Clintons and Bin Laden

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

Bill Clinton ignored repeated opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist allies and is responsible for the spread of terrorism, one of the ex-president’s own top aides charges.

Mansoor Ijaz, who negotiated with Sudan on behalf of Clinton from 1996 to 1998, paints a portrait of a White House plagued by incompetence, focused on appearances rather than action, and heedless of profound threats to national security.

Ijaz also claims Clinton passed on an opportunity to have Osama bin Laden arrested.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, hoping to have terrorism sanctions 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,” Ijaz writes in today’s edition of the liberal Los Angeles Times.

These networks included the two hijackers who piloted jetliners into the World Trade Center.

But Clinton and National Security Adviser Samuel "Sandy” Berger failed to act. ”I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities,” Ijaz writes. ”The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening." Thank Clinton for 'Hydra-like Monster'

”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,” says Ijaz, chairman of a New York investment company and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ijaz’s revelations are but the latest to implicate the Clinton administration in the spread of terrorism. Former CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson today also noted the failure of Clinton to do more than talk.

Among the many others who have pointed out Clinton’s negligence: former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, former Clinton adviser Dick Morris, the late author Barbara Olson, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iraq expert Laurie Mylroie, the CIA and some of the victims of Sept. 11.

And the list grows: members of Congress, pundit Charles R. Smith, former Department of Energy official Notra Trulock, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, government counterterrorism experts, the law firm Judicial Watch, New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Bret Schundler, the liberal Boston Globe – and even Clinton himself.

The Buck Stops Nowhere

Ijaz's account in the Times reads like a spy novel. Sudan’s Bashir, fearing the rise of bin Laden, sent intelligence officials to the U.S. in February 1996. They offered to arrest bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or to keep close watch over him. The Saudis "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.”

That’s when bin Laden went to Afghanistan, along with "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.”

If these names sound familiar, just check the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists.

The Clinton administration repeatedly rejected crucial information that Sudan had gathered on these terrorists, Ijaz says.

In July 2000, just three months before the deadly attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen, Ijaz "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.”

This offer would have brought bin Laden to that Arab country and eventually to the U.S. All the proposal required of Clinton was that he make a state visit to request 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.”

Concludes Ijaz: "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.”

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A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity called the Clinton administration's decision to pass up a chance to arrest Osama bin Laden in 1996 a "disgrace," saying "somebody didn't want this to happen."

A second intelligence official, also speaking anonymously, corroborated the charge that there was a deliberate effort to let bin Laden escape from the Sudan to Afghanistan, saying "somebody let this slip up."

The intelligence officials, both of whom were involved in secret negotiations between Washington and Khartoum to take bin Laden into custody, offered the damning accounts to New York's Village Voice. The Voice's first source said the chance to arrest bin Laden should have been a no-brainer, despite FBI claims that it lacked the evidence to convict him in an American court. "We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags," he told the paper.

The State Department may have blocked the wily terrorist's arrest to placate a part of the Saudi Arabian government that supported him, he speculated. The second official lamented that the U.S. lost a treasure trove of intelligence on the elusive al-Qaeda chief when it let him slip away. "It was not a matter of arresting bin Laden but of access to information," he told the Voice.

"We could have dismantled his operations and put a cage on top ... That's the story, and that's what could have prevented September 11. I knew it would come back to haunt us."

Sudan's former defense minister, major general Elfatih Erwa, agreed, telling the paper that he tried to warn the Clinton administration that letting bin Laden escape from the Sudan to Afghanistan was a major blunder.

"We knew that if he went to Afghanistan no one could control him (but) the U.S. didn't care," Erwa said. "They forgot about human intelligence after the Cold War. The feeling of supremacy led them astray. Many think that. Now they're harvesting the thorns."

Clinton Unleashed bin Laden

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