Ijaz: Clarke Blocked bin Laden Extradition
Clinton administration diplomatic troubleshooter Mansoor Ijaz charged Monday that one-time White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke blocked his efforts to have Osama bin Laden extradited from the Sudan to the United States five years before the 9/11 attacks.
"I was personally asked to brief Condoleezza Rice's deputy national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, on exactly what had gone wrong in the previous efforts to get bin Laden out of the Sudan, to get the terrorism data out of the Sudan," Ijaz told Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends."
"In each case of things that were involved in the Clinton administration, Richard Clarke himself stepped in and blocked the efforts that were being made over and over and over again."
Ijaz said that if Clarke hadn't put up roadblocks to obtaining Sudanese intelligence, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 might have been prevented.
He called Clarke's account of the Sudanese episode "absolutely disingenuous; it comes very close to flat-out lying."
After months of denials from his former aides, ex-President Clinton finally admitted that he personally turned down the offer by Sudan to arrest bin Laden.
"We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again," Clinton told a New York business group in February 2002.
"They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."
Monday, March 22, 2004
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