© 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.
