Check out this article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1764035,00.html
*PREVIOUSLY unseen footage of Osama Bin Laden taken by a CIA spy drone reveals how close the Americans came to killing the Al-Qaeda leader two years before the September 11 attacks. *
*The pictures are part of a mass of evidence now emerging of the missed opportunities to kill or capture Bin Laden and his associates before they launched the terror attacks on America in 2001.
They include at least three further occasions in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 when the CIA had Bin Laden in its sights but was prevented from acting. There were divisions between the agency and the White House over who would have the authority to fire and the legality of killing the Al-Qaeda leader. *
*It describes how Bill Clinton’s administration turned down an offer from the Sudanese government to help to capture Bin Laden when he was living in Khartoum in the early to mid-1990s. It also shows how the Americans “lost” two of the September 11 hijackers despite having them under surveillance. The two men later entered America. *
Add all this to the increasing evidence that Clinton’s White House did indeed have 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta’s name and picture a full year before the WTC attacks, and I think we can really begin to suspect just what Sandy Burglar was busy stuffing down his pants and socks in the National Archives.
And it’s amazing how badly Bush is dropping the ball with killing him now, considering the THOUSANDS of troops we have in the general region and the fact that we have a pretty good idea of where he may be.
Osama? Osama who? Can’t you see we got a country to liberate!?
And all the US would have had to do was never support Saddam OR Osama in their past ventures and we wouldn’t be in any of this mess. So what exactly is your point?
I’ve never seen such a feeding frenzy on this board before…and one driven by emotion instead of fact. There is a GD thread that is casually asking whether or not a president can be impeached from inaction…wonder what the OP is REALLY getting at there… :rolleyes:
As for THIS OP…while I have a lot of problems with Clinton I don’t think he dropped the ball on ObL…after all, he didn’t have a magic time machine and KNOW what was going to happen.
Is this guy really lambasting Clinton because he wouldn’t order a missile strike against members of the royal family of an allied nation? The cad! What’s a little collateral damage compared to capturing someone you have no idea is going to commit a heinous crime years down the road when you are no longer in office? A crime the sitting president will entirely fail to prevent despite none-too-subtle hints like memos titled “Wake up, you dumb fuck: bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.”. A sitting president who, I might add, has not only also failed to capture the guy responsible despite the greater resources dedicated to doing so, but has brushed off that failure.
No one who holds the Clinton Administration in contempt for its failure to capture bin Laden has any business supporting the Bush Administration.
The stuff about Sudan making offers to the U.S. is NewsMax guff. From the 9/11 Commission’s statement(pdf):
[QUOTE=The Tooth]
Is this guy really lambasting Clinton because he wouldn’t order a missile strike against members of the royal family of an allied nation? The cad! What’s a little collateral damage compared to capturing someone you have no idea is going to commit a heinous crime years down the road when you are no longer in office? A crime the sitting president will entirely fail to prevent despite none-too-subtle hints like memos titled “Wake up, you dumb fuck: bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.”.
[QUOTE]
Well, really, here’s the point: Clinton has made a big deal about how he told Bush that Osama was dangerous. In fact, Clinton said on Larry King Live that as soon as the 2nd plane hit the WTC, he thought, “Osama.”
Now given that Clinton would have us believe that he knew Osama was capable of such a thing (no other names seemed to have leapt to his mind on 9/11), why the hell didn’t he take him out when he had the chance? It’s kind of stupid to brag about how you knew he would do something like this, but then complain that you really didn’t have enough evidence on hand to pull the trigger on the guy.
You really can’t have it both ways. Did Osama magically become more dangerous at the exact instant Bush was sworn into office?
For the record, I don’t really blame Clinton or Bush for failing to stop 9/11.
I think it was the correct decision not to shoot Bin Laden from an UAV, for the reasons laid out in the article, and also according to the principle that we don’t do extrajudicial assassinations.
I do agree, however, that Clinton dropped the ball at least twice. One is the Sudan episode. If it’s true that Sudan offered to extradite Bin Laden, and Clinton did not take up that offer, then he made a grave mistake. That was exactly the way how it should have been handled. Bring him to justice with any and all legal means.
There was a later episode where Afghanistan(!) had already decided to extradite Bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. The guy was already on his way to the gallows. Then Clinton ruined it with his militarism. After which Bin Laden became best buddies with the Taliban. And we all know what came from that. (Actually I don’t support the way “justice” works in Saudi Arabia, or the way they impose death penalties, but other than that, this would have been the exact right way to handle it (also noting that Bin Laden is a Saudi citizen)).
So you’re blaming Clinton for not launching missiles at members of the royal family of an allied nation in order to kill someone he believed capable of doing bad things, but hadn’t actually done these bad things, and wouldn’t until a nine months into the next president’s term.
Yes, I can see how suspecting someone could do bad things some time in the future justifies killing highly placed citizens of other nations.
What impresses you does not interest me. If you have proof that the Commission’s findings regarding Sudan are false, then by all means provide this proof. Otherwise I’ll just have to suspect that you’re dismissing them because they make your whining about Clinton look even sillier than it did when you started.
