Osama bin Laden, according to Richard Clark, chief counter-terrorism adviser to the national security council in the Clinton and Bush administrations, is not in Pakistan but his native Yemen or perhaps in Somalia.
He made the claim in an interview on National Public Radio this week. In another appearance on the CBS weekly show 60 Minutes, in addition to a write-up in Newsweek, Clark related that after the World Trade Centre attacks on September 11, 2001, he told his colleagues at the White House, “We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.” But Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, “No, no, no. We don’t have to deal with Al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.” Clark said, “I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they (came) back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.” Clark said, “Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, ‘America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.’
He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden’s propaganda. And the result of that is that Al Qaeda and organisations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation Al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened.”