For those who think Richard Clarke deserves credibility, read on...

Clarke Blocked bin Laden Extradition

Clinton administration diplomatic troubleshooter Mansoor Ijaz charged Monday that one-time White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke blocked efforts to gather intelligence on al Qaeda and torpedoed a deal to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan in the years before the 9/11 attacks.

"I was personally asked to brief Condoleezza Rice's deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley on exactly what had gone wrong in the previous efforts to get bin Laden out of the Sudan, to get the terrorism data out of the Sudan, which I negotiated the offer for," Ijaz told Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends."

He said he also personally negotiated a deal "to get bin Laden out of Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 2000, using at Abu Dhabi Royal Family as a proxy to get him out on an extradition offer."

But Ijaz told Fox:

"In each case of things that were involved in the Clinton administration, Richard Clarke himself stepped in and blocked the efforts that were being made over and over and over again."

The unofficial diplomat said that if Clarke hadn't put up roadblocks to obtaining Sudanese intelligence, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 might have been prevented.

He called Clarke's account denying offers of Sudanese cooperation "absolutely disingenuous; it comes very close to flat-out lying."

After months of denials from his former aides, ex-President Clinton finally admitted that he personally turned down the offer by Sudan to arrest bin Laden.

"We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again," Clinton told a New York business group in February 2002.

"They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."

In his book, "Against All Enemies," Clarke called reports that Clinton had turned down the Sudanese offer "a fable."

See: *News Article*