Clinton’s plan to eliminate al Qaeda
Comments(5) In my continuing series of evidence I’m sending to my more conservative friends and family to prove points I’ve made in recent discussions we’ve had, I’m posting my rebuttal to the usual “Clinton was soft on terrorism” line.
For the following, I have to give a lot of credit to Al Franken’s new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. If you’re arguing with someone who pulls out a lot of anti-left sound bites they heard on some of these right-wing talk shows (like on Fox News), then its pretty easy to go into the book and pick up those exact stories. Since every chapter has pretty extensive references, it’s easy to get back to the original source (which I prefer) and make sure there’s no spin going on (pun intended).
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily send my Republican friends a copy of this book and urge them to read it, as those same right-wing commentators have attacked Al Franken to the point where many people will stop listening as soon as you mention his name.
Really, I find the fact that many smart smart people I know are falling for a lot of this stuff hook-line-and-sinker very disturbing. When my Dad said, “In 1996 a foreign government offered bin Laden to Clinton and he wouldn’t take him,” something triggered in my memory. Turns out that in his book, Franken has an entire sidebar about this quote. Some of what I say below is paraphrased from him, some of it supports other claims I’ve been making about the evolution of technology in our military under Clinton. In any case, I found it all very interesting, I hope you do as well.
I did some research this morning on what you said yesterday about a foreign government offering bin Laden to Clinton and the administration turning down the opportunity. This was suprising to me, knowing how much the Clinton administration was working to eliminate al Qaeda’s threat. I was going to ask what your source was on that, but with a quick search I found this quote from Sean Hannity’s Let Freedom Ring:
It’s truly astonishing. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and their liberal allies on Capitol Hill were offered Osama bin Laden by the Sudanese government, and they turned the offer down. They could have taken him into custody and begun unraveling his terrorist network almost six years ago. But they didn’t. And now more than three thousand innocent Americans have paid with blood.
Hannity ranks up there with Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter for making unfounded claims, so I did some searching for people who’ve researched the history on this.
The best summary I’ve heard of the whole story comes from a front page Washington Post article on Oct 3, 2001, “U.S. Was Foiled Multiple Times in Efforts To Capture Bin Laden or Have Him Killed”
“U.S. Was Foiled Multiple Times in Efforts To Capture Bin Laden or Have Him Killed”
It looks like that while the administration knew he was leaving Sudan, the Saudi’s blocked the effort due to fear of a fundamentalist backlash. The idea was floated on our side to kill him anyways while in transit, but at this point (1996) there wasn’t enough evidence:
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.
As al Qaeda hit more targets, and evidence built, Clinton did take action to try and take him out. Specifically, after the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, Clinton issued a presedential directive authorizing the assassination of bin Laden. There’s a lot more on this in the extensive article “Broad Effort Launched After ‘98 Attacks” at:
“Broad Effort Launched After ‘98 Attacks”
It has a section on the first deployment of the Predator in the Balkans and then later in Afghanistan, as I had mentioned yesterday:
The gossamer-weight unmanned aircraft, with a 49-foot wingspan, has the horsepower and top speed of a motorbike. But in the Balkans, where it got its first use in 1996, the drone had proved immensely valuable.
…
The trial period ended when a Predator crash-landed. But it had spurred something new. In their final months in office, the Clinton national security team launched a controversial effort to arm the Predator with a Hellfire missile, ordinarily used by attack helicopters.
State Department lawyers maintained for a time that such a hybrid would fall under restrictions of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.
The Air Force and CIA argued over who would fund and operate it. Opponents scoffed at the notion of a 950-pound aircraft laboring aloft with a 100-pound missile. Richard A. Clarke, National Security Council senior director, “broke a lot of china,” as one colleague put it, in ramming the program forward. Not long after Clinton left office, the Air Force tested a working prototype.
And finally, like I was talking about yesterday, in the last few months of the Clinton administration, the USS Cole was attacked (Oct 12, 2000). Clinton put the very same Richard A. Clarke in charge of developing a comprehensive plan to battle al Qaeda. That report was completed in December of 2000 and included such recommendations as clamping down on international financing and putting special forces on the ground in Afghanistan.
The outgoing administration made it very clear to Bush’s team that al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups posed a very imminent threat to Americans both at home and abroad, and Clarke stayed on to try to convince people to adopt his plan to take on al Qaeda. That advice was ignored until the 9/11 tragedy.
This clusterfuck is the subject of an August 12, 2002 cover story in Time magazine titled, “They Had A Plan”. I read this when it first came out in print but no longer have the magazine. You can buy it from their archives here:
So, these are some of the reasons that I take exception when people say that Clinton was soft on terrorism. From what I’ve seen, the Clinton administration had a much more long-term view on how to combat international terrorist groups and how to do it in a framework which wouldn’t polarize a large portion of the international community against us.
Its also why I don’t trust a lot of what Sean Hannity says, or anyone else on Fox News for that matter. I find that many times these political commentators on TV and the radio will spit out something which is either taken out of context, ill-researched, or just plain wrong. Since you don’t get a lot of footnotes scrolling across the bottom of the screen — not a lot of space on Fox News with the constant “Terror Alert” rating — its far to easy to take what they say at face value and not dive any deeper.
Thoughts?
