Absolutely not...Clinton: I warned Bush about bin Laden threat
Describes his inability to 'convince' his successor as 'disappointment'
Former President Bill Clinton is taking the proverbial "I told you so" stance with regards to terror chief Osama bin Laden.
Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the History Channel yesterday, Clinton said he warned incoming President George W. Bush before he left office in 2001 that the founder of al-Qaida was the biggest security threat the United States faced.
"In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defense," Clinton said, according to Reuters. "I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden."
Clinton told the audience his inability to convince Bush of the danger posed by al-Qaida represented "one of the two or three of the biggest disappointments that I had."
While he may have warned his successor, various reports suggest Clinton dropped the ball, himself.
A former FBI agent claims former Attorney General Janet Reno scrubbed a clandestine plan to capture the terror mastermind in 1998. Jack Cloonan told ABC News a secret team of federal investigators he was a part of even practiced the daring operation in the Texas desert. The scheme was to have a plane from Uzbekistan swoop into the area of Kandahar, Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating at the time and execute an arrest warrant.
"A U.S. plane was to fly in," Cloonan said. "And he [bin Laden] would have been greeted by an FBI agent, who would have said, 'Sheik bin Laden, there is a warrant for your arrest,'" he said.
But when the details of the operation went up the chain of command for approval, according to Cloonan, Reno killed it.
"They came to the decision that this plan was probably too dangerous, that the loss of life on the ground would have been significant," Cloonan told the news network. There was concern that people around the bin Laden compound would be killed."
WorldNetDaily reported the Clinton administration "de-emphasized" fighting Arab international terrorism to focus on domestic terrorism – namely, white "right-wing" militia groups. Veteran FBI agents told WND this led to the FBI ignoring Arab nationals flocking to U.S. flight schools, namely the 19 hijackers who claimed nearly 3,000 lives on Sept. 11, 2001.
Even though Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qaida had been responsible for a pattern of attacks from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the 1996 bombing of U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, FBI Director Louis Freeh told a Senate subcommittee in 1999 "a growing number (while still small) of 'lone offender' and extremist splinter elements of right-wing groups have been identified as possessing or attempting to develop/use chemical, biological or radiological materials."
worldnetdaily.com |
