frankenlies.com
#1: Franken and the Pope and 12 airplanes
Is Al Franken so determined to defend President Clinton’s record on terrorism that he has to make things up? What about those 14 Harvard researchers? On pages 109-110 (paperback, pp. 117-118) of Lies, Franken writes,
"Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah are all currently behind bars ... They were involved in [further] plots to kill the Pope and blow up twelve U.S. jetliners simultaneously. But neither happened. ... Why? Because Clinton thwarted them. He thwarted them all."
The truth? The plot to kill the Pope was thwarted by Philippine officials in January 1995, less than one week before the pontiff’s arrival in Manila!1 Abdul Murad was captured after he and Yousef accidentally started a fire in their apartment while trying to mix explosives. Upon interrogation, Murad confessed to the plot to kill the Pope.2
Murad also confessed the details of a plan called Bojinka, the plot to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners.3
When Murad was handed over to the F.B.I. months later, the work (and heroics) had already been done ... by Philippine law enforcement!4
The truth is that Bill Clinton had as much to do with thwarting these plots as much as, well, as much as Al Franken did.
How many Harvard researchers was that again?
__________________
Notes:
1 Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge: International
Terrorism and the FBI, The Untold Story (New York: Regan Books, 2003),
timeline pp. 14-15, pp. 266-269, p. 274.
[See also Richard Miniter, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures
Unleashed Global Terror (Regenery, 2003), pp. 80-81 and ...
Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (Random
House, 2003), pp. 78-79.]
2 Miniter, Losing Bin Laden, p. 80.
[Also Lance, 1000 Years ..., timeline p. 15, p. 274.]
3 Lance, 1000 Years ..., pp. 274-277, p. 342, timeline p. 15.
4 In addition, the Report of the Joint Inquiry Into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 – By the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released in full to the public in July 2003, states (emphasis mine),
"In 1995, Yousef’s plots to bomb twelve U.S. airplanes flying Asian routes, kill the Pope, and crash a plane into CIA Headquarters were thwarted by Philippine police when a fire erupted in an apartment where Yousef was preparing explosives." (page 310) http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/part3.pdf