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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (13938)	4/11/2004 12:05:56 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Sandy Berger denied any offer for OBL was made. I was confused about this one too until I saw a panel of experts including Berger and a guy who wrote a book about terrorism debating it on a major network, Fox News I think. The writer insisted the offer was made but could not prove it got beyond an airport in Yemen. The Wash Post has a third story. What came out of the discussion was that the offer was low-level, back-channeled, not trusted, not credible, too late or all of the above. Sandy Berger denied ever getting such and offer. Strangely though, CLinton remembers hearing about it and said he tried to get the Saudis to take OBL and indict him because we had no clear evidence against him at that point. So was Berger lying or out of the loop? Confusing. Remember though this was way back in 1996. Long before the Cole bombing and OBL being a famous global menace. Anyway, the offer was clearly a muddled affair if it was ever a true offer at all. PS: There was also a back-channeled offer reportedly made by Saddam to surrender to the US just days before we invaded. Was that offer deliberately ignored? Same sort of thing. Some people say the offer existed, others don't. One thing is for sure, next time a third world country wants to make such an important offer they ought to work through the embassy and state department and make sure it gets through the proper channels. If one or both of these offers are true they both remind me of the 20th hijacker arrest and the Arizona report in early 2001 about flight schools. That is, if the right people had talked we might have stopped something terrible from happening, either it the Cole bombing, 9-11 or the rush to war in Iraq. Actually the war in Iraq may now prove much more costly to us than 9-11. We're moving in that direction.