Posted 9:28 AM by Scoobie Davis

Hannity's Sudan Smear
Sean Hannity is a Rush-clone whose recently syndicated radio show is gaining in popularity. In order to deflect attention from the Bush regime's ineptitude, one dead horse Hannity has been flogging recently is the charge that Sudan offered to hand bin Laden over to the US during the Clinton years but that Clinton turned down the offer. Media whore Pat Cadell also told this lie. This is a Hiterlike big lie that was demolished by Joe Conason in his response to an article by Andrew Sullivan (both articles require registration). Here is Conason's response to Sullivan's charges:

Perhaps the most sensational charge against Clinton to emerge in the
months since Sept. 11 is the dubious claim that he somehow let an
offer from Sudan to turn over bin Laden slip through his fingers.
Sullivan blatantly misrepresents a definitive article that appeared in
the Washington Post on Oct. 3, 2001, on this topic. "The Sudanese
government offered to hand over bin Laden to the United States,"
Sullivan writes. "Astonishingly, the Clinton administration turned the
offer down." But that phony accusation is exploded by the very first
sentence of the Post article, which says only that Sudan offered to
"arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody."

Specifically, the Post reported that during secret negotiations in
1996 between American officials and Sudan defense minister Elfatih
Erwa, "The [Khartoum] government was prepared to place [bin Laden] in
custody and hand him over, though to whom was ambiguous. In one
formulation, Erwa said Sudan would consider any legitimate proffer of
criminal charges against the accused terrorist. Saudi Arabia, he said,
was the most logical destination." The Post then detailed efforts by
the White House and the State Department to induce the Saudis to
accept custody of bin Laden, which the authorities in Riyadh adamantly
refused.

Nowhere does the Post's carefully worded story state that Sudan agreed
to "hand bin Laden over to the United States" -- because that never
happened, except perhaps in Sullivan's imagination.

Still referring to the same Post article, Sullivan complains that the
Clinton administration "didn't even use the negotiations with the
Sudanese to disable bin Laden's financial assets in the Sudan." But as
the Post reported, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan pointedly inquired
whether those assets would remain under bin Laden's control after his
expulsion. He got no reply from Sudan's foreign minister, and within a
few days after his query, the Saudi terror chief departed for
Afghanistan.

The Sudanese have always had their own agenda, by the way, which
Sullivan doesn't think worth mentioning. They promised to cooperate
against terrorism only if the United States ended economic sanctions
imposed to punish their genocidal campaign of murder and enslavement
against black Christians.

"There were meetings between U.S. and Sudanese officials, including in
New York, involving senior counter-terrorism officials, where
[Sudanese envoys] would hint that they had great stuff if we lifted
sanctions," says a former NSC official with direct knowledge of those
events. Other former administration officials have publicly confirmed
this account. (And imagine the howling protest from pundits like
Sullivan if the Clinton White House had suddenly turned "soft" on
Sudan.) But neither the FBI nor the CIA believed that Khartoum was
providing anything valuable on bin Laden or al-Qaida.

Sullivan refers to other alleged foreign "offers" to arrest or track
bin Laden, but there appears to be little substance to those stories
beyond mere speculation. As if he knows what he's talking about, he
complains that "it is astonishing that more effort wasn't made to
clinch the deals." But of course he knows nothing more than what he
read in the London Sunday Times's murky account. What's truly
astonishing is that he plays the useful idiot in a Sudanese
disinformation gambit, with which Khartoum hopes to win friends in the
Bush White House.