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American Morning

The Big Question: Did the U.S. Miss an Opportunity to Get Osama bin Laden?

Aired December 03, 2001 - 09:21   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Did the U.S. miss an opportunity years ago to perhaps get Osama bin Laden, and more importantly, perhaps head off the events of September 11th? A report in the new issue of "Vanity Fair" magazine says the Clinton administration rejected repeated offers by Sudanese intelligence officials to share information on Osama bin Laden and the terrorist network of Al Qaeda. Former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice calls the allegations "erroneous and irresponsible." She joins me now from Washington. And from Abbington, England is the "Vanity Fair" reporter David Rose.

Welcome to both of you.

Mr. Rose, let me begin with you. What kind of information did the Sudanese officials offer to the Clinton administration and the White House?

DAVID ROSE, "VANITY FAIR": Well, bin Laden and his closest followers, 200 or 300 of the so-called Afghan Arabs who'd been with him during the war against the Soviets, and the Afghan Arabs lived in Sudan between 1991 and 1996, and although bin Laden had gone there extensively as an investor, pretty soon, the Sudanese realized that he was hooked into a worldwide network of Islamic terrorism, and they began to watch him and his followers very closely. They built up detailed files, including photographs, travel details, origins, all kinds of information about where these people where, who they where, where they came from. And of course some of these people went on to play direct parts in both the 1998 Embassy bombings in East Africa, and later the atrocities of September 11th, including Bin laden himself.

CAFFERTY: Let me get Susan Rice's reaction to the piece. Mrs. Rice, you call the article erroneous and irresponsible. Did anyone from the Sudanese government offer intelligence about bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization to you or any of your colleagues at the time you were in the member of the Clinton administration?

SUSAN RICE, FMR. ASST. SECY. OF STATE: The reason I say this erroneous and irresponsible because the notion that we would somehow have missed opportunity to receive information that might have been valuable in foiling terrorism operations is absurd. The fact is that we had an obvious interesting in obtaining as much information from Sudan as possible, precisely because it was a state sponsor of terrorism and remains on the U.S. list of state sponsor of terrorism. That's why the United States spent a great deal of time in the period between 1994 and 2001 meeting repeatedly at high levels and mid levels with Sudanese officials. This include meeting of intelligence officials, our law enforcement officials, and State Department officials from the cabinet level on down.

Those meeting occurred in venues ranking from Adis Abda (ph) Ethiopia to Khartum to New York to Washington, so the meetings were numerous.

CAFFERTY: I understand that. During those meetings, were there specific pieces of intelligence that were related to Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda that alluded to his possible terrorism activities that were offered to you or any of your colleagues?

RICE: Absolutely not. We wish there had been. The whole purpose of those discussions and the whole purpose of a counterterrorism team that Clinton dispatched in May of 2000 has been on the ground constantly , full time was to obtain any and all information from the Sudanese that could be useful. They never offered these files to us. They never provided us with any information that Mr. Rose alleges. And in fact, we did not unfortunately get significant information from them, which our law enforcement or our intelligence people deemed to be of any significant operational value, throughout all of these meetings.

CAFFERTY: Mr. Rose, one of your primary sources in the article was Tim Carney (ph), the former U.S. ambassador to the Sudan. It's been suggested that he had a possible ax to grind, that he was angry over the closing of the American Embassy in Khartum, and that when you began researching this article, this was maybe a chance for him to get even. Comments?

ROSE: Well, I think that's an astonishing thing to say. Tim Carney is one of the most respected member of the U.S. diplomatic community. He served the State Department honorably and with distinction for 30 years. He was actually the very last person I spoke to in researching this article.

I should add that the points I make in the article are not based on simply on interviews with either him or other U.S. sources, or indeed with Sudanese officials; it based on a documentary record, which states quite clearly that these approaches were made, and they were not taken up. Now I've had the benefit of speaking with Mr. Carney this morning, since I spoke with CNN and Dr. Rice yesterday afternoon.

Mr. Carney tells me that he's appalled by the suggestion that he has some kind of ax to grind. He also strongly questions the description of these meeting, which Dr. Rice has just given you. In fact, his words to me, which he's given permission for me to quote today on CNN are "We must have been talking about different meeting," because he was completely unaware of meetings of the type that Dr. Rice is discussing.

The documentary record quite clear. The U.S. was offered intelligence on bin Laden and Al Qaeda and repeatedly it refused it, and the most dramatic example right after the 1998 embassy bombings. When the Sudanese arrested two suspects of those bombings in Khartum, they offered them to the FBI. I've spoken to sources in Sudan and within the U.S. intelligence community, and they have backed what the documents say, that the U.S. refused those offers, at the behest of the State Department, and they then replied to those offers by bombing the Al-Shite (ph) medicine factory hi Khartum, in the utterly erroneous belief that is making chemical weapons.

CAFFERTY: I can offer the last word to Susan Rice, and we've got about 10 or 15 seconds, Mr. Rice. The clock is leading us into a commercial here.

RICE: This is utterly erroneous. The Sudanese are the primary sources for this article. They are sponsors of terrorism. Ambassador Carney sat in meetings in which this information was not offered and in which we sought to elicit information on counterterrorism. The record is clear. There's numerous American officials who sat in on these meeting. And unfortunately, Mr. Rose has been taken in by the Sudanese government and made to look like a very weak journalist, I'm afraid to say.

CAFFERTY: Well I thank you for joining us. The article in the current issue of "Vanity Fair," David Rose, joining us from Abbington, England this morning, and former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, joining us from Washington D.C. Thank you both.

RICE: Thank you.

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