"September 10 is his, too."

I've been meaning to post this for a long time, and, after the horrible attack in Spain, I'm finally motivated to do it. Bush has long made it clear that he is going to make his prosecution of the war on terror the key element to his reelection. But, as demonstrated by his refusal to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission, Bush has been reluctant to give any help to people trying to figure out what went wrong from September 10, 2001 backwards. And he may have good reason for refusing to cooperate.

Devoted readers will remember that I mentioned that Richard Clarke is coming out with a book this month, on March 22. Who is Richard Clarke? Well, he was essentially the counter-terrorism czar for the Clinton Administration and his formal title was head of the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council. Clarke's background is important to consider: he was one of the two senior directors from Bush Sr. that was kept on by Clinton and he eventually stayed on to work for Bush Jr. during the beginning of his Presidency.

Clarke is important because he was convinced, by the end of the Clinton Administration, that the threat of radical Islamic terror, by Al-Qaeda specifically, was as great as ever, and he was convinced that Bin Laden's next strike would take place on American soil. After the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, Clarke desperately wanted the U.S. to take military action, but he was unclear what he could do, since the Clinton Administration was about to leave office.

Nevertheless, Clarke put together a proposal for a massive attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He presented his plan to his boss, NSA Sandy Berger and others on the NSC, on December 20, 2000. Remembering that Clinton had been left to deal with Bush Sr.'s foray into Somalia in 1993, Berger did not feel that it was right to start a military action just when Bush Jr. was about to take over.

An article in Time Magazine that should be required reading details what Berger did:

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...

Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice... 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."

After the briefing, Rice, soon to become Clarke's boss, admitted to him that the dangers from Al-Qaeda appeared to be greater than she had ever realized. Significantly, Rice was not the only senior White House official who was given Clarke's briefing:

As the new Administration took office, Rice kept Clarke in his job as counterterrorism czar. In early February, he repeated to Vice President Dick Cheney the briefing he had given to Rice and Hadley. There are differing opinions on how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's wwarnings. Some members of the outgoing Administration got the sense that the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed with terrorism. "It was clear," says one, "that this was not the same priority to them that it was to us."

Well, this certainly helps to explain why Rice demanded that she testify before the 9/11 Commission in private and Cheney has wanted to limit questioning.

TO BE CONTINUED
- posted by Joshua @ 2:00 PM