in Sudan.

Former Clinton White House officials have also accused Ijaz of
representing himself as an agent of the U.S. government in his
interactions with foreign governments. And they also question whether
Ijaz, who donated almost $1 million to Democrats during the 1990s, is
angry that his donations did not influence the Clinton administration's
foreign policy. 

Ijaz, who has celebrated Christmas at the White House in recent years
and says he had good access to Clinton administration officials,
disputes that he had business interests in Sudan. He also disputes that
he represented himself to foreign governments as an agent of the U.S.
government during his forays into private diplomacy in South Asia,
Africa and other locations. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Osama bin Laden arrived in Sudan from Afghanistan in 1991, he was
welcomed by government leaders. Bin Laden began investing in public
works in the African country. According to a Los Angeles Times
commentary by Gayle Smith, another former senior Clinton administration
official, the government also started terrorist training camps and
provided a safe haven for extremist Islamic groups. It also did little
to try to stop the country's civil war, which has cost 2 million lives,
Smith argued. 

Ijaz has said that he met with Sudanese leaders and repeatedly came
forward with counterterrorism offers to the Clinton administration, but
that he was rebuffed. 

Susan Rice, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs from 1997 to 2000, said Friday that Sudanese officials never
followed up with any substantive change in behavior. And they never gave
U.S. officials any intelligence files, Rice said.

Ijaz is not alone in criticizing the Clinton administration for failing
to engage Sudan.

Former Sudan ambassador Timothy Carney said in a phone interview
Saturday that from 1996 to when he left his post in 1997 the dialogue
between U.S. officials and the Sudanese government "petered out." The
Clinton administration then rejected Carney's suggestions about how to
re-engage the Sudanese, Carney said.

"The fact is, they were opening the doors, and we weren't taking them up
on it," Carney told Vanity Fair. "The U.S. failed to reciprocate Sudan's
willingness to engage us on serious questions of terrorism. We can
speculate that this failure had serious implications - at the least for
what happened at the U.S. embassies in 1998. In any case, the U.S. lost
access to a mine of material on bin Laden and his organization." 

Rice countered that diplomatic channels to Sudan were always open and
that ambassadors, administration and FBI and CIA officials met
repeatedly with Sudanese officials from 1994 to 2000. The White House
was not looking for foreign policy assistance from Ijaz, a wealthy
investor with business interests in oil-rich Sudan, Rice said.

"We did not need, nor would it have been appropriate for us to use a
private citizen, particularly one with business interests," Rice said.
She added that Ijaz did not disclose his business interests to
administration officials when he met with them in 1996.

Ijaz disputed Rice's claim, arguing that when he met with Berger and
Rice at the White House in 1996, he had "absolutely no business
interests in Sudan whatsoever." The Washington Post reported in a 1997
story, however, that "Ijaz also acknowledged his commercial interests in
effecting a reconciliation between the United States and Sudan."

In 1997, Arakis Energy Corp., a Canadian company with oil fields in
Sudan, announced Ijaz's appointment to an advisory committee to the
company's board. Ijaz said he did not get paid for the position.

But he said "it wouldn't be the first time that an interested party
lobbied Mr. Berger, the White House, the National Security Council or
other organs of our government for business purposes."

Rice and other senior Clinton officials have suggested that Ijaz's
recent criticism stemmed from Ijaz's frustration that the administration
did not listen to his foreign policy recommendations, despite raising
almost $1 million for the Democrats during the 1990s. She recalled that
at the 1996 White House meeting Ijaz was basically saying that Sudanese
leaders weren't "bad guys."

"He seems to have expected that his views would become policy because he
gave a lot of money," Rice said.

Ijaz has said the entreaties on the part of the Sudanese government also
involved a letter he delivered to the Clinton administration from one of
the country's most powerful politicians, Hassan Turabi, who was later
placed under house arrest for criticizing Sudanese president Omar Hassan
al-Bashir's government. The letter, according to New York Newsday,
offered to "usher in a new era of improving the understanding and
attitudes of all elements of the Islamic world."

Ijaz delivered another letter from al-Bashir to Rep. Lee Hamilton, the
ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1997. In the
letter, al-Bashir offered to open up the country to FBI counterterrorism
units and to provide the United States with access to the government's
intelligence files. The Clinton administration did not respond, Ijaz
said.

Rice has suggested that the Sudanese government was attempting to
"rewrite history."

"Their lobbyists, business partners and other friends are engaged in an
effort to convince people that they were Boy Scouts who wanted to help
the United States if we would only let them," Rice said.

Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan, points to the letters from
Sudanese leaders to Clinton and Hamilton as evidence of efforts by the
Sudanese to open a dialogue with the United States.

"That's where the evidence lies," Carney said. "That is history, it is
not rewritten history."

Berger questioned the timing of a Dec. 5 column in The Los Angeles Times
in which Ijaz claimed that the Sudanese government had been trying to
share intelligence about terrorist networks.

"Why did this all happen after Sept. 11, when President Bush is talking
about targeting state sponsors of terrorism?" Berger asked.

Ijaz wrote in the column that he met with Clinton, Berger, and other
administration officials and Sudanese leaders. Sudanese President
al-Bashir offered to arrest bin Laden and supply intelligence about the
operations of other terrorist groups, Ijaz wrote.

"Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted
commercial airliners into the World Trade Center," Ijaz continued. "The
silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was
deafening." 

In July 2000, Ijaz wrote, he brought a proposal to the Clinton
administration from a counterterrorism officer of an Arab nation
friendly to the United States that he declined to name. The Arab
official offered that bin Laden would be extradited to the unnamed
country first and then extradited to the United States if Clinton would
make a state visit. 

Rice countered that she was "not aware of Bashir ever offering the
arrest and extradition of bin Laden." 

Ijaz has claimed he had access to the White House, often meeting with
National Security Council staffers. Berger said he recalled meeting with
Ijaz twice, once about Pakistan, then about Sudan.

But after the second meeting with Ijaz and Rice in 1996 and before
Berger's appointment as Clinton's National Security Advisor in 1997,
Berger said he was advised by his staff not to continue to stay in touch
with Ijaz. Ijaz, however, has said he remained in contact with Berger.

"More than one foreign government, including the Pakistanis, came to the
United States government and said Mr. Ijaz was asserting that he was
acting as an agent of the United States government," Berger said. "That
was not true and we told them that. And my staff after that suggested
that we should be careful in dealing with him."

Ijaz replied that "the governments that would do that were the ones who
wanted to contain and control me."

-- 
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then
gets elected and proves it.
-P.J. O'Rourke