Chicago Tribune March 28, 2004
9/11 inquiry finding array of deficiencies
Slow transition by administration is under scrutiny
By Stephen J. Hedges
Last week's dramatic hearings on why the U.S. government failed to foresee the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks did not serve up any single culprit. Instead, work by the commission appointed to find what went wrong showed a trail of mistakes stretching from the Oval Office down through the halls of the national security establishment.
The hearings offered a rare look inside the national security structure when it was under renovation--torn down to be rebuilt by a new administration with different ideas about what threats the U.S. faced and how they should be handled.
Whether the Bush administration needed to change the Clinton administration's policies and whether the change was done well and on time is fodder for the Sunday morning talk shows. There was no disagreement among the commission members or the witnesses that the terrorism that struck America in 2001 was not properly anticipated.
Instead, the new president and his team were rebuilding the National Security Council to fit their world view, one that put as much emphasis on foreign missile attacks and nuclear proliferation as it did on Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.
"They really thought of the world in terms of nation-states," said Rand Beers, a former Bush administration National Security Council staff member who resigned a year ago and now advises the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry.
"Some have said this is a Cold War legacy, this is when they were last in power," Beers said. "Others have said they saw the national security agenda as a way of looking at the big state threats--that's where the nuclear powers were, where the large armies were, where the economic power was."
It was Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, who accused President Bush and his aides of failing to make terrorism an urgent priority. In a new book and in testimony before the commission last week, Clarke said many of his warnings and efforts to confront the possibility of an Al Qaeda attack in the U.S. got lost among bureaucratic layers.
"My view is that this administration, while listening to me, either didn't believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there was an urgent problem," said Clarke, who also served in terrorism and intelligence posts under Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
The reason for that lack of urgency, he concluded, was that the president and his Cabinet had other concerns--primarily Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"By invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism," Clarke said.
A multitude of factors left the U.S. open to attack, as last week's reports by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, or the 9/11 commission, made plain. But each event and decision was shaped by the presidency under which it occurred, as well as the policies and politics of the day.
Before Sept. 11, the U.S. had suffered terrorist attacks at home and overseas that terrorism analysts traced to Al Qaeda. These were the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the June 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers apartment building in Saudi Arabia housing U.S. military personnel, the near-simultaneous attacks in August 1998 on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the October 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
Clarke, among otherwitnesses, testified before the commission that by 2000, combating terrorism had became an "extraordinarily high priority" within the Clinton administration.
Clinton's tactics on Al Qaeda
But Clinton, the hearings suggest, dealt with that threat by pursuing Al Qaeda members in criminal investigations, largely ineffective cruise missile strikes and covert CIA plans that were not carried out. Although former National Security Adviser Samuel "Sandy" Berger testified that Clinton wanted bin Laden dead, CIA officials testified that it was unclear to them whether they had the authority to kill him. A commission report found that Clinton and his policy advisers on three occasions chose not to attack bin Laden.
After Bush took office in 2001, officials in the new administration roundly scoffed at the cruise missile response to Al Qaeda's attacks; they saw little sense in repeating the tactic.
Such reluctance was part of a larger pattern of disdain for the way Clinton and his foreign policy team had functioned.
"The Republican national security team has a fundamentally different view of the world than the Clinton people did," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense analysis group. "The Clinton people basically took a traditional containment view of the world." Under Bush's new national security adviser, Stanford University academic Condoleezza Rice, the administration launched lengthy reviews on a broad range of topics. Everything was subject to scrutiny, from North Korea's nuclear program to U.S. aid to help Russia clean up its nuclear weapons mess to Iraq. Al Qaeda, bin Laden and terrorism were also the focus of review.
Such studies are routine when administrations change. But the length and breadth of topics tackled by the Bush administration's National Security Council slowed important policy decisions.
Rice and her deputy national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, kept Clarke as a terrorism adviser, though they recognized, according to the commission, that Clarke had a reputation for being headstrong and difficult to work with.
One of Clarke's first acts was to share with Rice the Clinton administration's plans for dealing with Al Qaeda. One was a general set of ideas adopted in 2000. But an earlier, 1998 Clarke plan called for diplomacy, covert operations, efforts to restrict Al Qaeda's financial resources and military operations. It never went anywhere within the Clinton administration, and it apparently was not taken up directly by Rice. But its four key elements are now central to the administration's war on terrorism.
The lumbering nature of the terrorism review was in direct conflict to the urgent action that Clarke and others thought was necessary to deal with the Al Qaeda threat. When an increasing number of intelligence reports warning of impending Al Qaeda attacks began to stream in during the summer of 2001, some government analysts were alarmed that Rice's staff was not giving the reports urgent treatment.
One of the most concerned was John McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence.
"Some CIA officials expressed frustration about the pace of policymaking during the stressful summer of 2001," the commission reported last week. "Although [CIA Director George] Tenet said he thought the policy machinery was working in what he called a rather orderly fashion, Deputy DCI McLaughlin told us he felt a great tension, especially in June and July 2001, between the new administration's need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency."
On Sept. 4, policy emerges
Seven days before the hijackings--Sept. 4, 2001--presidential advisers endorsed a new policy on Al Qaeda.
The plan included aid to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, a group fighting to overthrow the Taliban, the ruling fundamentalist Islamic group that protected Al Qaeda training camps.
For months, Clarke had been advocating that the CIA secretly back the alliance. In a memo to Rice in preparation for the Sept. 4 meeting, Clarke asked officials to consider the prospect of a terrorist attack with "hundreds of Americans" dead at home or abroad.
On Sept. 10, a commission report states, "Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley formally tasked DCI Tenet to draw up new draft authorities for the broad covert action program" against Al Qaeda. A plan for dealing with Al Qaeda was in the works.
But bin Laden and Al Qaeda had their own plan, and they were months ahead of the Americans.
© Copyright 2004, Chicago Tribune Company
