CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm (1998)

[sabra]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2382789,00.html

Focus: CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm


Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, where Mohammed Atta’s video was shot, has a special place in the history of Al-Qaeda: it was once Osama Bin Laden’s personal kingdom within Afghanistan.

Exclusively Arab, it was home for Bin Laden’s wives and children, as well as for the elite fighters being trained for special operations. And, as we now know, for a few weeks in early 2000 it was home to Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers.

...

US intelligence knew Bin Laden, already a wanted terrorist, used Tarnak as his base, and in spring 1998 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center began working on a plan to capture him at the compound, partly with the help of Afghan tribal fighters.

...

However, getting the plan accepted at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was not straightforward. It was known that dozens of women and children lived in the compound, and security chiefs feared there would be many casualties.

By June 1998, much to the disappointment of the field officers responsible for devising the plan, nobody at a senior level within the CIA seemed willing to support it. Nor was there any support within the White House.

[Poll_Blind]

1. Wait, this is one of the things used in the "Path to 9/11". I didn't see.

...the film but I saw clips of Harvey Keitel talking about how nobody wanted to do this because they didn't want to hurt any people. Can someone confirm this? The last two paragraphs seem really familiar. Maybe it was whomever played Sandy Berger. Either Keitel or whoever played Berger. Anyone?

PB

[Poll_Blind]

3. Found it! This _was_ immortalized in the 9/11 hit piece.

  Yeah, this is the same thing. I don't recommend anyone do so, but this is "Clip 1" at this site, some right-winger bullshit web page.

Against a barren central Asian landscape, an American special action
team moves in for a "snatch" operation on Osama bin Laden. But back
in Washington, DC, Clinton's National Security Advisor cannot bring
himself to make the final call.

  I had seen a portion of this clip before but watching the full ~3 minutes of it...sheesh, what a load of shit.

PB

[pinto]

2. This article from Washington Post provides much more information:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59775-2004Feb21.html

A Secret Hunt Unravels in Afghanistan
Mission to Capture or Kill al Qaeda Leader Frustrated by Near Misses, Political Disputes

By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2004; Page A01

The seeds of the CIA's first formal plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden were contained in another urgent manhunt -- for Mir Aimal Kasi, the Pakistani migrant who murdered two CIA employees while spraying rounds from an assault rifle at cars idling before the entrance to the CIA's Langley headquarters in 1993.

For several years after the shooting, Kasi remained a fugitive in the border areas straddling Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. From its Langley offices, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center asked the Islamabad station for help recruiting agents who might be able to track Kasi down. Case officers signed up a group of Afghan tribal fighters who had worked for the CIA during the 1980s guerrilla war against Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan.

<snip>

As bin Laden's bloodcurdling televised threats against Americans increased in number and menace during 1997, the CIA -- with approval from Clinton's White House -- turned from just watching bin Laden toward making plans to capture him.

Working with lawyers at Langley in late 1997 and early 1998, the TRODPINT agents' CIA controllers modified the original Kasi capture plan -- with its secret airstrip for extraction flights -- so it could be used to seize bin Laden and prosecute him, or kill him if he violently resisted arrest.

A long and frustrating hunt for bin Laden had formally begun.

<snip>

Members of the White House counterterrorism team reacted skeptically. Their sense was that the TRODPINT agents were old anti-Soviet mujaheddin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. If they did go through with a Tarnak raid, some White House officials feared, women and children would die and bin Laden would probably escape. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. interests in the Muslim world and elsewhere.

<much more>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59775-2004Feb21.html

[AIJ Alom]

4. Hmm. Trying to snatch a man from his stronghold with woman and children

present while relying on aged foreign fighters very difficult.

Now trying to catch a man holed up in a mountains with no women and children and fanatics willing to fight to the death surrounded 1,000's of elite American forces on the ground... that's another story....

Then again so is the Taliban offering to transfer said terrorist to Saudi Arabia for lifting of sanctions (note the sanctions were Clinton policy that had obviously worked) and ignoring/tabling the offer....