America Fights Back
Clinton raises the stakes in the war against terrorism
Sanctions irrelevant. Yet bin Laden's unique circumstances convinced American officials that a vigorous military strike was the best way to combat him. Unlike most other well-known terrorist groups, bin Laden's loose network of adherents is not sponsored by any particular country. Bin Laden appears to finance the group from his personal fortune of $250 million or more. That means that conventional measures such as economic sanctions and world condemnation, which experts credit with being somewhat effective at helping reduce terrorism in recent years, don't apply. Such considerations "have forced us to adopt some very different approaches to the problem," said Defense Secretary William Cohen.
Those differences were evident in how quickly and secretly Clinton's team planned the raids. Clinton first discussed possible military retaliation with his advisers on August 12, just five days after the embassy bombings. Since August 7, when the two blasts occurred, U.S. intelligence agents had been gathering electronic intercepts--mainly satellite telephone calls among bin Laden and his associates--that linked the Saudi dissident to the bombings. By August 14, CIA director George Tenet had decided that the evidence was conclusive. In his televised address last week, President Clinton even fingered bin Laden for events he had only been suspected of previously: ambushes of American, Belgian, and Pakistani peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993; plots to kill the pope and the president of Egypt; a scheme to blow up several American jetliners over the Pacific; and a bus bombing that killed nine German tourists in Egypt in 1997.
In addition to retribution, U.S. officials said the strike was aimed at heading off additional truck bombings that bin Laden's operatives were heard discussing in the intercepts. Though U.S. officials never knew for sure when or where those attacks were to occur, the information led the State Department to evacuate half of the American employees from its four diplomatic posts in Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan and is home to numerous bin Laden supporters. The United States also boosted security at embassies around the world and scaled back operations in places such as Egypt, Albania, Eritrea, Malaysia, Uganda, and Yemen.
Bin Laden's Afghanistan camps and the chemical plant in Sudan--which Sudan's Islamic government said produced only medicines--had been in the Pentagon's inventory of targets for several years. That made it relatively easy for military planners to organize the strikes. One final step was to run computer models of the risk that explosions at the chemical factory would unleash a plume of poison gas across Sudan. After assessing data on the suspected chemicals, climate, and prevailing winds, analysts decided the harmful effects would be minimal.
By August 14--just seven days after the embassy bombings killed 257 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 5,000--Defense Secretary William Cohen and Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had briefed Clinton on the military plan. Clinton gave the go-ahead for technical experts on the U.S. ships in the region to begin orchestrating the launches--a laborious process that involves charting by hand the flight paths of every missile to check the computerized plans and make sure that the weapons would not interfere with one another. By noon Washington time on August 20, those missiles were airborne. They hit their targets at roughly the same time--approximately 7:30 p.m. local time in Sudan and 10:00 p.m. in Afghanistan.
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