- In the initial shock of the September 11 massacre, one
small notion lodged itself into the mass psyche. It is perhaps best summed
up by the phrase: "Who could have seen that coming?" Because
of the sheer audacity of the attack, its novel use of kamikaze-style jets,
its uniquely horrendous death toll, most of us tended to exculpate the
leaders of the United States for any responsibility for the lax security
and failure of intelligence and foreign policy it represented.
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- But nearly three weeks later, as the sheer extent of
America's unpreparedness and vulnerability comes into better focus, one
other conclusion is inescapable. The September 11 massacre resulted from
a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect
its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the
face and, if the errors are to be rectified, it is essential to acknowledge
what went wrong.
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- Two questions come to mind: how was it that the Osama
Bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and
dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was
responsible
in the government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and
national security? These questions have not been asked directly, for good
reasons.
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- There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of
national crisis. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness
that Tuesday is already slowing the capacity to bring Bin Laden to justice
by constricting military and diplomatic options. And with a president just
a few months in office, criticism need not extend to the young
administration
that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus.
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- Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy
exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year.
When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries
- say, the invasion of the Falkland islands - ministers responsible have
resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the
effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled?
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- The most plausible answer is that nobody has been fired
because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing
in America's security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem
with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton
years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not
only had Bin Laden already attacked American embassies and warships, he
had done so repeatedly and been completely frank about his war. He had
even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Same guy, same
building. To say that nobody could have anticipated this type of attack
is simply to say that US intelligence wasn't good enough to have found
it out.
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- How prominent were the warnings of the danger of Islamic
terrorism in the 1990s? Here's one: "The crater beneath the World
Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs
and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how
brutal
these extremists can be." This was written by Salman Rushdie in The
New York Times in 1993.
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- Did the Clinton administration overhaul its intelligence
and defence priorities in response to the 1993 warning? No. No effort was
made to co-ordinate the mess of agencies designed to counter terrorism
- the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the airlines, local
law enforcement, the Coast Guard. No effort was made to recruit more spies
who could speak Arabic or go undercover to pre-empt such attacks. Under
the Clinton administration a law was passed making it more difficult for
America to use spies who had sleazy or criminal pasts - the kind needed
to infiltrate Bin Laden's cells.
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- The debacle of the Somalia expedition in 1992 and 1993
- which led to US special forces being humiliated - dramatically chilled
the military's willingness to use such Delta Force units in action again.
This occurred despite the fact that aggressive use of such forces was
critical
to any successful effort to regain the initiative against terrorism.
-
- In a remarkably revealing and overlooked article in last
week's New Yorker, Joe Klein argues that "there seems to be
near-unanimous
agreement among experts: in the 10 years since the collapse of the Soviet
Union almost every aspect of American national security policy - from
military
operations to intelligence-gathering, from border control to political
leadership - has been marked by . . . institutional lassitude and
bureaucratic
arrogance".
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- The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists,
to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively, was simply
never taken. Many bear the blame for this: Warren Christopher, the
clueless,
stately former secretary of state; Anthony Lake, the tortured intellectual
at the National Security Council; General Colin Powell, whose decision
to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but, above all,
former president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to military and security
matters now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to
slaughter.
-
- Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton
official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national
defence
than any other president in recent memory. He could learn an issue very
quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with
detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was,
before taking action. This was truer in his first term than in the second,
but even when he began to pay attention he was constrained by public
opinion
and his own unwillingness to take risks."
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- It is hard to come up with a more damning description
of negligence than that.
-
- Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after Bin
Laden struck again at US embassies in Africa, the president was put on
notice that the threat was deadly. He responded with a couple of missile
strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets
and none of which seriously impacted on Osama Bin Laden.
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- Clinton's own former defence secretary, John Deutch,
wrote in The New York Times that August: "We must insist on superior
intelligence that will warn of potential terrorist actions. We must insist
on tough and prompt responses, and on developing an effective capability
to manage the consequences of these acts when they occur. In general,
public
and private experts have concluded that our country is not fully prepared
to act effectively on these matters." Clinton largely ignored the
warning.
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- In The Washington Post that August, the following
prescient
words were written by L Paul Bremer III, the former anti-terrorism chief
in the Reagan administration: "The ideology of such groups [as Bin
Laden's] makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures. They
hate America, its values and its culture and proudly declare themselves
to be at war with us. We cannot seek a 'political solution' with
them."
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- Bremer then set out a list of what the US should do:
"Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here
and abroad, especially 'softer' targets such as American businesses
overseas.
Attack the enemy. Keep the pressure on terrorist groups. Be as systematic
and relentless as they are. Crush Bin Laden's operations by pressure and
disruption. The US government should order further military strikes against
the remaining terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. The
government,
further, should announce a large reward for Bin Laden's capture - dead
or alive. This might work and at the least would exacerbate the paranoia
common to all terrorists."
-
- Sound familiar? It's exactly what is being done now,
three years too late, with no element of surprise, and with far from
adequate
human intelligence.
-
- This brings Bremer to the most critical point in his
recommendations: "Improve our intelligence operations. Effective
counterterrorism
depends on good intelligence . . . We must pre-empt attacks before they
happen. This requires improved co-ordination of intelligence collection.
While it is difficult, we should expand the use of deep-cover agents on
the ground to infiltrate organisations."
-
- None of this happened. The CIA's feckless record went
uncorrected.
-
- Perhaps the most farsighted critic was a man called Reuel
Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and
the author, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, of a book called Know Thine
Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran.
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- In The Atlantic Monthly this summer, he emphasised the
need for trained spies to go underground in the Muslim world of Afghanistan
and Pakistan if the West were ever to get adequate intelligence on Bin
Laden's operation. Gerecht also reported the following devastating fact:
"Robert Baer, one of the most talented Middle East case officers of
the past 20 years (and the only operative in the 1980s to collect
consistently
first-rate intelligence on the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian
Islamic
Jihad), suggested to headquarters in the early 1990s that the CIA might
want to collect intelligence on Afghanistan from the neighbouring central
Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.
-
- "Headquarters' reply: too dangerous, and why bother?
The cold war there was over with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Afghanistan
was too far away, internecine warfare was seen as endemic, and radical
Islam was an abstract idea.
-
- "Afghanistan has since become the training ground
for Islamic terrorism against the United States, yet the CIA's clandestine
service still usually keeps officers on the Afghan account no more than
two or three years."
-
- If you want to know why it seems unlikely that America
knows enough about Bin Laden's whereabouts to mount an immediate attack
today, then re-read those sentences. This is an intelligence failure of
colossal proportions.
-
- What happened to the man who presided over that massive
failure? George Tenet, director of the CIA since 1997, is still in his
job.
-
- Not everyone in Washington was asleep at the switch.
In response to the African embassy bombings, a national commission on
terrorism
was set up to propose changes. It was headed by a top-notch group of former
officials and got plenty of attention. The panel argued that America was
extremely vulnerable to a huge attack by a group such as Al-Qaeda, and
recommended better espionage, more Arabic-speaking spies, better
intelligence-sharing
between the FBI and the CIA, wider wiretapping, and much of what is now
on the table. The report was even prescient enough to have a picture of
the World Trade Center on its cover.
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- But the report died the death of a thousand quibbles.
Civil liberties advocates complained about a threat to individual freedom.
James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute, said the
proposals
were like "the darkest days of the McCarthy era".
-
- A writer in the online magazine Salon described the
warnings
of a domestic attack as "a con job with roughly the veracity of the
latest Robert Ludlum novel". The CIA opposed lowering its
squeaky-clean
standards for spies, and the FBI was desperate, under Clinton, to avoid
any Reagan-like dirty tricks in its operation.
-
- When the report came to Congress, it was attacked by
Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who distrusted the CIA and wanted to
avoid what he called "risks to civil liberties we hold
dear".
-
- The proposal picked up momentum after the attack in Aden
on the USS Cole last October, but was so watered down by the end of the
legislative process that it was virtually useless. The Clinton
administration
did next to nothing to rescue it.
-
- Clinton's former national security adviser, Sandy Berger,
defended the president's record to Klein in The New Yorker. He argued that,
after the embassy bombings, there was a concerted effort to find and kill
Bin Laden, and that the cruise missile in Afghanistan missed its target
by an hour, after which Bin Laden disappeared from view. Anonymous Clinton
officials also blame the former treasury secretary Robert Rubin for
resisting
measures to cut off Bin Laden's financing, and to use cyber warfare to
crack down on terror money networks.
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- Others blame the FBI: "[The FBI's] standard line
was that Bin Laden wasn't a serious domestic security threat," one
source told Klein. "They said that he had about 200 guys on the ground
and they had drawn a bead on them." But whatever the nuances of blame
here, it is clear that nobody from the top intervened, imposed order and
reorganisation.
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- Earlier this year, yet another report, chaired by the
respected former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, came to yet another
definitive conclusion that America was vulnerable. They made exactly the
same recommendations that are now finally being implemented; the report
was well advertised and disseminated in the press - and still nothing was
done.
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- Hindsight is easy, of course. In the halcyon and feckless
climate of the 1990s, it would have required real political leadership
to dragoon various stubborn government agencies into a difficult
reorganisation
to counter terrorism. It would have been extremely hard to persuade a
sceptical
public and a prickly civil liberties lobby that vast new powers were
necessary
to prevent catastrophe. This much is true.
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- But it's also true that there were several unmistakable
attacks on America by the very forces that have now launched a war. It
is also true that many, many people recognised this and were brave enough
to warn about it.
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- In August 1998, Milton Bearden, the former CIA chief
in Pakistan and Sudan, wrote in The New York Times: "The case against
Osama Bin Laden is clear-cut. Through his self-proclaimed sponsorship of
terrorism against the United States, he has, in effect, declared war on
us."
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- In July 1999, William Cohen, Clinton's defence secretary,
wrote in The Washington Post: "In the past year, dozens of threats
to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned
out to be hoaxes. Someday, one will be real".
-
- Whatever excuses members of Clinton's administration
may have, they cannot trot out the excuse of not having been warned. We
were all warned. We just preferred to look the other way.
-
- It is clear that there are many in the American
government
who, while not being "guilty men" in sympathising with, and
appeasing,
the enemy were, at the very least, "negligent men". They deserve
some sympathy. They were imperfect human beings in a world where September
11 was still an abstract. But we pay our politicians to assess the
possibility
of an actual threat. That's what they are there for. And, on that critical
task, they failed.
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- If the security manager of a nuclear power plant presides
over a massive external attack on it, then it's only right that he should
be held responsible, in part, for what happened. More than 6,000 families
are now living with the deadly consequences of the negligence of the
government
of the United States. There is no greater duty for such a government than
the maintenance of national security, and the protection of its own
citizens.
-
- When a senior Clinton official can say of his own leader
that he "spent less concentrated attention on national defence than
any other president in recent memory", and when this administration
is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American
history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting.
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- Clinton is not alone. The list of people who resisted
or thwarted the measures needed to have avoided this catastrophe are many.
They reach back to president George Bush Sr, who balked at removing Saddam
Hussein from power at the end of the Gulf war, thus leaving the single
most dangerous abetter of international terrorism at large on the world
stage.
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- They include Bush and Clinton officials who failed to
see the danger in the vacuum left in Afghanistan after the successful
insurgency
against the Soviets. They include senators, congressmen, lobbyists, civil
liberties advocates and journalists - all of whom failed to see the danger.
Few of us are free from blame, but the most blame must surely be attributed
to the top.
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- We thought for a long time that the Clinton years would
be seen, in retrospect, as a mixed blessing. He was sleazy and
unprincipled,
we surmised, but he was also competent, he led an economic recovery, and
he conducted a foreign policy of multilateral distinction.
-
- But the further we get away from the Clinton years, the
more damning they seem. The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of
an America absent without leave in the world was fomented from the top.
The boom at the end of the decade turned out to include a dangerous bubble
that the administration did little to prevent.
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- The "peace-making" in the Middle East and
Ireland
merely intensified the conflicts. The sex and money scandals were not just
debilitating in themselves - they meant that even the minimal attention
that the Clinton presidency paid to strategic military and intelligence
work was skimped on.
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- We were warned. But we were coasting. And the main person
primarily entrusted with correcting that delusion, with ensuring America's
national security - the president - was part of the problem.
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- Through the dust clouds of September 11, and during the
difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage - and that is
Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker with each passing day.
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- Additional research by Reihan Salam
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