how could a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and chairman of a New York-based investment company, be wrong . . . .
>< http://www.latimes.com >
>Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize
>Sudan offered up the terrorist and data on his network. The
>then-president and his advisors didn't respond.
>By MANSOOR IJAZ
>
>December 5 2001
>
>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.
>
>*
>
>Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is
>chairman of a New York-based investment company.