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You are here: Home / Politics / War on Terror / War on Terror aka GSAVE® / Bin Laden and the State Department

Bin Laden and the State Department

by John Cole|  August 16, 200511:49 pm| 25 Comments

This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®

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Interesting piece on 1996 State Department warnings about Bin Laden in Afghanistan:

State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden’s move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam “well beyond the Middle East,” but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that “his prolonged stay in Afghanistan – where hundreds of ‘Arab mujahedeen’ receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate – could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum,” in Sudan.

The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to The New York Times, shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden’s history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.

Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Two years after the State Department’s warning, with Mr. bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, Al Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan…

Michael F. Scheuer, who from 1996 to 1999 led the Central Intelligence Agency unit that tracked Mr. bin Laden, said the State Department documents reflected a keen awareness of the danger posed by Mr. bin Laden’s relocation.

“The analytical side of the State Department had it exactly right – that’s genius analysis,” he said in an interview when told of the declassified documents. But Mr. Scheuer, who wrote a book in 2004 titled “Imperial Hubris,” under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” that was highly critical of American counterterrorism strategies, said many officials in the C.I.A.’s operational side thought they would have a better chance to kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan than they did in Sudan because the Sudan government protected him.

“The thinking was that he was in Afghanistan, and he was dangerous, but because he was there, we had a better chance to kill him,” Mr. Scheuer said. “But at the end of the day, we settled for the worst possibility – he was there and we didn’t do anything.”

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Reader Interactions

25Comments

  1. 1.

    Caroline

    August 17, 2005 at 12:30 am

    And 4 years after 9/11, he’s still living large. I sometimes wonder if we will ever catch him.

  2. 2.

    GT

    August 17, 2005 at 12:50 am

    Ouch.

    And people never did belive me when I faulted 9-11 to the Clinton administration, if any had to be held to blame at all.

    This and so many other things..

  3. 3.

    jg

    August 17, 2005 at 1:07 am

    There’s no blame for 9/11. Just some people could have paid more attention. I doubt they would have stopped it tho, they would just look a little less incompetent.

  4. 4.

    KC

    August 17, 2005 at 1:26 am

    I don’t think this information is totally new. Steve Cole recounts similar things in his book, Ghost Wars. Cole is also careful to put things in proper context since a great many people were far more concerned about threats other than bin Laden during the mid-90s.

    Honestly, this whole trip by both the left and right to assign blame for 911 is really stupid. I’ve got a buddy who is so deep in the 911 conspiracy stuff I get sick when I think about it. Lets face it, in retrospect, both Bush and Clinton would have done things differently. As much as we may dislike either of them, they were/are American presidents charged with defending our country.

  5. 5.

    croatoan

    August 17, 2005 at 2:07 am

    The difference is, when Clinton tried to do things, he was criticized for wagging the dog. Bush mocked Clinton, saying, “I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.” Clinton and Bush both gave Al Qaeda a pass for attacking the USS Cole. Clinton had the excuse of not wanting to mount an attack during the transition; what’s Bush’s excuse?

    Bush also said he was tired of swatting at flies, but what flies did he swat? The Clinton administration gave them warnings, and he didn’t do shit. He got 36 PDBs concerned al-Qaeda during 2001, and didn’t do shit. He didn’t do shit about the August 6 PDB that warned of domestic attacks and hijackings. (If you prevent the hijackings, it doesn’t matter what they want to do with the plane.)

  6. 6.

    rilkefan

    August 17, 2005 at 2:19 am

    Kevin Drum’s take: Shut down half our “intelligence” agencies and let the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research do the job.

  7. 7.

    rilkefan

    August 17, 2005 at 2:26 am

    Apropos of nothing, Drum also notes that the original story about that Brazilian guy was a crock. I think I expressed some doubt about the police version on this blog back when this was in the news, but I find the discrepancy between what we were discussing and the actual facts shocking.

  8. 8.

    Kimmitt

    August 17, 2005 at 2:27 am

    Afghanistan is one place where Clinton really did just screw up. Most folks agree about this, including Clinton and his advisors these days.

  9. 9.

    jg

    August 17, 2005 at 2:41 am

    Apropos of nothing, Drum also notes that the original story about that Brazilian guy was a crock.

    I read about that earlier today. No bulky coat, didn’t jump the turnstile and by random chance all the cameras in the area were inoperative that day. (I beleive that, don’t you?) He should have been stopped outside but those cops were unarmed and the ones that went into the tube lost radio contact with superiors so they were on their own. S.N.A.F.U. I can’t fault the cops too much. I probably would have done the same thing.

    One interesting item from the article I read (Guardian I think), one in-train camera has footage of a terrorist blowing up.

  10. 10.

    Steve

    August 17, 2005 at 8:27 am

    I’m confused about what the US would have, or should have, done to “deter” bin Laden from moving to Afghanistan. Would we have put him on a no-fly list?

  11. 11.

    DougJ

    August 17, 2005 at 8:28 am

    This is further proof that the attacks of 9/11 were essentially the fault of the Clinton administration. He completely ignored these warnings. He was too busy getting, ahem, attention, from interns to confront the terrorist who would one day so barbarically attack us.

    And look at what’s happening now: we’ve smoked him out, got him on the run, reduced him to releasing videos. And yet all the media does is whine about how we “let him get away in Tora Bora”, as if they knew whether or not he was there.

    Rush had a great thing about this yesterday about Michael Jackson going on the run and hanging out with Osama, making music videos with him.

  12. 12.

    Caroline

    August 17, 2005 at 9:57 am

    Um,
    Doug J: Who was sitting in the oval office on 9/10/01? Yeah, I know it doesn’t matter. It’s always someone else’s fault isn’t it?

  13. 13.

    Geek, Esq.

    August 17, 2005 at 10:42 am

    There was a bipartisan consensus on one aspect of the 911 investigation: the need to CYA for past fuck-ups by both Clinton and Bush.

    Makes me wish there was a viable third party.

  14. 14.

    Mike

    August 17, 2005 at 11:04 am

    “KC Says:

    Honestly, this whole trip by both the left and right to assign blame for 911 is really stupid. I’ve got a buddy who is so deep in the 911 conspiracy stuff I get sick when I think about it. Lets face it, in retrospect, both Bush and Clinton would have done things differently. As much as we may dislike either of them, they were/are American presidents charged with defending our country.”

    Bingo. Completely concur.
    The best thing to do is figure out how to prevent future occurances, not go on a Presidential witchhunt.
    And I have to say in defense of Clinton (can’t BELIEVE I’m doing this), that there’s no way he could have gotten Congress or the country to back him on military action to go after OBL. Especially after the debacle of Mogadishu just a few years before. An event which ironically after watching American actions, emboldened Osama to future destruction.

  15. 15.

    tBone

    August 17, 2005 at 11:20 am

    And I have to say in defense of Clinton (can’t BELIEVE I’m doing this), that there’s no way he could have gotten Congress or the country to back him on military action to go after OBL. Especially after the debacle of Mogadishu just a few years before. An event which ironically after watching American actions, emboldened Osama to future destruction.

    This is called intellectual honesty, DougJ. You should try it sometime.

  16. 16.

    Jim Caputo

    August 17, 2005 at 11:24 am

    I thought this was supposed to an administration that was going to “bring an era of responsibility back to Washington.” But all they and their supporters do is make excuses for every fuck up they heap upon us.

    Whatever Clinton did or didn’t do doesn’t really matter since no one on the Bush, Hannitty, Limbaugh, etc. side of the fence would ever give him credit for it.

    Imagine if Clinton had killed Osama. Would the wingnuts be praising him for it? No. We’d have had no idea that 9-11 would’ve happened (hell, it might have happened even with a dead Osama), and the wingnuts would still be talking about how he targeted an innocent man. “Apirin factory, Aspirin factory, Apirin factory!!!”

    And if 9-11 happened anyway, the wingnuts would be saying it was payback for Clinton killing an innocent leader of the Afghanistan that stood up against the evil Soviet empire back in the 80s. And somehow they’d tie it into some deep rooted hatred of Ronald Reagan.

    Someone tell me I’m wrong. Someone tell me that Clinton today would be praised by the right had he killed Osama.

    So what did Bush do when he took office and found out what a major threat Osama was? After all, the intelligence people that told Clinton to kill Osama didn’t change their minds, they must’ve been telling Bush the same thing. So what did Bush do? He told the people in charge to back off the Afghanistan/Taliban stuff because he was hoping to negotiate a laying an oil pipeline through Afghanistan.

    Bush traded our national security to help out his oil industry buddies.

  17. 17.

    DougJ

    August 17, 2005 at 11:36 am

    This is called intellectual honesty

    Well, I’m honest — at least I like to think so — but I’m no intellectual. As far as I can tell, intellectual is a synonym for librul. As far as leadership goes, this country can do without people who do that much thinking. I prefer the crisp decisions made by president Bush to the overthought decisions of intellectuals.

    We had an intellectual in the White House for 8 years and what did we get? A recession, a series of increasingly brutal terrorist attacks, and a moral abomination.

  18. 18.

    tBone

    August 17, 2005 at 11:51 am

    We had an intellectual in the White House for 8 years and what did we get? A recession, a series of increasingly brutal terrorist attacks, and a moral abomination.

    You need heavier shoes, dude. I’m worried you’re going to float right off of the planet.

  19. 19.

    DougJ

    August 17, 2005 at 11:58 am

    I’m worried you’re going to float right off of the planet.

    Don’t worry, if I do, 53% of the country will be coming with me. The few of you that remain will be happy watching Michael Moore movies with Susan Sarandon all by yourselves.

  20. 20.

    tBone

    August 17, 2005 at 12:12 pm

    The few of you that remain will be happy watching Michael Moore movies with Susan Sarandon all by yourselves.

    Nah, God would never be that cruel, even to those “Left Behind.”

  21. 21.

    Mike

    August 17, 2005 at 12:17 pm

    “Someone tell me I’m wrong. Someone tell me that Clinton today would be praised by the right had he killed Osama.”

    How can anyone tell you something about a thought that is based solely on pure fantasy? You have no clue about what might be said and neither does anyone else. Besides, what’s the point? Your mind is clearly made up. As comparison, I point out that Clinton should not necessarily be vilified for his actions or lack thereof, (that coming from someone on the “Right”), and you do nothing but rant about that very same Right. Does that seem…silly to you?

  22. 22.

    Caroline

    August 17, 2005 at 12:53 pm

    53% of the country will be coming with me

    Haven’t looked at those approval ratings lately have you? More like about 41% would be going with you while the other 59 % would be staying behind.

  23. 23.

    Steve

    August 17, 2005 at 2:47 pm

    John’s good friend Atrios links to this post on the subject.

    This NY Times story, State Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996 ends with this:

    “The thinking was that he was in Afghanistan, and he was dangerous, but because he was there, we had a better chance to kill him,” Mr. Scheuer said. “But at the end of the day, we settled for the worst possibility – he was there and we didn’t do anything.”

    It accidently forgot to include this:

    CLINTON STRIKES TERRORIST BASES

    THE United States launched cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan yesterday against centres allegedly linked with the terrorist bombings of two American embassies.

    … Clinton presented several reasons for the decision to act swiftly and forcefully, rather than to punish bin Laden through the means of diplomacy and law. Repeatedly he said bin Laden presented an imminent threat, quoting his pledge this week to wage a war in which Americans were “all targets.”

    Republicans, of course, angrily criticized Clinton for his actions. Had they taken terrorism more seriously than politics, and urged further bipartisan actions against bin Laden, who knows what might have happened?

  24. 24.

    Jim Caputo

    August 17, 2005 at 5:30 pm

    How can anyone tell you something about a thought that is based solely on pure fantasy? You have no clue about what might be said and neither does anyone else. Besides, what’s the point? Your mind is clearly made up. As comparison, I point out that Clinton should not necessarily be vilified for his actions or lack thereof, (that coming from someone on the “Right”), and you do nothing but rant about that very same Right. Does that seem…silly to you?

    The point that apparently escaped you was this: no matter what Clinton did it would have been vilified by the right. And since you’re not a mouthpiece for the right with any significant audience, your opinion doesn’t negate my contention.

  25. 25.

    DougJ

    August 17, 2005 at 8:43 pm

    More like about 41% would be going with you while the other 59 % would be staying behind.

    That just means more beer for us ;)

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