On Aug. 20, 1998, three days after half-confessing to lying about Monica Lewinsky and the day she testified before a federal grand jury, former President Clinton declared bin Laden the world's most dangerous terrorist and retaliated against him for blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa months earlier.
Three years later he's still at large.
Clinton ordered the military to pump as many as 20 Tomahawk missiles into what he said was a chemical-weapons plant in Sudan financed by bin Laden. It turned out to be a pill plant owned by a Saudi businessman to whom the administration later had to pay $1 million in interest for seizing his plant.
Intelligence officials at the time expressed reservations about including the plant on the target list. Clinton picked the target himself.
Clinton ordered another 60 or so Tomahawks launched against six camps near Khost, Afghanistan, where bin Laden operated with the blessing of the ruling Taliban militia.
None of them came close to hitting bin Laden.
The mission, which used some 80 missiles at a price of about $750,000 apiece, was seen as a very expensive failure – if, that is, Clinton's mission was in fact to knock out bin Laden, and not to distract attention from his impeachment scandal.
"Clinton knew it wouldn't work in Afghanistan. It was a public-affairs move," the Pentagon official said, arguing that bombing is an extremely unreliable way to destroy a terrorist cell or assassinate its leader. "If he hit him [bin Laden], he would have been lucky." |
