about bin Laden threat
Describes his inability to 'convince' his successor as 'disappointment'
Posted: October 16, 2003
1:55 p.m. Eastern
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Former President Bill Clinton is taking the proverbial "I told you so" stance with regards to terror chief Osama bin Laden.
Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the History Channel yesterday, Clinton said he warned incoming President George W. Bush before he left office in 2001 that the founder of al-Qaida was the biggest security threat the United States faced.
"In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defense," Clinton said, according to Reuters. "I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden."
Clinton told the audience his inability to convince Bush of the danger posed by al-Qaida represented "one of the two or three of the biggest disappointments that I had."
While he may have warned his successor, various reports suggest Clinton dropped the ball, himself.
A former FBI agent claims former Attorney General Janet Reno scrubbed a clandestine plan to capture the terror mastermind in 1998. Jack Cloonan told ABC News a secret team of federal investigators he was a part of even practiced the daring operation in the Texas desert. The scheme was to have a plane from Uzbekistan swoop into the area of Kandahar, Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating at the time and execute an arrest warrant.
"A U.S. plane was to fly in," Cloonan said. "And he [bin Laden] would have been greeted by an FBI agent, who would have said, 'Sheik bin Laden, there is a warrant for your arrest,'" he said.
But when the details of the operation went up the chain of command for approval, according to Cloonan, Reno killed it.
"They came to the decision that this plan was probably too dangerous, that the loss of life on the ground would have been significant," Cloonan told the news network. There was concern that people around the bin Laden compound would be killed."
WorldNetDaily reported the Clinton administration "de-emphasized" fighting Arab international terrorism to focus on domestic terrorism – namely, white "right-wing" militia groups. Veteran FBI agents told WND this led to the FBI ignoring Arab nationals flocking to U.S. flight schools, namely the 19 hijackers who claimed nearly 3,000 lives on Sept. 11, 2001.
Even though Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qaida had been responsible for a pattern of attacks from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the 1996 bombing of U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, FBI Director Louis Freeh told a Senate subcommittee in 1999 "a growing number (while still small) of 'lone offender' and extremist splinter elements of right-wing groups have been identified as possessing or attempting to develop/use chemical, biological or radiological materials."
Under Reno's direction, Freeh and his deputy Robert B. "Bear" Bryant made "right-wing" terrorism the centerpiece of their strategy to combat Y2K security threats. The strategy, called "Project Megiddo," zeroed in on white supremacists, militias and Christian "extremists." The project was outlined in a 32-page report the FBI had posted on its website until last fall.
FBI veterans say the shift was so dramatic at the agency that some 40 boxes of evidence that agents gathered in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case were never analyzed – until it was too late. The evidence held valuable clues to al-Qaida's network and operations, they say.
Other federal law-enforcement branches during the Clinton era also focused on the domestic threat from militia groups over the foreign threat from Islamic groups. The head of security at the Commerce Department, for one, sanitized a Y2K counterterrorism report distributed to the Census Bureau by removing Islamic threats. Only threats from white "right-wing" groups were included in the report, Commerce security officials told WorldNetDaily.
In his comments yesterday, Clinton said that after bin Laden, the next security priority would have been the absence of a Middle East peace agreement, followed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
"I would have started with India and Pakistan, then North Korea, and then Iraq after that," Reuters quotes him as saying. "I thought Iraq was a lower order problem than al-Qaida."
In his book "The High Cost of Peace" terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky makes the case that Clinton's foreign policies, specifically his zeal to strike a Mideast Peace accord, set the stage for the devastating terrorist attacks that have happened around the world in this century, including Sept. 11.
"Not only is the real Middle East in the early 21st century still the most volatile and dangerous region in the world, but, in addition, the enduring legacy of the Clinton administration's 'humanitarian aggression' (as European officials call it) has been to make the Arab world even more virulently radicalized and uncompromisingly hostile to the U.S.-led West," writes Bodansky.
So blinded was Clinton to achieving a Palestinian state as part of his enduring legacy that he completely overlooked the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, says Bodansky.
His "imposition of the peace process" whereby he boosted the election of Ehud Barak and then pushed the new Israeli prime minister to make "once-in-a-lifetime concessions" to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, according to Bodansky, helped embolden Muslim ire toward the United States.
"What the Clinton administration accomplished with its Middle East policy was to create in the Muslim eyes the image of a weak and subservient Israel, vulnerable to political pressure from the United States and military onslaught by its neighbors, while at the same time arousing frustration and wrath toward the United States because of its failure to 'deliver' Israel," writes Bodansky.
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