- WASHINGTON -- One of the
most tumultuous weeks in recent Washington history ended yesterday with
the same over-arching, monumental question with which it began. Could the
Bush administration have prevented the attacks of 11 September 2001? Upon
the answer hangs a Presidency.
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- Before that terrible Tuesday in New York and Washington,
Mr Bush had faced the threat of al-Qa'ida for eight months, compared to
the six years of the Clinton administration, who first formally acknowledged
the existence of the organisation in 1995, and designated Osama bin Laden,
as a terrorist financier. This President and his closest advisers are being
held to account for their actions between January and September 2001. In
the aftermath of the attacks, such questions were first swamped by collective
grief, then overshadowed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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- Now above all because of the explosive memoirs of Richard
Clarke, the White House counter-terrorism chief under both Mr Bush and
Mr Clinton they are being asked. And the answers provided by the book
and the first findings of the federal commission examining the attacks,
are anything but flattering so unflattering that the Bush campaign is
leaving no stone unturned to discredit Mr Clarke, denouncing his testimony
as "lies".
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- In counter-terrorism, as in everything else, the Bush
team came to office determined to be "Anything But Clinton".
The charitable explanation for its new approach to al-Qa'ida is that, as
the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insists, the President wanted
to stop "swatting flies" and have a new strategy to destroy,
not merely contain, the terrorist threat.
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- That grand plan was finally approved just seven days
before 11 September, when it was too late to have made any difference.
According to Mr Clarke and others such as the former Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill, the real reason was antipathy to Mr Clinton and his works,
and a conviction Saddam Hussein and Iraq were at the root of all evil.
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- Mr Clarke, one of the few holdover officials from the
Clinton administration, says he gave Ms Rice a detailed memo on dealing
with al-Qa'ida on 25 January, five days after the inauguration. This document
built on the briefings given by the CIA and departing Clinton officials
to the incoming administration.
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- But, according to Mr Clarke, he was, in effect, demoted,
instructed to report to deputy-level cabinet officials.
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- That, Mr Clarke charges, delayed action "by months".
He adds that during that first briefing on 25 January "her facial
expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term [al-Qa'ida]
before".
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- Thus the increasingly dark forebodings of the intelligence
community failed to resonate. The preliminary report of the commission
notes the "tension" felt by John McLaughlin, the deputy director
of the CIA, between the understandable wish of a new administration to
get its own take on an issue, and the urgency of the situation on the ground.
The sudden spike in intercepted "chatter" suggesting one or more
impending terrorist strikes went unheeded or was downplayed because of
the assumption they would be abroad. In May, according to private testimony
from Ms Rice, Mr Bush expressed frustration as George Tenet, the CIA director,
warned again of terrorist threats in his daily briefing.
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- By July, so nervous were intelligence specialists that
two unidentified CIA officers dealing with al-Qa'ida contemplated resignation
in order to go public with their fears. But, by the end of July, the "chatter"
had subsided. Wrongly, Mr Tenet concluded that any attacks had been postponed.
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- Mr Clarke was so upset his advice was not being followed
that he prepared to ask for a new post. In June, a new presidential draft
on ambitious covert action against al-Qa'ida was circulating. But nothing
happened.
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- The next, and penultimate, key date is 6 August 2001.
That day Mr Bush, on holiday at his Texas ranch, received his top-secret
"President's Daily Briefing", or PDB. The document contained
the CIA's latest assessment of the terrorist threat, including renewed
intelligence that hijacked aircraft might be used in an attack. Calls for
its release have been resisted.
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- On 4 September the day the new blueprint for action
against al-Qa'ida was approved Mr Clarke wrote to Ms Rice asking how she
would feel if hundreds of Americans were killed in a terrorist attack.
A week later, the Eastern seaboard was attacked.
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- By then, clues of what was about to happen had been gathered.
The CIA knew that two al-Qa'ida terrorists, who would take part in the
attacks, were in the country. The FBI had discovered strange goings-on
at pilot schools, of Middle Eastern men wanting to learn how to fly airliners,
but not to land or take off. But the agencies would not share the information.
Had he been in possession of them, Mr Clarke said, "I like to think
I would have connected the dots". But that probably was wishful thinking
as wishful as Mr Bush's belief that Saddam was involved with 11 September.
Meanwhile requests for Ms Rice to appear before the federal commission
have been turned down.
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- Hindsight, famously, is perfect. Or as Madeleine Albright,
Bill Clinton's last Secretary of State put it when she testified on Tuesday:
"History happens forward, but is written backwards."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=505463
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