Out of the Loop?

October 22, 1998 You may remember a few weeks ago that I reported that many were questioning the raids we carried out against supposed terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Now the latest story out documents that most of the nation's top military officials were kept in the dark about the raids until they were about to take place.

Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker magazine, says that four members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not told of the plan to bomb these sites until the last minute. In fact, Joint Chiefs Chairman Henry Shelton, who was consulted, was ordered not to breathe a word of the impending missile strikes to the other four members. He was presented with a fait accompli and essentially obeyed his orders.

The Joint Chiefs weren't the only ones kept in the dark. FBI Director Louis Freeh deployed hundreds of agents to Africa after the terrorist bombing of our two embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Nevertheless, he was kept out of the loop. And the White House did consult Attorney General Janet Reno, but ignored her advice to delay the raids until there was more evidence to link the targets to Osama bin Laden.

And the question of evidence is another sore point. One congressman who took part in a classified CIA briefing on the case against Osama bin Laden was unimpressed. He said there was lots of suspicious activity, but nothing conclusive. Some officials in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology have reportedly said there was a rush to judgment. The soil sample from Sudan, as well as other intelligence gathering information, did not seem to warrant the U.S. actions.

Does that mean the bombings were merely part of a "Wag the Dog" scenario? Maybe not, but it certainly wasn't the United States at its best.

I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion.