Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War by Paul Moorcraft

Author:Paul Moorcraft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Africa / General
ISBN: 9781473854963
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2015-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

He said that he offered the CIA the bin Laden files in mid-1997. The Mukhabarat had watched his every move, literally. Equally important were the details of the many Islamists who had travelled to meet the Saudi.

Could the information in those files have prevented 9/11?

‘Definitely,’ al-Mahdi said. ‘The Americans didn’t want to look at those files.’

Why on earth not?

‘Because their preoccupation was demonizing the government of Sudan rather than tracking down terrorists.’

A key question remains: if bin Laden was not up to anything in Sudan, why were the files intelligence gold?

Once bin Laden had gone, Sudanese intelligence conveniently played up their alleged offer of the Saudi warlord’s head on a platter. The many opponents of Khartoum argued that Khartoum was too implicated to hand the Islamist over to the CIA. Inside the Washington intelligence community there was intense debate, mostly after the Saudi had moved to Afghanistan. Most intelligence experts said to me, in essence: ‘If the offer was really there, we would have taken it. Why not?’ A good question. With hindsight, the State Department worried that no hard evidence was available to convict bin Laden in an open court in the US. Others considered the Khartoum offer a bluff. Even if it were not, intelligence dialogue would weaken the sanctions pressure on a ‘rogue’ state the US was trying to isolate.

The Sudanese line at the time was the American campaign to kick out bin Laden and Khartoum’s compliance angered the Saudi so much that this turned him on to his international jihad. Prevented from plying his trade as an engineer, war was the obvious alternative. This is not an entirely satisfactory psychological explanation for bin Laden’s behaviour, especially as he had trodden the warlord path in the 1980s in Afghanistan.

In 1998 bin Laden was held responsible by Washington for the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, with heavy loss of life. Partly in response to these bombings, the Pentagon launched a wave of cruise missiles against Sudan (and Afghanistan). Unfortunately, the main target in Sudan turned out to be not a chemical weapon precursor site, but the al-Shifa medical facility, which produced anti-malaria and veterinary products. Embarrassingly, the British ambassador had recently attended the opening of the facility. I carefully checked through the site, after the bombing, and saw only destroyed medicines. Scientists in British intelligence confirmed this to be true and the Americans, much later, admitted the factory had no proven connection to bin Laden or chemical weapons, although they did not rush to compensate the innocent owner of the facility. Moreover, the film cameraman I worked with had been given total licence to film inside al-Shifa just before the missiles completely destroyed the factory. There were no guards there at all, my colleague said.

The fashionable Khartoum line at this time – and it had some resonance in Washington – was that President Clinton, who had form in the trouser department, had used the raids to distract the media from the Monica Lewinsky scandal which threatened his impeachment.

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