North America
America - Andrew Stephen now knows what George W knew
Published 21 February 2005
Newly released papers show the extent of the warnings to Bush before 9/11
I have never been one of those who have said that the Bush administration, had it been more competent, could and should have prevented the 11 September 2001 atrocities. The sheer scale and monstrosity of the attacks, it always seemed to me, could not reasonably have been foreseen by even the most assiduous member of the Bush cabinet.
Now, though, I am beginning to have my doubts. I have been poring through 16 pages of classified briefings that were sent to Condoleezza Rice, then the newly appointed US national security adviser, on 25 January 2001 - five days after the administration took office. They were written by Richard Clarke, a top US government official whose tenure dated back to the Reagan administration and was then George W Bush's chief adviser on terrorist threats. The briefings consist of two documents: a 13-page briefing, written for the Clinton administration in 1998, entitled Strategy for Eliminating the Threat of the Jihadist Networks of al Qida [sic]: status and prospects; and a three-page memo accompanying it and urging Rice to take immediate action.
If the administration had had its way, these memos would not have seen the light of day. But the 9-11 Commission had the power to subpoena White House documents relating to the atrocities, and on 7 April last year - the day before Rice gave evidence to the commission - Clarke's 16 pages were quietly declassified, presumably to avoid the subpoena process and the attention that this would bring.
But the administration then never actually released them. It was only after the National Security Archive sued under the Freedom of Information Act that the pages became available for scrutiny.
They still have chunks blacked out, with the words "Operational Detail, removed at the request of the CIA" stamped instead (interestingly, two of these blackouts come where Clarke was discussing the issue of US "assistance" to Uzbekistan). In the longer briefing paper, Clarke says that "al Qida is present in the United States . . . [it] affects centrally our policies on Pakistan, Afghanistan, central Asia, North Africa, and the [Gulf states]". He goes on to itemise all the Qaeda attacks on the US at home and abroad since 1992, pointing out that there was also intelligence that "an extensive network of al Qida 'sleeper' agents currently exists in the US".
The first document was sent to Rice because Clarke had been alarmed that she seemed never to have heard of al-Qaeda at her first briefing on national security; he hoped that it would convince Rice just how potent he believed the threat of al-Qaeda to be. The second memo was designed to make her take immediate action: it is clearly headed "Memorandum to Condoleezza Rice" and says that "as we noted in our briefing for you, al Qida is not some narrow little terrorist issue . . . [it] is the active, organised, major force that is using a distorted version of Islam . . . We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge." His second sentence reads: "We urgently need . . . a Principals-level review on the al Qida network." "Urgently" is both underlined and italicised.
We now know, from evidence pieced together from Clarke's testimony to the 9-11 Commission and other sources, that Rice ignored these implorings and that she saw fit instead to relegate al-Qaeda to an issue that merited attention only at below-cabinet level. But the warnings, meanwhile, gathered in intensity: an intelligence briefing dated 20 April 2001 was headed "Bin Ladin [sic] planning multiple operations".
Five weeks later, Clarke urged Rice to ask the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, what more the US could do to stop "a series of major terrorist attacks" - which, he said, would probably either be against Israel or the US. "When these attacks occur, as they likely will," Clarke told Rice in writing, "we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them." He wrote to Rice again on 28 June to say that the pattern of al-Qaeda activities indicating an attack had "reached a crescendo". He went on: "A series of new reports continue to convince me . . . that a major terrorist attack or series of attacks is likely in July."
Despite this abundance of warnings, Rice still did not see al-Qaeda as an issue that required cabinet attention. Even when she finally did, she saw al-Qaeda primarily as an organisation that was creating problems for US foreign policy rather than one that was a domestic threat; the matter was not considered urgent enough to be brought before the "principals" until July itself. Before anything could be organised, however, most of them departed for their summer holidays - and Bush himself duly ignored (as far as we know) a top-secret briefing given to him at his Texas ranch on 6 August that was headed "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US". The "principals" finally met to decide what to do on 4 September - exactly a week before Bin Laden's "sleepers" slammed their hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
There were other warnings we now know the administration received. Just a few days ago, we learned that between April and 10 September 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) received no fewer than 52 separate intelligence reports that specifically talked about threats to domestic air travel by al-Qaeda or Bin Laden. Five of these even referred to al-Qaeda's expertise in hijacking. Possible Terrorist Threat Against American Citizens, read the title of one such report, received by the FAA on 22 June. It warned that "an airline hijacking remains a concern".
Clarke says that the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Bush himself still insisted to him during this period that Bin Laden was, in Wolfowitz's words, "this little terrorist in Afghanistan". Clarke adds that even after 9/11 he was personally ordered by Bush to look into Saddam Hussein's ties with terrorism instead. The day after the atrocities, he says, Wolfowitz was still insisting to a meeting of "principals" that the strikes could not have been committed by al-Qaeda and that "it must have been Iraq". At the same meeting, Rumsfeld came out in favour of bombing Iraq rather than al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.
Having watched Washington politics here for a long time, I have learned not to judge administrations primarily on how they react to matters that are deemed by the media to be of vital concern. To do that requires no great skill or insight. Rather, what distinguishes a good administration from a bad one is how it deals with apparently minor issues that are not on the front pages, but which it has none the less come to believe merit immediate attention behind the scenes.
Had Rice made al-Qaeda a top-level priority in the way Clarke urged her to do, would more intelligence resources have been unleashed? Would proper surveillance then have been carried out on the al-Qaeda "sleepers" who Rice had been told were in the US? Could that have unearthed the 9/11 plot and stopped it happening?
We will never know, though I am beginning to think the answer in each case could be "yes". The Bush administration is responding true to form, privately heaping derision on Clarke as a "hothead" who left the White House as an unwanted discard. Rice is clinging to evasive semantics, insisting that she was never presented with a "plan" on al-Qaeda. But I have read those declassified documents for myself. And I know that Clarke got it right, and the Bush administration didn't.
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