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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."
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.
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.
Originally posted by Banshee
Oh damn.
You mean Clarke was just trying to sell books after all??
-B.
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.
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.
"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."
"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.
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.