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

To: unclewest who wrote (15507)	1/5/2002 12:22:32 AM
From: LPS5	Respond to of 281500

Hey unclewest, since you did not know exactly where all the groups are now, coupled with the ISA remark, i am going to guess that you have a connection to MI. LOL! Nah, but that's a great and understandable guess. I was a rifleman during my time in the military some years ago, but I'm no stranger to the concept of intelligence gaps, as you might imagine. And I'd always found that if you wanted to know where the unit was going, what the training/deployment schedule was going to look like a month ahead, or what other units on post were doing, the most reliable intel sources were the unit cooks or finance folks. They'd know things long before schedules were up at battalion HQ or in the company area or articles appeared in the post newspaper. ISA no longer exists. it folded a number of years ago after the press figured it out and exposed them in articles. No kidding, huh? I had no idea. But, when I first read your post, I remembered something...some time ago...about budgetary questions raised in the media pertaining to some special operations unit and such items as a hot air balloon, some luxury cars, etc. Was that part of ISA's demise, or an entirely different situation? LP.

To: unclewest who wrote (15507)	1/8/2002 12:50:46 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Clinton's bin Laden gaff From the Sunday Times 07 jan 02 US president Bill Clinton turned down at least three offers involving foreign governments to help seize Osama bin Laden after he was identified as a terrorist who was threatening the US, according to sources in Washington and the Middle East. Mr Clinton himself, according to a Washington source, has described the refusal to accept the first offer as "the biggest mistake" of his presidency. When Sudanese officials claimed late last year that Washington had spurned bin Laden's secret extradition from Khartoum in 1996, former White House officials said they had no recollection of the offer. Senior sources in the former administration now confirm that it was true. Far from an isolated incident, this was the first in a series of missed opportunities. One of these involved a Gulf state; another would have relied on the assistance of Saudi Arabia. In early 1996, America was putting strong pressure on Sudan's Islamic government to expel bin Laden, who had been living in the country since 1991. Sources now reveal that Khartoum sent a former intelligence officer with CIA connections to Washington with an offer to hand over bin Laden – just as it had put another terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, into French hands in 1994. At the time, the State Department was describing bin Laden as "the greatest single financier of terrorist projects in the world" and was accusing Sudan of harbouring terrorists. The extradition offer was turned down, however. A former senior White House source said: "There simply was not the evidence to prosecute Osama bin Laden. He could not be indicted, so it would serve no purpose for him to have been brought into US custody." A former figure in American counter-terrorist intelligence claims, however, that there was "clear and convincing" proof of bin Laden's conspiracy against the US. In May 1996, US diplomats were informed in a Sudanese government fax that bin Laden was about to be expelled – giving Washington another chance to seize him. The decision not to do so went to the very top of the White House, according to former administration sources. Barely a month later, on June 25, a 2300kg truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 US servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected. A second offer to get bin Laden came unofficially from Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American millionaire who was a donor to Mr Clinton's election campaign in 1996. On July 6, 2000, he visited John Podesta, then the president's chief of staff, to say that intelligence officers from a Gulf state were offering to help to extract bin Laden. Details of the meeting are confirmed in an exchange of emails between the White House and Mr Ijaz. The deal fell through when, according to Mr Ijaz, the US sent a senior counter-terrorism expert to the United Arab Emirates to check the authenticity of the offer. Mr Ijaz said the arrangement was to have been made through unofficial channels, and the US's "front-door" approach had rendered that impossible. A third, more mysterious, offer to help came from the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, then led by Prince Turki al-Faisal, according to Washington sources. Details of the offer are still unclear although, by one account, Prince Turki offered to help to place a tracking device in the luggage of bin Laden's mother, who was seeking to make a trip to Afghanistan to see her son. The CIA did not take up the offer. sundaytimes.news.com.au