by:   Paul Stenbjorn

OpEdNews.Com

The Website of the Republican National Committee (RNC) has taken on what it has called “unprincipled” attacks by General Wesley Clark. Clark told the Boston Globe on Tuesday that the Clinton administration had developed a plan to topple Al-Qaeda and had turned it over to the incoming Bush administration that promptly did nothing. The RNC called these allegations “wild accusations and conspiracy theories”. Only one problem with the RNC accusations, Clark’s statements were backed by US officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

“Wesley Clark is long on wild accusations and conspiracy theories and very, very short on facts to back these things up,” said RNC press secretary Christine Iverson to the Globe in response to his stating that the Bush administration failed to act on a plan to apprehend Osama Bin Laden. According to the Globe Clark said that Clinton's national security team had compiled a lengthy intelligence record on Al Qaeda, and especially after a bin Laden lieutenant issued a fatwa in 1998 calling for the killing of Americans.

“They [the Clinton administration] built a plan and turned it over to the Bush administration,” Clark told the Globe. “[The Bush] administration failed to do its duty to protect the United States of America before 9/11.”

How wild and spurious are these claims? In October 2001, CNN reported that the CIA trained and armed about 60 Pakistani commandos in 1999 with plans for them to enter Afghanistan and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. CNN’s sources were unnamed US officials.

The plan apparently unraveled in the wake of the Musharraf coup and the stronger Pakistani ties with the Taliban. On September 23, 2001, President Clinton told reporters he had authorized a plan to arrest, and if necessary, kill bin Laden and had even contacted a group in Afghanistan to carry out the plan according to CNN.

And according to a 2002 article in Time magazine Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger and terrorism expert Richard Clarke outlined Al-Qaeda threats in briefings they provided for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in January 2001, a few weeks before she and her team took up their posts.

According to Time, at the briefing, Clarke presented proposals to “roll back” Al-Qaeda which closely resemble the measures taken after September 11, 2001. Its financial network would be broken up and its assets frozen. Vulnerable countries like Uzbekistan, Yemen and the Philippines would be given aid to help them stamp out terrorist cells.

Clarke’s plan detailed how the US would go after Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Plans would be drawn up for combined air and special forces operations, while support would be channeled to the Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban and its Al-Qaeda allies.

Clarke, who stayed on in his job as White House counter-terrorism expert, repeated his briefing for vice president Dick Cheney in February 2001. However, the proposals got lost in the clumsy transition process, turf wars between departments and the separate agendas of senior members of the Bush administration.

It was, the Time article concluded, “a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat”.

The Time report quotes Bush officials as well as Clinton aides as confirming the seriousness of the Clarke plan. The sources said it was treated the same way as all policies inherited from the Clinton era, and subjected to a lengthy “policy review process”.

The proposals were not re-examined by senior administration officials until April, and were not earmarked for consideration by the national security heads of department until September 4.

Paul Stenbjorn, Executive Director of www.Republicons.org , has been a professional journalist, on and off, since the age of 16 (that makes 22 years).  He founded the non-profit Republicons.org in 2002 as a outlet for progressive investigative journalism with Erik Sorensen, the site's Editor in Chief.  Paul's recent works have appeared in numerous online publications and have been featured on Google News, Yahoo News, The Telegraph (UK) and many other publications. In earlier years his works appeared in the Newark (NJ) Star Ledger, the Plainfield (NJ) Courier News and other publications.  He is also the co-author of the recently published book "The Bush Trinity: Consumerism Secrecy and Jesus Christ" available from Cafe Press.

originally published in republicons.org