T0P U.S. BRASS KEPT 0UT 0F L00P
0N MISSILE RAID: MAG
By TRACY CONNOR
The White House reportedly kept the nation's
top military officials and the FBI in the dark
while it plotted anti-terrorist bombing raids in
Sudan and Afghanistan.
The president and his men never talked to the
pros, a senior general told The New Yorker
magazine in an article that raises questions
about whether the strikes were justified.
Four members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were
not told of the plan to hit suspected terror boss
Osama bin Laden until the last minute,
according to an article by journalist Seymour
Hersh.
In fact, Joint Chiefs Chairman Henry Shelton,
who was consulted, was ordered not to breathe
a word of the impending missile strikes to the
other four members, the report said.
He was presented with a fait accompli ... and
obeyed his orders. And now he's catching it
from both sides, one source told the magazine.
FBI Director Louis Freeh, who had deployed
hundreds of agents to Africa after the terrorist
bombing of two American embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania, was also out of the loop.
The FBI has left a bad taste in other
departments because it leaks like a sieve, a
national-security official involved in the planning
explained.
The White House did consult Attorney General
Janet Reno - but ignored her advice to delay
the raids until there was more evidence linking
the targets to bin Laden, the magazine
reported.
On Aug. 20, the United States launched 80
Tomahawk missiles at a suspected
chemical-warfare plant in Sudan and alleged
terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon did not dispute that key officials
were left out of the planning.
General Shelton played an active role
throughout the planning and execution of this
operation, a statement said.
As is appropriate for any sensitive military
operation, planning was limited to those who
needed to be involved.
The article questions whether the White House
authorized the strikes based on flimsy
evidence.
A congressman who took part in a classified
CIA briefing on the case against bin Laden was
unimpressed by the presentation.
They came up with a lot of suspicious activity,
but nothing conclusive, he said.
Some officials in CIA's Directorate of
Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and
Technology have reportedly told CIA chief
George Tenet there was a rush to judgment.
In his article, Hersh claims the CIA's case was
weak.
The agency was relying on a soil sample from
the Sudan's Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant that
contained Empta, a chemical used to make VX
nerve gas.
But a chemical-weapons expert at The Hague
told the magazine it was unlikely the highly
reactive chemical would have been found
unaltered in the ground.
The only way this chemical could be in the
ground is if somebody had emptied a flask ...
and then taken a sample. That's credible, a
senior inspector insisted.
Some in Washington blamed National Security
Adviser Sandy Berger and Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright for pushing forward with the
bombings before the bin Laden connection
could be nailed down.
Madeleine is willing to fire a missile at anybody,
a general said.
Others raised the wag-the-dog scenario: The
president took action to deflect attention from
the sex scandal at home.
If Clinton was not in all this trouble, he wouldn't
have done it, a former high-level State
Department official said. He's too smart.
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