"Too Obsessed"

President Clinton also claimed on Fox News yesterday that "all the right-wingers" believed he was "too obsessed" with bin Laden, that he "did too much" in going after the al Qaeda head. The reality is a bit different. Many conservatives applauded Clinton's decision to strike in Sudan and Afghanistan following the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. In November 1998, for example, Andrew McCarthy wrote a lengthy piece in the Weekly Standard in support of the strikes, but he also explained why the Clinton administration's overall approach to combating the terror threat was woefully inadequate. Similar to what Reuel Marc Gerecht would argue in the wake of the USS Cole bombing, McCarthy pushed the administration to treat international terrorism as "a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue." He wrote:

Does the administration actually grasp the nature of the threat we face? Following the August 20 retaliatory strikes, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and national security adviser Samuel Berger rejected the predictable "wag the dog" accusations with solemn admonitions that, in terrorism, the United States has suddenly been confronted with a "new war" -- one we would now have to be prepared to fight, alone if necessary. This was exceedingly curious. There is nothing at all "new" about radical Islam's terrorist war against the United States. It has been going on since the late 1980s. It has been openly declared since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which killed six, injured over a thousand, and caused nearly $ 1 billion in damage. Its leaders, moreover, have been promising for more than five years that in pursuing this war, they would kill American civilians and bomb American military installations and embassies overseas…. Such an adversary will not be defeated by the techniques the president recommended at the U.N. -- increased international cooperation in the prosecution and extradition of terrorists. These are necessary steps, but breathtakingly inadequate. A military threat calls for a military response…. In the main, international terrorism is a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue. There is a severe limit to the circumstances in which it is either possible or prudent to apprehend terrorists overseas only to swaddle them in the rights of American defendants -- including education them, through the extensive discovery our system mandates, as to what we know about them and the precious and regrettably scarce sources of that information. Terrorists, furthermore, see the world in gimlet-eyed simplicity. They are not swayed by our breathless pursuit of international conventions that are broken with impunity, weapons-inspection regimes that we lack the stomach to police, or "peace processes" that become hideous euphemisms for body counts. These convey weakness. What impresses them is the certainty that force will swiftly and surely be met with exponentially superior force. That alone is a meaningful deterrent.

The Weekly Standard November 2, 1998 HEADLINE: THE SUDAN CONNECTION; The Missing Link in U.S. Terrorism Policy BYLINE: By Andrew C. McCarthy; Andrew C. McCarthy, formerly chief trial counsel at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, was the lead prosecutor at the terrorism trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others. BODY: At the very moment last month when Americans watched the videotape of their chief executive weaseling through testimony before a federal grand jury, President Clinton was addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on international terrorism. To those who watch terrorism closely, the president's remarks and the accompanying atmosphere were profoundly disheartening. It was clear from the timing that the administration sees terrorism as a "winning issue" -- one that both illustrates the president's engagement in a matter of grave importance and reminds the public of the need for an energetic commander in chief. But Clinton's speech was a disaster. It succeeded only in spotlighting the dangerous uncertainty and incompetence of the administration's policy. In many respects it was a boilerplate speech. There was the multilateralism one has come to expect from speeches at the U.N. (the president spoke not of American leadership in fighting terrorism but of the "common obligations" of nations to protect our "common destiny"). There was a tough-sounding summons "to step up extradition and prosecution" of terrorists. And there was the usual call for signing toothless "global antiterror" conventions. None of this was out of t ordinary. But noticeably and alarmingly absent -- especially after the president correctly portrayed the rising danger from global terror organizations bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction -- was any call for increased military readiness to meet the threat. The omission was all the more pregnant since, in context, it seemed to signal a retreat from the decisive action the administration took on August 20, when it retaliated with cruise-missile strikes for he bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The American attack targeted sites in Afghanistan and Sudan linked to the wealthy exiled Saudi terrorist, Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the embassy attacks. Indeed, according to defense secretary William Cohen, the missiles were targeted directly at the camp in Afghanistan where bin Laden was staying. Sudan, for its part, has been a lifeline for bin Laden throughout his fierce, years-long anti-American campaign. The military strike was thus a fitting response. Yet the president shrank from defending it. Just minutes before he spoke at the U.N., secretary general Kofi Annan offered a none-too-veiled rebuke of the unilateral American action. And the day before, the New York Times had reported on the continued hand-wringing at the State Department, which is dissatisfied with the (ever-increasing) level of proof that the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory we bombed was in fact being used at bin Laden's behest to make nerve gas. At the most opportune possible moment, the president declined to speak in defense of his own military response to terrorism. Does the administration actually grasp the nature of the threat we face? Following the August 20 retaliatory strikes, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and national security adviser Samuel Berger rejected the predictable "wag the dog" accusations with solemn admonitions that, in terrorism, the United States has suddenly been confronted with a "new war" -- one we would now have to be prepared to fight, alone if necessary. This was exceedingly curious. There is nothing at all "new" about radical Islam's terrorist war against the United States. It has been going on since the late 1980s. It has been openly declared since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which killed six, injured over a thousand, and caused nearly $ 1 billion in damage. Its leaders, moreover, have been promising for more than five years that in pursuing this war, they would kill American civilians and bomb American military installations and embassies overseas. Since the World Trade Center attack, investigators have traced Osama bin Laden and his organization -- Al Qaeda, or "the Base" -- to several catastrophic attacks on Americans: the 1993 ambush of U.S. soldiers in Somalia during Operation Restore Hope (18 killed), the November 1995 bombing of the American military training center in Riyadh (six killed), and the June 1996 bombing of he Khobar towers in the American military complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (19 killed). Along the way, bin Laden has also been linked to sundry assassination plots against President Clinton and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, among others. Most alarming, documents recently unsealed in federal court in New York make explicit something that has been assumed for years. Bin Laden's Al Qaeda has formed an alliance with three of the world's most ruthless practitioners of terror: Sudan's National Islamic Front, headed by Hassan al-Turabi; the Iranian sponsored Hezbollah organization; and the Islamic Group headed by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman -- who is serving a life sentence in federal prison following his 1995 conviction (along with 11 underlings) for waging a war of urban terrorism that included the World Trade Center attack and an even more ambitious plot to bomb other New York City landmarks. That is why, in the aftermath of the cruise-missile launchings, the question bedeviling terrorism-watchers was not whether the American retaliatory strikes targeted a bona fide foe. The question was, Why on earth did Washington take so long to make use of the military option? Now, however, we must ask -- and you can bet bin Laden is also asking -- Was the impetus for acting a realistic appreciation of the international threat, or the need to find surcease from domestic scandal? The question arises not from cynicism about the administration's motives but from its thoroughly inept handling of the questions surrounding the Sudanese strike. When officials have come to a rational understanding about a real threat, one expects they will be able to make a cogent case for their actions. And the investigative record supporting the cruise-missile strikes is so rich, the administration should easily have been able to defend them. Instead, an operation against an eminently worthy target, Sudan, is being discredited by the Clinton administration itself, with a series of conflicting explanations narrowly centered on the nature of the chemical plant we targeted. Indeed, hardly a day goes by without continued anonymous bickering over the attack between CIA agents and State Department officials in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The critical error was twofold. Because the administration's foreign-policy attention span is gnat-like and its aversion to prudent military measures immense, it failed to prepare the country -- even after the August 7 mass murders at our embassies in Nairobi and Dares Salaam -- for the need to respond with force. Then, after the deed was done, the administration allowed the debate on the Sudanese strike to focus solely on the goings-on at the Al Shifa plant, rather than on Sudan generally. As a result, the propriety of our self-defense has come to rest on such minutiae as the reliability of soil samples, when, from the mountaintops, the State Department should have been proclaiming the prodigious record of anit-American terror complied since the early 1990s by Hassan al-Turabi, Sudan's de facto sovereign. Turabi's National Islamic Front has ruled Sudan amid continuing civil strife since 1989, when a military coup wrested control from the democratic government. While his coy manner, fluent English, and Western education have frequently charmed the media here and in Europe, Turabi is a fierce opponent of the U.S. government, of the secular Egyptian government, and of the Saudi regime. He is a friend of radical Islam, of the Hamas and Hezbollah organizations -- ever counseling his longtime associate Yasser Arafat towards greater intransigence in dealing with Israel. Turabi is also an intimate of bin Laden, whom Sudan officially took in when the Saudi ruling family expelled him in 1994. For Turabi, providing safe harbor for terrorists was nothing new. Indeed, in 1991, bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization was permitted to move its entire command-and-control structure into Sudan from Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the criminal charges recently unsealed in federal court in Manhattan recount, bin Laden's and Turabi's organizations worked in lock-step: setting up training camps to prepare for terrorist actions, working to obtain sophisticated communications equipment to facilitate their secret activities, and trying to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons. Sudan offered a congenial atmosphere for a grand alliance of terrorists. In Afghanistan, where traditionally hostile Shia and Sunni Muslims had fought in tandem against the Soviets, bin Laden watched firsthand as the cohesiveness evaporated into bitter infighting once the common Soviet enemy left. Safely ensconced in Sudan, he reflected on how much the radical cause might advance if his Sunni forces could combine with the Shiites of Hezbollah, who are legendarily adept in explosives techniques, to focus on their common enemies: the United States, Israel, and the secular governments in Islamic countries. In Sudan, where Hezbollah had long been welcome, such liaison was possible; thus, under Turabi's wing, joint Al Qaeda-Hezbollah strategies flourished, and bin Laden's guerrillas began shuttling for bomb schooling between Sudan and Iran. Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman was also frequently at the receiving end of Turabi's hospitality. Like Turabi and bin Laden, Abdel Rahman -- whose Islamic Group is the leading resistance organization in neighboring Egypt and carried out the 1981 murder of Anwar Sadat for the high crime of making peace with Israel -- perceived great benefit in joint ventures with other extremist fundamentalist groups, including Shiites. And like bin Laden, Abdel Rahman has been the beneficiary of generous Sudanese patronage. Thanks to the broad investigations surrounding Rahman's trial in the World Trade Center bombing, we have extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the Sudanese assistance to Abdel Rahman's terrorist operations in the United States and abroad. By the late 1980s, Abdel Rahman had succeeded in forming a violently anti-American jihad army in the New York metropolitan area, committed to executing terror operations -- both here and overseas -- aimed at withering U.S. support for Israel. Even before the sheik relocated to the United States in 1990 -- aboard flights originating in Sudan -- terrorists like El Sayyid Nosair and Mahmud Abouhalima, who planned the World Trade Center bombing, were referring to Abdel Rahman as their leader in cryptic telephone reports to him about paramilitary exercises they had organized in remote areas of New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Documents seized from Nosair's home showed longstanding plans to blow up skyscrapers and other sites of political significance. In mid-1992, those plans were stepped up with the arrival in New York of Ramzi Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj -- straight from Peshawar, Pakistan, where bin Laden's Al Qaeda was headquartered before moving to Sudan. Abdel Rahman, the renowned "emir of jihad," had more in common with bin Laden than cozy ties with Sudan's Hassan al-Turabi. Their agendas were joined at the hip. Both Abdel Rahman and bin Laden vigorously urged their subordinates to attack American armed forces in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. And their organizations have long worked hand in hand. As federal prosecutors investigating the recent embassy bombings revealed in court last month, Wadih el Hage, a chief lieutenant in bin Laden's organization, is a longtime associate of Nosair and once sought to supply arms for Abouhalima. Moreover, when Ramzi Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj arrived from Peshawar for their rendezvous with Abdel Rahman's New York henchmen in 1992, they were carrying bomb-making manuals annotated with the phone number of a bin Laden contact -- a number Abdel Rahman frequently called from his Jersey City apartment. After they landed at New York's JFK International Airport, Ajaj was arrested for attempting to enter the U.S. illegally. Yousef, however, managed to persuade customs officials to release him on a bare promise to show up for future immigration proceedings. He, Abouhalima, and several assistants then set about building the powerful urea-nitrate bomb that would be set off under the World Trade Center. Abouhalima turned for assistance in testing explosive chemicals to a young Sudanese immigrant named Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali. A polished English speaker, Siddig Ali had key contacts in Turabi's National Islamic Front, including at Sudan's U.N. mission in New York. He became a translator and aide-de-camp for Abdel Rahman. Immediately after the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing, Siddig Ali made arrangements for Abouhalima and his family to flee to Sudan, where their safety would be assured. Unwisely, while en route, Abouhalima stopped to visit relatives in Egypt, where he was arrested. When Hosni Mubarak's government agreed to extradite him to the Untied States to face trial for the bombing, an enraged Siddig Ali confided to an associate named Abdo Haggag (a covert informant who later became a U.S. government witness) that the time had come to fulfill Sheik Abdel Rahman's longstanding call for Mubarak's assassination. The Egyptian president was scheduled for a state visit to the Untied States. Siddig Ali, using his Turabi connections, called officials at Sudan's U.N. mission. Deputy consul Ahmed Yousef, after admonishing Siddig Ali that it was better to discuss such matters in person, told him Mubarak's itinerary -- which was to include an overnight stay at Manhattan's posh Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Siddig Ali reconnoitered the site, ordered the weaponry needed for his plan (grenades and high-power firearms) from an associate in New York, and sketched diagrams for deploying his Sudanese paramilitary recruits during the anticipated attack. The plot was betrayed by Haggag, who confided it to an Egyptian government official. As a result, Mubarak avoided New York during his U.S. trip. Siddig Ali assured Abdel Rahman that the assassination effort would continue, anticipating a renewed attempt in September 1993, when Mubarak was scheduled to return for a U.N. function. Meanwhile, Siddig Ali had bigger fish fry to fry. Picking up where the World Trade Center bombers had left off, he spent the spring of 1993 designing a series of simultaneous bombing of New York City landmarks. This plan, too, was foiled by his unlucky choice of accomplices: As his bomb technician, Siddig Ali drafted an Egyptian named Emad Salem who had been an FBI informant since 1991. Following the Trade Center bombing, Salem agreed to record conversations for the FBI, and the result was a trove of insight -- including Siddig Ali's explanation that his information about Mubarak's itinerary had come from the "highest level" of the Sudanese government. After scouting a number of potential targets that included army installations, the Javits Federal Building (which houses the FBI's New York field office), and the George Washington Bridge, Siddig Ali settled on three: the United Nations headquarters and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, which connect Manhattan to New Jersey. The operation against the tunnels was to be as simple as it was horrifying. Siddig Ali would direct his Sudanese underlings to steal four cars, two for stowing bombs to be left in the middle of each tunnel, an two in which to flee from the targets minutes before the explosion. Car theft would avoid the tell-tale error of the World Trade Center bombers, who were found because one of them had rented under his true name the van that had carried the bomb. The U.N. plot, because of the presence of security guards, was more demanding. But consular officials at the Sudanese mission agreed to provide access to the complex so that Siddig Ali could study the site. They would also supply diplomatic license plates. By affixing the plates to another stolen, bomb-laden car, Siddig Ali would forestall questions at the entrance and be able park in an area that promised maximum carnage. Siddig Ali anticipated fleeing undetected to the Philippines and then to Sudan, using travel papers provided by the Sudanese mission. Siddig Ali did not merely speak incessantly of his Sudanese government contacts. He actually brought Emad Salem to the U.N. mission, where the consul, Siraj el-Din, rolled out the red carpet for his honored guests (who were in the middle of planning a massive bombing). Siddig Ali later explained that Turabi's consular officials were committed to jihad and worked to bring those of similar mind to the Untied States. Such immigrants included the men who were then involved in constructing explosives for bombing the U.N. and the tunnels. Siddig Ali advised Salem that the tactical plan for the U.N. attack would have to include provisions for keeping Sudanese mission personnel out of harm's way. By the time Siddig Ali spoke with deputy consul Yousef on May 23, 1993, his telephone was wiretapped by federal agents. Having been gulled into believing Salem had "swept" his home and telephone to detect bugging devices, Siddig Ali comforted Yousef with the assurance that his telephone was "good and clean." With the bombing plans already well underway, Siddig Ali cryptically asserted: "May God grant you . . . the ability to repulse the enemies . . . the ones who are here . . . Because we are ready, we are watching the situation. . . . Strong conspiracies are being weaved in the darkness." After Siddig Ali repeated that he and the others were "red to die" if necessary, Yousef spoke of the "cost" of "confronting the West" and invoked Islamic scripture in adding, "We are not going to prevail by outnumbering you, but rather God's wrath is focused upon you." Siddig Ali concurred: "Yes, we'll fight them with this religion." This call took place as contacts in the Sudanese mission were putting Siddig Ali in touch with Mohammed Saleh, a Hamas operative who owned two gas stations in Yonkers. Eventually, Saleh contributed over 200 gallons of diesel fuel for the construction of the bombs that were to be deployed at the U.N. and in the tunnels. In a startling conversation recorded by Salem on June 4, 1993, Saleh bragged of his long-standing association with Sudan's Turabi, recounted Hamas terror operations in Israel, and agreed with Siddig Ali that priority should be given to a plan to murder U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutors-Ghali. Siddig Ali has explained to Salem that he and deputy counsel Yousef considered plans to kill Boutros-Ghali but ultimately shelved them out of fear that a successor might prove worse for militant Muslims. As the bombing plans progressed, Siddig Ali assured Salem that the current plot was not the only thing in store for the United States. The ware would also be taken overseas against American military bases and embassies -- particularly if the World Trade Center bombers were convicted and received life sentences. This only served to underscore the threat made by the bombers -- in letter to the New York Times and other media outlers -- of more and greater bloodshed if the United States did not heed their demand to abandon Israel and Middle East affairs. In mid-June 1993, Siddig Ali brought another Sudanese associate, Tarig Elhassan, into the bombing conspiracy. Elhassan consulted a Sudanese engineer for a study of the tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, later recalling how he had told the engineer the results would be sent to Sudan, to the Hamas and Fatah organizations, and to similar groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Siddig Ali agreed that it was essential "to collect information for the future" because of what he perceived as the likelihood of American retaliation against Sudan if its connection to the landmarks-boombing plot were later discovered. On June 24, 1993, at 2 A.M. in a dank Queens garage serving as a makeshift safehouse, Siddig Ali, Elhassan, and three of their countrymen were arrested with on other man (an American named Victor Alvarez, who was called "Mohammed the Spanish") in the act of mixing fertilizer and fuel oil. At this Yonkers home, Mohammed Saleh was also arrested, carrying on his person contact numbers for the Sudanese consul Siraj el-Din, deputy consul Ahmed Yousef, and a diplomat at the Sudanese embassy in Washington. The would-be bombers, Abdel Rahman, and Nosair were all convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy to levy war against the United States. The Sudanese consular officials, el-Din and Yousef, were expelled from the United States as personae non gratae. Yet, just as the World Trade Center bombers and Siddig Ali predicted, the war was even then being taken overseas. By late 1993 in Sudan, Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda was not merely producing firearms and explosives in conjunction with Sudan's ruling National Islamic Front and Hezbollah; it was making efforts to procure enriched uranium for the development of unclear weapons. At the same time, bin Laden issued fatwas to all his followers declaring that the United States was an enemy of Islam and that attacking its forces was a sacred obligation. Among the principal justifications he cited was the imprisonment of Sheik Abdel Rahman. From Sudan, Al Qaeda guerrillas were sent to recruit and train fighters in Somalia. The dearly attacks against American troops in Mogadishu soon followed. While still headquartered in Sudan, bin Laden proceeded to orchestrate not just bombings of U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia but another nearly successful assassination attempt on Mubarak -- this one in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. That attack was carried out in 1995 by guerrillas trained in Sudan. The next year, bin Laden's Al Qaeda moved its headquarters form Sudan back to Afghanistan, where the Taliban were consolidating their holds on power. The Sudanese camps, however, continued to function. In early 1998, some six months before Al Qaeda explosives razed our embassies in east Africa, bin Laden joined the Islamic Group in a public declaration calling for resources to be pooled for the purpose of killing Americans -- including civilians -- anywhere in the world. For a brief period in August, it looked as if the Clinton administration understood the facts of the situation: The United States is under hostile, military attack from a capable adversary committed to terrorism as a method. That adversary is an international amalgam, and Sudan is a significant member -- in common parlance, an enemy, and one without whom the terrorists' venture could not succeed. Such an adversary will not be defeated by the techniques the president recommended at the U.N. -- increased international cooperation in the prosecution and extradition of terrorists. These are necessary steps, but breathtakingly inadequate. A military threat calls for a military response. Former president Jimmy Carter and the New York Times, to name two, have recently jointed the orchestra of Neros fiddling for official inquiries into the good faith of our retaliatory strike against the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory -- preoccupied with learning whether it was actually processing deadly VX gas (as the Clinton administration first asserted), "merely" storing VX (or precursor chemicals) among legitimate medicinal supplies, or had no connection to never gas or bin Laden. Surely, the choice of targets can be debated, but no one in the administration, it seems, is prepared with the brief to make the case that should have been made in the first place: Sudan has threatened our vital interests with impunity for years. And while civilian casualties are a regrettable fact of life in times of war, responsibility of our retaliatory use of force belongs not to U.S. analysts but squarely on the shoulders of Hassan al-Turabi. In the main, international terrorism is a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue. There is a severe limit to the circumstances in which it is either possible or prudent to apprehend terrorists overseas only to swaddle them in the rights of American defendants -- including education them, through the extensive discovery our system mandates, as to what we know about them and the precious and regrettably scarce sources of that information. Terrorists, furthermore, see the world in gimlet-eyed simplicity. They are not swayed by our breathless pursuit of international conventions that are broken with impunity, weapons-inspection regimes that we lack the stomach to police, or "peace processes" that become hideous euphemisms for body counts. These convey weakness. What impresses them is the certainty that force will swiftly and surely be met with exponentially superior force. That alone is a meaningful deterrent. What is most needed in the war against terror is increased, military spending and preparedness, and a missile-defense system for the day in the not-too-distant future when Osama bin Laden or someone like him is capable of launching weapons of mass destruction at the United Stats, our soldiers, diplomats, and citizens abroad, and our allies. That requires making the case, straightforwardly and without apology, about who our enemies are. Sudan would be a good place to start.