idd:
Not necessary, despite Albright and Berger's parsing before the 9-11 commission of the meaning of the word "offer," the story is well documented.
This first story below is confirmed in a January 2002 Vanity Fair article by former US Ambassador to the Sudan: Timothy Carney, and is a first hand account:
Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize
Sudan offered up the terrorist and data on his network. The then-president and his advisors didn't respond.
By MANSOOR IJAZ
President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.
I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.
From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Sudan's president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.
Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.
The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.
As an American Muslim and a political supporter of Clinton, I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then, that their counter-terrorism policies fueled the rise of Bin Laden from an ordinary man to a Hydra-like monster.
Realizing the growing problem with Bin Laden, Bashir sent key intelligence officials to the U.S. in February 1996.
The Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to "baby-sit" him--monitoring all his activities and associates.
But Saudi officials didn't want their home-grown terrorist back where he might plot to overthrow them.
In May 1996, the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.
Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden's personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.
Some of these men are now among the FBI's 22 most-wanted terrorists.
The two men who allegedly piloted the planes into the twin towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, prayed in the same Hamburg mosque as did Salim and Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian trader who managed Salim's bank accounts and whose assets are frozen.
Important data on each had been compiled by the Sudanese.
But U.S. authorities repeatedly turned the data away, first in February 1996; then again that August, when at my suggestion Sudan's religious ideologue, Hassan Turabi, wrote directly to Clinton; then again in April 1997, when I persuaded Bashir to invite the FBI to come to Sudan and view the data; and finally in February 1998, when Sudan's intelligence chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, wrote directly to the FBI.
Gutbi had shown me some of Sudan's data during a three-hour meeting in Khartoum in October 1996. When I returned to Washington, I told Berger and his specialist for East Africa, Susan Rice, about the data available. They said they'd get back to me. They never did. Neither did they respond when Bashir made the offer directly. I believe they never had any intention to engage Muslim countries--ally or not. Radical Islam, for the administration, was a convenient national security threat.
And that was not the end of it. In July 2000--three months before the deadly attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen--I brought the White House another plausible offer to deal with Bin Laden, by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings. A senior counter-terrorism official from one of the United States' closest Arab allies--an ally whose name I am not free to divulge--approached me with the proposal after telling me he was fed up with the antics and arrogance of U.S. counter-terrorism officials.
The offer, which would have brought Bin Laden to the Arab country as the first step of an extradition process that would eventually deliver him to the U.S., required only that Clinton make a state visit there to personally request Bin Laden's extradition. But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer, letting it get caught up in internal politics within the ruling family--Clintonian diplomacy at its best.
Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.
Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is chairman of a New York-based investment company.
http://www.infowars.com/saved pages/Prior_Knowledge/Clinton_let_bin_laden.htm
Some additional sources:
"Resentful West Spurned Sudan's Key Terror Files", 'The Observer' (London), 30 September 2001,
"US Rejected Sudanese Files on al-Qaeda", 'The Financial Times'
(London), 30 November 2001.
US Missed Three Chances to Seize Bin Laden", 'The Sunday
Times', (London), 6 January 2002
The attempts by Albright et al. to deny the story are rebutted very well here in this second story:
Miniter responds
By Richard Miniter
Denial is more than a river in Egypt. It runs through the Clinton administration's Sudan policy.
As the media attention on my book "Losing bin Laden" grows and it climbs the New York Times bestseller list, some former Clinton officials have emerged to deny the undeniable. (See Op-Ed at left.) They deny that Sudan ever offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to American justice, they deny that Sudan ever offered to share its intelligence files on bin Laden's terror network, and they offer excuses for President Clinton's failure to retaliate following bin Laden's attack on the USS Cole (which killed 17 sailors). Since the facts and the on-the-record accounts of senior Clinton officials are against them, they are reduced to parsing words and obfuscatory statements. That's unfortunate. The point of examining Mr. Clinton's flawed war on terror is not to condemn the former president, but to learn from his successes and his setbacks and apply those lessons to the current phase of America's war on terror.
In that spirit, let's examine the record and see how well those denials hold up.
mArresting bin Laden. They write nearby that "no offer was ever conveyed to any senior official in Washington." Does Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor, count as a senior official in Washington? Here is what Mr. Berger told the Washington Post's Barton Gellman: "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." If there was no offer, just what offer was the FBI evaluating and opposing? Or is Mr. Berger telling tall tales?
Other senior Clinton officials are on the record debating the merits of taking bin Laden into custody from Sudan. Susan Rice, an assistant secretary of state under Mr. Clinton, told the Village Voice: "They [the Sudanese] calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer."
You can't doubt the sincerity of an offer that doesn't exist. Perhaps the Clinton administration overlooked that Sudan had handed over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, to the French. He now sits in a French prison, while bin Laden is free. As Ambassador Timothy Carney argued in 1996, even if the offer wasn't serious, why not call Sudan's bluff? If Sudan failed to deliver, then the skeptics are proven right. If Sudan did hand bin Laden over, then Mr. Clinton would strike a blow against international terrorism.
And, of course, Sudan did make good on its word to expel bin Laden from that country in May 1996 — at the Clinton administration's request. If Sudan could expel bin Laden, why couldn't it arrest him?
mSudan's intelligence files. Some Clinton administration officials deny that Sudan offered to provide its intelligence files on bin Laden. In my research, I've uncovered letters by senior Sudanese officials, including one from that nation's president, addressed to President Clinton, top Clinton officials and senior members of Congress expressly offering those files. Besides, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced in September 1997 that she was sending a team to Sudan to re-engage Sudan on terrorism issues. They planned to examine those files. That promising initiative was overturned by the White House six days later. Whose fault was that?
mThe USS Cole. They admit that "al Qaeda was a prime suspect," but say more investigation was needed to prove bin Laden guilty. They ignore that the CIA had traced phone calls from the attackers to a house in Yemen and from that house to bin Laden's satellite phone, and traced $5,000 sent to the terrorists from bin Laden. Yes, the investigation was ongoing, but that should have been enough. They forget that America's enemies are not in a court of law, but are waging war on us. And, even if they weren't sure that bin Laden was behind the attack, there was blood on his hands. Bin Laden's network killed 59 Americans in the Clinton years. The retaliation plan developed by the Clinton administration would have smashed all of his terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — less than a year before September 11.
After September 11, some Clinton officials admitted their mistakes. Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, told the Boston Globe: "Clearly, not enough was done. We should have caught this. Why this happened, I don't know . . . We should have prevented this." Nancy Soderberg, a member of Clinton's National Security Council, added: "In hindsight, it wasn't enough, and anyone involved in policy would have to admit that."
Madeleine Albright recently told Bill O'Reilly, "?do you think we're so stupid that, if somebody had offered us Osama bin Laden, we would haven't taken it?"
Madam Secretary, that is now for the American people to judge.
Richard Miniter is the author of the New York Times bestseller "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery, Sept. 2003) and a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe in Brussels
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030922-090028-4916r.htm
And the offer has been confirmed by Klintoon himself, the NewsMax story below has a link to an audio recording of him admitting the offer was made.
In a Feb. 15, 2002, speech to the Long Island Association, Mr. Clinton revealed:
"We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him.
"At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan." [End of Excerpt]
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/23/102636.shtml
And finally, here's the Audio Clip of Klintoon admitting the offer was made and was genuine:
http://www.newsmax.com/clinton2.mp3
Do you have any evidence that Klintoon was lying when he made this admission? Take your time.
