Made for TV: Bill Clinton's Flawed Record on Terrorism

By Ken Silverstein

ABC's docudrama, The Path to 9/11, is a “mix of fact, fantasy and deliberate distortion,” says a post on the liberal blog Firedoglake.com. Some would say the same of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which was a terrific film based partly on the historical record but clearly a piece of agitprop. The Path to 9/11 deserves to be critiqued and criticized, but the hysterical crusade against it—including calls for censorship—is as overblown, partisan, and hypocritical as the conservative attack on Fahrenheit 9/11.

Yes, the Bush Administration's “War on Terrorism” has been a catastrophe. But the Clinton Administration was not nearly as prescient, effective, and brilliant as the critics of the The Path to 9/11 are now suggesting. For example, in the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration squandered repeated offers of counterterrorism collaboration from Sudan, when Osama bin Laden still lived in that country. Sudanese officials have claimed that they were willing to turn over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia or even to the United States. Clinton Administration officials deny this, but it's indisputable that Sudan was desperate to improve relations with the United States at the time and saw counterterrorism assistance as the best means to achieve that end. It wasn't until 2000, four years after Sudan evicted bin Laden (who then moved on to Afghanistan), that the Clinton Administration accepted a longstanding invitation to send a CIA-FBI counterterrorism team to Khartoum. That ultimately led to close cooperation with Sudan in the war on terror, especially after the 9/11 attacks.

Jack Cloonan, a retired FBI agent, tells of a specific—and previously unreported—missed opportunity: how the Clinton Administration bungled an opportunity to nab two men who were likely involved in the August 7, 1998 Al Qaeda attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Between 1996 and 2002, Cloonan served on a joint CIA-FBI task force that tracked bin Laden. The task force had issued a subpoena for bin Laden's satellite phone calls and, at the time of the embassy attacks, Cloonan was receiving those records from a CIA contractor and matching up his calls with National Security Agency intercepts.

Mohammed Atef, a senior Al Qaeda official who was killed by a Predator strike in Afghanistan in 2001, was the only other person who used bin Laden's satellite phone. On August 12, Cloonan learned, Atef placed a phone call from Afghanistan to Khartoum and talked to someone there about bringing several men out of Sudan. Cloonan immediately contacted a senior Sudanese intelligence officer. “I told him we wanted to know who owned the phone in Khartoum that Atef called,” Cloonan recalled. “He said, ‘Are you accusing us?’ I said ‘No, but we need to know who Atef called.’”

After being authorized to proceed by Sudan's leader, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, the Sudanese intelligence officer contacted Cloonan and told him that the man who owned the phone that Atef called was associated with the Khartoum tannery, which bin Laden owned. But two other men, both Afghans, had use of the phone. At Cloonan's request, the Sudanese regime arrested the two men. Both, it turned out, had stayed at the Hilltop Hotel in Nairobi, the same hotel where the embassy bombers stayed before the attack, and had returned to Khartoum after the bombing. The Sudanese concluded, on the basis of “pocket litter” and other evidence they gathered, that the two Afghans were involved in the attacks. “Do you think we wanted to talk to those two guys?” Cloonan asked. “We had 400 people on the ground in Nairobi and [the Sudanese] were prepared to turn them over to our agents.”

Cloonan was working on the embassy bombings case with John O'Neill, the FBI official who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11 (and whom the Firedoglake posting describes as “the counterterrorism expert who presciently warned about Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.”) On August 17th, O'Neill flew from New York to Washington and met with senior Clinton Administration officials. He urged that an FBI team be dispatched immediately to Khartoum to interview the two suspects. Cloonan says that he received “a noncommittal reply.”

The following day, the United States bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, claiming, falsely as it turned out, that it was associated with Al Qaeda and was involved in the production of chemical weapons. “After that,” says Cloonan, “the Sudanese let the two guys go to Pakistan and the FBI never got access to them. The Pakistanis told us they had nothing to do with the embassy bombing, that they were drug traffickers, and wouldn't let us talk to them.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department opened a case against Cloonan, alleging that when he provided the Sudanese with the telephone number called by Atef he had disclosed classified information. The case was dropped several years later, and no charges were filed against Cloonan, who tactfully calls the whole episode “unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate” also describes attempts by Clinton and his friends to get ABC to halt broadcast of The Path to 9/11, whether it's conservative agitprop or not. “As a nation, we need to be focused on preventing another attack, not fictionalizing the last one for television ratings,” Clinton representatives Bruce R. Lindsey and Douglas J. Band wrote to Bob Iger, President and CEO of ABC. “We expect that you will make the responsible decision to not air this film.” President Clinton himself told reporters that, while he had not seen the film, “I think they ought to tell the truth.”

After six years of George W. Bush, it's easy to romanticize Clinton, but the former president should be careful in calling for “the truth.” This is the man who “did not have sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky and had a hard time defining the word “is.” Bill Clinton was never big on owning up to his failures, whether with interns or Osama.

Note: Another controversial film made its Washington premiere last night— 9/11: Press for Truth . I wasn't able to attend—but these video clips showing Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice are highly amusing in a dark way.

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