You Can’t Treat Terrorists Like Criminals

Now, NBC News over the next three nights is going to present this footage and reveal some of the difficult questions it has raised for the 9-11 commission. Some of those questions are the ’93 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa, killed 224 people. Now, in 1998 President Clinton announced we will use all means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes.

Well, that didn’t happen. And that’s what this is all about. When it comes to bin Laden, we know from Mansoor Ijaz of Fox News, that he personally brokered a couple attempts on the part of the Sudanese to hand over bin Laden to the Clinton administration, and do you remember why the Clinton administration said no? They said we don’t have any evidence, we don’t have any reason to charge him with anything. They were treating it as a legal issue which is what John Kerry just said the other day he would do if he were president. He would go after these people in Spain and go after all these other terrorists with indictments and this kind of thing, and that’s what the Clinton administration was trying to do with bin Laden rather than treating them as war criminals or enemy combatants, as it were. As Lisa Myers reported last night, “NBC News has obtained, exclusively, extraordinary secret video, shot by the U.S. government. It illustrates an enormous opportunity the Clinton administration had to kill or capture bin Laden. Critics call it a missed opportunity.”
This is video from one year, at least one year prior to 9/11, 2001. Bush was nothing but a candidate. Clinton was in office. So we have all these attempts by the Sudanese to hand bin Laden over, and the Clinton administration says no.

Now we’ve got this videotape from the CIA, apparently it’s bin Laden, and they knew it. Now, you might say, well, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. Well, they knew bin Laden was behind the ’93 World Trade Center. They knew bin Laden was behind the ’98 embassy bombings. They knew, by the way, that bin Laden was behind Somalia. They knew all this, and all of these are things that took place on the Clinton watch. So why didn’t Clinton administration go after it? That’s what Lisa Myers’ point is. It will be an interesting series of questions that the 9-11 commission is looking into.
She said, “The tape proves the Clinton administration was aggressively tracking al-Qaida a year before 9/11. But that also raises one enormous question: If the U.S. government had bin Laden and the camps in its sights in real time, why was no action taken against them?”
Retired general Wayne Downing, who ran counter terror efforts for the Bush administration said, “‘We were not prepared to take the military action necessary. We should have had strike forces prepared to go in and react to this intelligence, certainly cruise missiles ? either air- or sea-launched ? very, very accurate, could have gone in and hit those targets.’
Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, says the White House required the CIA to attempt to capture bin Laden alive, rather than kill him.”
And it goes on to say in this story, “A Democratic member of the 9/11 commission says there was a larger issue: The Clinton administration treated bin Laden as a law enforcement problem.” Not a military problem, that’s why there aren’t any strikes, law enforcement problem, that’s the fascinating thing in the first of these three reports.
And where did we first hear this, folks, can I remind you? Bill Gertz, he’s written two books, one’s Betrayal and one is Breakdown and I get them confused, but we interviewed him on both. I remember the first book, it was Breakdown, connect the dots, all the intelligence. I think it was that book, and when I got to the part where he said that Janet Reno… Remember this, Janet Reno had interceded and wanted to treat all these terrorist attacks as a law enforcement problem and take all the information we learned to a grand jury, remember this? When you take it to a grand jury, CIA and FBI are not entitled to it, because grand jury proceedings are confidential. And so here they’ve got bin Laden, now this is another bit of evidence, in addition to the Sudanese offers of bin Laden to the Clinton administration, now we’ve got this videotape a year before 9-11 in real time, CIA knows at the moment, they’re looking live at bin Laden, not a tape, at this place, and that’s who they think it is, and nothing was done because the Clinton administration treated bin Laden as a law enforcement problem. And, you know, bin Laden was behind the ’93 World Trade Center, and, yeah, we treated those guys that we caught, Ramsey Yousef and the Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman or whatever his name is, the blind sheik, these guys are convicted and they’re in jail. Hasn’t stopped diddly squat, has it? Because we didn’t get the people actually behind it. We got the soldiers. And, now, I’m not condemning that, but this is war.

You know, these are not U.S. citizens that have rights under the U.S. Constitution. Well, apparently not. Apparently if you’re not a citizen and you attack a U.S. installation or institution such as the USS Cole or World Trade Center, takes it out of the legal system, that’s what Janet Reno did. Janet Reno changed all that. That’s what Gertz’s point was – Janet Reno changed all that and made these people something other than own combatants and just treated them as criminals. That’s what interesting about this, ladies and gentlemen, is this is exactly after the Spanish blast, the Madrid blast this week, this is exactly what John Kerry said that his change would be, that the military – we’re overusing, we’re exaggerating terrorism and the military is not the way to do this. We need to treat this as a law enforcement problem. Well, we see how successful Democrats have been treating terrorists as law enforcement criminals or problems. It isn’t working.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
RUSH: The new prime minister of Spain, Jos? Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, today rebuffed an appeal from President Bush to stand by the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq which he described as a fiasco, but listen to these quotes from Mr. Jos? Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. “Fighting terrorism with bombs, with operations of Shock and Awe, with missiles, that does not combat terrorism, it only generates more radicalism. The way to fight terrorism is with the rule of law, with international legislation, with intelligence services. This is what the international community should be talking about.”
Hey, loco weed, take a look, take a look at what NBC is reporting and understand just how dangerous you’ve made the rest of the world with your election to this country. Because this is exactly what the Clinton administration did with bin Laden all throughout the nineties. They treated him as an international criminal and they came up with the rule of law and international legislation, intelligence services, and they had him in their dead sights, real time, let him go.

Now, this is not the way you deal with people that are blowing up Baghdad. This is not the way you deal with people that are blowing up Madrid and New York City and Bali and Saudi Arabia. You can have all the stupid-ass international courts, pass all the stupid-ass international legislation you want, Mr. Zapatero, and it isn’t going to do diddly squat, may as well say the same thing to Senator Kerry since Zapatero is one of the foreign leaders who has expressed a desire to meet with senator Kerry. And CNN is all upset about this story. CNN is all upset about NBC’s story on this drone, the CIA drone that showed live pictures of bin Laden walking around, free as a bird in his camp, in Afghanistan, and in the year 2000.
END TRANSCRIPT

<*ICON*> Visit the Limbaugh Archives?
<a target=new href=”/home/folder/may_20_osama_on__a_platter.member.html”>(Clinton Refused Osama on a Platter -05.20.02)</a>