JTEM wrote:
Democrats wrote:

WHILE WE RULING Republicans,


Not five months before 9/11 the Bush administration
had tis to say about Bill Clinton:


http://www.infowars.com/saved%20page..._bin_laden.htm

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 U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks;
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain
electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden's personal
secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S.
for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya;
and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out
the embassy attacks.

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.

Important data on each had been compiled by the Sudanese.

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 U.S., 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.