Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[seabass]

>>>Yeah, the same Clinton that had the opportunity TWICE to have OBL taken care of and didn't pull the trigger<<<


Even a few republicans with integrity have called that characterization what it is: Horseshit.


John McLaughlin helped run the CIA in both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

"JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: President Clinton did aggressively pursue Osama bin Laden. I give the Clinton administration a lot of credit for the aggressiveness with which they went after al Qaeda and bin Laden."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0609/24/cnr.04.html



"Clarke told me that in the mid-nineties “the C.I.A. was authorized to mount operations to go into Afghanistan and apprehend bin Laden.” President Clinton, Clarke said, “was really gung-ho” about the scenario. “He had no hesitations,” he said. “But the C.I.A. had hesitations. They didn’t want their own people killed. And they didn’t want their shortcomings exposed. They really didn’t have the paramilitary capability to do it; they could not stage a snatch operation.” Instead of trying to mount the operation themselves, Clarke said, “the C.I.A. basically paid a bunch of local Afghans, who went in and did nothing.”

In 1998, Al Qaeda struck the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. In retaliation, Clinton signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to kill bin Laden. It was the first directive of this kind that Clarke had seen during his thirty years in government. Soon afterward, he told me, C.I.A. officials went to the White House and said they had “specific, predictive, actionable” intelligence that bin Laden would soon be attending a particular meeting, in a particular place. “It was a rare occurrence,” Clarke said. Clinton authorized a lethal attack. The target date, however—August 20, 1998—nearly coincided with Clinton’s deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Clarke said that he and other top national-security officials at the White House went to see Clinton to warn him that he would likely be accused of “wagging the dog” in order to distract the public from his political embarrassment. Clinton was enraged. “Don’t you fucking tell me about my political problems, or my personal problems,” Clinton said, according to Clarke. “You tell me about national security. Is it the right thing to do?” Clarke thought it was. “Then fucking do it,” Clinton told him.

The attacks, which cost seventy-nine million dollars and involved some sixty satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles, obliterated two targets—a terrorist training camp outside Khost, in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant thought to be manufacturing chemical weapons in Khartoum, Sudan—and were notorious failures. “The best post-facto intelligence we had was that bin Laden had left the training camp within an hour of the attack,” Clarke said. What went wrong? “I have reason to believe that a retired head of the I.S.I. was able to pass information along to Al Qaeda that an attack was coming,” he said.

Clarke also blames the military for enabling the Pakistanis to compromise the mission. “The Pentagon did what we asked them not to,” he said. “We asked them not to use surface ships. We asked them to use subs, so they wouldn’t signal the attack. But not only did they use surface ships—they brought additional ones in, because every captain wants to be able to say he fired the cruise missile.”

Asad Hayauddin denies that anyone in Pakistan even had enough knowledge to compromise the mission: “The U.S. didn’t tell us about it until forty-five minutes before the missiles hit.”

After the 1998 fiasco, Clinton secretly approved additional Presidential findings, authorizing the killing not just of bin Laden but also of several of his top lieutenants, and permitting any private planes or helicopters carrying them to be shot down. These directives led to nothing. “The C.I.A. was unable to carry out the mission,” Clarke said. “They hired local Afghans to do it for them again.” The agency also tried to train and equip a Pakistani commando force and some Uzbeks, too. “The point is, they were risk-averse,” he said. Tenet was “eager to kill bin Laden,” Clarke said. “He understood the threat. But the capability of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations was far less than advertised. The Directorate of Operations would like people to think it’s a great James Bond operation, but for years it essentially assigned officers undercover as diplomats to attend cocktail parties. They collected information. But they were not a commando unit that could go into Afghanistan and kill bin Laden.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/030804fa_fact