US got it wrong, says bipartisan
panel By Jeffrey Donovan
WASHINGTON - An array of past and present United
States officials went before the panel investigating the
September 11 attacks on Wednesday.
Secretary of
State Colin Powell, defending the Bush administration's
stance on terrorism ahead of the September 11 attacks on
the US, said: "This administration came in fully
recognizing the threat presented to the United States
and its interests and allies around the world by
terrorism. We went to work on it immediately. The
president made it clear it was a high priority, the
interagency group was working, we had continuity in our
counterterrorism institutions and organizations."
Also testifying before the September 11
commission were Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former
defense secretary William Cohen, who both served under
the administration of Bill Clinton. Former US
counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, who served the
last four US presidents, also testified.
Albright said that terrorism was one of many
policy concerns to suffer in the transition from the
Clinton administration to the Bush administration. "Many
of the policy issues that [the Clinton administration]
had developed were not followed up," she said. "And I
have to say, with great sadness, to watch an incoming
administration kind of take apart a lot of the policies
that we did have - whether it had to do with North Korea
or the Balkans - was difficult."
But both
administrations came under fire in two separate reports
released by the bipartisan 10-member panel, whose staff
has spent months interviewing officials and probing the
September 11 terrorist attacks that killed some 3,000
people. The reports say that both administrations failed
to use military means to combat al-Qaeda, choosing
diplomatic strategies instead.
They point to
several opportunities missed by the Clinton White House
to capture or kill bin Laden. They also accuse the Bush
administration of failing to plan for potential attacks
until the day before jets struck the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon.
Former Nebraska Senator Bob
Kerrey, a Democratic panel member, voiced frustration
that neither administration acted aggressively to
preempt a major attack by al-Qaeda, which by the late
1990s had already struck several US targets abroad.
"They killed airmen in Khobar Towers [in Saudi
Arabia]. They attacked our facilities in East Africa.
They attacked our sailors on the [USS] Cole [in Yemen].
I don't understand, and still today don't understand,
why the military wasn't given a dominant role," Kerrey
said.
The hearings and reports come just seven
months before presidential elections, and are
contributing to a politically charged atmosphere.
George W Bush is running on his record as a "war
president," but his rival, Democratic Senator John
Kerry, argues that Bush's policies have actually
weakened the country's ability to fight terrorism.
This week, Clarke accused Bush of failing to
take adequate measures to protect Americans against
terrorism before September. Clarke also accused the
president of worrying more about Iraq than al-Qaeda
right after the September 11 attacks. Republicans have
accused Clarke, who is also a Republican, of being
politically motivated.
The September 11
hearings, which were scheduled to continue on Thursday
with testimony by Clarke and others, come after repeated
commission clashes with the Bush administration over
what it called the White House's reluctance to give the
panel full access to sensitive intelligence information.
A compromise was reached whereby Bush has agreed
to testify in private before the bipartisan panel. The
deadline to complete the commission's overall findings
was also extended, from this spring until mid summer.
Bush told reporters he would have acted swiftly
to prevent the September 11 attacks had he had advance
intelligence about them. "Had my administration had any
information that terrorists were going to attack New
York City on September 11, we would have acted," he
said.
It was Bush's first direct response to
Clarke's criticism that the president ignored bin Laden
and the threat of the al-Qaeda terror network prior to
the attacks, instead focusing on Saddam Hussein.
In its initial report, the September 11 panel
said a day before the September 11 attacks,
administration officials agreed that the US would try to
oust Afghanistan's Taliban rulers - but only if they
reneged on a previously agreed deal with Washington to
expel bin Laden.
Powell later told the panel
that Bush's diplomatic plan to get bin Laden had been
the right course at the time. "President Bush was very
concerned about al-Qaeda and about the safe haven given
them by the Taliban [prior to September 11]. But he knew
that implementing the diplomatic road map we envisioned
would be difficult. The deputies went to work, reviewing
all of these complex regional issues. Early on, we
realized that a serious effort to remove al-Qaeda's safe
haven in Afghanistan might well require introducing
military force, especially ground forces," Powell said.
But the political support for such an
undertaking was nonexistent in Washington prior to
September 11. Although Clarke and other Clinton
officials say the incoming Bush administration did not
take their warnings about al-Qaeda seriously, Albright
came partly to her successors' defense, telling the
panel that invading Afghanistan was never a serious
consideration before September 11.
"I do think -
this is my personal opinion - that it would be very
hard, pre-9/11, to have persuaded anybody that an
invasion of Afghanistan was appropriate. I think it did
take the mega-shock, unfortunately, of 9/11 to make
people understand the considerable threat [posed by
Al-Qaeda]," Albright said.
Although officials
from both administrations took minor shots at one
another, they also did not back away from defending one
another. For example, the panel's reports list at least
four separate occasions in the late 1990s when it said
the Clinton administration had a very good chance of
killing bin Laden, but failed to act.
Such
evidence would seem to put the blame on the former
administration for the September 11 attacks. But
Rumsfeld argued that even killing bin Laden would
probably not have been enough to prevent September 11.
"Even if bin Laden had been captured or killed
in the weeks before September 11, no one I know believes
that it would necessarily have prevented September 11.
Killing bin Laden would not have removed bin Laden's
sanctuary in Afghanistan. Moreover, the sleeper cells
that flew the aircraft into the World Trade towers and
into the Pentagon were already in the United States
months before the attack. Indeed, if actionable
intelligence had appeared - which it did not - 9/11
likely would still have happened," Rumsfeld said.
Intelligence, or the lack of it, was a common
theme in much of the testimony.
William Cohen,
Rumsfeld's predecessor as Pentagon chief, was barraged
by a series of aggressive questions from Senator Kerrey
about why Clinton never ordered a strike against bin
Laden and always appeared to opt for diplomacy over the
use of force.
Cohen responded that the
administration definitely wanted to kill bin Laden, but
that it was wary that a missed shot would only make him
look stronger and enhance his prestige among potential
followers. In that light, Cohen said, Clinton could not
afford to send a "warning shot" to bin Laden.
"We weren't trying to send simply a summons to
bin Laden in Afghanistan. We were trying to kill him -
or anyone else who was there at the time. That was what
they call a warning shot to the temple. We were trying
to kill bin Laden," Cohen said.
For his part,
Rumsfeld said he personally had no intelligence in the
six months the Bush administration was in power before
September 11 of any terrorist plan to fly jets into US
buildings. His remarks drew objections from one
panelist, who argued it has been well documented that US
intelligence services had at least eight such warnings
during the 1990s.
Rumsfeld replied: "I didn't
say we didn't know; I said I didn't know. I was
confessing ignorance." The defense secretary added that
the hijacking of civilian planes "was a law enforcement
matter to be handled by law enforcement and aviation
authorities".
Clarke, meanwhile, told the
commission that Bush did not take the terrorism threat
seriously enough, and the head of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), George Tenet, admitted more
could have been done to foil the strikes.
Clarke
said that the Clinton administration was active in
tracking bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, but the Bush
administration, which took office in January 2001, did
not consider the issue urgent. "I believe the Bush
administration in the first eight months considered
terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue,"
said Clarke, who shook Washington this week with his
book directly criticizing Bush.
Clarke told the
hearing that Bush had "greatly undermined the war on
terrorism" after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon by invading Iraq last year.
Seeking to discredit Clarke, the White House
released the transcript of a briefing he gave in early
August 2002 praising the way the Bush team had taken
over the war against al-Qaeda. At the time, Clarke was
only identified as a "senior official" but the White
House has now revealed his identity.
In his
testimony Tenet dismissed criticism that his agency had
a fear of conducting high-risk operations. "The idea
that they [CIA's clandestine unit] are risk-averse,
couldn't get the job done, weren't forward leaning. I'm
sorry, I've heard those comments and I just
categorically reject it," Tenet told the panel.
Asked why the 2001 attacks were not prevented,
Tenet said: "We didn't steal the secret that told us
what the plot was, we didn't recruit the right people or
technically collect the data, notwithstanding enormous
effort to do so. "We didn't integrate all the data we
had properly, and probably we had a lot of data that we
didn't know about that if everybody had known about
maybe we would have had a chance."
Jeffrey
Donovan is a senior correspondent based in
Washington, DC. A graduate of the University of
California, Santa Cruz, he writes mainly about US
foreign policy after having spent 12 years in Europe
with news organizations including Reuters, the
Associated Press, and the Economist Group.
Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted
with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave
NW, Washington DC 20036
