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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (23053)	5/1/2003 8:02:32 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Respond to of 27666

The London Telegraph's weekend revelations raise deeply disturbing questions about the extent and magnitude to which President Clinton, his national-security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, and senior terrorism and State Department officials — including Assistant Secretary of State for East Africa, Susan Rice — politicized intelligence data, relied on and even circulated fabricated evidence in making critical national-security decisions, and presided over a string of intelligence failures during the months leading up to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Analysis of documents found in the rubble of Iraq's intelligence headquarters show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Iraqi military and intelligence officials sought out al Qaeda leaders, not the other way around, and ultimately met with bin Laden on at least two occasions. They also show that channels of communication between al Qaeda and Iraq were created much earlier and were wider ranging in scope than previously thought. The timing of the meetings sheds important new light on how grave the Clinton administration's intelligence failures may have been. On February 19, 1998, about six months prior to the attacks in Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi, Iraqi intelligence officials set in motion a plan to bring a senior and trusted bin Laden aide to Baghdad from Khartoum. One of the key Mukhabarat intelligence documents shows that a recommendation was made for "…the deputy director general to bring the [bin Laden] envoy to Iraq because we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden." The meetings took place in March 1998. The initial program to have the terror talks last for one week was extended to two because of the success in whatever nefarious plans were being hatched. The meetings also laid the groundwork for Iraq's former intelligence chief, Farouk Hijazi, arrested last Friday in Iraq, to meet with bin Laden in December 1998 in Afghanistan. Press reports also chronicled an earlier meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden in Sudan in 1994. Baghdad, however, was not the only game in town. While Saddam was busy trying to find a formula for embracing and employing al Qaeda's budding global terror network to attack U.S. interests, Sudan was busy trying to alert Western intelligence officials — including those at the National Security Council, the State Department's Terrorism Bureau, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency — of the dangers still lurking in Khartoum's sandblasted neighborhoods after bin Laden's May 1996 expulsion. A brief chronology demonstrates how compelling the Sudan's offer to turn over terrorism data might have been in thwarting attacks on U.S. citizens and assets overseas, and how mendacious a narrow clique of Clinton officials were in not taking advantage of those efforts. OCTOBER 27, 1996. In a confidential memorandum I wrote to Sandy Berger to follow up on the August 1996 meeting he and Susan Rice (then a National Security Council official) had called me to the White House for to discuss U.S.-Sudan relations, I recounted events of my first meeting with the new Sudanese intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Gutbi al-Mahdi, just days earlier — a meeting whose consequence even I did not fully grasp at the time nationalreview.com