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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (2630)	10/4/2001 4:24:30 PM
From: Scoobah	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Just in case anyone thinks the Saudi's are our friends; they refused to take Bin Laden into custody in 1996: Sudan's Offer to Arrest Militant Fell Through After Saudis Said No By Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 3, 2001; Page A01 The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries. The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture. Sudan expelled bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan. From there, he is thought to have planned and financed the twin embassy bombings of 1998, the near-destruction of the USS Cole a year ago and last month's devastation in New York and Washington. Bin Laden's good fortune in slipping through U.S. fingers torments some former officials with the thought that the subsequent attacks might have been averted. Though far from the central figure he is now, bin Laden had a high and rising place on the U.S. counterterrorism agenda. Internal State Department talking points at the time described him as "one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today" and blamed him for planning a failed attempt to blow up the hotel used by U.S. troops in Yemen in 1992. "Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference," said a U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counterterrorism. "We probably never would have seen a September 11th. We would still have had networks of Sunni Islamic extremists of the sort we're dealing with here, and there would still have been terrorist attacks fomented by those folks. But there would not have been as many resources devoted to their activities, and there would not have been a single voice that so effectively articulated grievances and won support for violence." Clinton administration officials maintain emphatically that they had no such option in 1996. In the legal, political and intelligence environment of the time, they said, there was no choice but to allow bin Laden to depart Sudan unmolested. "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States," said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then. washingtonpost.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (2630)	10/4/2001 5:36:54 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

If Palestine was so barren, then why did Moshe Dayan say that, "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages . . . There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population" [ Ha'aretz Interview, April 4, 1969 ]? Ooops! -g- It is well documented that Palestine had considerable agriculture in the 1800s, before the influence of Zionists. My previous link is just the tip of the iceberg. ukar.org <<< While in Palestine in 1891, when Jews owned less than one per cent of the land, the Jewish moralist and philosopher Ahad Ha'am observed that "throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed." In 1930, when Jews owned about four per cent of the land, Zionist official Arthur Ruppin wrote that displacement of Arab farmers was inevitable "since there are hardly any more arable unsettled lands in Palestine." By 1944, when Jews owned about 5.5 per cent, the area of the Negev alone (Palestine's only "desert") under cultivation by Palestinians was three times the area cultivated by the Jewish community in all of Palestine after more than 60 years of loudly trumpeted "pioneering." In short, the Palestinians made the desert bloom and they had been doing so for centuries. Israel's much-touted expansion of cultivated land since 1948 was more apparent than real as it involved mainly the "reclamation" of farmland belonging to Palestinian refugees. >>> Tom