Ignoring Terror Threats A Pattern With The Clintons

IBD Editorials

President Clinton let an Osama bin Laden informant slip through his hands. He is pictured in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 10, 1993. -- AP View Enlarged Image

Leadership: Court papers reveal the FBI had an informant right next to Osama bin Laden in 1993 sending reports up the chain of command. Yet then-President Clinton did nothing — a pattern with both him and his wife.
It came to light during a 2010 employment discrimination case filed by FBI agent Bassem Youssef, a Coptic Christian who contended he'd been passed over for promotion after directing an agent he recruited after the 1993 terror attack on the World Trade Center.
The still-unnamed agent provided valuable intelligence to the bureau on that 1993 case, and went on to reveal the terror ring's ties to an even more malevolent terrorist by the name of Osama bin Laden, the Washington Times reported.
The informant eventually went overseas to work as bin Laden's driver and eventually worked with the CIA until he was killed in Bosnia by suspicious Islamic terrorists in the mid-1990s.
The discrimination case, which Youssef won, highlights an important reality: that intelligence was developed and passed on to federal policymakers about the scope of bin Laden's nascent network and intentions as early as 1993.
That would have been during Clinton's presidency, signaling a failure of leadership that brings to three the number of lost opportunities to take out bin Laden before he could strike in 2001.
After Clinton ignored this information — and the FBI he led ignored the agent's contributions and denied him a promotion, in addition to "forgetting" to mention it all to the 9/11 commission — Clinton went on to ignore even clearer opportunities to take bin Laden out as a threat, focusing instead on domestic politics and the great health care battle in the era of "irrational exuberance."
In 1996, the Sudanese government offered to arrest and execute bin Laden, rather than let him escape to Afghanistan, a failed state where he could set up a base.
Clinton told them no.
Then in 2012, a top CIA counterterror official, Hank Crumpton, told CBS's 60 Minutes that in 1999, the CIA had bin Laden in its sights in Afghanistan, where his convoy had been identified. Drones showed clear images of his face. But Clinton refused that chance to act, too.
"The optics were spot-in, it was beaming back to us, CIA headquarters," Crumpton told CBS. "We immediately alerted the White House, and the Clinton administration's response was 'Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So you need to tell us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now."
And scroll forward to 2012, when terrified diplomats warned of needing security against bin Laden's organization at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored their pleas.
They were massacred and dragged through the streets by cellphone-photo-snapping terrorists in yet another 9/11 terror attack. Secretary Clinton and her boss, President Obama, had the temerity to cover it up by claiming it was just the spontaneous act of a Muslim mob enraged over an obscure YouTube video.
President Clinton, meanwhile, claimed in an interview in the New Yorker that he paid far more attention to the emerging bin Laden network than his successor, President Bush, ever did.
Maybe so, because the information was emerging during his tenure. But as with the Benghazi case, he also made the decision to ignore the intelligence — and then blame Bush for the mayhem that followed.
It's a dereliction of duty that ought to be enough to hold the Clintons accountable for repeatedly failing to act when they should have.
Instead, they shamelessly move on, with Hillary Clinton now possibly angling for a new shot at power in the White House. At this point, it is beginning to sound like a plan that could get us killed.

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