Frankly, I am surprised at this New York Times article which features among other mistruths misstatements and downright lies, MIchael Scheuer whom I thought was a truth teller given his recent tome.
The lede pretty much readies the eye for the turds of bovine origins to come later on in the piece.
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.
Yes the piece goes on to highlight recently declassified documents from a FOIA request from Judicial Watch:
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.
In one of the latest moves by the press to dig in and try and pin the blame for 9/11 not on the sitting president who ignored counterterrorism experts and memo’s that warned of imminent attack, but on the usual suspect Bill Clinton. Matter of fact, also today another article in the Times is sure to get some traction in the land where 2+2=5. Where it “clearly” states (according to a Fox news account) that Mohammed Atta was found on Curt Weldon’s secret chart back in mid 2000. No doubt Clinton told the army to hush up so that we can let terrorists operate within the United States.
But let me get back to Michael Scheurer’s comments towards the end of the article:
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.’
UM OK then. Why was there a certain…. I dunno …. Bombing of Afghani Terrorist training camps back in 1998?
Right that was to distract us from the blow job. Sorry Michael. I thought you were the expert on this.
