frankenlies.com
#4: Audiotape doesn’t lie. But ____ does.
On page 117 (p. 121 in the paperback) of Lies, Franken takes issue with the following claim from Sean Hannity:
"Bill Clinton ... [was] offered Osama bin Laden by the Sudanese government, and they turned the offer down. They could have taken him into custody and begun unraveling his terrorist network 6 years ago [1996]. But they didn’t."
(Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring (New York: Regan Books, 2002))
The issue: Did the U.S. at least have the option to take Osama bin Laden into custody in 1996, as Sean Hannity has written?
Franken points to a couple of former Clinton officials who question this claim.1 In effect, Franken utilizes these officials to discredit Hannity and refute the notion that there was ever such an option.
However, Franken’s entire passage rings hollow to those with the knowledge of a recorded statement from someone who should really know the truth of the matter: former President Bill Clinton. At a February 2002 business luncheon in New York, Clinton said this:
"Mr. Bin Laden used to live in Sudan ... And we’d been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again. They released him. At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America."2
Sean Hannity is right-on! Don’t believe it? Newsmax has the exclusive audiotape. Listen to it here.
It has also been reported that Clinton has confided that this failure "was the greatest mistake of my presidency."3
Franken’s passage is particularly sad because he tarnishes a decent, well-intentioned citizen, a Pakistani-American named Mansoor Ijaz, the man who is credited with brokering the U.S.-Sudan deal. A successful businessman and diplomat,4 he is a testament to the American Dream. But Ijaz is also on a special mission to fulfill his father’s dying wish to save his father’s country (Pakistan) and the world from radical extremists and terrorists.5 Here is a man who really loves America. Are you reading this, Al?
Oh, yeah. The Clinton tape became public in August 2002, one year before Franken’s book was released. Did TeamFranken not know about the tape? Or did Clinton’s words fail to meet Franken’s "impossibly high standard"?
[Additional Note: In 2004, a former CIA officer in charge of operations against Al Qaeda from Washington, Michael Scheuer, revealed that,
"[B]etween January 1996 and June 1999 ... I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden - either by capture or by U.S. military attack. I witnessed and documented, along with dozens of other CIA officers, instances where life-risking intelligence-gathering work of the agency's men and women in the field was wasted." (emphasis mine)
Read his article, originally published in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday December 5, 2004: http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/printer_120604E.shtml. Who was President between 1996 and 1999? You got it: Bill Clinton. Scheuer's experience was also formulated in a bestselling book, Imperial Hubris.]
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Notes:
1 For more on this see “Skeptical About Sudan” by Sandy Berger, from the Saturday July 13, 2002, edition of the Washington Post. See also pages 462-463 “Notes” of The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (New York: Random House, 2002). Warning: readers of these pieces might become “skeptical” of their views, especially if they read Richard Miniter’s book afterwards (see citation below).
2 The audiotape of Clinton was obtained exclusively by Newsmax.com.
3 “The Road to Ground Zero,” The Sunday Times, January 6, 2002.
4 According to Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 462. Though they attempt to discredit Ijaz, they say Ijaz “has advertised his close ties to governments in South Asia and his ability to make progress on the Kashmir conflict.”
5 Richard Miniter, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror (Washington, DC: Regenery, 2003), p. 133. [Note: Another must-read. Ijaz is Chapter 6. Great work by Miniter.]