Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The people behind the bogus charge against the Wasington Times bin Laden satelite phone story

Free Belarus:

Daniel Benjamin, the Clinton era-NSC staffer (who somehow jumped directly from NSC speechwriter to Director for Transnational Threats with a mere four years of NSC staffer work in between - perhaps an indication of the level of importance given to counterterrorism by the Clinton administration) propagates a long-held myth of the left that claims the "unabashedly conservative" Washington Times ran a story that "leaked" the fact that the US was tracing bin Laden's location through his satellite phone.

On Aug. 21, 1998, the Washington Times, the capital's unabashedly conservative newspaper, which regularly breaks more intelligence-related stories than any other daily, ran an article saying that Bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." This occurred less than two weeks after the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam by al-Qaida and the day after the United States had bombed al-Qaida targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. After that report, Bin Laden stopped using his phone and let his aides do the calling.

[...]

The Washington Times story was a classic case of "sources and methods" being compromised.

Benjamin then goes on to make the outrageous claim that the satellite phone was our best chance of finding bin Laden, and that Sieff's leak was somehow a direct cause of 9/11.

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I think Benjamin et.al.were retaliating against the Times because of their embarassment at some the stories broken by Bill Gertz about the failures of the Clinton administration. The Free Belarus post goes on to quote the BBC article mentioned in my earlier post where bin Laden called them on his satelite ohone one hour before the Clinton administration retalitory attack for the African embassy bombings.

In that call bin Laden lies about his involvement in the bombings. It raises the question, did he know the attacks were on the way one hour before they struck? If we were using the phone as a homing device, why did we strike a base he had abandoned?

Also, if Benjamin didn't know the story he was passing on was bogus, who was his source and what was their motive? Was this some attempt by the Clinton administration to avoid responsibility for 9-11? Why did the 9-11 commission not investigate this bogus allegation rather than repeating it as fact? Did the Democrats on the committee insert it in the report to cover the Clinton administration? So far no one on the commission has given satisfactory answers to these questions.