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Clarke: I Let Bin Laden Family Go

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posted on Apr, 1 2004 @ 11:56 PM
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Clarke: I Let Bin Laden Family Go

Don't look now, but Clinton terrorism czar Richard Clarke has inadvertently let the White House off the hook on the most potentially explosive charge related to 9/11 - allegations that President Bush let Osama bin Laden's family escape from the U.S. in the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

It turns out that it was Clarke himself who gave the green light for Osama bin Laden's relatives to fly home to Riyadh beginning on Sept. 14, just three days after U.S. skies were closed to all air traffic.

"My role was to say it can't happen until the FBI approves it," he told VF writer Craig Unger. "And so the FBI was asked - we had a live connection to the FBI - and we asked the FBI to make sure that they were satisfied that everybody getting on that plane was someone that it was O.K. to leave."

Then Clarke confessed, "And [the FBI] came back and said, yes it was fine with them. So we said fine, let it happen."


Here is what Mr. 'Flip-flop' Clarke said on this at the 9/11 Commission:

The subject of the bin Ladens' escape came up briefly during Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission last week, where he tried to finesse his role in blowing what many still believe was the best chance to get information on Osama bin Laden's whereabouts and his family's financial network.

Clarke told the Commission that an individual - whose identity he doesn't recall - relayed a request for the bin Laden fly-out from the Saudi embassy to his White House Situation Room Crisis Management Team.

He says that he refused to grant approval until the FBI signed off.

In his testimony the closest Clarke came to admitting responsibility was when he told the Commission:

"I believe after the FBI came back and said it was all right with them, we ran it through the decision process for all of these decisions that we were making in those hours, which was the interagency Crisis Management Group on the video conference," Clarke explained, before hinting at his own responsibility.

"I was making - or coordinating a lot of decisions on 9/11 in the days immediately after," he told the Commission.

But in the next breath Clarke tried to shift responsibility away from himself, suggesting instead that blame for the blunder should go perhaps to White House Chief of Staff Andy Card or Secretary of State Colin Powell.


Well, well........good ole' Mr. Clarke strikes again.....

Any rebuttals from those who vehemently asserted and claimed, as if their own lives depended upon it, that Bush let Bin Laden's family escape?!
Comments, thoughts?


What about all those rense.com type sites that were preaching this like it was 'gold'....what they saying now? Low and behold, seems they are carrying this news also and are changing their tunes; their 'flip-flopping' about as worse as Kerry is and what makes it so bad is that a check of their archives will reveal that they were vehemently proclaiming and claiming that Bush did this!


The below article covers this also:
Skeleton in Clarke's closet

What is more interesting, is that in checking the ATS archives, I ran across a number of threads by those proclaiming such against Bush, as well as many members eatting it up like it was cotton candy, hmmm....

But what I did also find was a thread mentioning the name of Mr. Clarke, by Netchicken, dated 3-9-2003:
BL's family evacuated out of America during 9/11

Members of Osama bin Laden's family were allowed to fly out of the US shortly after the September 11 terror attacks, a senior official has said.

Even though American airspace had been shut down, the Bush administration allowed a jet to fly around the US picking up family members from 10 cities, including Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston and Houston.

Some 140 high ranking Saudi officials were also on the plane.

The revelations come from former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke.


Hmmm.......


Related post making such "Bush" claims:
FBI allowed Osama Bin Laden's family to fly out of the US While US citizens couldn't fly anywhere



seekerof

[Edited on 2-4-2004 by Seekerof]



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 12:12 AM
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Oh damn.
You mean Clarke was just trying to sell books after all??



-B.



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 12:35 AM
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Sorry, nice try though. You cant take pieces of a news max article and call them true. Especially news max when it concerns the republicans.
I listened to the investigations for both days and dont remember it that way at all.
I remember Clarke saying he received a call from higher up and since it wasnt his call pushed it to the F.B.I. He wanted to make sure the Bureau didnt need to question any of them first though. The request did come from a higher up though,I remember that and thought that was strange.
What he did say though is that the request was made from the Saudi embassy to remove the Saudi citizens. Was that all Saudi citizens, just relatives of Bin Laden, just friends and business partners of Bush and co.
How did the Saudis (if Clarke was told the truth) know to call and have their people flown out. Did the Germans call? Did the Israelis call? Did any other nation call and request favors, were they denied?
Why were Saudis flown out so soon before any investigation,bodies, pictures, i.d.s, anything. Sounds suspicious to me. If the flight attendants call is to believed all she said is midddle eastern(i think). The middle east is a lot more than Saudi Arabia. I smell something fishy.



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 12:50 AM
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Originally posted by Banshee
Oh damn.
You mean Clarke was just trying to sell books after all??



-B.


I guess I am one of them, just started reading it. To me, regardless of what is going on, it is intresting to know what was going on that day in DC, even though it is through clarkes eyes.



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 01:11 AM
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I read that the whitehouse was in charge of the time of release for the book. Im thinking they had to make sure it didnt contain material that was secret and upon review released it.
That was when they were still stonewalling the panel,then they were pressured into agreeing to the panels demands for an investigation and then by that time the book had already been o.k'd.
Once again they screwed the pooch,these guys are not very thought out.



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 08:19 AM
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Spinning like a whirling Dervish, but this time a 1000 RPM!


Dipping into the NewsMax out-house-hole for that smear?
The strategy of misinformation favored by the propaganda arm of this White House ( say half lies are whole truths & feed it to the complicit media sources, which is in turm parroted by the DittoHead & Freeper network ) is already transparent.
A smarter tactic would have to been more reservered in their attacks on people coming forward; instead, the "release the hounds of Hell" style against O'neill, Clarke, Larry Lindsay, General Zini, Ambassador Wilson, Special Agent Pietrowski(sic) from AZ et al, is in stark ironic & hypocritical contrast to their cement footed disregard in catching the Anthrax terrorists or the security leak that outed an undercover network of Vlame.

Clarke had refused to authorize the release of that flight. He spent great lengths on Meet the Press detailing the authorization levels that it went up to; the final OK came from Andrew Card.



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 08:30 AM
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What I want to know is why the hell they were privilidged enough to fly out while the rest of us were grounded regardless of who ordered it?

I know for a fact that a wealthy Saudi flew his private jet out of Lexington KY's Bluegrass field on 9-11-01. It was big news in the local paper but never got any national airtime. Hmm. Wonder why? He was supposedly in town to buy a racehorse and then left quickly just before the attacks on WTC.

Also, on the morning of 9-11, the barrage of middle eastern students normaly present in the Engineering college break/vending room were suspiciously missing. An hour before the attack, I remarked to a collegue about how dead is was that morning.



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 08:41 AM
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Originally posted by astrocreep
What I want to know is why the hell they were privilidged enough to fly out while the rest of us were grounded regardless of who ordered it?

I know for a fact that a wealthy Saudi flew his private jet out of Lexington KY's Bluegrass field on 9-11-01. It was big news in the local paper but never got any national airtime. Hmm. Wonder why? He was supposedly in town to buy a racehorse and then left quickly just before the attacks on WTC.

Also, on the morning of 9-11, the barrage of middle eastern students normaly present in the Engineering college break/vending room were suspiciously missing. An hour before the attack, I remarked to a collegue about how dead is was that morning.



I was talking to a friend a couple of nights ago, who is in the Detroit area. we were talking politics and current events, I was telling him about ATS and that he should join, has some great political views... anyway, he was telling me that apparently there were a couple of flights that were allowed to leave a small airport near Detroit later in the night on 9/11. I asked who was on them and he said he didn't know exactly who, but the planes were headed somewhere overseas. I asked him how he knew this, he has friends who work at the airport he said. My friend is in the industrial field, so there's no government or political contacts giving this info...

I know that statement is vauge, but I feel that it's true and that there probably were several flights in the air on 9/11 after the attack that were not Military flights...

[Edited on 2-4-2004 by elevatedone]



posted on Apr, 2 2004 @ 11:26 AM
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Originally posted by Bout Time
Spinning like a whirling Dervish, but this time a 1000 RPM!


Dipping into the NewsMax out-house-hole for that smear?
The strategy of misinformation favored by the propaganda arm of this White House ( say half lies are whole truths & feed it to the complicit media sources, which is in turm parroted by the DittoHead & Freeper network ) is already transparent.
A smarter tactic would have to been more reservered in their attacks on people coming forward; instead, the "release the hounds of Hell" style against O'neill, Clarke, Larry Lindsay, General Zini, Ambassador Wilson, Special Agent Pietrowski(sic) from AZ et al, is in stark ironic & hypocritical contrast to their cement footed disregard in catching the Anthrax terrorists or the security leak that outed an undercover network of Vlame.

Clarke had refused to authorize the release of that flight. He spent great lengths on Meet the Press detailing the authorization levels that it went up to; the final OK came from Andrew Card.



Nice try again "stop-gap" BT...cause really dude, it is bout time that you understand what the black and white is....did you fail to grasp this:

"My role was to say it can't happen until the FBI approves it," he told VF writer Craig Unger. "And so the FBI was asked - we had a live connection to the FBI - and we asked the FBI to make sure that they were satisfied that everybody getting on that plane was someone that it was O.K. to leave."

Then Clarke confessed, "And [the FBI] came back and said, yes it was fine with them. So we said fine, let it happen."


And this

"I was making - or coordinating a lot of decisions on 9/11 in the days immediately after," he told the Commission.

But in the next breath Clarke tried to shift responsibility away from himself, suggesting instead that blame for the blunder should go perhaps to White House Chief of Staff Andy Card or Secretary of State Colin Powell.


Or this from the other link I provided:

Clarke's role was revealed in an October 2003 Vanity Fair article. ``Somebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country,'' Clarke told Vanity Fair. ``My role was to say that it can't happen unless the FBI approves it. . . And they came back and said yes, it was fine with them. So we said `Fine, let it happen.' ''

Vanity Fair uncovered that the FBI never fully investigated the passengers on those privately chartered flights (one of which flew out of Logan International Airport after scooping up a dozen or so bin Laden relatives.) But Clarke protested to Vanity Fair that policing the FBI was not in his job description.

Isn't that convenient?

The same sanctimonious Clarke who now claims National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice didn't even know what al-Qaeda was, could have stopped the bin Laden airlift singlehandedly.

Why didn't he appeal to Rice, or even President Bush [related, bio] himself in one of those one-on-ones in the Situation Room, to block the flights? Surely it would have been helpful to determine - without a shred of doubt - that those passengers knew nothing about the Sept. 11 plot or the modus operandi of their notorious relative.



Bout Time...how the hell does "I" imply Andy Card and/or Collin Powell?! This topic on Clarke and what he said must have hit home cause you wouldn't have tried to refute it if it wasn't true?!

Please feel free to provide your 'biased' informational links anytime mentioning that indeed it was Andy Card who gave the authorization, k?
What you fail to grasp or should I say, fail to admit is that Mr Clarke has been caught flip-flopping and outright contradicting himself. Between his book, his "60 Minutes" apprearance and then his 9/11 testimony, there has been two hands worth of contradictions about what he has said....thoughts, cause I can certainly provide to the contrary when you so need them.




seekerof

[Edited on 2-4-2004 by Seekerof]



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