Mansoor Ijaz and Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir were sitting in the shade, in Bashirâs private residence. Ijaz tried a bold move. He proposed that the Sudanese make an unconditional offer to share intelligence with Washington. Bashir insisted that he could never get such an open-ended initiative through his nationâs parliament, which was then largely controlled by hard-line Islamic clerics. And he doubted it would work anyway. (Months later, Sudan would make a plain, no-strings attached offer to share its intelligence. It didnât work.)
âLook, you are a well-intentioned young man,â Bashir said. âBut this is not the first timeâ that Sudan has tried to re-establish friendly ties with the United States.
Then came the bombshell. âAre you aware that I sent General Fatih Erwa to Washington to discuss bin Ladenâs extradition to Saudi Arabia?â
Then, Bashir explained, Sudan made an offer to send bin Laden to the United States. Neither offer was accepted.
Ijaz was shocked. No one at the White House had mentioned these diplomatic moves to him.
Within days, Ijaz was handed carefully redacted extracts from Sudanâs intelligence reports. Ijaz says that he was shown complete copies of the passports of bin Ladenâs top operatives. He saw passport numbers, copies of photographs, visas, dates of travel, plane tickets. He was also shown extensive Arabic-language reports about the movements of bin Ladenâs men, the assessment of their characters, and their role in al Qaeda. (I was later shown and received copies of similar documents in Khartoum.) With this intelligence, the CIA and the FBI would have had the names and travel histories of hundreds of al Qaeda members. Many of these same names would turn up after terrorist explosions killed a score of American diplomats and embassy staffers in the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
Bergerâs response to the detailed Sudanese intel? âVery interesting, weâll deal with this after the [1996] elections are over.â
But nothing changed after President Clintonâs victory in the 1996 election. The quicksand of the Clinton White House swallowed up the promising policy change.
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MANY involved within govt and working for our govt have been able to see the visas and TOTAL LACK of willingness to detain OBL early on (or his network). The ASSETS were UNTOUCHABLE leading up to 9/11......NO ONE was able to stop ANY of the build up to 9/11!
CIA assets get protected and they get VISA EXPRESS! :eek: