Bush's Support on Major Issues Tumbles in Poll

[DLR'sCock]

Bush's Support on Major Issues Tumbles in Poll
By Robin Toner and Marjorie Connelly
The New York Times

Friday 17 June 2005

Increasingly pessimistic about Iraq and skeptical about President Bush's plan for Social Security, Americans are in a season of political discontent, giving Mr. Bush one of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and even lower marks to Congress, according to the New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Forty-two percent of the people responding to the poll said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling his job, a marked decline from his 51 percent rating after of the November election, when he embarked on an ambitious second term agenda led by the overhaul of Social Security. Sixteen months before the midterm elections, Congress fared even worse in the survey, with the approval of just 33 percent of the respondents, and 19 percent saying Congress shared their priorities.

Despite months of presidential effort, the nationwide poll found the public is not rallying toward Mr. Bush's vision of a new Social Security that would allow younger workers to put part of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts. Two-thirds said they were uneasy about Mr. Bush's ability to make sound decisions on Social Security. Only 25 percent said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling Social Security, down slightly from what the poll found in March.

Moreover, 45 percent said the more they heard about the Bush plan, the less they liked it. The survey also found the public shared the growing skepticism in Washington about Mr. Bush's prospects for success on Social Security, with most saying they did not think Mr. Bush would succeed.

Still, Mr. Bush continued to have majority support for his handling of the war on terrorism - 52 percent - one of his strengths throughout his 2004 re-election campaign.

Mr. Bush's approval rating is below the historical pattern for June in the first year of a second term: President Clinton's stood at 60 percent and President Reagan's at 59 percent. But that could reflect, in part, the much greater partisan polarization in modern politics, underscored by the 71 percentage point gap between Mr. Bush's approval rating from Democrats and Republicans in the recent poll. Nicolle Devenish, White House communications director, dismissed the significance of the poll, saying Mr. Bush believes that following polls is equivalent to a dog chasing its tail. "We have advanced a broad agenda, and will continue to advocate the people's priorities," she said.

On Iraq, months of continued turmoil, insurgent attacks and casualties appear to have taken a further toll on public attitudes. Looking back, 51 percent said they thought the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, while 45 percent said military action was the right thing to do. That reflects only a slight erosion from findings by CBS News throughout the spring, but a marked turnaround from 2004, when pluralities tended to think it was still the right thing to do.

Moreover, only 37 percent said they approved of Mr. Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq, down from 45 percent in February. A strong majority of Americans now say the effort by the United States to bring stability and order to Iraq is going badly - 60 percent, up from 47 percent in February.

The latest poll was conducted by telephone June 10 through Wednesday with 1,111 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

In general, the survey found Americans in a darker mood. In one key measure, only 33 percent said they thought the country was on the right track, while 61 percent said it had gone off in the wrong direction. Similar results were found by CBS News in April and May, but that measure of national optimism was markedly better last November. There was little change in the way Americans rate the current condition of the American economy - 54 percent say it is very or fairly good. But the number of Americans who say the economy is getting worse is growing, to 36 percent from 30 percent in February.

When asked an open-ended question about the most important problems facing the nation, Americans cited the economy and jobs, war and terrorism at the top of the list. Social Security, which has consumed an enormous amount of political energy this spring, did not make the top six, suggesting voters have a different view of political priorities than the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House.

The public's view of Congress dropped sharply earlier this year, and has hovered at unusually low levels since March, according to CBS News Polls.

The sharpest drop in Congressional approval in recent months occurred among Republicans. In February, 54 percent of Republicans said they approved of the way Congress was doing its job; in the most recent poll, that had dropped to 40 percent. Some analysts suggest that Congress is paying the price for months of intense partisan struggle over judicial nominations and the decision to intervene in the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo.

Christine Weisman, a 54-year-old Republican homemaker in Reading, Pa., said in a follow-up interview, "They're not getting anything done. They don't seem to be able to come together on anything." She added, "It's all a political thing and they're forgetting the basic needs of the people."

Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said, "The American people know instinctively that we have major problems and we've got a Congress that is not attending or dealing with them." As the party in control, Republicans should be held responsible, Mr. Emanuel said, although he added that the 2006 midterms were far too distant for predictions.

Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the old truism still held: "People are not enamored, maybe, of the institution of Congress, but they love their congressman." He added, "My advice to the policy makers around Congress is to continue to get the work done, and make sure that as we get the work done, people know about it."

Mr. Bush faces a very resistant public when it comes to his Social Security proposals. He recently embraced a solvency plan that would cushion the lowest income workers from any benefit cuts, but a majority in the survey said they still believed Mr. Bush's general plan would most benefit high income people.

He has spent months trying to explain the virtues of private investment accounts, but public opinion on them remains very divided. Forty-five percent said those accounts were a good idea, 50 percent a bad idea, the same breakdown found in the survey in January.

People like the idea that the accounts could be inherited and that they could result in more money for retirement; both arguments boost support for the accounts. But the idea that these accounts could lead to huge amounts of government borrowing - to finance the transition costs - resulted in a very negative response, as did the idea that the accounts would be accompanied by a cut in the guaranteed government benefit.

Americans also recognized that Mr. Bush has a Social Security plan and the Democrats in Congress do not. A majority said they would like to see the Democrats offer a plan and not simply oppose Mr. Bush's.

But most said they did not think Mr. Bush's plan for private accounts would do anything for the system's long-term solvency.

Mr. Bush's approval rating in the Times/CBS Survey is one of a series of recent national polls that registered difficulties for Mr. Bush. The Associated Press-Ipsos Poll found Mr. Bush with a 43 percent approval rating; Gallup with 47 percent, and the Washington Post/ABC News Poll at 48 percent.

--------

Fred Backus contributed reporting for this article.

[academic punk]

yeah yeah yeah yeah...

first of all, his approval rating was below 50% before the election, and the media tried to play that up as proof that he wasn't going to be re-elected, and look who's still sitting in the executive chair at the Oval Office...

Second, it's not about what the press says about him today, it's what the history books will say about him twenty years down the road.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by academic punk
yeah yeah yeah yeah...

first of all, his approval rating was below 50% before the election, and the media tried to play that up as proof that he wasn't going to be re-elected, and look who's still sitting in the executive chair at the Oval Office...

Second, it's not about what the press says about him today, it's what the history books will say about him twenty years down the road. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/da/thumb/0/06/180px-Lbj.jpg

[Warham]

Well, I know Clinton had a near 60% rating at one time, and I don't think history will judge him very well in twenty years.

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
Well, I know Clinton had a near 60% rating at one time, and I don't think history will judge him very well in twenty years.

You're so fucking predictable it's not even funny:rolleyes:


We're stuck with the SHITTIEST pResident in our lifetime, and all you can do is but Clinton, but Clinton, but Clinton.....

whatever:cool:

[Warham]

No, the point is, ratings at one point in time mean nothing.

Carter was the shittiest president of our lifetime. At least of mine anyway.

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
No, the point is, ratings at one point in time mean nothing.

Carter was the shittiest president of our lifetime.

In the immortal words of YOUR Vice-president




Go Fuck Yourself.



Carter didnt lie to congress

Carter didnt lie to the UN

Carter didnt turn record surplus into record deficit

Carter didnt start illegal wars


But Dutch, Poppy, and Junior all hae done MUCH worse

Your support of this administration is disgusting to me.

Your hatred of Slick Willie is funny to me.

I'll take HIS 8 years over Ronnie's or Junior's ANYDAY:cool:

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
Well, I know Clinton had a near 60% rating at one time, and I don't think history will judge him very well in twenty years.

He's looking better by the day, especially when compared to your monkey boy

[Warham]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
He's looking better by the day, especially when compared to your monkey boy

He only looks better because he's been hanging out with Poppy Bush the last few months.

He said on Letterman last night that he was going up to Maine to visit with Bush the Elder next month. BCE business, you know.

'During a recent appearance together in Houston, Clinton noted that Barbara Bush had taken to calling Clinton "son."

"I told the Republicans in the audience not to worry, every family has one _ you know, the black sheep, kind of drifts off," he said. "I told them, I said, `This just shows you the lengths at which the Bushes would go to get another president in the family, and I wish I could get them to adopt Hillary."'

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
He only looks better because he's been hanging out with Poppy Bush the last few months.


Now you're just pushing FORD's buttons, you rabble rouser, you:D


What can I say.

I liked him better in office.

Junyor still doesn't hold a candle to Willie:cool:

[FORD]

BCE or not, at least Clinton knew how to have a goddamned domestic agenda, and he left the economy in great shape.

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by FORD
BCE or not, at least Clinton knew how to have a goddamned domestic agenda, and he left the economy in great shape.

And received his "oral negotiations" from Monica, not Jimmy/Jeff Gannon/Guckert:D

Monkey boy's domestic agenda polls lower than snake shit, yet there he is, out campaigning on Air Force One at 25k per hour trying to get people to understand his "social security plan":rolleyes:

[blueturk]

Originally posted by academic punk


Second, it's not about what the press says about him today, it's what the history books will say about him twenty years down the road.

And the history books will say that Bush started a war based on lies and looked after the wealthy (and his corporate cronies) while claiming to be a messenger from God.

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by blueturk
And the history books will say that Bush started a war based on lies and looked after the wealthy (and his corporate cronies) while claiming to be a messenger from God.

....who left office in shame in 2006 aboard Marine One waving the peace sign:D

[academic punk]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
....who left office in shame in 2006 aboard Marine One waving the peace sign:D

God forbid! Do you want to make Brie cry, you scoundrel???

Besides, then that would leave Cheney in the President's seat...imagine Mary running naked through the Rose Garden with her life partner while sipping on a Coors!!!

BRRRR!!!!

[FORD]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
....who left office in shame in 2006 aboard Marine One waving the peace sign:D

Nah, he'll probably just do another dopey SIEG OIL salute like he does in all of his photo ops......

[DLR'sCock]

As Red Fox would say, "BUSH: A president for big dummies!!!!"


:D

[Warham]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
And received his "oral negotiations" from Monica, not Jimmy/Jeff Gannon/Guckert:D

Monkey boy's domestic agenda polls lower than snake shit, yet there he is, out campaigning on Air Force One at 25k per hour trying to get people to understand his "social security plan":rolleyes:

If I was Clinton, I wouldn't be bragging about Ms. Lewinsky, but then again, Hillary was the other option...

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
If I was Clinton, I wouldn't be bragging about Ms. Lewinsky, but then again, Hillary was the other option...

If I was Bush I wouldn't be bragging about Iraq, the economy, my foreign policy, my plan for Social Security, the Homeland Security joke, my polling numbers, or paying journalists to shill for my lame initiatives.


If YOU were Bush, what would you be bragging about Warpig?

[ this should be fucking hilarious]


:cool:

[Warham]

The economy is just fine. Even Clinton's buddy Alan Greenspan said so about a week ago. Housing is through the roof. 5.1% unemployment rate is good. Inflation is decent.

Homeland Security has been OK. I haven't heard of any terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11.

Social Security? I'm still waiting for some ideas from the Democrats in Congress about what they plan to do. Raising the retirement age is a good idea, as has been suggested by some members of Congress.

Paying journalists? You mean like the ones from the NY Times, LA Times and the three major networks?

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham


Homeland Security has been OK. I haven't heard of any terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11.



Are you really this stupid?


Do you not read or study what your "homeland seurity" has spent, and on what?

Because they [ bin laden, et al ] take their time in planning [ 4-6 years avg.] you think this administration has done a good job on Homeland Security???????

You no longer have a shred of cred with me.


".....haven't heard of any attacks since 9/11......"

unfuckingbelievable.:rolleyes:

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham



Social Security? I'm still waiting for some ideas from the Democrats in Congress about what they plan to do. Raising the retirement age is a good idea, as has been suggested by some members of Congress.



The Bush "plan" DOES NOTHING TO SOLVE THE SOLVENCY OF SOCIAL SECURITY :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

What part of that can you not understand???????????????

Diverting trillions into private accounts DOES NOTHING TO SOLVE THE SOLVENCY OF SOCIAL SECURITY


You're too much.

I'm done even responding to your posts.

Take the last word. It's all your's:cool:

[Warham]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
Are you really this stupid?


Do you not read or study what your "homeland seurity" has spent, and on what?

Because they [ bin laden, et al ] take their time in planning [ 4-6 years avg.] you think this administration has done a good job on Homeland Security???????

You no longer have a shred of cred with me.


".....haven't heard of any attacks since 9/11......"

unfuckingbelievable.:rolleyes:

I said I thought they've done a good job with Homeland Security.

If Clinton would have done a better job with Homeland Security, bin Laden might not have been sitting around in one cave for 4-6 years planning 9/11.

He went for MONTHS and MONTHS without even talking to the head of the CIA. Bush sees the guy every day to get a report. If Slick Willy would have been more concerned about terrorist attacks throughout the years, we might not be the mess we are now.

[Warham]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
The Bush "plan" DOES NOTHING TO SOLVE THE SOLVENCY OF SOCIAL SECURITY :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

What part of that can you not understand???????????????

Diverting trillions into private accounts DOES NOTHING TO SOLVE THE SOLVENCY OF SOCIAL SECURITY


You're too much.

I'm done even responding to your posts.

Take the last word. It's all your's:cool:

I said I was still waiting to see what Democrats have to offer before I make a choice as to who's plan is better.

So tell me, what have they offered so far?

Oh yes, that's right, you are done with me. Most likely for about a half-hour.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
I said I thought they've done a good job with Homeland Security.


If Clinton would have done a better job with Homeland Security, bin Laden might not have been sitting around in one cave for 4-6 years planning 9/11.

As opposed to Bin LADEN (assuming he' still alive) sitting around in caves plotting new 9/11's? And by your own twisted logic, CLINTON was great at HOMELAND SECURITY 'cause there was only one major AL-Qaida directed attack in CONUS that killed less than 10, in his eight years in office.


He went for MONTHS and MONTHS without even talking to the head of the CIA. Bush sees the guy every day to get a report. If Slick Willy would have been more concerned about terrorist attacks throughout the years, we might not be the mess we are now.


BULLSHIT! Like to see the link for that one, in fact CLINTON had regular meetings on terrorism with his chief advisors!

How many did BUSH have in nine months preceding 9/11?





















NONE! Not one fucking meeting convened on the subject of terrorism! Spare the Kool-Aid bushit WAR....:rolleyes: But I'm really glad he sees his NEO CON stooge CIA Director, who admitted that he can barely handle the job...

[Warham]

Clinton’s Loss?
How the previous administration fumbled on bin Laden.

A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Richard Miniter is a Brussels-based investigative journalist. His new book, Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror has just been released by Regnery. He spoke to NRO early today about the run-up to the war on terror.


Kathryn Jean Lopez: What did the Clinton administration know about Osama bin Laden and when did they know it?

Richard Miniter: One of the big myths about the Clinton years is that no one knew about bin Laden until Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the bin Laden threat was recognized at the highest levels of the Clinton administration as early as 1993. What's more, bin Laden's attacks kept escalating throughout the Clinton administration; all told bin Laden was responsible for the deaths of 59 Americans on Clinton's watch.

President Clinton learned about bin Laden within months of being sworn into office. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake told me that he first heard the name Osama bin Laden in 1993 in relation to the World Trade Center attack. Lake briefed the president about bin Laden that same year.

In addition, starting in 1993, Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla.) repeatedly wrote to President Clinton and warned him and other administration officials about bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists. McCollum was the founder and chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and had developed a wealth of contacts among the mujihedeen in Afghanistan. Those sources, who regularly visited McCollum, informed him about bin Laden's training camps and evil ambitions.

Indeed, it is possible that Clinton and his national-security team learned of bin Laden even before the 1993 World Trade Center attack. My interviews and investigation revealed that bin Laden made his first attack on Americans was December 1992, a little more than a month after Clinton won the 1992 election. His target was 100 U.S. Marines housed in two towering Yemen hotels. Within hours, the CIA's counterterrorism center learned that the Yemen suspected a man named Osama bin Laden. (One of the arrested bombing suspects later escaped and was detained in a police sweep after al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in 2000.) Lake says he doesn't remember briefing the president-elect about the attempted attack, but that he well might have.

So it is safe to conclude that Clinton knew about the threat posed by bin Laden since 1993, his first year in office.

Lopez: What exactly was U.S. reaction to the attack on the USS Cole?

Miniter: In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the blast. The USS Cole was almost sunk. In any ordinary administration, this would have been considered an act of war. After all, America entered the Spanish-American war and World War I when our ships were attacked.

Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had ordered his staff to review existing intelligence in relation to the bombing of the USS Cole. After that review, he and Michael Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, were convinced it was the work of Osama bin Laden. The Pentagon had on-the-shelf, regularly updated and detailed strike plans for bin Laden's training camps and strongholds in Afghanistan.

At a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Attorney General Janet Reno, and other staffers, Clarke was the only one in favor of retaliation against bin Laden. Reno thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it. Tenet wanted to more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was. Albright was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims, and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process. Cohen, according to Clarke, did not consider the Cole attack "sufficient provocation" for a military retaliation. Michael Sheehan was particularly surprised that the Pentagon did not want to act. He told Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

Instead of destroying bin Laden's terrorist infrastructure and capabilities, President Clinton phoned twice phoned the president of Yemen demanding better cooperation between the FBI and the Yemeni security services. If Clarke's plan had been implemented, al Qaeda's infrastructure would have been demolished and bin Laden might well have been killed. Sept. 11, 2001 might have been just another sunny day.

Lopez: When the World Trade Center was first bombed in '93, why was it treated at first as a criminal investigation?

Miniter: The Clinton administration was in the dark about the full extent of the bin Laden menace because the president's decision to treat the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a crime. Once the FBI began a criminal investigation, it could not lawfully share its information with the CIA — without also having to share the same data with the accused terrorists. Woolsey told me about his frustration that he had less access to evidence from the World Trade Center bombing — the then-largest ever foreign terrorist attack on U.S soil — than any junior agent in the FBI's New York office.

Why did Clinton treat the attack as a law-enforcement matter? Several reasons. In the first few days, Clinton refused to believe that the towers had been bombed at all — even though the FBI made that determination within hours. He speculated a electrical transformer had exploded or a bank heist went bad.

More importantly, treating the bombing as a criminal matter was politically advantageous. A criminal matter is a relatively tidy process. It has the political benefit of insulating Clinton from consequences; after all, he was only following the law. He is not to blame if the terrorists were released on a "technicality" or if foreign nations refuse to honor our extradition requests. Oh well, he tried.

By contrast, if Clinton treated the bombing as the act of terrorism that it was, he would be assuming personal responsibility for a series of politically risky moves. Should he deploy the CIA or special forces to hunt down the perpetrators? What happens if the agents or soldiers die? What if they try to capture the terrorists and fail? One misstep and the media, Congress, and even the public might blame the president. So Clinton took the easy, safe way out, and called it a crime.

Lopez: Bill Clinton was actually offered bin Laden? Could you set the scene a little and clue us in on why, for heavens sakes, he would not take advantage of such opportunities?

Miniter: On March 3, 1996, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney, Director of East African Affairs at the State Department, David Shinn, and a member of the CIA's directorate of operations' Africa division met with Sudan's then-Minister of State for Defense Elfatih Erwa in a Rosslyn, Virginia hotel room. Item number two on the CIA's list of demands was to provide information about Osama bin Laden. Five days later, Erwa met with the CIA officer and offered more than information. He offered to arrest and turn over bin Laden himself. Two years earlier, the Sudan had turned over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal to the French. He now sits in a French prison. Sudan wanted to repeat that scenario with bin Laden in the starring role.

Clinton administration officials have offered various explanations for not taking the Sudanese offer. One argument is that an offer was never made. But the same officials are on the record as saying the offer was "not serious." Even a supposedly non-serious offer is an offer. Another argument is that the Sudanese had not come through on a prior request so this offer could not be trusted. But, as Ambassador Tim Carney had argued at the time, even if you believe that, why not call their bluff and ask for bin Laden?

The Clinton administration simply did not want the responsibility of taking Osama bin Laden into custody. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is on the record as saying: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." Even if that was true — and it wasn't — the U.S. could have turned bin Laden over to Yemen or Libya, both of which had valid warrants for his arrest stemming from terrorist activities in those countries. Given the legal systems of those two countries, Osama would have soon ceased to be a threat to anyone.

After months of debating how to respond to the Sudanese offer, the Clinton administration simply asked Sudan to deport him. Where to? Ambassador Carney told me what he told the Sudanese: "Anywhere but Somalia."

In May 1996 bin Laden was welcomed into Afghanistan by the Taliban. It could not have been a better haven for Osama bin Laden.

Steven Simon, Clinton's counterterrorism director on the National Security Council thought that kicking bin Laden out of Sudan would benefit U.S. security since "It's going to take him a while to reconstitute, and that screws him up and buys time." Buys time? Oh yeah, 1996 was an election year and team Clinton did not want to deal with bin Laden until after it was safely reelected.

Lopez: This amazes me every time I hear it: You write, "When a small plane accidentally crashed into the White House lawn in 1994, West Wing staffers joked that it was [Jim] Woolsey trying to see the president..." How could the CIA director have that bad a relationship with his president? And this, after the first WTC attack. Did no one in the West Wing get it?

Miniter: Never once in his two-year tenure did CIA director James Woolsey ever have a one-on-one meeting with Clinton. Even semiprivate meetings were rare. They only happened twice. Woolsey told me: "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn't exist."

One of the little scoops in the book is the revelation that Clinton froze Woolsey out because the CIA director refused to put a friend of Bill on the agency's payroll. This account was confirmed by both Woolsey and the Clinton's consigliore Bruce Lindsey.

Considering the Justice Department's experience with Webster Hubbell, another Friend of Bill, Woolsey's decision may have done the CIA a great deal of good. But Clinton's pique did not make America any safer from bin Laden.

Another Clinton intelligence failure involved a refusal to help the CIA hire more Arabic language translators. In 1993, Woolsey learned that the agency was able to translate only 10 percent of its Arabic intercepts and badly wanted more translators. But Sen. Dennis DeConcini refused to approve the funds unless Clinton phoned him and said it was a presidential priority. Despite entreaties, Clinton never phoned the Democratic senator and the CIA didn't get those translators for years.

Lopez: In sum, how many times did Bill Clinton lose bin Laden?

Miniter: Here's a rundown. The Clinton administration:

1. Did not follow-up on the attempted bombing of Aden marines in Yemen.

2. Shut the CIA out of the 1993 WTC bombing investigation, hamstringing their effort to capture bin Laden.

3. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key bin Laden lieutenant, slip through their fingers in Qatar.

4. Did not militarily react to the al Qaeda bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

5. Did not accept the Sudanese offer to turn bin Laden.

6. Did not follow-up on another offer from Sudan through a private back channel.

7. Objected to Northern Alliance efforts to assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.

8. Decided against using special forces to take down bin Laden in Afghanistan.

9. Did not take an opportunity to take into custody two al Qaeda operatives involved in the East African embassy bombings. In another little scoop, I am able to show that Sudan arrested these two terrorists and offered them to the FBI. The Clinton administration declined to pick them up and they were later allowed to return to Pakistan.

10. Ordered an ineffectual, token missile strike against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.

11. Clumsily tipped off Pakistani officials sympathetic to bin Laden before a planned missile strike against bin Laden on August 20, 1998. Bin Laden left the camp with only minutes to spare.

12-14. Three times, Clinton hesitated or deferred in ordering missile strikes against bin Laden in 1999 and 2000.

15. When they finally launched and armed the Predator spy drone plane, which captured amazing live video images of bin Laden, the Clinton administration no longer had military assets in place to strike the archterrorist.

16. Did not order a retaliatory strike on bin Laden for the murderous attack on the USS Cole.

Lopez: You sorta defend Clinton against "wag the dog" criticisms in regard to that infamous August 1998 (Monica times) bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and some bin Laden strongholds in Afghanistan. That wasn't the problem, was it — that we fired then?

Miniter: Certainly the timing is suspicious. The day before the East African-embassy bombings, Monica Lewinsky had recanted her prior affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Clinton. The sex scandals kicked into overdrive.

Still, the president wasn't doing too much in combating bin Laden because of his sex scandals — he was doing too little. He should have launched more missile strikes against bin Laden and the hell with the political timing. Besides, after the East African-embassy bombings, any president would have been negligent not to strike back. If he had not, it would be open season on Americans. He would have been as ineffectual as Carter was during the Tehran hostage crisis. Indeed, this was the mistake made following the attack on the USS Cole.

But Clinton was distracted by sex and campaign-finance scandals and his political support was already heavily leveraged to get him through those scandals. If he fought bin Laden more vigorously, the leftwing of the Democratic party might have deserted him — which could have cost him the White House.

Instead Clinton's token, ineffectual missile strikes that only emboldened bin Laden. He believed that America was too intimidated to fight back — and was free to plan one of the most-murderous terrorist attacks in history.

Lopez: How did George Tenet perform during the Clinton years vis-à-vis al Qaeda/bin Laden?

Miniter: Tenet seemed to take a too legalistic view of CIA operations. He was risk-averse, wanting almost absolute certainty before recommending action, focused on safeguards against error and unintended consequences. Tenet seemed more concerned with not getting in trouble rather than relentlessly pursuing results to safeguard Americans against terrorism, the focus of a warrior.

Each time U.S. intelligence pinpointed bin Laden, Tenet was against a missile strike on the grounds that the information was "single threaded" — a pet phrase of the director which means single source. The predator was armed and fitted with video cameras mostly to overcome Tenet's objections to taking out bin Laden.

Lopez: Madeline Albright — frequently called upon expert nowadays — what's her record vis-à-vis al Qaeda?

Miniter: Albright always insisted that diplomatic efforts would best yield results on bin Laden. Even after the Cole bombing, Albright urged continued diplomatic efforts with the Taliban to turn him over, even though that effort had been going on for two years with no progress. Two simple facts should have made Albright aware that the Taliban would never turn over bin Laden: Osama had married off one of his sons to Mullah Omar's daughter. The Taliban weren't about to surrender a member of the family — especially one that commanded thousands of armed fighters who helped maintain Omar's grip on power.

Lopez: What exactly is the Iraq-al Qaeda connection?

Miniter: Osama bin Laden's wealth is overestimated. He had been financially drained during his years in Sudan and financing terrorist operations in dozens of countries, including training camps, bribes, etc., requires a large, constant cash flow. Saddam Hussein was unquestionably a generous financier of terrorism. Baghdad had a long history of funding terrorist campaigns in the bin Laden-allied region that straddles Iran and Pakistan known as Beluchistan. Documents found in Baghdad in April 2003 showed that Saddam funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden since the 1990s. Saddam openly funded the Iraqi Kurdish Group and its leader, Melan Krekar, admitted that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan. George Tenet testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq had provided training in forging documents and making bombs. Farouk Harazi, a senior officer in the Iraqi Mukhabarat reportedly offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq. Salah Suleiman, an Iraqi intelligence operative, was arrested in October 2000 near the Afghan border, apparently returning from a visit to bin Laden. One of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Abdul Rahman Yasin, reportedly fled to Baghdad in 1994. Iraq ran an extensive intelligence hub in Khartoum; Sudanese intelligence officers told me about dozens of meeting between Iraqi Intel and bin Laden. Tellingly, reports that Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague several times in 2000 and 2001 have not been disproved. I have far more on this in Appendix A of Losing bin Laden.

Lopez: What most surprised you to learn about the Clinton years and terrorism?

Miniter: Three things:

1) That the Sept. 11 attacks were planned in May 1998 in the Khalden Camp in southeastern Afghanistan, according to American and British intelligence officers I interviewed. In other words, the 9/11 attacks were planned on Clinton's watch.

2) The sheer number of bin Laden's attacks on Americans during the Clinton years.

3) And how much senior Clinton-administration officials knew about bin Laden and how little they did about it.

Lopez: This sounds like this could all be right-wing propaganda. How can you convince readers otherwise?

Miniter: Most of my best sources were senior Clinton officials, including both of his national-security advisers, his first CIA director, Clinton's counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, Madeline Albright, and others. Plus, I interviewed scores of career federal officials. None of them are card-carrying members of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

And, while I shine the light on Clinton's shortcomings in dealing with bin Laden, I also give credit where it is due. Chapter nine is all about one of the greatest (and least-known) Clinton victories over bin Laden — the successful thwarting of a series of plots to murder thousands of Americans on Millennium night, 1999.

If anyone has any doubts about the credibility of this book, they should read the acknowledgements, which list many of my sources. Or peruse the more than 15,000 words of footnotes, that allow the reader to see exactly where information is coming from. Or examine the intelligence documents reproduced in Appendix B. Or pick a page at random and read it. Any fair-minded reader will see a carefully constructed and balanced account that attempts to lay out the history of Clinton and bin Laden.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
Clinton’s Loss?
How the previous administration fumbled on bin Laden.

A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

...
Lopez: This sounds like this could all be right-wing propaganda. How can you convince readers otherwise?

Miniter: Most of my best sources were senior Clinton officials, including both of his national-security advisers, his first CIA director, Clinton's counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, Madeline Albright, and others. Plus, I interviewed scores of career federal officials. None of them are card-carrying members of the vast right-wing conspiracy.



If anyone has any doubts about the credibility of this book, they should read the acknowledgements, which list many of my sources. Or peruse the more than 15,000 words of footnotes, that allow the reader to see exactly where information is coming from. Or examine the intelligence documents reproduced in Appendix B. Or pick a page at random and read it. Any fair-minded reader will see a carefully constructed and balanced account that attempts to lay out the history of Clinton and bin Laden.

Gee, he seems to spend an awful lot of time regarding his cred. So, what did one of the experts he mentions think of BUSH's efforts as compared to CLINTON?:

Former Aide Decries Bush Over Terror War
The Associated Press

Saturday 20 March 2004

WASHINGTON - Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, accuses the Bush administration of failing to recognize the al-Qaida threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and then manipulating America into war with Iraq with dangerous consequences.

He accuses Bush of doing "a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

Clarke, who is expected to testify Tuesday before a federal panel reviewing the attacks, writes in a new book going on sale Monday that Bush and his Cabinet were preoccupied during the early months of his presidency with some of the same Cold War issues that had faced his father's administration.

"It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier," Clarke told CBS for an interview Sunday on its "60 Minutes" program.

CBS' corporate parent, Viacom Inc., owns Simon & Schuster, publisher for Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies."

Clarke acknowledges that, "there's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too." He said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Jan. 24, 2001, asking "urgently" for a Cabinet-level meeting "to deal with the impending al-Qaida attack." Months later, in April, Clarke met with deputy cabinet secretaries, and the conversation turned to Iraq.

"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke said. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something."

The Associated Press first reported in June 2002 that Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions.

The last of those two meetings occurred Sept. 4 as the security council put finishing touches on a proposed national security policy review for the president. That review was finished Sept. 10 and was awaiting Bush's approval when the first plane struck the World Trade Center.

Almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Clarke said the president asked him directly to find whether Iraq was involved in the suicide hijackings.

"Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'Iraq did this,"' said Clarke, who told the president that U.S. intelligence agencies had never found a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida.

"He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection,' and in a very intimidating way," Clarke said.

CBS said it asked Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy on the national security council, about the incident, and Hadley said: "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."

CBS responded to Hadley that it found two people it did not identify who recounted the incident independently, and one of them witnessed the conversation.

"I stand on what I said," Hadley told CBS, "but the point I think we're missing in this is, of course the president wanted to know if there was any evidence linking Iraq to 9-11."

Clarke also harshly criticizes Bush over his decision to invade Iraq, saying it helped brew a new wave of anti-American sentiment among supporters of Osama bin Laden.

"Bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.' This is part of his propaganda," Clarke said. "So what did we do after 9/11? We invade ... and occupy an oil-rich Arab country, which was doing nothing to threaten us."

Clarke retired early in 2003 after 30 years in government service. He was among the longest-serving White House staffers, transferred in from the State Department in 1992 to deal with threats from terrorism and narcotics.

Clarke previously led the government's secretive Counterterrorism and Security Group, made up of senior officials from the FBI, CIA, Justice Department and armed services, who met several times each week to discuss foreign threats.

Link (http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2004/03/16727.php)

[Nickdfresh]

And what did CLINTON have to do with the warnings (http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16871) between April and September 2001?

BTW, that SUDAN story as told as a tale of extradition of BIN LADEN to the US is total bullshit!

http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=303838#post303838

[Warham]

He spends a paragraph on his sources, Nick. That's not 'alot of time regarding' his cred.

It's ironic that Clarke would rant about Bush's ineffectiveness before 9/11 when an administration that he was part of made that long list of gaffs and missed opportunities.

The horses were already out of the stable by 2001, Clarke.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
He spends a paragraph on his sources, Nick. That's not 'alot of time regarding' his cred.

It's ironic that Clarke would rant about Bush's ineffectiveness before 9/11 when an administration that he was part of made that long list of gaffs and missed opportunities.

The horses were already out of the stable by 2001, Clarke.

Oh bullshit WARHAM, what "sources did he actually mention? NONE! Your hatred for CLINTON has made you irrational and dumb! Fucking get a clue and post real articles that aren't some sycophant douchebag!

You know, like the kind of people that lie their ass off about the whole SUDAN thing. The following is an example of the faulty logical bullshit I already deflated:


NO NO NO! While there is some basis in truth, this simplistic article that turns what would have been a very complex operation and makes it sound like it is all so simple and deletes some key facts of the case (such as Bin Laden was to have been sent to Saudi Arabia, not the US, and they refused to take him) The overall assertion of Clinton ignoring Bin Lickcock is clearly not the case, whether he was getting stress relief blowjobs or not!

It was not so simple nor was it cut and dryed. This rag article you provided makes it seem like a done deal or something which clearly NOT THE CASE. This is puerile "Monica" bullshit at it's most repugnant and you guys make fun of Ford for his BCE theories and then believe this trash! Whatever!

I have research three sources from the provided links. The first is by the Pakistani man that claimed to have "brokered" a deal, which has been discredited. I believe the real story, is the Washington Post article at the end:

PBS.org

May 1996---The Sudan expels bin Laden because of international pressure by the United States and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden then moves back to Afghanistan. (Source: Jane's Intelligence Review 10/1/98)




© 2001 New York University. All Rights Reserved.

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away

"Radical Islam was a convenient national security threat"

By Mansoor Ijaz The Lying Pakistani Source for the bullshit
December 11, 2001

NEW YORK -- 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 United States 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.

The Sudanese had compiled Important data on each. 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 United States, 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.

Copyright 2001, Global Beat Syndicate, 418 Lafayette Street, Suite 554, New York, NY 10003 http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate.

**END of BULLSHIT**





The National Review

JuLY 2, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Sudan Story
Second-guessing games.


Al Gore is revisiting an old strategy. Back in 1992, the then-vice presidential candidate led the charge against President Bush I's handling of foreign policy. National security was an area in which most thought the former U.N. ambassador, deposer of Noriega and victor of Desert Storm was immune from criticism. However, the Clinton team adroitly turned this supposed immunity into a liability, making charges that were difficult to respond to and impossible to disprove. One such accusation was that Bush in fact caused the Gulf War by coddling Saddam. Therefore, the (incomplete) victory was in fact just damage control, the product of an inept foreign policy. It was a smart tactical ploy, and may have convinced some impressionable people that the Clinton-Gore team would handle foreign affairs more wisely.


Now Gore is assailing another President Bush on a national-security issue by accusing him of failure in not having "gotten Osama bin Laden or the al Qaeda operation." Gore did not offer any helpful hints on how to achieve this goal, but it is nevertheless a clever gimmick. Who can argue with the sought after result? He tossed in a sop to the Left by mentioning that Bush had not provided enough peacekeepers to prevent resurgent warlordism in Afghanistan, but Gore is far ahead of other Democratic 2004 hopefuls in understanding that if they want to criticize the president on the war, they should do it from the right.
However, in so doing, Gore has legitimized an inquest into the role of the administration he served in "getting" bin Laden. Secretary of State Powell raised the issue in his response to Gore on Sunday by mentioning the failure of the Clinton-Gore team to close a deal with the Sudan in the mid-90s when the terrorist haven offered bin Laden up. The sometimes fluctuating details can be found in a series of articles dating back at least to David Rose's September 30, 2001 Observer report, "Resentful west spurned Sudan's key terror files." See also Barton Gellman's October 3, 2001 Washington Post article, "Sudan's Offer to Arrest Militant Fell Through After Saudis Said No," Mark Huband's November 30 Financial Times article, "US rejected Sudanese files on al-Qaeda: Clinton administration refused offer to share terror network intelligence" (posted here — scroll down a bit:, David Rose's expanded account in the December 2001 Vanity Fair, "The Osama Files," and Mansoor Ijaz's December 11, 2001 column (among others) "Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away."
Ijaz is the source for much of this information. He is a Pakistani American investor and Clinton fundraiser who claims to have been an important broker in the deal. Last May 20 on WOR Radio, DNC spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri said that Ijaz was lying, that he had "absolutely no credibility," which really only tends to confirm his status as a Clinton insider. However, even she would not deny that something was going on back then. Sandy Berger is quoted in the Gellman article saying "the FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." The administration had wanted bin Laden to go someplace where justice was more "streamlined" like Saudi Arabia. Prince Turki al Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief, confirmed negotiating inconclusively with Sudan, and later with Afghanistan, over bin Laden's extradition. Bin Laden himself has given various reasons for leaving Sudan, including threats from the United States, but is lately unavailable for comment.
As I have argued here before, second-guessing in these situations is not productive. No one knew in 1996 that bin Laden would perpetrate the 9/11 attacks six years later. However, neither can Al Gore be free to make such charges without an examination of his record on the bin Laden issue. Personally, I think such an exercise would be exhausting and distracting. We know how this will shake out, it will be the usual Clinton-Gore m.o., a series of carefully crafted, somewhat ambiguous statements designed to skip around perjury — technical evasions of truth designed primarily to shift blame — explanations worthy of overly clever adolescents that offend common sense (Osama? I recall Usama.) We've seen it before. Nevertheless, if this is the direction Gore wants to go, equity demands a thorough inquiry. In the process, perhaps we will learn more about the war that bin Laden began in 1996 (if not earlier). We will find out why he was not taken seriously sooner, and what gave him the confidence to undertake what he called "the Battles of New York and Washington." It is a New World since 9/11; the question is did the attacks signal the beginning of a new era, or the logical culmination of the old?
— James S. Robbins is a national-security analyst & NRO contributor





The WashingtonPost

U.W. Was Foiled Multiple Times in Efforts
To Capture Bin Laden or Have Him Killed

Sudan's Offer to Arrest Militant Fell Through After Saudis Said No

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, October 3, 2001; Page A01

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.

Sudan expelled bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan. From there, he is thought to have planned and financed the twin embassy bombings of 1998, the near-destruction of the USS Cole a year ago and last month's devastation in New York and Washington.

Bin Laden's good fortune in slipping through U.S. fingers torments some former officials with the thought that the subsequent attacks might have been averted. Though far from the central figure he is now, bin Laden had a high and rising place on the U.S. counterterrorism agenda. Internal State Department talking points at the time described him as "one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today" and blamed him for planning a failed attempt to blow up the hotel used by U.S. troops in Yemen in 1992.

"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 September 11th. 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 in 1996. In the legal, political and intelligence environment of the time, they said, there was no choice but to allow bin Laden to depart Sudan unmolested.

"The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States," said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then.

Three Clinton officials said they hoped -- one described it as "a fantasy" -- that Saudi King Fahd would accept bin Laden and order his swift beheading, as he had done for four conspirators after a June 1995 bombing in Riyadh. But Berger and Steven Simon, then director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council (NSC) staff, said the White House considered it valuable in itself to force bin Laden out of Sudan, thus tearing him away from his extensive network of businesses, investments and training camps.

"I really cared about one thing, and that was getting him out of Sudan," Simon said. "One can understand why the Saudis didn't want him -- he was a hot potato -- and, frankly, I would have been shocked at the time if the Saudis took him. My calculation was, 'It's going to take him a while to reconstitute, and that screws him up and buys time.' "

Conflicting Agendas

Conflicting policy agendas on three separate fronts contributed to the missed opportunity to capture bin Laden, according to a dozen participants. 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.

In 1999, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir referred elliptically to his government's early willingness to send bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. But the role of the U.S. government and the secret channel from Khartoum to Washington had not been disclosed before.

The Sudanese offer had its roots in a dinner at the Khartoum home of Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Othman Taha. It was Feb. 6, 1996 -- Ambassador Timothy M. Carney's last night in the country before evacuating the 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. Now Carney was instructed, despite his objections, to withdraw all remaining Americans from the country.

Carney and David Shinn, then chief of the State Department's East Africa desk, considered the security threat "bogus," as Shinn described it. Washington's dominant decision-makers on Sudan had lost interest in engagement, preparing plans to isolate and undermine the regime. The two career diplomats thought that was a mistake, and that Washington was squandering opportunities to enlist Sudan's cooperation against radical Islamic groups.

One factor in Washington's hostility was an intelligence tip that Sudan aimed to assassinate national security adviser Anthony Lake, the most visible administration critic of Khartoum. The Secret Service took it seriously enough to remove Lake from his home, shuffling him among safe houses and conveying him around Washington in a heavily armored car. Most U.S. analysts came to believe later that it had been a false alarm.

Taha, distressed at the deteriorating relations, invited Carney and Shinn to dine with him that Tuesday night. He asked what his country could do to dissuade Washington from the view, expressed not long before by then-United Nations Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright, that Sudan was responsible for "continued sponsorship of international terror."

Carney and Shinn had a long list. Bin Laden, as they both recalled, was near the top. So, too, were three members of Egypt's Gamaat i-Islami, Arabic for Islamic Group, who had fled to Sudan after trying to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Sudan also played host to operatives and training facilities for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

"It was the first substantive chat with the U.S. government on the subject of terrorism," Carney recalled.

Taha mostly listened. He raised no objection to the request for bin Laden's expulsion, though he did not agree to it that night. His only rejoinders came on Hamas and Hezbollah, which his government, like much of the Arab world, regarded as conducting legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation.

Sudanese President Bashir, struggling for dominance over the fiery cleric Hassan Turabi, had already made overtures to the West. Not long before, he had delivered the accused terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal" to France. Less than a month after Taha's dinner, he sent a trusted aide to Washington.

Maj. Gen. Elfatih Erwa, then minister of state for defense, arrived unannounced at the Hyatt Arlington on March 3, 1996. Using standard tradecraft, he checked into one room and then walked to another, across Wilson Boulevard from the Rosslyn Metro.

Carney and Shinn were waiting for him, but the meeting was run by covert operatives from the CIA's Africa division. The Washington Post does not identify active members of the clandestine service. Frank Knott, who was Africa division chief in the directorate of operations at the time, declined to be interviewed.

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," the two-page memorandum 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 mujahedin [holy warriors] that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan," the document demanded. The CIA emissaries told Erwa that they knew of about 200 such bin Laden loyalists in Sudan.

During the next several weeks, Erwa raised the stakes. The Sudanese security services, he said, would happily keep close watch on 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. 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.

Susan Rice, then senior director for Africa on the NSC, remembers being intrigued with but deeply skeptical of the Sudanese offer. And unlike Berger and Simon, she 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."

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

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

Saudis Feared a Backlash

Clinton administration officials recalled that the Saudis feared a backlash from the fundamentalist opponents of the regime. Though regarded as a black sheep, bin Laden was nonetheless an heir to one of Saudi Arabia's most influential families. One diplomat familiar with the talks said there was another reason: The Riyadh government was offended that the Sudanese would go to the Americans with the offer.

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.

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.

"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.

From the Sudanese point of view, the failed effort to take custody of bin Laden resulted primarily from the Clinton administration's divisions on how to relate to the Khartoum government -- divisions that remain today as President Bush considers what to do with nations with a history of support for terrorist groups.

Washington, Erwa said, never could decide whether to strike out at Khartoum or demand its help.

"I think," he said, "they wanted to do both."



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© 2001 The Washington Post Company



Link (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/etc/cron.html)

[Warham]

I must have hit a nerve.

He listed his sources, Nick. Do you need me to go hunt them down for you in a list? He mentions Madame Albright, Richard Clarke, John Deutch, Sandy 'Burglar' Berger, Anthony Lake, plus others.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
I must have hit a nerve.

He listed his sources, Nick. Do you need me to go hunt them down for you in a list? He mentions Madame Albright, Richard Clarke, John Deutch, Sandy 'Burglar' Berger, Anthony Lake, plus others.

Really? No, actually he lists their names. He spends time TALKING ABOUT ALL OF HIS SOURCES, not listing ONE of them. And the nerve is only because you guys serve up heaping reams of bullshit to back up your nefarious claims. But if I supported a policy that has resulted in over 1,700 dead Americans and thousands of Iraqis with nothing to show for it except an approaching civil war, I suppose I would be reaching for crap books sold off NEWSMAX or wherever. Say, if you want RICHARD CLARK as a source, why don't you just use his comments directly rather than the author selectively (mis)quoting him second hand?

[Warham]

I don't think blaming Clinton's administration for at least half of 9/11 is nefarious, Nick.

I blame the Bush administration as well.

[FORD]

Mansucker Ijizz is a CIA/PNAC stooge.

[Warham]

Louis Freeh and George Tenet both deserve a big portion of the blame.

[academic punk]

So, let's see, if Clinton knew about bin Laden by '93 (and I'm certain it was actually much, much earlier), then that would indicate that Poppy Bush must've been aware of him too, right? Especially considering the ties the Bush family has with the rest of the bin Laden clan. But, no...no one ever in the Bush administration would ever commisurate with terror threats...

(if I could be bothered I would attatch the pic of Rumsfeld having a hearty handshake with Saddam Hussein, but, hey, use your imagination)

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by academic punk
So, let's see, if Clinton knew about bin Laden by '93 (and I'm certain it was actually much, much earlier), then that would indicate that Poppy Bush must've been aware of him too, right? Especially considering the ties the Bush family has with the rest of the bin Laden clan. But, no...no one ever in the Bush administration would ever commisurate with terror threats...



Excellent point.

However, as we all know, NO Bush can be held accountable for ANYTHING.

:rolleyes:


Even if some of them were meeting with members of the Bin Laden family on the morning of 9.11.01

:cool:

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
Louis Freeh and George Tenet both deserve a big portion of the blame.

Okay, I'll give you that. But so does RICE, RUMMY and some of the other stooges...

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Okay, I'll give you that. But so does RICE, RUMMY and some of the other stooges...

Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Chalabi............

[LoungeMachine]

Bush Advisers Planned Iraq War
Since 1990s

by Joe Taglieri, FTW Staff

Oct. 1, 2002, 17:00 PDT (FTW) -- The George W. Bush Administration's intentions of removing Saddam Hussein from power are not a recent development by any stretch of the imagination. Top White House officials affiliated with conservative think tanks and past administrations have been developing strategies for removing the Iraqi leader since the 1990s.

One such think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), published a report in September 2000 recommending policies for preserving and expanding U.S. dominance in world affairs, including an aggressive policy for deposing Saddam Hussein. Members of this group include Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, convicted Iran-Contra perjurer and current National Security Council (NSC) staffer Elliot Abrams, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and assistant for national security affairs.

Referring to the Persian Gulf region the report states, "Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The crux of the report advocates bulking up America's military so it can be "able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars." It lists southern Europe, the Middle East, Central- and East Asia as targets for increased military deployments.

Gary Schmitt, one of the report's project co-chairmen and a former Reagan policy adviser, told FTW that a U.S. invasion of Iraq is inevitable. "We will definitely be involved in Iraq for two reasons," said Schmitt. "One is because of issues myself, the administration and others have laid out for a number of years, and two, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell Saddam will allow inspections that matter."

ALL THE VICE PRESIDENT'S MEN

U.S. military action against Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein has long been a goal of members of the present Bush Administration. The PNAC report was based upon a 1992 draft of the Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance, which was prepared for then-Defense Secretary Cheney, Wolfowitz and Libby. At the time Libby and Wolfowitz were part of Cheney's policy staff.

Libby has an extensive background in international relations and defense policy. He joined President Reagan's State Department in 1981 as a member of the Policy Planning Staff and then became the director of special projects in the department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Libby was a deputy undersecretary for policy in President George H. W. Bush's Defense Department headed by Cheney.

He has a law degree from Columbia University and during the Clinton years was a managing partner for the Washington, D.C. international law firm Dechert, Price & Rhoads. Libby was also a legal consultant for the "Cox Committee," the congressional body that investigated Chinese breaches of U.S. national security and trade secrets in 1999.

Wolfowitz has worked for the government as a defense policy strategist since 1973. He was head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff from 1981 to 1982 and was deputy assistant secretary of defense for regional programs from 1977 to 1980.

During his time with regional programs Wolfowitz helped establish the force that would become the United States Central Command. He also contributed to the creation of the Navy's Maritime Pre-positioning Ships, which his Defense Department bio describes as the supply ships program that provided "the backbone of the initial U.S. deployment twelve years later in Operation Desert Shield."

Under Reagan, Wolfowitz served as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, where he was responsible for shaping U.S. relations with all Far East nations.

Along with five fellow signatories of PNAC's 1997 statement of principles, Wolfowitz is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. He was the dean and professor of international relations at the university's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Thomas Donnelly, the principle author of the 2000 report advocating aggressive U.S. military policies, holds a masters degree from the Nitze School.

SAIS is also home to foreign policy behemoth Zbigniew Brzezinski, the author of a 1997 book foretelling current U.S. conflicts with Iraq and terrorists called "The Grand Chessboard." Brzezinski, a trustee of the Trilateral Commission and a member the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, is billed by SAIS as a Robert E. Osgood professor of American foreign policy.

PNAC member Elliot Abrams is a former assistant secretary of state who was a major player in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. He was convicted of several felony offenses including lying to Congress but was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.

Abrams has recently served on the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom and was appointed to the NSC staff position several months into George W. Bush's tenure. Given his controversial background, it was widely known that Abrams would never have survived a Senate confirmation hearing for a deputy or assistant secretary position at either the Department of Defense or State Department.

'RICHARD'S STRING OF PERLES'

Richard Perle is another key Bush policy maker at the center of the administration's push toward war with Iraq. He is the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which reports policy recommendations to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

Perle was assistant secretary of defense for international security policy during both terms of the Reagan Administration. He has been a frequent contributor to national media publications and television programs.

He is also a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank which has a member list that reads like a who's who of conservative politicians, academics, and policy makers.

Some contend Perle is a major puller of defense policy strings. Jude Wanniski, an analyst who focuses on the politics of "supply-side economics," claims Perle controls the "brass" of the Bush Administration's defense policy team -- Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice.

"It is a badge of honor among the Warrior Class to be identified as one of Richard's String of Perles," Wanniski wrote in a memo posted on his Polycomomics, Inc. website.

Two PNAC men cited by Wanniski as faithful Perlites are William Kristol and Frank Gaffney.

Gaffney is a Washington Times columnist and a contributor to Defense News and Investor's Business Daily. During the Reagan Administration he was an assistant secretary of defense under Perle.

Gaffney, who holds a Masters Degree from Johns Hopkins' SAIS, is the founder and president of yet another think tank known as the Center for Security Policy.

Conservative commentator Kristol is the editor of the Weekly Standard magazine and a frequent pundit on TV news programs. He is also the PNAC chairman and, according to Wanniski, part of a network of opinion makers who answer to Perle. Kristol's network consists of many editorial page writers and journalists for national publications and television programs.

The vast majority of PNAC's money comes from funds forwarded through the New Citizenship Project, another organization founded by Kristol. Watchgroup Media Transparency reports PNAC has received a total of $600,000 between the organization's founding in 1997 and 2000.

The New Citizenship Project is primarily funded by grants from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. All are conservative philanthropic non-profits.

Tim Barker, FTW Staff, contributed to this report.

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine


PNAC member Elliot Abrams is a former assistant secretary of state who was a major player in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. He was convicted of several felony offenses including lying to Congress but was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.

Abrams has recently served on the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom and was appointed to the NSC staff position several months into George W. Bush's tenure.

Fucking amazing:rolleyes: :mad:

Convicted Felon, Lied to Congress, Pardoned by Poppy, Hired by Monkeyboy

fucking unreal:cool:

[LoungeMachine]

Facing lagging support, Bush defends war in Iraq
Saturday, June 18, 2005; Posted: 3:01 p.m. EDT (19:01 GMT)

(CNN) -- The United States will settle for "nothing less than victory" in Iraq, President Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.

Speaking amid a swirl of lagging support for the war and declining approval ratings for his leadership, Bush defended U.S. operations in Iraq and showed no intention of pulling out of the region.

"We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens," he said.

Recent polls have given Bush some of the lowest approval ratings of his tenure, with figures hovering in the low-to-mid 40s.

A Gallup poll released Monday found that 59 percent of Americans favor at least some U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, and some lawmakers are calling for troops to be brought home. A bipartisan group this week called for a timetable for bringing all the troops home.

"Their (the terrorists') goal is to get us to leave before Iraqis have had a chance to show the region what a government that is elected and truly accountable to its citizens can do for its people," Bush said in his address Saturday.

Bush's comments were a marked change from last week's address, which concentrated on domestic issues.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, speaking Thursday, said Bush realizes that Americans are concerned about the war, "and that's why he's going to sharpen his focus, spending more time talking about the progress that's being made on the ground."

In recent days, some prominent lawmakers -- including Bush's fellow Republicans -- have spoken out about their dimming views of the conflict.

"After 1,700 deaths, over 12,000 wounded and $200 billion spent, we believe it is time to have this debate and this discussion on this resolution," Rep. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, said Thursday.

Jones, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is the same congressman who pushed for the House cafeteria to change the name of French fries to "freedom fries" after France opposed the U.S. drive to war.

On Thursday he joined a bipartisan group of House members sponsoring a proposed bill calling on the administration to announce a plan for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq by the year's end and for the withdrawal to begin by Oct. 1, 2006.

Jones was joined by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a former Libertarian presidential candidate; Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, another Armed Services member; and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

Of the proposed resolution, McClellan said it would be the wrong message to send the world at a time when the insurgency against U.S. troops and Iraqi forces is in a "desperate mode."

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine



White House spokesman Scott McClellan, speaking Thursday, said Bush realizes that Americans are concerned about the war, "and that's why he's going to sharpen his focus, spending more time talking about the progress that's being made on the ground."



Yeah. That's great Scottie.

That strategy sure worked for Monkeyboy's "plan to fix SS":rolleyes:

Sharpen his focus????????????????

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?????????????????????????

So his "focus" has been dull?

Spend more time talking about the progress being made on the ground?????????????????????????????

This is SURREAL :confused: :confused: :confused: