Osama Bin Laden in Somalia or Yemen: Clark
errrr, I dont think he’s in Yemen. But if you see this guy in Sa’ada, let me know. But then again, you couldn’t because there’s no phones or internet in Sa’ada.
Washington, Sept 14: The Bush Administration’s former chief counter-terrorism adviser, Richard Clark, has claimed that Osama bin Laden is either in Yemen or Somalia, and not in Pakistan.
Clark, who was also the chief counter-terrorism adviser to the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, said that bin Laden was propagating a kind of propaganda to lure Washington into a sense of neutrality to enable it to strengthen itself.
“Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, ‘America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.’ He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda,” the Daily Times quoted Clark, as saying.
“In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden’s propaganda. And, the result of that is that al Qaeda and organisations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened,” he added.
In another interview to the CBS weekly show, 60 Minutes, in addition to a write-up in Newsweek, Clark said that after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, he told his colleagues at the White House, “We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda,” but Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, “No, no, no. We don’t have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.”
Photo courtesy of Hot Air
Note to the readers: This is not the position of the Bush adminstration or the US, and it doesn’t signal anything about US policy. Richard Clark is an outspoken critic of Bush. He used to work at the White House; now he is a private citizen with no claim to fame beyond trashing Bush. He doesn’t provide any basis for his analysis. He wanted the headlines, so he made this statement.
