Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [45]
The fact that Osama isn’t actually a foreign head of state and that Clinton issued his presidential directive to assassinate him didn’t stop Hannity from writing in his book about a February 2001 episode of Hannity and Colmes on the topic. Guest racist David Horowitz is quoted as saying: “We can protect ourselves from terrorist threats like Osama bin Laden. It would be nice if the CIA were able to assassinate him.”
Hannity writes about his own reaction: “Amen, I thought.”
What is his deal, anyway?
The final al Qaeda attack of the Clinton Era came on October 12, 2000. Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the USS Cole, killing seventeen of our sailors. Clinton decided to take the fight against al Qaeda to the highest level possible. Instead of funding and arming them like Reagan, or ignoring them like Bush, Clinton decided to destroy them. He put Richard Clarke, the legendary bulldog whom he had appointed as the first national antiterrorism coordinator, in charge of coming up with a comprehensive plan to take out al Qaeda. What unfolded became the subject of a shocking cover story in the August 12, 2002, Time magazine, which I will now take credit for having read.
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Reliable Sources
In Let Freedom Ring, Hannity outlines a charge that he frequently makes both on television and on the radio: that Clinton let bin Laden slip from his grasp. He writes,
It’s truly astonishing. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and their liberal allies on Capitol Hill were 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 almost six years ago. But they didn’t. And now more than three thousand innocent Americans have paid with their blood.
That is astonishing. Hard to think of a more serious charge. You want to be damned sure you have that one locked down pretty tight before you put it in print.
But knowing what we already know about Sean Hannity and the standards to which he holds himself, what are the chances that this whole charge is just baloney?
His entire case comes from a guy named Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American who claims to have transmitted the offer as a middleman between the U.S. and Sudan. I got the story on Ijaz from former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and from Daniel Benjamin, past director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and now senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Berger only had to meet once with Ijaz to determine that he was an unreliable freelancer, pursuing his own financial interests. Ijaz was an investment banker with a huge stake in Sudanese oil.
Ijaz had urged Berger to lift sanctions against Sudan. Why the sanctions? Because Sudan was and remains a notorious sponsor of terrorism, harboring Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda. Also, the Sudanese regime is the leading state sponsor of slavery and is considered by many to be genocidal. And totally untrustworthy. Ijaz, however, was arguing their case. As Benjamin said of Ijaz, “Either he allowed himself to be manipulated, or he’s in bed with a bunch of genocidal terrorists.”
Ijaz said that Sudan was ready to hand over bin Laden. The U.S. does not conduct diplomacy through self-appointed private individuals. When the U.S. talked to Sudan, there was no such offer. The U.S. pursued every lead and tried to negotiate. Nothing.
The story does have a happy ending. Ijaz now has a job as foreign affairs analyst for the Fox News Channel.
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Working furiously, Clarke produced a strategy paper that he presented to Sandy Berger