Time Forgot: Clinton Personally Nixed Plans to Get Bin Laden
Time magazine's "bombshell" report this weekend claiming the Bush White House shelved Clinton administration plans to attack al-Qaeda and take out Osama bin Laden omitted one key detail: Clinton himself personally deep-sixed the same plans long before they reached the Bush team.
As recently as February, in a speech to a Long Island, N.Y., business group, the ex-president described two separate bin Laden attack plans drawn up during the last two years of his administration by his national security and military teams - and explained why he decided not to pursue either one.
The first plan involved a "boots-on-the-ground" assault by U.S. Special Forces on Khandahar of the kind Time says then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger wanted.
"I actually trained people to do this. We trained people," Clinton told the Long Island Association's Feb. 15 luncheon.
"But in order to do it we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat, maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval," he explained.
By Clinton's own account, in other words, it was he, and not the Bush administration, that put the kibosh on Berger's "boots-on-the-ground" plan. And he did so for reasons that don't sound particularly well founded in hindsight - fear of "illegally" violating the airspace of Afghanistan's neighbors.
Time also claims that in 2000, the ex-president had dispatched submarines to the northern Arabian Sea. There they waited, ready to attack bin Laden if his coordinates could be determined.
In fact, as Clinton revealed in the same speech six months ago, military planners had indeed determined bin Laden's whereabouts with enough certainty to develop a plan to take him out with a cruise missile attack.
But once again, the ex-president acknowledged, he pulled the plug on the operation - this time because he was afraid innocent Afghans would die in the same attack.
"The only place bin Laden ever went that we knew was occasionally he went to Khandahar, where he always spent the night in a compound that had 200 women and children," Clinton told the business group.
"So I could have, on any given night, ordered an attack that I knew would kill 200 women and children, that had less than a 50 percent chance of getting him," he explained, struggling to justify his failure to act.
It's likely that the Clinton White House had dozens of contingency plans to get bin Laden that were eventually rejected by the Bush administration.
But it's equally clear, by the ex-president's own words, that the plans with the best chance to succeed in decapitating al-Qaeda before 9-11 were personally rejected by Clinton himself. |
