On August 20, 1998, one of the targets of Operation Infinite Reach, President Bill Clinton’s retaliatory strike for the August 7, 1998, African embassy bombings, was a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. It was supposedly tied to bin Laden and producing chemical weapons. “The plant was targeted based on a soil sample gathered by a CIA […]
Category: quotes
8/20/1998
“Earlier, on August 20, 1998, as special prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation of the president’s alleged indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky was reaching a climax, cruise missiles had been fired at the Sudan and Afghanistan, aimed at punishing Osama bin Laden for the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa on August 7. They failed to hit […]
8/20/1998
The August 20, 1998, retaliatory attacks by the U.S. on bin Laden’s camp at Khost, Afghanistan and his chemical plant in Sudan “turned bin Laden from a marginal figure in the Muslim world into a global celebrity. …Maulana Sami ul-Haq, a corpulent cleric who runs what is probably Pakistan’s largest religious academy, explained that the […]
8/20/1998
“The Clinton administration has been criticized for not following up on its first missile attack [on August 20, 1998] with an all-out effort to get bin Laden. But former officials said that they lacked the ‘actionable intelligence,’ or precise information about bin Laden’s whereabouts, to launch another attack. ‘The main focus was location, location, location,’ […]
8/20/1998
National Security Advisor Sandy Berger answered the charge that there had been ambiguity about the CIA’s authorization to kill bin Laden: ” ‘We gave the CIA every inch of authorization it asked for. …There could not have been any doubt about what President [Bill] Clinton’s intent was after he fired 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at […]
8/20/1998
“…Pakistani officials, aware of the timing of the strike [President Bill Clinton’s retaliatory effort on August 20, 1998, for the African embassy bombings], had warned key Taliban and al Qaeda allies, even sending a senior ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] operative to personally tell bin Laden of the impending attack.” – Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, Page […]
8/20/1998
In a speech announcing the U.S. cruise missile strikes of August 20, 1998, on locations in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the August 7, 1998, African embassy bombings, President Bill Clinton said: ” ‘I want the world to understand that our actions today were not aimed against Islam, the faith of hundreds of millions of […]
8/20/1998
“After the outcry over the [unsuccessful] missile strikes [on August 20, 1998], [President Bill] Clinton directed that the campaign against al Qaeda be a covert one conducted by the CIA, with an emphasis on disrupting their operations. He also authorized lethal force only if they found bin Laden or other top al Qaeda leaders.” – […]
8/20/1998
National Security Advisor Sandy “Berger was particularly rankled by an editorial in the [August 29, 1998, issue of] Economist that said that only the future would tell whether the U.S. missile strikes [which targeted, but failed to kill Bin Ladin on August 20, 1998] had ‘created 10,000 new fanatics where there would have been none.’ […]
8/20/1998
“Tracing al Qaeda through communications intercepts was no longer easy. Once, Osama bin Laden had used a satellite phone for everything from positioning his forces to chatting with his mother in Saudi Arabia. But Osama had abandoned the practice after press leaks revealed that the August [20] 1998 TLAM [Tomahawk Land Attack Missile] strikes after […]