Leadership: Court papers reveal the FBI had an informant right next to Osama bin Laden in 1993 sending reports up the chain of command. Yet then-President Clinton did nothing — a pattern with both him and his wife. It came to light during a 2010 employment discrimination case filed by FBI agent Bassem Youssef, a Coptic Christian who contended he'd been passed over for promotion after directing an agent he recruited after the 1993 terror attack on the World Trade Center. The still-unnamed agent provided valuable intelligence to the bureau on that 1993 case, and went on to reveal the terror ring's ties to an even more malevolent terrorist by the name of Osama bin Laden, the Washington Times reported. The informant eventually went overseas to work as bin Laden's driver and eventually worked with the CIA until he was killed in Bosnia by suspicious Islamic terrorists in the mid-1990s. The discrimination case, which Youssef won, highlights an important reality: that intelligence was developed and passed on to federal policymakers about the scope of bin Laden's nascent network and intentions as early as 1993. That would have been during Clinton's presidency, signaling a failure of leadership that brings to three the number of lost opportunities to take out bin Laden before he could strike in 2001. After Clinton ignored this information — and the FBI he led ignored the agent's contributions and denied him a promotion, in addition to "forgetting" to mention it all to the 9/11 commission — Clinton went on to ignore even clearer opportunities to take bin Laden out as a threat, focusing instead on domestic politics and the great health care battle in the era of "irrational exuberance."
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