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Politics : Proof that John Kerry is Unfit for Command -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (19389)	10/16/2004 3:43:21 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27181

Good point. The Church hearings in the 1970s are generally considered to be the start of the CIA's decline and institutionalized risk-aversion. Blacks and women were finally liberated so surely all other institutions in society were deeply flawed and oppressive as well. The Carter years only made it worse because Carter and his DCI Turner sacrificed human intelligence in favor of satellites. Despite the victorious end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, the Clinton years compounded those problems even further and arguably institutionalized risk-aversion beyond the point of return. Clinton changed DCIs more times than he changed his hairdresser. In retrospect, Dubya probably made a mistake in not replacing a DNC political operative and Clinton appointee like Tenet right away because right now, we have vicious factions inside the CIA in an absolute state of war against the White House during a time of war, DURING A TIME OF WAR! After having lost many governorships, both houses of Congress and the White House, the desperation of the Democrats is almost palpable. That kind of desperation is ultimately contagious. Too bad for us and our children.

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (19389)	10/16/2004 4:05:27 PM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27181

Political reasons? Let's deal with the most famous Clinton "failure": One version of the story originates from one Mansoor Ijaz, an investment banker now based in New York, a former "lobbyist for Pakistan" who is now a regular Clinton hit-man on conservative FOX News and the National Review. The story seems to have many variations, that Osama was offered up once, twice, even three times. However, Ijaz has no evidence that he was integral, and the Clinton White House denied he ever was. They saw him as self-serving, having business ties with Sudan, which was then under embargo for their terrorist ties, wanting the embargo lifted so he could position himself profitably when Sudan opened its oil fields for export as planned in 1997. Clinton's people had worked with Ijaz before in dealing with Pakistan, but this time disregarded him because of the conflicts inherent in his Sudan business connections, not to mention Ijaz's later tendencies to present himself inaccurately to several foreign nations as "agent" of the U.S. government. The Clinton administration underwent negotiations with Sudan without Ijaz, but Ijaz's self-important story gets repeated ad nauseam--by Ijaz himself--with right-wing platforms eager to give him air time and column space. Ijaz later made even more fantastic claims that he could get Osama extradited in 2000, again unsupported. Apparently, Ijaz would have us believe that he had Osama in a bottle and pleaded with Clinton to take him, but Clinton maliciously unleashed him to wreak havoc upon the world. The government of Sudan, using a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in custody in Saudi Arabia, 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 hotel in Arlington, Virginia, on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept Mr. bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture. ... Resigned to Mr. bin Laden's departure from Sudan, some officials raised the possibility of shooting down his chartered aircraft, but the idea was never seriously pursued because Mr. bin Laden had not been linked to a dead American, and it was inconceivable that Mr. Clinton would sign the "lethal finding" necessary under the circumstances. In short, Sudan claimed that it would arrest Osama and extradite him to another country, though the veracity of that offer has never been confirmed, and was doubted by many. But the Clinton administration tried to achieve this. However, the U.S. itself could not take him because at that time (and this is what the right-wing hatchet stories usually leave out), bin Laden had not been connected with any U.S. deaths, and the U.S. did not have any jurisdiction to try him. So they tried to convince the Saudis to take him, but the Saudis refused. To suggest that Clinton had the ability to nab bin Laden but decided not to goes contrary to Clinton's 10-week effort to get bin Laden put in a Saudi jail and possibly executed there. The deal was simply unworkable, pure and simple. xpat.org