SECTION NINE
PAGE ONE
sm
COLUMN
SEVENTY-SIX, OCTOBER 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 Al Aronowitz)
FROM
TIME MAGAZINE:
THE BUSHIES BLEW IT!
ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI, NOW ON TRIAL IN VIRGINIA
AS THE ALLEGED "20TH HIJACKER" AND FEATURED IN THE ARTICLE BELOW,
CLAIMS THAT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION KNEW THE WORLD TRADE CENTER WAS GOING TO BE
ATTACKED AND JUST DIDN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. SIMILAR INFERENCES HAVE BEEN MADE
IN PREVIOUS ARTICLES THAT HAVE APPEARED IN THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST.
THE ARTICLE BELOW WAS LIFTED FROM TIME MAGAZINE AND MAKES ITS APPEARANCE
HERE BECAUSE OF ITS IMPORTANCE TO AMERICA
Could
9/11 Have Been Prevented?
Long
before the tragic events of September 11th, the White House debated taking the
fight to al-Qaeda. It didn't happen and soon it was too late. The saga of a lost
chance
BY
MICHAEL ELLIOTT
Timeline:
Blown Chances
Cover
Collection: Sept. 11 And Its Aftermath
From
the Archive: Sept. 11 to the Present
Sunday,
Aug. 04, 2002
Sometimes
history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of
an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation
took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what
to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have
been missed even by those who took part in it.
One
such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week
of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's
National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the
Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With
some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been
helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of
that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his
successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.
Berger
attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed
to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm
coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how
important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice,
Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend
more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other
subject." The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career
bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the
Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism. As chair of
the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a
bit of an osessive---just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since
the
Berger
had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined
his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed
a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's
materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a
more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment,
but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was
present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations,
however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back"
al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads,
"Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the
"breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The
financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked,
its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where
al-Qaeda was causing trouble---Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen---would be
given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a
dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the
sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden
was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come
to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by
bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke
supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance,
the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating
from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting
(and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S.
military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the
introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was
estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the
words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to
"everything we've done since 9/11."
And
that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were
not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then
spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy
before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that
nobody predicted Sept. 11---that nobody guessed in advance how and when the
attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those
in the know---he spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement
professionals in a dozen countries---were almost frantic with worry that a major
terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted
because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's
national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.
The
winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time
spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to
institute its own "policy review process" on the terrorist threat.
Clarke told Time that the review moved "as fast as could be expected."
And Administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by
the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it was more aggressive than anything
contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was designed not to
"roll back" al-Qaeda but to "eliminate" it. But that delay
came at a cost. The Northern Alliance was desperate for help but got little of
it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing,
nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone---an unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was
happening in the terror camps---should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the
Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11. No single person was
responsible for all this. But "Washington"---that organic compound of
officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and
unknown---failed horribly.
Could
al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the
terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to
attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta
and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in
Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight
schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern
California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell
phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash---not wire
transfers---wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed,
and every lead explored, Atta's team might still never have been caught.
But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended---just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure.
Richard
Clarke's
unfinished
business
Berger
was determined that when he left office, Rice should have a full understanding
of the terrorist threat. In a sense, this was an admission of failure. For the
Clinton years had been marked by a drumbeat of terror attacks against American
targets, and they didn't seem to be stopping.
In
1993 the World Trade Center had been bombed for the first time; in 1996 19
American servicemen had been killed when the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia, was bombed; two years later, American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
were attacked. As the millennium celebrations at the end of 1999 approached, the
CIA warned that it expected five to 15 attacks against American targets over the
New Year's weekend. But three times, the U.S. got lucky. The Jordanians broke up
an al-Qaeda cell in Amman; Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian based in Montreal, panicked
when stopped at a border crossing from Canada while carrying explosives intended
for Los Angeles International Airport; and on Jan. 3, 2000, an al-Qaeda attack
on the U.S.S. The Sullivans in Yemen foundered after terrorists overloaded their
small boat.
From
the start of the Clinton Administration, the job of thwarting terror had fallen
to Clarke. A bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's
office on cyberterrorism, he has served four Presidents from both
parties---staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two
sides, one for a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat.
Aggressive and legendarily abrasive, Clarke was desperate to persuade skeptics
to take the terror threat as seriously as he did. "Clarke is unbelievably
The
two men had an ally in George Tenet, who had been appointed Director of Central
Intelligence in 1997. "He wasn't sleeping on the job on this," says a
senior Clinton aide of Tenet, "whatever inherent problems there were in the
agency." Those problems were immense. Although the CIA claims it had
penetrated al-Qaeda, Republican Congressman Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, chairman
of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security,
doubts that it ever got anywhere near the top of the organization.
"The
CIA," he says, "were not able to recruit human assets to penetrate
al-Qaeda and the al-Qaeda leadership." Nobody pretends that such an
exercise would have been easy. Says a counterterrorism official: "Where are
you going to find a person loyal to the U.S. who's willing to eat dung beetles
and sleep on the ground in a cave for two or three years? You don't find people
willing to do that who also speak fluent Pashtu or Arabic."
In
the absence of men sleeping with the beetles, the CIA had to depend on less
reliable allies. The agency attempted to recruit tribal leaders in Afghanistan
who might be persuaded to take on bin Laden; contingency plans had been made for
the CIA to fly one of its planes to a desert landing strip in Afghanistan if he
was ever captured. (Clinton had signed presidential "findings" that
were ambiguous on the question of whether bin Laden could be killed in such an
attack.) But the tribal groups' loyalty was always in doubt. Despite the
occasional abortive raid, they never seemed to get close to bin Laden. That
meant that the Clinton team had to fall back on a second strategy: taking out
bin Laden by cruise missile, which had been tried after the embassy bombings in
1998. For all of 2000, sources tell Time, Clinton ordered two U.S. Navy
submarines to stay on station in the northern Arabian Sea, ready to attack if
bin Laden's coordinates could be determined.
But
the plan was twice flawed. First, the missiles could be used only if bin Laden's
whereabouts were known, and the CIA never definitively delivered that
information. By early 2000, Clinton was becoming infuriated by the lack of
intelligence on bin Laden's movements. "We've got to do better than
this," he scribbled on one memo. "This is unsatisfactory."
Second, even if a target could ever be found, the missiles might take too long
to hit it. The Pentagon thought it could dump a Tomahawk missile on bin Laden's
camp within six hours of a decision to attack, but the experts in the White
House thought that was impossibly long. Any missiles fired at Afghanistan would
have to fly over Pakistan, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI)
was close to the Taliban. White House aides were sure bin Laden would be tipped
off as soon as the Pakistanis detected the missiles.
Berger
and Clarke wanted something more robust. On Nov. 7, Berger met with William
Cohen, then Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. The time had come, said
Berger, for the Pentagon to rethink its approach to operations against bin
Laden. "We've been hit many times, and we'll be hit again," Berger
said. "Yet we have no option beyond cruise missiles." He wanted
"boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces deployed inside
Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he
would look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, were dead set against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One,
the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in Iran during an
abortive mission to rescue American hostages.
It
wasn't just Pentagon nerves that got in the way of a more aggressive
counterterrorism policy. So did politics. After the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, the
secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., drew up plans to
have Delta Force members swoop into Afghanistan and grab bin Laden. But the
warriors were never given the go-ahead; the Clinton Administration did not order
an American retaliation for the attack. "We didn't do diddly," gripes
a counterterrorism official. "We didn't even blow up a baby-milk
factory." In fact, despite strong suspicion that bin Laden was behind the
attack in Yemen, the CIA and FBI had not officially concluded that he was, and
would be unable to do so before Clinton left office. That made it politically
impossible for Clinton to strike---especially given the upcoming election and
his own lack of credibility on national security. "If we had done anything,
say, two weeks before the election," says a former senior Clinton aide,
"we'd be accused of helping Al Gore."
For Clarke, the bombing of the Cole was final proof that the old policy hadn't worked. It was time for something more aggressive-a plan to make war against al-Qaeda. One element was vital. The Taliban's control of Afghanistan was not yet complete; in the northeast of the country, Northern Alliance forces led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla leader who had fought against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s, were still resisting Taliban rule. Clarke argued that Massoud should be given the resources to develop a viable fighting force. That way, terrorists leaving al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan would have been forced to join the Taliban forces fighting in the north. "You keep them on the front lines in Afghanistan," says a counterterrorism official. "Hopefully you're killing them in the process, and they're not leaving Afghanistan to plot terrorist operations. That was the general approach." But the approach meant that Americans had to engage directly in the snake pit of Afghan politics.
Who
was
the last man
standing?
In
the spring of 2001, Afghanistan was as rough a place as it ever is. Four sets of
forces battled for position. Most of the country was under the authority of the
Taliban, but it was not a homogeneous group. Some of its leaders, like Mullah
Mohammed Omar, the self-styled emir of Afghanistan, were dyed-in-the-wool
Islamic radicals; others were fierce Afghan nationalists. The Taliban's
principal support had come from Pakistan---another interested party, which
wanted a reasonably peaceful border to its west---and in particular from the hard
men of the I.S.I. But Pakistan's policy was not all of a piece either. Since
General Pervez Musharraf had taken power in a 1999 coup, some Pakistani
officials, desperate to curry favor with the U.S.---which had cut off aid to
Pakistan after it tested a nuclear device in 1998-had seen the wisdom of
distancing themselves from the Taliban, or at the least attempting to moderate
its more radical behavior. The third element was the Northern Alliance, a
resistance movement whose stronghold was in northeast Afghanistan. Most of the
Alliance's forces and leaders were, like Massoud, ethnic Tajiks---a minority in
Afghanistan. Massoud controlled less than 10% of the country and had been beaten
back by the Taliban in 2000. Nonetheless, by dint of his personality and
reputation, Massoud was "the only military threat to the Taliban,"
says Francesc Vendrell, who was then the special representative in Afghanistan
of the U.N. Secretary-General.
And
then there was al-Qaeda. The group had been born in Afghanistan when Islamic
radicals began flocking there in 1979, after the Soviets invaded. Bin Laden and
his closest associates had returned in 1996, when they were expelled from Sudan.
Al-Qaeda's terrorist training camps were in Afghanistan, and bin Laden's forces
and money were vital to sustaining the Taliban's offensives against Massoud.
By
last spring, the uneasy equilibrium among the four forces was beginning to break
down. "Moderates" in the Taliban---those who tried to keep lines open to
intermediaries in the U.N. and the U.S.---were losing ground. In 2000, Mullah
Mohammed Rabbani, thought to be the second most powerful member of the Taliban,
had reached out clandestinely to Massoud. "He understood that our country
had been sold out to al-Qaeda and Pakistan," says Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's
secretary. But in April 2001, Rabbani died of liver cancer. By that month, says
the U.N.'s Vendrell, "it was al- Qaeda that was running the Taliban, not
vice versa."
A
few weeks before Rabbani's death, Musharraf's government had started to come to
the same conclusion: the Pakistanis were no longer able to moderate Taliban
behavior. To worldwide condemnation, the Taliban had announced its intention to
blow up the 1,700-year-old stone statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley.
Musharraf dispatched his right-hand man, Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider, to
plead with Mullah Omar for the Buddhas to be saved. The Taliban's Foreign
Minister and its ambassador to Pakistan, says a Pakistani official close to the
talks, were in favor of saving the Buddhas. But Mullah Omar, says a member of
the Pakistani delegation, listened to what Haider had to say and replied,
"If on Judgment Day I stand before Allah, I'll see those two statues
floating before me, and I know that Allah will ask me why, when I had the power,
I did not destroy them." A few days later, the Buddhas were blown up.
By
summer, Pakistan had a deeper grievance. The country had suffered a wave of
sectarian assassinations, with gangs throwing grenades into mosques and
murdering clerics. The authorities in Islamabad knew that the murderers had fled
to Afghanistan (one of them was openly running a store in Kabul) and sent a
delegation to ask for their return. "We gave them lists of names, photos
and the locations of training camps where these fellows could be found,"
says Brigadier Javid Iqbal Cheema, director of Pakistan's National Crisis
Management Cell, "but not a single individual was ever handed over to
us." The Pakistanis were furious.
As
the snows cleared for the annual spring military campaign, a joint offensive
against Massoud by the Taliban and al-Qaeda seemed likely. But the influence of
al-Qaeda on the Taliban was proving deeply unpopular among ordinary Afghans,
especially in the urban centers. "I thought at most 20% of the population
supported the Taliban by early summer," says Vendrell. And bin Laden's
power made Massoud's plea for outside assistance more urgent. "We told the
Americans---we told everyone---that al-Qaeda was set upon a transnational
program," says Abdullah Abdullah, once a close aide to Massoud and now the
Afghan Foreign Minister. In April, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in
Strasbourg, France, seeking support for the Northern Alliance. "If
President Bush doesn't help us," he told a reporter, "these terrorists
will damage the U.S. and Europe very soon."
But
Massoud never got the help that he needed-or that Clarke's plan had deemed
necessary. Most of the time, Northern Alliance delegates to Washington had to be
satisfied with meeting low-level bureaucrats. The Alliance craved recognition by
the U.S. as a "legitimate resistance movement" but never got it,
though on a visit in July, Abdullah did finally get to meet some top National
Security Council (NSC) and State Department officials for the first time. The
best the Americans seemed prepared to do was turn a blind eye to the trickle of
aid from Iran, Russia and India. Vendrell remembers much talk that spring of
increased support from the Americans. But in truth Massoud's best help came from
Iran, which persuaded all supporters of the Northern Alliance to channel their
aid through Massoud alone.
Only
once did something happen that might have given Massoud hope that the
The purpose of the meeting, according to Tomsen, was to see if Massoud and Haq could forge a joint strategy against the Taliban. "The idea," says Sayeed Hussain Anwari, now the Afghan Minister of Agriculture, who was present at the meeting, "was to bring Abdul Haq inside the country to begin an armed struggle in the southeast." Still hoping for direct assistance from Washington, Massoud gave Tomsen all the intelligence he had on al-Qaeda and asked Tomsen to take it back to Washington. But when he briefed State Department officials after his trip, their reaction was muted. The American position was clear. If anything was to be done to change the realities in Afghanistan, it would have to be done not by the U.S. but by Pakistan. Massoud was on his own.
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