Planned Bush-Cheney Appearance Criticized
Fri Apr 2, 3:39 PM ET
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says it's baffling and embarrassing that President Bush (news - web sites) is appearing before the Sept. 11 commission with Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) at his side instead of by himself.
"I think it speaks to the lack of confidence that the administration has in the president going forth alone, period," Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday. "It's embarrassing to the president of the United States that they won't let him go in without holding the hand of the vice president of the United States."
"I think it reinforces the idea that the president cannot go it alone," she said. "The president should stand tall, walk in the room himself and answer the questions."
White House spokesman Ken Lisaius dismissed Pelosi's comments and said the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, had expressed appreciation for Bush and Cheney's planned appearance.
"This has been a development that the commission welcomes and said so in their own statement; so it certainly sets the minority leader apart from the commission," Lisaius said.
Bush and Cheney agreed this week to a single joint private session with all 10 commissioners investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Previously, the administration was offering only private interviews of Bush and Cheney with the commission chairman and vice chairman. The commission agreed to the new plan.
Pelosi made her comments during a discussion with several reporters. She also said it was unfortunate that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) is giving her commission testimony next Thursday, when the House won't be in session.
"I think it should've happened much sooner," she said.
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Saturday, April 03, 2004
Friday, April 02, 2004
Condi Rice's other wake-up call
Former Sen. Gary Hart says he, too, warned Rice about an imminent terror attack on two occasions before 9/11.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Talbot Salon.com
April 2, 2004 | Richard Clarke was not the only national security expert who warned National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials about terrorist threats before 9/11. Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado also directly told senior Bush officials loudly and clearly that, in his words, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming."
Hart was co-chair (with former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H.) of the U.S. Commission on National Security, a bipartisan panel that conducted the most thorough investigation of U.S. security challenges since World War II. After completing the report, which warned that a devastating terrorist attack on America was imminent and called for the immediate creation of a Cabinet-level national security agency, and delivering it to President Bush on January 31, 2001, Hart and Rudman personally briefed Rice, Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. But, according to Hart, the Bush administration never followed up on the commission's urgent recommendations, even after he repeated them in a private White House meeting with Rice just days before 9/11.
Hart, who is now advising the Kerry campaign on national security issues, spoke with Salon this week about the Bush administration's failures to heed his warnings and why he feels the country is still at grave risk. Even at this late date, says Hart, Bush has failed to sufficiently coordinate federal, state, local and private-sector security efforts, leaving open American ports as possible entry points for weapons of mass destruction and exposing such prime targets as petrochemical facilities located near major urban areas. And two and a half years after 9/11, Hart observes, no government official has been held responsible for the disastrous security failures of that day. The Bush White House, he charges, is locked in a strange and delicate dance with intelligence officials, maneuvering to place blame on the CIA but fearing if it does so too blatantly, the Bush team's own failings will be exposed.
Hart spoke with Salon by phone from Denver, where he works for the international law firm Coudert Brothers.
What was the reaction from Bush officials to your warnings about terrorism when you delivered your final report to the president in late January 2001?
We didn't meet with President Bush. But we briefed at length Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. And all of them at that time treated it seriously. I conducted the briefing, along with my co-chairman Warren Rudman, and Gen. Charles Boyd, who was our commission's executive director, and maybe one or two other commissioners. I would say the response was respectful, professional, serious. And Rumsfeld, as I recall, made pages of notes on a yellow pad.
After your briefings, do you think the administration responded adequately to your warnings?
Well, let me just go through the history of things. Because we also sent copies of the report to every member of Congress. And we lobbied specific members of Congress, including Joe Lieberman, who took it very seriously. And in the spring of 2001, some members of Congress introduced legislation to create a homeland security agency. Hearings were scheduled. And our commission, which was scheduled to go out of operation on Feb. 15, 2001, was given a six-month extension so we could testify with some authority. Which we did in March and April.
And then as Congress started to move on this, and the heat was turned up, George Bush -- and this is often overlooked -- held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he was turning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney.
So this wasn't just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, "I don't want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me." We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.
In other words, a bipartisan commission of seven Democrats and seven Republicans who had spent two and a half years studying the problem, a group of Americans with a cumulative 300 years in national security affairs, recommended to the president of the United States on a reasonably urgent basis the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to protect our country -- and the president did nothing!
By the way, when our final report came out in 2001, it did not receive word one in the New York Times. Zero. The Washington Post put it on Page 3 or 4, below the fold.
So there was absolutely no follow-up on your commission's recommendations once Bush referred the matter to Cheney?
Right.
And were you ever consulted again by the administration?
No. But as one of those fearing a near-term attack, I went out on my own throughout the spring and summer of 2001 saying, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming." One of the speeches I gave was, ironically enough, to the International Air Transportation Association in Montreal. And the Montreal newspapers headlined the story, "Hart predicts terrorist attacks on America."
By pre-arrangement I had gotten an appointment with Condi Rice the following day and had gone straight from Montreal to Washington to meet with her. And my brief message to her was, "Get going on homeland security, you don't have all the time in the world." This was on Sept. 6, 2001.
What was her response?
Her response was "I'll talk to the vice president about it." And this tracks with Clarke's testimony and writing that even at this late date, nothing was being done inside the White House.
And your sense from talking with Rice that day was ...
She didn't seem to feel a terrible sense of urgency. Her response was simply "I'll talk to the vice president about it."
Did you get a sense that the administration had made any progress on security since you first briefed her, Rumsfeld and Powell in January?
No. I think she made some kind of gratuitous statements like, "We've taken your report very seriously, we're looking at it, we're thinking about it, we've asked people to give comments on it."
But you felt that was more or less a pro forma response?
I thought so. Now the backdrop here is that I'd known Condi Rice for about 20 years. She supported me in my presidential effort in 1984. She later said she changed parties in the early '80s, but I know she was a supporter of mine in '84. She was completing her Ph.D. at the University of Denver at the time. She helped me with foreign policy in my '84 campaign. I think that's the only reason I got in to the White House to see her.
One more thing: I met with Rice not long after the president was in Crawford and being briefed by CIA officials on the possible use of aircraft against American targets. This was all happening in the weeks before 9/11.
So I think it's terribly disingenuous for the president of the United States to say, "If somebody had told us they were going to use aircraft against the World Trade Center, we would of course have taken action." I think it's just ridiculous to say, "We're not going to do anything until someone tells us where, when and how."
How would you grade the administration's response after 9/11?
"You know why I think George Tenet is still in his job? I think there are smoking guns all over"
I have said for over two and a half years that no one has been held accountable for 9/11. No one lost his or her job, not [CIA Director] George Tenet, not [FBI Director] Robert Mueller, not anybody. Now this is the president who claims to be strong and tough, but he clearly does not have on his desk a sign that says, "The buck stops here." I honor Dick Clarke for what he said to the victims' families. I think George Bush should say that, I think he should apologize. I think he should take responsibility, as John Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs. That's presidential leadership, that's a strong president. This is a weak president. He will not take responsibility.
In Kennedy's case, he was clearly misled by his national security advisors who were bound and determined to go ahead with their Cuban adventure.
And he fired some of them. None of that happened here. You know why I think George Tenet is still in his job? I think there are smoking guns all over the White House. I think if you crack the White House safe, you're going to find memos from Tenet saying, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming."
So you think the intelligence community was giving Bush information he should have acted on before 9/11?
Precisely. And that's the only explanation I can think of for why no one's been fired. Which leaves open the possibility that the president misled the American people.
Clearly there are a number of intelligence professionals who are not happy with this administration and the way it has politicized the intelligence process. Do you sense there's a growing restiveness in that community against Bush?
Oh, absolutely. And here's how it works. Career intelligence officers are in constant touch with their colleagues who are retired. And I believe the vast majority of those people are honorable, oath-taking, straight-talking professionals who love their country. But, as with any other human beings, when pushed too far -- by being blamed for something they didn't do or being unfairly held out to ridicule for not doing their job -- they will do what most human beings will do. They will fight back. They will have lunch with one of their colleagues, and they will say, "Let me bring you up to date," and they will give chapter and verse on what the White House and the CIA did and did not do. And they have the understanding that their retired colleague may very well have lunch with somebody from the New York Times. You can say this is shameful or disloyal -- but for these people, who have given their lives to their country, if they think that our political leadership is not protecting the country, they're going to do something about it. Their loyalty is not to George W. Bush -- their loyalty is to the flag of the United States of America.
So a growing number of intelligence and security professionals like Clarke, Joe Wilson and Karen Kwiatkowski are getting fed up with the Bush administration and are doing something about it?
I think that's true. And I think Karl Rove is taking a huge risk. I think since 9/11 they've been walking a very fine line, between wanting to put the blame on the CIA and knowing if they did so unjustifiably, they're going to get whacked. And I think that's exactly what this little dance is about, and I think that's why they did not fire Tenet. They want him and those who work for him not to retaliate.
Has the war in Iraq increased our security in the U.S.?
Absolutely not -- it's increased our vulnerability. It's helped with terrorist recruitment, the spawning of cells in various countries. Don't take my word for it -- that's what the security authorities have said. The directors of the CIA, FBI and DIA have all warned that when America attacks an Arab state, the risk to America skyrockets, it doesn't go down. Now Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have said we're safer, of course -- the more we keep them on the run abroad, the safer we are at home. I think that's just patent nonsense.
If Bush has not made us safer, why hasn't there been another terrorist attack in the U.S.? Have we just been lucky?
No, we have made it somewhat more difficult. But my analogy is that when I got Secret Service protection during my presidential run in 1984, the head of the Secret Service said to me, "If someone wants to kill you, they will probably kill you. Our job is to make it as difficult as possible." So nearly three years later, we are making it somewhat more difficult for terrorists. Are we making it as difficult as we can? The answer is no.
The first attack on the World Trade Center occurred almost two years after its triggering event, which was the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia. Of course that barracks subsequently got blown up. So when people say, "Gee whiz, we must be safe, we haven't been attacked again," well, these enemies we're confronting are patient people.
What would it take for the American people to begin to doubt that Bush has made them safer?
Well, God forbid, another attack, and I don't rule that out. I know we're going to be attacked again.
Do you think that terrorists learned from Spain that they can affect the outcome of a presidential election?
I think they'd be wrong to assume that about this nation. And I think they'd be dead wrong to assume they'd be better off with a Kerry administration. John Kerry is not soft on terrorism.
Do you think there's ever a role for unilateral American action?
Of course.
But Iraq did not meet the proper criteria?
Right. The global rules for nations throughout history have been pretty consistent: a threat must be immediate and unavoidable. Iraq was neither. If someone knocks on your door, and you've been robbed before, you're not justified in blowing that person away simply because you're afraid. The same is true of nations.
Will the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction come back to haunt Bush in November?
I think what will haunt this administration is its lack of accountability. Either George Bush was misled, which is his story, or he misled the American people. There are no other choices. If he's a strong president, as he and his supporters claim, then heads should roll. If the president of the United States is misled by those who advise him, heads should roll. And we have not seen this. If he misled the American people, then he must go.
salon.com
__________________________________________________________________________
Former Sen. Gary Hart says he, too, warned Rice about an imminent terror attack on two occasions before 9/11.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Talbot Salon.com
April 2, 2004 | Richard Clarke was not the only national security expert who warned National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials about terrorist threats before 9/11. Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado also directly told senior Bush officials loudly and clearly that, in his words, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming."
Hart was co-chair (with former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H.) of the U.S. Commission on National Security, a bipartisan panel that conducted the most thorough investigation of U.S. security challenges since World War II. After completing the report, which warned that a devastating terrorist attack on America was imminent and called for the immediate creation of a Cabinet-level national security agency, and delivering it to President Bush on January 31, 2001, Hart and Rudman personally briefed Rice, Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. But, according to Hart, the Bush administration never followed up on the commission's urgent recommendations, even after he repeated them in a private White House meeting with Rice just days before 9/11.
Hart, who is now advising the Kerry campaign on national security issues, spoke with Salon this week about the Bush administration's failures to heed his warnings and why he feels the country is still at grave risk. Even at this late date, says Hart, Bush has failed to sufficiently coordinate federal, state, local and private-sector security efforts, leaving open American ports as possible entry points for weapons of mass destruction and exposing such prime targets as petrochemical facilities located near major urban areas. And two and a half years after 9/11, Hart observes, no government official has been held responsible for the disastrous security failures of that day. The Bush White House, he charges, is locked in a strange and delicate dance with intelligence officials, maneuvering to place blame on the CIA but fearing if it does so too blatantly, the Bush team's own failings will be exposed.
Hart spoke with Salon by phone from Denver, where he works for the international law firm Coudert Brothers.
What was the reaction from Bush officials to your warnings about terrorism when you delivered your final report to the president in late January 2001?
We didn't meet with President Bush. But we briefed at length Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. And all of them at that time treated it seriously. I conducted the briefing, along with my co-chairman Warren Rudman, and Gen. Charles Boyd, who was our commission's executive director, and maybe one or two other commissioners. I would say the response was respectful, professional, serious. And Rumsfeld, as I recall, made pages of notes on a yellow pad.
After your briefings, do you think the administration responded adequately to your warnings?
Well, let me just go through the history of things. Because we also sent copies of the report to every member of Congress. And we lobbied specific members of Congress, including Joe Lieberman, who took it very seriously. And in the spring of 2001, some members of Congress introduced legislation to create a homeland security agency. Hearings were scheduled. And our commission, which was scheduled to go out of operation on Feb. 15, 2001, was given a six-month extension so we could testify with some authority. Which we did in March and April.
And then as Congress started to move on this, and the heat was turned up, George Bush -- and this is often overlooked -- held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he was turning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney.
So this wasn't just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, "I don't want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me." We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.
In other words, a bipartisan commission of seven Democrats and seven Republicans who had spent two and a half years studying the problem, a group of Americans with a cumulative 300 years in national security affairs, recommended to the president of the United States on a reasonably urgent basis the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to protect our country -- and the president did nothing!
By the way, when our final report came out in 2001, it did not receive word one in the New York Times. Zero. The Washington Post put it on Page 3 or 4, below the fold.
So there was absolutely no follow-up on your commission's recommendations once Bush referred the matter to Cheney?
Right.
And were you ever consulted again by the administration?
No. But as one of those fearing a near-term attack, I went out on my own throughout the spring and summer of 2001 saying, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming." One of the speeches I gave was, ironically enough, to the International Air Transportation Association in Montreal. And the Montreal newspapers headlined the story, "Hart predicts terrorist attacks on America."
By pre-arrangement I had gotten an appointment with Condi Rice the following day and had gone straight from Montreal to Washington to meet with her. And my brief message to her was, "Get going on homeland security, you don't have all the time in the world." This was on Sept. 6, 2001.
What was her response?
Her response was "I'll talk to the vice president about it." And this tracks with Clarke's testimony and writing that even at this late date, nothing was being done inside the White House.
And your sense from talking with Rice that day was ...
She didn't seem to feel a terrible sense of urgency. Her response was simply "I'll talk to the vice president about it."
Did you get a sense that the administration had made any progress on security since you first briefed her, Rumsfeld and Powell in January?
No. I think she made some kind of gratuitous statements like, "We've taken your report very seriously, we're looking at it, we're thinking about it, we've asked people to give comments on it."
But you felt that was more or less a pro forma response?
I thought so. Now the backdrop here is that I'd known Condi Rice for about 20 years. She supported me in my presidential effort in 1984. She later said she changed parties in the early '80s, but I know she was a supporter of mine in '84. She was completing her Ph.D. at the University of Denver at the time. She helped me with foreign policy in my '84 campaign. I think that's the only reason I got in to the White House to see her.
One more thing: I met with Rice not long after the president was in Crawford and being briefed by CIA officials on the possible use of aircraft against American targets. This was all happening in the weeks before 9/11.
So I think it's terribly disingenuous for the president of the United States to say, "If somebody had told us they were going to use aircraft against the World Trade Center, we would of course have taken action." I think it's just ridiculous to say, "We're not going to do anything until someone tells us where, when and how."
How would you grade the administration's response after 9/11?
"You know why I think George Tenet is still in his job? I think there are smoking guns all over"
I have said for over two and a half years that no one has been held accountable for 9/11. No one lost his or her job, not [CIA Director] George Tenet, not [FBI Director] Robert Mueller, not anybody. Now this is the president who claims to be strong and tough, but he clearly does not have on his desk a sign that says, "The buck stops here." I honor Dick Clarke for what he said to the victims' families. I think George Bush should say that, I think he should apologize. I think he should take responsibility, as John Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs. That's presidential leadership, that's a strong president. This is a weak president. He will not take responsibility.
In Kennedy's case, he was clearly misled by his national security advisors who were bound and determined to go ahead with their Cuban adventure.
And he fired some of them. None of that happened here. You know why I think George Tenet is still in his job? I think there are smoking guns all over the White House. I think if you crack the White House safe, you're going to find memos from Tenet saying, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming."
So you think the intelligence community was giving Bush information he should have acted on before 9/11?
Precisely. And that's the only explanation I can think of for why no one's been fired. Which leaves open the possibility that the president misled the American people.
Clearly there are a number of intelligence professionals who are not happy with this administration and the way it has politicized the intelligence process. Do you sense there's a growing restiveness in that community against Bush?
Oh, absolutely. And here's how it works. Career intelligence officers are in constant touch with their colleagues who are retired. And I believe the vast majority of those people are honorable, oath-taking, straight-talking professionals who love their country. But, as with any other human beings, when pushed too far -- by being blamed for something they didn't do or being unfairly held out to ridicule for not doing their job -- they will do what most human beings will do. They will fight back. They will have lunch with one of their colleagues, and they will say, "Let me bring you up to date," and they will give chapter and verse on what the White House and the CIA did and did not do. And they have the understanding that their retired colleague may very well have lunch with somebody from the New York Times. You can say this is shameful or disloyal -- but for these people, who have given their lives to their country, if they think that our political leadership is not protecting the country, they're going to do something about it. Their loyalty is not to George W. Bush -- their loyalty is to the flag of the United States of America.
So a growing number of intelligence and security professionals like Clarke, Joe Wilson and Karen Kwiatkowski are getting fed up with the Bush administration and are doing something about it?
I think that's true. And I think Karl Rove is taking a huge risk. I think since 9/11 they've been walking a very fine line, between wanting to put the blame on the CIA and knowing if they did so unjustifiably, they're going to get whacked. And I think that's exactly what this little dance is about, and I think that's why they did not fire Tenet. They want him and those who work for him not to retaliate.
Has the war in Iraq increased our security in the U.S.?
Absolutely not -- it's increased our vulnerability. It's helped with terrorist recruitment, the spawning of cells in various countries. Don't take my word for it -- that's what the security authorities have said. The directors of the CIA, FBI and DIA have all warned that when America attacks an Arab state, the risk to America skyrockets, it doesn't go down. Now Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have said we're safer, of course -- the more we keep them on the run abroad, the safer we are at home. I think that's just patent nonsense.
If Bush has not made us safer, why hasn't there been another terrorist attack in the U.S.? Have we just been lucky?
No, we have made it somewhat more difficult. But my analogy is that when I got Secret Service protection during my presidential run in 1984, the head of the Secret Service said to me, "If someone wants to kill you, they will probably kill you. Our job is to make it as difficult as possible." So nearly three years later, we are making it somewhat more difficult for terrorists. Are we making it as difficult as we can? The answer is no.
The first attack on the World Trade Center occurred almost two years after its triggering event, which was the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia. Of course that barracks subsequently got blown up. So when people say, "Gee whiz, we must be safe, we haven't been attacked again," well, these enemies we're confronting are patient people.
What would it take for the American people to begin to doubt that Bush has made them safer?
Well, God forbid, another attack, and I don't rule that out. I know we're going to be attacked again.
Do you think that terrorists learned from Spain that they can affect the outcome of a presidential election?
I think they'd be wrong to assume that about this nation. And I think they'd be dead wrong to assume they'd be better off with a Kerry administration. John Kerry is not soft on terrorism.
Do you think there's ever a role for unilateral American action?
Of course.
But Iraq did not meet the proper criteria?
Right. The global rules for nations throughout history have been pretty consistent: a threat must be immediate and unavoidable. Iraq was neither. If someone knocks on your door, and you've been robbed before, you're not justified in blowing that person away simply because you're afraid. The same is true of nations.
Will the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction come back to haunt Bush in November?
I think what will haunt this administration is its lack of accountability. Either George Bush was misled, which is his story, or he misled the American people. There are no other choices. If he's a strong president, as he and his supporters claim, then heads should roll. If the president of the United States is misled by those who advise him, heads should roll. And we have not seen this. If he misled the American people, then he must go.
salon.com
__________________________________________________________________________
Maverick McCain rips GOP
By Noelle Straub
Friday, April 2, 2004
WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain yesterday unleashed an attack on his own party, saying the GOP is ``astray'' on key issues and criticizing President Bush [ related ,bio ]on the war in Iraq .
``I believe my party has gone astray,'' McCain said, criticizing GOP stands on environmental and minority issues.
``I think the Democratic Party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy,'' he said. ``But I also feel the Republican Party can be brought back to the principles I articulated before.''
The maverick senator made the remarks at a legislative seminar hosted by U.S. Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Lowell) as he again ruled out running on a ticket with Democrat John F. Kerry [ related ,bio ].
The Arizona Republican took on President Bush for failing to prepare Americans for a long involvement in Iraq, saying, ``You can't fly in on an aircraft carrier and declare victory and have the deaths continue. You can't do that.''
McCain said the U.S. should seek more U.N. involvement in Iraq. ``Many people in this room question, legitimately, whether we should have gone in or not,'' he said, adding that that debate ``will be part of this presidential campaign.'
__________________________________________________________________________
By Noelle Straub
Friday, April 2, 2004
WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain yesterday unleashed an attack on his own party, saying the GOP is ``astray'' on key issues and criticizing President Bush [ related ,bio ]on the war in Iraq .
``I believe my party has gone astray,'' McCain said, criticizing GOP stands on environmental and minority issues.
``I think the Democratic Party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy,'' he said. ``But I also feel the Republican Party can be brought back to the principles I articulated before.''
The maverick senator made the remarks at a legislative seminar hosted by U.S. Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Lowell) as he again ruled out running on a ticket with Democrat John F. Kerry [ related ,bio ].
The Arizona Republican took on President Bush for failing to prepare Americans for a long involvement in Iraq, saying, ``You can't fly in on an aircraft carrier and declare victory and have the deaths continue. You can't do that.''
McCain said the U.S. should seek more U.N. involvement in Iraq. ``Many people in this room question, legitimately, whether we should have gone in or not,'' he said, adding that that debate ``will be part of this presidential campaign.'
__________________________________________________________________________
COMMENTARY
Bush Puts a 'Cancer on the Presidency'
Watergate insider calls this White House 'scary.'
Robert Scheer
March 30, 2004
"Worse Than Watergate," the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee before being recruited by Nixon, "This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." And when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush crowd makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. As Dean writes, they "have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime … far worse than during Watergate."
Dean knows what he's talking about. He was the one who dared tell Nixon in 1973 that the web of lies surrounding the Watergate break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters had formed "a cancer on the presidency." When Dean went public about that conversation, the Nixon White House smeared him as a liar. Fortunately, the conversation had been taped, and Dean was vindicated.
The dark side of the current White House was on full display last week when top officials of the Bush administration took to the airwaves to destroy the credibility of a man who had honorably served presidents Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes.
The character assassination of Richard Clarke, the former White House anti-terrorism chief, was far more worrisome than Nixon's smears of Dean because it concerned not petty crime in pursuit of partisan political ambition but rather the attempt to deceive the nation and the world as to the causes of the 9/11 assault upon our national security — and to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq.
First, Bush's aides suggested that Clarke had invented the meeting in which Clarke said the president pressured him to find a link between the 9/11 attack and Iraq, ignoring Clarke's insistence that intelligence agencies had concluded that no such link existed. But on Sunday, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was forced to admit that Bush had pressed Clarke on an Iraq connection. This backed up earlier assertions by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as to Bush's obsession with Iraq from the very first days of his administration at the expense of focusing on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
That the Bush lies didn't work this time may be because just too many veterans of the U.S. intelligence community are finding their voices and are willing to denounce an administration that has seriously undermined the nation's security.
They are speaking out, as 23 former CIA and other defense intelligence agents did in Robert Greenwald's devastating documentary, "Uncovered." They have stepped forward, as did David Kay, Bush's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq.
This is an administration that has been dominated by the neoconservative ideologues who condemned the logical restraint of the first Bush administration on foreign policy as a betrayal of the national interest.
These neocons have made a horrible mess of things, but that gives them no pause. They went to war with a nation that had no weapons of mass destruction and few connections to terrorism — but have coddled Pakistan, which sponsored the Taliban and Al Qaeda and which recently was revealed as the source of nuclear weapons technology for North Korea, Iran and Libya.
The president's team is wrong to believe its outrageous lies can continue to lull a gullible public. Nixon's lies won him a second election, but then he lost the country.
Bush smiles better than Nixon, but when the lies are exposed, the smile turns into a character-revealing smirk. That happened last week when the White House released photos of a skit, performed for the amusement of jaded media heavyweights, in which the president pretended to look under his desk for the missing weapons of mass destruction. This may have amused his cynical audience, but to the general public, the carefully lip-synced policy pronouncements of the man who cried wolf has morphed into a sick joke.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
____________________________________________________________________________
Bush Puts a 'Cancer on the Presidency'
Watergate insider calls this White House 'scary.'
Robert Scheer
March 30, 2004
"Worse Than Watergate," the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee before being recruited by Nixon, "This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." And when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush crowd makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. As Dean writes, they "have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime … far worse than during Watergate."
Dean knows what he's talking about. He was the one who dared tell Nixon in 1973 that the web of lies surrounding the Watergate break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters had formed "a cancer on the presidency." When Dean went public about that conversation, the Nixon White House smeared him as a liar. Fortunately, the conversation had been taped, and Dean was vindicated.
The dark side of the current White House was on full display last week when top officials of the Bush administration took to the airwaves to destroy the credibility of a man who had honorably served presidents Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes.
The character assassination of Richard Clarke, the former White House anti-terrorism chief, was far more worrisome than Nixon's smears of Dean because it concerned not petty crime in pursuit of partisan political ambition but rather the attempt to deceive the nation and the world as to the causes of the 9/11 assault upon our national security — and to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq.
First, Bush's aides suggested that Clarke had invented the meeting in which Clarke said the president pressured him to find a link between the 9/11 attack and Iraq, ignoring Clarke's insistence that intelligence agencies had concluded that no such link existed. But on Sunday, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was forced to admit that Bush had pressed Clarke on an Iraq connection. This backed up earlier assertions by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as to Bush's obsession with Iraq from the very first days of his administration at the expense of focusing on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
That the Bush lies didn't work this time may be because just too many veterans of the U.S. intelligence community are finding their voices and are willing to denounce an administration that has seriously undermined the nation's security.
They are speaking out, as 23 former CIA and other defense intelligence agents did in Robert Greenwald's devastating documentary, "Uncovered." They have stepped forward, as did David Kay, Bush's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq.
This is an administration that has been dominated by the neoconservative ideologues who condemned the logical restraint of the first Bush administration on foreign policy as a betrayal of the national interest.
These neocons have made a horrible mess of things, but that gives them no pause. They went to war with a nation that had no weapons of mass destruction and few connections to terrorism — but have coddled Pakistan, which sponsored the Taliban and Al Qaeda and which recently was revealed as the source of nuclear weapons technology for North Korea, Iran and Libya.
The president's team is wrong to believe its outrageous lies can continue to lull a gullible public. Nixon's lies won him a second election, but then he lost the country.
Bush smiles better than Nixon, but when the lies are exposed, the smile turns into a character-revealing smirk. That happened last week when the White House released photos of a skit, performed for the amusement of jaded media heavyweights, in which the president pretended to look under his desk for the missing weapons of mass destruction. This may have amused his cynical audience, but to the general public, the carefully lip-synced policy pronouncements of the man who cried wolf has morphed into a sick joke.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
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Thursday, April 01, 2004
Main U.S. Focus Before 9/11 Not on Terrorism - Report
Thu Apr 1, 1:46 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice ( news -web sites ) was scheduled to deliver a major policy speech on Sept. 11, 2001, that focused on missile defense, not terrorism, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Citing former U.S. officials who have seen the text, the newspaper said the speech was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of the Bush administration's national security and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden ( news -web sites ) or Islamic extremist groups.
Former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, in a new book and in public testimony, accused President Bush ( news -web sites ) of focusing too much on Iraq ( news -web sites ) and not enough on the threat of al Qaeda prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a Bush administration counter-offensive, Rice rejected the suggestion that before the attacks the administration failed to regard terrorism as an urgent problem.
The Washington Post reported that the text of Rice's Sept. 11 speech, which was never delivered, mentioned terrorism as one of the dangers from rouge nations such as Iraq rather than from the cells of extremists now considered the main security threat to the United States.
The newspaper said the text broadly reflected the administration's foreign policy statements during the eight months leading up to the attacks.
According to a review of public statements, the administration did address terrorism, but devoted far more attention to pushing missile defense, the newspaper said.
"Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism rated lower on the list of priorities, as outlined by officials in their own public statements on policy," the newspaper said.
The White House declined to release the complete text of Rice's speech since it was not given but did confirm the accuracy of excerpts given to The Post, the report said.
The Post said former U.S. officials provided a detailed summary of the speech.
_________________________________________________________________________
Thu Apr 1, 1:46 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice ( news -web sites ) was scheduled to deliver a major policy speech on Sept. 11, 2001, that focused on missile defense, not terrorism, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Citing former U.S. officials who have seen the text, the newspaper said the speech was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of the Bush administration's national security and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden ( news -web sites ) or Islamic extremist groups.
Former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, in a new book and in public testimony, accused President Bush ( news -web sites ) of focusing too much on Iraq ( news -web sites ) and not enough on the threat of al Qaeda prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a Bush administration counter-offensive, Rice rejected the suggestion that before the attacks the administration failed to regard terrorism as an urgent problem.
The Washington Post reported that the text of Rice's Sept. 11 speech, which was never delivered, mentioned terrorism as one of the dangers from rouge nations such as Iraq rather than from the cells of extremists now considered the main security threat to the United States.
The newspaper said the text broadly reflected the administration's foreign policy statements during the eight months leading up to the attacks.
According to a review of public statements, the administration did address terrorism, but devoted far more attention to pushing missile defense, the newspaper said.
"Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism rated lower on the list of priorities, as outlined by officials in their own public statements on policy," the newspaper said.
The White House declined to release the complete text of Rice's speech since it was not given but did confirm the accuracy of excerpts given to The Post, the report said.
The Post said former U.S. officials provided a detailed summary of the speech.
_________________________________________________________________________
Most in U.S. Back View Bush Was Lax on Terror -Poll
By Randall Mikkelsen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most Americans agree with a former White House counterterrorism chief that President Bush was lax on terrorism before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a poll published on Thursday found.
However, the poll also found that a majority of Americans still support Bush's record on security, a key issue in his reelection effort.
The poll by the Los Angeles Times found that 52 percent of Americans agreed with charges by the former official, Richard Clarke, that Bush "failed to take the threat of terrorism seriously enough" before the attacks, while 40 percent disagreed.
An even larger share, 57 percent, agreed with Clarke that Bush placed a higher priority on invading Iraq than on combating terrorism.
Clarke's charges have received immense publicity in recent weeks -- in testimony before a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, in media coverage of a new book by Clarke, and in the White House's ferocious counterattack against his credibility.
The Los Angeles Times survey of 1,616 Americans, taken March 27-30, also found that 56 percent approved of Bush's handling of the war on terrorism, and 59 percent believed he had made the country more secure -- a figure little changed since November.
Those findings are significant for an election year in which Bush, who has called himself a "war president," has made his leadership of the fight against global terrorism a major campaign theme.
LONG TERM PROBLEM
"While the new questions about Bush's initial response to the terrorist threat could pose a long-term problem for him, the poll suggests the controversy (over Clarke's charges) has not significantly changed the dynamics propelling the country toward another close presidential race," the newspaper said in its report on the poll.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released earlier this week also found majority support for Bush's handling of the terrorism issue, but said the 58 percent support represented the lowest level since measurement began after the Sept. 11 attacks.
A survey released on Wednesday by the nonpartisan Council for Excellence in Government found that fewer than half of Americans -- 47 percent -- believed the United States was safer now than before the Sept. 11 attacks, although the share was greater than the 38 percent minority one year after the attacks.
The Los Angeles Times poll also found some support for the White House's criticisms of Clarke, with 58 percent saying his book was politically motivated. But only 28 percent agreed with charges by some Republicans that his criticisms were motivated by a failure to win a promotion from Bush.
In the presidential campaign pitting Bush against Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the poll showed Kerry leading Bush by 49 percent to 46 percent among voters, a difference within the poll's 3-point margin of error.
Bush's overall job approval rating was 51 percent, down slightly from November and just above the 50 percent level that heralds a danger zone for candidates seeking reelection.
The newspaper said the share of Americans who cited security issues as their top concern was the same as those who picked economic issues.
___________________________________________________________________
By Randall Mikkelsen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most Americans agree with a former White House counterterrorism chief that President Bush was lax on terrorism before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a poll published on Thursday found.
However, the poll also found that a majority of Americans still support Bush's record on security, a key issue in his reelection effort.
The poll by the Los Angeles Times found that 52 percent of Americans agreed with charges by the former official, Richard Clarke, that Bush "failed to take the threat of terrorism seriously enough" before the attacks, while 40 percent disagreed.
An even larger share, 57 percent, agreed with Clarke that Bush placed a higher priority on invading Iraq than on combating terrorism.
Clarke's charges have received immense publicity in recent weeks -- in testimony before a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, in media coverage of a new book by Clarke, and in the White House's ferocious counterattack against his credibility.
The Los Angeles Times survey of 1,616 Americans, taken March 27-30, also found that 56 percent approved of Bush's handling of the war on terrorism, and 59 percent believed he had made the country more secure -- a figure little changed since November.
Those findings are significant for an election year in which Bush, who has called himself a "war president," has made his leadership of the fight against global terrorism a major campaign theme.
LONG TERM PROBLEM
"While the new questions about Bush's initial response to the terrorist threat could pose a long-term problem for him, the poll suggests the controversy (over Clarke's charges) has not significantly changed the dynamics propelling the country toward another close presidential race," the newspaper said in its report on the poll.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released earlier this week also found majority support for Bush's handling of the terrorism issue, but said the 58 percent support represented the lowest level since measurement began after the Sept. 11 attacks.
A survey released on Wednesday by the nonpartisan Council for Excellence in Government found that fewer than half of Americans -- 47 percent -- believed the United States was safer now than before the Sept. 11 attacks, although the share was greater than the 38 percent minority one year after the attacks.
The Los Angeles Times poll also found some support for the White House's criticisms of Clarke, with 58 percent saying his book was politically motivated. But only 28 percent agreed with charges by some Republicans that his criticisms were motivated by a failure to win a promotion from Bush.
In the presidential campaign pitting Bush against Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the poll showed Kerry leading Bush by 49 percent to 46 percent among voters, a difference within the poll's 3-point margin of error.
Bush's overall job approval rating was 51 percent, down slightly from November and just above the 50 percent level that heralds a danger zone for candidates seeking reelection.
The newspaper said the share of Americans who cited security issues as their top concern was the same as those who picked economic issues.
___________________________________________________________________
April 1, 2004 NY TIMES
9/11 Widows Skillfully Applied the Power of a Question: Why?
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, March 31 — Kristen Breitweiser was at home in Middletown, N.J., cleaning out closets. Patty Casazza of Colts Neck was dashing to the dry cleaners. Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick was headed out to do grocery shopping. Her neighbor Mindy Kleinberg had just packed her children off to school.
Then came word, Tuesday morning, that President Bush had agreed to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. All at once, the cellphones started ringing and the e-mail started flying and "the Jersey girls," as the four women are known in Washington, were getting credit for chalking up another victory in the nation's capital.
Americans just tuning in to the work of the commission investigating the attacks may not have heard of Ms. Breitweiser and the rest. But on Capitol Hill, these suburban women are gaining prominence as savvy World Trade Center widows who came to Washington, as part of a core group of politically active relatives of Sept. 11 victims, and prodded Congress and a recalcitrant White House to create the panel that this week brought official Washington to its knees.
"They call me all the time," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. "They monitor us, they follow our progress, they've supplied us with some of the best questions we've asked. I doubt very much if we would be in existence without them."
The families have spent months pressing for Ms. Rice's public testimony; when the White House failed to send her to last week's hearings, they walked out in silent protest. On Tuesday, two Democratic senators, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Charles E. Schumer of New York, suggested that the families think about asking Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to testify publicly as well.
Ms. Van Auken said that had always been their preference. "Of course we would like them to testify publicly," she said Wednesday.
Before Sept. 11, the Jersey girls (the nickname, which distinguishes the women from their New York and Connecticut counterparts, was popularized in song by Bruce Springsteen) knew little about government and less about politics. The closest Ms. Casazza came to foreign affairs was processing visa applications for French trainees while working for the cosmetics company Lancôme. Ms. Van Auken could not keep the two chambers of Congress straight.
"I remember saying to Patty: `Which one is the one with more people, the Senate or the House?' " she recalled.
The story of how they helped move a seemingly immoveable bureaucracy is at once the tale of a political education, and a sisterhood born of grief. They gathered Monday in the sun-drenched living room of Ms. Casazza's spacious home to tell it. The place, with its well-tended lawn and tennis court out back, spoke of another life. Ms. Casazza, who has a 13-year-old son, is planning to sell it. "Downsizing," she said simply.
Three of them were married to men who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, but the women were strangers until after the attacks. Ms. Breitweiser, 33, and Ms. Casazza, 43, voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. Ms. Van Auken, 49, and Ms. Kleinberg, 42, voted for Al Gore. All insist they had no political agenda, then or now.
But they had a burning question. "We simply wanted to know why our husbands were killed," Ms. Breitweiser said, "why they went to work one day and didn't come back."
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were pressing for a commission; in December 2001, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, had proposed a bill. By the spring of 2002, Ms. Kleinberg had befriended the father of a victim of Pan Am Flight 103, the plane that was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. "He said, `The bill is languishing. If you want it to go anywhere, you have to make it happen.' "
The women went to Home Depot, sawed wood for signs and staged a Washington rally; 300 people came out in the blistering heat. They staked out lawmakers and boarded the elevators marked "Senators Only." They wheedled their way into the White House. Jay Lefkowitz, a former Bush domestic policy adviser, recalls giving them chocolate chip cookies, even as he successfully opposed some demands.
They stayed up nights surfing the Web, taking notes on things like Islamic radicalism and the Federal Aviation Administration's hijacking protocols.
"The Internet," Ms. Breitweiser said, "has been our fifth widow."
In the Capitol, they cried, they pleaded, they cajoled. Ms. Breitweiser showed her husband's wedding ring, found at ground zero still attached to his finger. Ms. Casazza brought photos of a Cantor Fitzgerald pool party, telling lawmakers, "All the men are dead."
They befriended reporters: Gail Sheehy, in The New York Observer, dubbed them "the four moms." With her articulate manner and Ivory girl complexion, Ms. Breitweiser became a fixture on the television networks.
"No one wanted to say no to these women," said a Republican who participated in negotiations over the commission. He said the women "were used" by Democrats, an accusation Republicans repeated recently when Ms. Breitweiser criticized the Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign advertisement. It is an acccusation she hotly denies.
Since the commission began its work, the Sept. 11 relatives, who call themselves the Family Steering Committee, have dogged its every move. When the panel complained of a lack of money, they lobbied for a bigger budget — and won. When the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, refused to grant the panel an extension, they headed to Washington again, and the speaker retreated. "Public pressure by the 9/11 families," Mr. Hastert's spokesman, John Feehery, said about the reversal. "There is no doubt about that."
For every battle they have won, though, the families have lost others. The commission rejected their calls to subpoena classified intelligence briefings and to fire its executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, who co-wrote a book with Ms. Rice. The families also complained that last week's hearings deteriorated into a partisan spat over a book by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official. "They were right on that one," Mr. Kean conceded.
So the Jersey girls are not congratulating themselves now on Ms. Rice. "There are no victories here," Ms. Casazza said. Ms. Breitweiser added: "A victory implies that this is a game. And this is not a game."
______________________________________________________________________________________
9/11 Widows Skillfully Applied the Power of a Question: Why?
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, March 31 — Kristen Breitweiser was at home in Middletown, N.J., cleaning out closets. Patty Casazza of Colts Neck was dashing to the dry cleaners. Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick was headed out to do grocery shopping. Her neighbor Mindy Kleinberg had just packed her children off to school.
Then came word, Tuesday morning, that President Bush had agreed to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. All at once, the cellphones started ringing and the e-mail started flying and "the Jersey girls," as the four women are known in Washington, were getting credit for chalking up another victory in the nation's capital.
Americans just tuning in to the work of the commission investigating the attacks may not have heard of Ms. Breitweiser and the rest. But on Capitol Hill, these suburban women are gaining prominence as savvy World Trade Center widows who came to Washington, as part of a core group of politically active relatives of Sept. 11 victims, and prodded Congress and a recalcitrant White House to create the panel that this week brought official Washington to its knees.
"They call me all the time," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. "They monitor us, they follow our progress, they've supplied us with some of the best questions we've asked. I doubt very much if we would be in existence without them."
The families have spent months pressing for Ms. Rice's public testimony; when the White House failed to send her to last week's hearings, they walked out in silent protest. On Tuesday, two Democratic senators, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Charles E. Schumer of New York, suggested that the families think about asking Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to testify publicly as well.
Ms. Van Auken said that had always been their preference. "Of course we would like them to testify publicly," she said Wednesday.
Before Sept. 11, the Jersey girls (the nickname, which distinguishes the women from their New York and Connecticut counterparts, was popularized in song by Bruce Springsteen) knew little about government and less about politics. The closest Ms. Casazza came to foreign affairs was processing visa applications for French trainees while working for the cosmetics company Lancôme. Ms. Van Auken could not keep the two chambers of Congress straight.
"I remember saying to Patty: `Which one is the one with more people, the Senate or the House?' " she recalled.
The story of how they helped move a seemingly immoveable bureaucracy is at once the tale of a political education, and a sisterhood born of grief. They gathered Monday in the sun-drenched living room of Ms. Casazza's spacious home to tell it. The place, with its well-tended lawn and tennis court out back, spoke of another life. Ms. Casazza, who has a 13-year-old son, is planning to sell it. "Downsizing," she said simply.
Three of them were married to men who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, but the women were strangers until after the attacks. Ms. Breitweiser, 33, and Ms. Casazza, 43, voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. Ms. Van Auken, 49, and Ms. Kleinberg, 42, voted for Al Gore. All insist they had no political agenda, then or now.
But they had a burning question. "We simply wanted to know why our husbands were killed," Ms. Breitweiser said, "why they went to work one day and didn't come back."
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were pressing for a commission; in December 2001, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, had proposed a bill. By the spring of 2002, Ms. Kleinberg had befriended the father of a victim of Pan Am Flight 103, the plane that was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. "He said, `The bill is languishing. If you want it to go anywhere, you have to make it happen.' "
The women went to Home Depot, sawed wood for signs and staged a Washington rally; 300 people came out in the blistering heat. They staked out lawmakers and boarded the elevators marked "Senators Only." They wheedled their way into the White House. Jay Lefkowitz, a former Bush domestic policy adviser, recalls giving them chocolate chip cookies, even as he successfully opposed some demands.
They stayed up nights surfing the Web, taking notes on things like Islamic radicalism and the Federal Aviation Administration's hijacking protocols.
"The Internet," Ms. Breitweiser said, "has been our fifth widow."
In the Capitol, they cried, they pleaded, they cajoled. Ms. Breitweiser showed her husband's wedding ring, found at ground zero still attached to his finger. Ms. Casazza brought photos of a Cantor Fitzgerald pool party, telling lawmakers, "All the men are dead."
They befriended reporters: Gail Sheehy, in The New York Observer, dubbed them "the four moms." With her articulate manner and Ivory girl complexion, Ms. Breitweiser became a fixture on the television networks.
"No one wanted to say no to these women," said a Republican who participated in negotiations over the commission. He said the women "were used" by Democrats, an accusation Republicans repeated recently when Ms. Breitweiser criticized the Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign advertisement. It is an acccusation she hotly denies.
Since the commission began its work, the Sept. 11 relatives, who call themselves the Family Steering Committee, have dogged its every move. When the panel complained of a lack of money, they lobbied for a bigger budget — and won. When the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, refused to grant the panel an extension, they headed to Washington again, and the speaker retreated. "Public pressure by the 9/11 families," Mr. Hastert's spokesman, John Feehery, said about the reversal. "There is no doubt about that."
For every battle they have won, though, the families have lost others. The commission rejected their calls to subpoena classified intelligence briefings and to fire its executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, who co-wrote a book with Ms. Rice. The families also complained that last week's hearings deteriorated into a partisan spat over a book by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official. "They were right on that one," Mr. Kean conceded.
So the Jersey girls are not congratulating themselves now on Ms. Rice. "There are no victories here," Ms. Casazza said. Ms. Breitweiser added: "A victory implies that this is a game. And this is not a game."
______________________________________________________________________________________
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Interactive Map Highlights "Jobs First"
Click on the link above to see an interactive map comparing the difference of Bush vs Kerry in your state's economy. John Kerry is unveiling a comprehensive economic agenda that will unleash the productive potential of America's economy to help create 10 million jobs in his first term as President. In the past America's dynamic economy and small businesses have been capable of creating two to three million jobs annually. But under President Bush, a failed economic strategy has resulted in the loss of nearly 3 million private-sector jobs - the result of a lack of confidence in the economy and George Bush's neglect of America's workers.
John Kerry will restore sound economic policies and create conditions that will allow America to regain its competitive edge and create 10 million jobs in four years.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Click on the link above to see an interactive map comparing the difference of Bush vs Kerry in your state's economy. John Kerry is unveiling a comprehensive economic agenda that will unleash the productive potential of America's economy to help create 10 million jobs in his first term as President. In the past America's dynamic economy and small businesses have been capable of creating two to three million jobs annually. But under President Bush, a failed economic strategy has resulted in the loss of nearly 3 million private-sector jobs - the result of a lack of confidence in the economy and George Bush's neglect of America's workers.
John Kerry will restore sound economic policies and create conditions that will allow America to regain its competitive edge and create 10 million jobs in four years.
___________________________________________________________________________________
50 Cent Gas Tax: Yet Another Misleading Bush Attack Ad
BUSH FICTION: Bush Ad: Kerry “supported a 50-cent-a-gallon gas tax.”
FACT: John Kerry has never sponsored or voted for a 50 cent gas tax increase.
Sen. Charles Robb introduced legislation in 1993 that phased in a 50-cent increase. John Kerry did not vote for or co-sponsor this bill. (S. 1068, Introduced 5/28/93) It’s George Bush who has broken his promise to lead the way to a sustainable energy policy. His refusal to stand up to his big oil contributors has contributed to the highest gas prices in history – an effective $245 tax increase on American families and commuters.
The Bush Administration is shamelessly misleading the American people about John Kerry’s record on cutting middle class taxes.
But there’s something they’re not telling you: while they are happy to use the gas tax for political purposes, George Bush and the Republicans have NEVER ONCE supported lowering the gas tax on middle class families, despite the fact that Bush promised to during his 2000 campaign. Bush has submitted three budgets and passed two huge tax cuts, but the gas tax has not changed one penny under George Bush. Gas prices, on the other hand, have increased dramatically, reaching their highest level in history and taxing families by $24 billion this year alone. While George Bush campaigned on the issue, he has let the problem sit and fester so that consumers are left paying the bill. Instead of helping consumers who will pay $24 billion more for gas this year, Bush and Cheney are aiding oil companies’ record profits and increasing American dependence on foreign countries.
Bush Ad: “families would pay $657 more a year"
FACT: Bush Gas Tax Hike Has ALREADY Cost Americans $24 Billion More
On January 5, consumers paid $1.51 for an average gallon of gas. As of today – less than three months later – they’re paying $1.75 per gallon, a 24 cent increase since January. According to the Wall Street Journal, “every penny increase in a gallon of gas costs consumers $1 billion a year.” That’s a $24 billion gas tax hike this year alone.
* But that’s not all: nationwide gas prices have risen 12% since 2000, and are expected to skyrocket upward to $1.83 a gallon this summer – a 17% increase since Bush took office.
* Guy Caruso, the administrator of the Energy Information Administration told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that an average family will spend about $1,700 for gas in 2004. At today’s gas prices, this means that an average family will spend over $300 more for gas than they would have if prices were at the level they were the week Bush took office.
* Bush’s top economic advisor backs a 50 cent per gallon increase. In Fortune Magazine, Gregory Mankiw, President Bush’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, argued that a 50 cent gas tax is a necessary component of income tax cuts. He explained that “cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming--all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.” [Fortune, 5/24/99]
Bush Ad: Kerry supported higher gasoline taxes 11 times.
FACT: Kerry Voted for 23 Million New Jobs, a Balanced Budget, and LOWER Gas taxes
* 1993 Vote balanced the budget and led to the creation of 23 Million New Jobs. The 1993 vote Bush criticizes put the U.S. back on track toward a balanced budget and fiscal discipline. The measure passed by one vote and did not receive ANY Republican support in either house of Congress. [Senate Roll Call vote, 1993, #247]. But after turning the largest surplus in history into the largest deficits ever, we can’t expect Bush to praise deficit reduction.
* REPUBLICANS opposed repealing the gas tax. Another vote Bush criticizes was to repeal the 4.3 cents gas tax. Unfortunately, it was defeated when 15 Republicans crossed the aisle to join Kerry because repealing the gas tax would be a job-killing plan -- costing up to 50,000 jobs. Republicans who also opposed the temporary suspension were from a wide range of states and ideological bents, including Pat Roberts (KS), Craig Thomas (WY), and Chuck Hagel (NE).
* George Bush counts airplane fuel as gas tax: One vote Bush uses is a vote to exempt airplane fuel from the proposed BTU tax. Keep that in mind next time you pull your 747 to the local Exxon pump. [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d103:SP00203:]
BUSH AND GAS TAXES: Bush only cares about the gas tax during election years
In 2000, George W. Bush promised to reduce the gas tax “as a means of helping motorists cope with the sharp rise in gasoline prices.” But not one of his budgets or tax cuts have kept this promise. In fact, while families have been hurt by the highest prices in history under Bush, he has delivered far more for the wealthy and his contributors. Here is a sample of tax breaks he has delivered for the wealthy instead of keeping his promise to roll back gas taxes:
· eliminate personal income taxes on dividends
· reduce capital gains taxes on sales of corporate stock.
According to Citizens for Tax Justice, “these new loopholes would cost $364 billion over the next 10 years. In 2003, half of the tax reductions from these provisions would go to only one percent of all taxpayers, and almost three-quarters would go to the best-off five percent.”
_______________________________________________________________
BUSH FICTION: Bush Ad: Kerry “supported a 50-cent-a-gallon gas tax.”
FACT: John Kerry has never sponsored or voted for a 50 cent gas tax increase.
Sen. Charles Robb introduced legislation in 1993 that phased in a 50-cent increase. John Kerry did not vote for or co-sponsor this bill. (S. 1068, Introduced 5/28/93) It’s George Bush who has broken his promise to lead the way to a sustainable energy policy. His refusal to stand up to his big oil contributors has contributed to the highest gas prices in history – an effective $245 tax increase on American families and commuters.
The Bush Administration is shamelessly misleading the American people about John Kerry’s record on cutting middle class taxes.
But there’s something they’re not telling you: while they are happy to use the gas tax for political purposes, George Bush and the Republicans have NEVER ONCE supported lowering the gas tax on middle class families, despite the fact that Bush promised to during his 2000 campaign. Bush has submitted three budgets and passed two huge tax cuts, but the gas tax has not changed one penny under George Bush. Gas prices, on the other hand, have increased dramatically, reaching their highest level in history and taxing families by $24 billion this year alone. While George Bush campaigned on the issue, he has let the problem sit and fester so that consumers are left paying the bill. Instead of helping consumers who will pay $24 billion more for gas this year, Bush and Cheney are aiding oil companies’ record profits and increasing American dependence on foreign countries.
Bush Ad: “families would pay $657 more a year"
FACT: Bush Gas Tax Hike Has ALREADY Cost Americans $24 Billion More
On January 5, consumers paid $1.51 for an average gallon of gas. As of today – less than three months later – they’re paying $1.75 per gallon, a 24 cent increase since January. According to the Wall Street Journal, “every penny increase in a gallon of gas costs consumers $1 billion a year.” That’s a $24 billion gas tax hike this year alone.
* But that’s not all: nationwide gas prices have risen 12% since 2000, and are expected to skyrocket upward to $1.83 a gallon this summer – a 17% increase since Bush took office.
* Guy Caruso, the administrator of the Energy Information Administration told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that an average family will spend about $1,700 for gas in 2004. At today’s gas prices, this means that an average family will spend over $300 more for gas than they would have if prices were at the level they were the week Bush took office.
* Bush’s top economic advisor backs a 50 cent per gallon increase. In Fortune Magazine, Gregory Mankiw, President Bush’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, argued that a 50 cent gas tax is a necessary component of income tax cuts. He explained that “cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming--all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.” [Fortune, 5/24/99]
Bush Ad: Kerry supported higher gasoline taxes 11 times.
FACT: Kerry Voted for 23 Million New Jobs, a Balanced Budget, and LOWER Gas taxes
* 1993 Vote balanced the budget and led to the creation of 23 Million New Jobs. The 1993 vote Bush criticizes put the U.S. back on track toward a balanced budget and fiscal discipline. The measure passed by one vote and did not receive ANY Republican support in either house of Congress. [Senate Roll Call vote, 1993, #247]. But after turning the largest surplus in history into the largest deficits ever, we can’t expect Bush to praise deficit reduction.
* REPUBLICANS opposed repealing the gas tax. Another vote Bush criticizes was to repeal the 4.3 cents gas tax. Unfortunately, it was defeated when 15 Republicans crossed the aisle to join Kerry because repealing the gas tax would be a job-killing plan -- costing up to 50,000 jobs. Republicans who also opposed the temporary suspension were from a wide range of states and ideological bents, including Pat Roberts (KS), Craig Thomas (WY), and Chuck Hagel (NE).
* George Bush counts airplane fuel as gas tax: One vote Bush uses is a vote to exempt airplane fuel from the proposed BTU tax. Keep that in mind next time you pull your 747 to the local Exxon pump. [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d103:SP00203:]
BUSH AND GAS TAXES: Bush only cares about the gas tax during election years
In 2000, George W. Bush promised to reduce the gas tax “as a means of helping motorists cope with the sharp rise in gasoline prices.” But not one of his budgets or tax cuts have kept this promise. In fact, while families have been hurt by the highest prices in history under Bush, he has delivered far more for the wealthy and his contributors. Here is a sample of tax breaks he has delivered for the wealthy instead of keeping his promise to roll back gas taxes:
· eliminate personal income taxes on dividends
· reduce capital gains taxes on sales of corporate stock.
According to Citizens for Tax Justice, “these new loopholes would cost $364 billion over the next 10 years. In 2003, half of the tax reductions from these provisions would go to only one percent of all taxpayers, and almost three-quarters would go to the best-off five percent.”
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004
The Bush/Cheney Sloganator
The Bush/Cheney election site provided the means to make your own slogans for the campaign. Until these started popping up.
__________________________________________________________________________________
The Bush/Cheney election site provided the means to make your own slogans for the campaign. Until these started popping up.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Cheney's Economics 101: Higher Deficits, 3 Million Jobs Lost, Mountains of Debt
Today Vice President Cheney is attacking John Kerry for opposing the Bush-Cheney economic plan which has lost 3 million jobs, created spiraling budget deficits and put the nation in debt for generations to come. Like Bush, Cheney has no credibility to lecture anyone on the economy. The Bush-Cheney approach to the economy isn't working, and Bush and Cheney are practically the only ones who continue to defend their failed economic policies. People want a change in the direction of our economy, and John Kerry is offering that change with his economic plan which will create 10 million new jobs, provide real tax relief for the middle class and cut our record-high deficits.
1. Bush-Cheney: Worst Job Creation Record Since Hoover. “The economy has lost 2.2 million payroll jobs since January 2001, giving Bush the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover. The U.S. economy, to match the White House's jobs forecast, would have to churn out well over 220,000 new jobs each month for the rest of the year, economists say.” Nationally, the economy has lost 2.9 million private sector jobs under Bush-Cheney team. Almost 2.8 million of those are in the manufacturing sector. [Associated Press, 2/11/2004; Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov]
2. Bush-Cheney Solution: Tax Cuts for the Rich. The Bush administration’s solution to economic problems was tax cuts for the richest Americans. They said their tax cuts would create about 4 million jobs over the course of Bush’s first 4 years. Instead the country lost 3 million jobs, and the richest 1% of taxpayers received about 50% of the total amount from tax cuts. Bush’s next solution? More tax cuts for the rich. [www.ctj.org; Associated Press, 2/19/2004; NBC, “Meet the Press,” 2/8/2004]
3. Bush-Cheney Team Presided Over “Biggest Gusher of Red Ink In History.” “President George W. Bush has now presided over the biggest gusher of red ink in the nation's history, from a surplus of $127 billion when he entered office for fiscal 2001 to a 2004 deficit projection of $521 billion. …” [Business Week Online, 2/3/2004]
4. As Gas Prices Soar and Consumers Suffer, Cheney Keeps Collecting from Oil Company. Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Texas-based Halliburton from 1995-2000. In addition to providing a massive salary and bonus for only eight months of work in 2000, Halliburton’s board of directors voted to give Dick Cheney a $20 million retirement package when he resigned. [New York Times, 8/12/2000; Los Angeles Times, 7/24/2000; Associated Press, 7/18/2002]
Oil-Industry Execs Argued for Ways to Create Higher Gas Prices. “A 400-page report in 2002 by the staff of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, then chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, uncovered several internal memos in which oil-industry execs advocated measures to hold back refinery output to keep gas prices high. [Business Week, 3/29/2004]
5. Cheney’s Firm Also Won No-Bid Contract, Then Billed Taxpayers. “Because Cheney served from 1995 to 2000 as CEO of Halliburton, which has been the biggest winner in landing Iraq work, the West Wing's ties to the company invite extra scrutiny. Cheney, who earned about $44 million during his tenure at Halliburton, has asserted that he has cut ‘all my ties with the company,’ but Halliburton confirms that he receives on average about $180,000 of deferred compensation annually from the company. Since the onset of the Iraq war, critics have decried the unusual no-bid contract that a Halliburton subsidiary received and the apparently inflated bills the company submitted to the government for some of its work.” [National Journal, 2/14/2004]
REALITY CHECK: CHENEY’S NOT TELLING THE TRUTH; KERRY HAS CONSISTENTLY SUPPORTED MIDDLE CLASS TAX CUTS
“In a speech planned for delivery to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Cheney questions Kerry's commitment to extending tax cuts due to expire: an increase in the child tax credit; tax reductions for some married couples who would pay more than they would as individuals; and an expansion of the bottom 10 percent tax bracket. Kerry has said he would keep those tax cuts in place. Cheney was to say that Kerry voted against creating the new 10 percent bracket; against repealing the inheritance tax; against cutting taxes on dividend income; and against raising the amount of investment expenses that businesses can write off.” [Lindlaw, Associated Press, 3/28/2004]
Once again, Dick Cheney is telling less than half of the truth. Today the Vice President has cherry-picked a handful of votes that were part of the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 and 2003, which John Kerry opposed because they primarily benefited the wealthy and contributed to record deficits. What Cheney didn’t say was that Kerry supported the middle class alternatives to the Bush Tax Cuts. Here are just a few examples of things that were included in those alternatives, which, again, Cheney failed to mention:
THE TRUTH: Kerry actually voted he actually voted to EXPAND the child credit by lowering the eligibility threshold for a refundable child tax credit from $10,500 to $5,000. [2003, #153]
THE TRUTH: Kerry actually voted for FASTER marriage penalty relief; casting a YES vote for Conrad’s amendment to cause marriage penalty relief for those in the 15 percent bracket to take effect in 2002. [HR 1836, 5/17/2001, #112]
THE TRUTH: Kerry voted to EXPAND the 10 percent bracket. [2003; #168]
THE TRUTH: Kerry voted to ELIMINATE the estate tax for small businesses and family farms. He voted to exempt family owned farms and businesses immediately, raise the exemptions and cut the estate tax rate for estates under $10 million. [HR 8, 6/12/2002, #149, 150]
THE TRUTH: Kerry voted to CUT taxes for small businesses.
Kerry voted to allow businesses for one year to write off $75,000 in investment, create a 50 percent tax credit for small business health care expenses, [2003, #167] voted to extend the business research and development tax credit through 2013, [2003, #154] and voted to extend R&D tax credit and increase first-year write-off for small business (a $4.3 billion tax cut) [1993, #326]
____________________________________________________________________
Today Vice President Cheney is attacking John Kerry for opposing the Bush-Cheney economic plan which has lost 3 million jobs, created spiraling budget deficits and put the nation in debt for generations to come. Like Bush, Cheney has no credibility to lecture anyone on the economy. The Bush-Cheney approach to the economy isn't working, and Bush and Cheney are practically the only ones who continue to defend their failed economic policies. People want a change in the direction of our economy, and John Kerry is offering that change with his economic plan which will create 10 million new jobs, provide real tax relief for the middle class and cut our record-high deficits.
1. Bush-Cheney: Worst Job Creation Record Since Hoover. “The economy has lost 2.2 million payroll jobs since January 2001, giving Bush the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover. The U.S. economy, to match the White House's jobs forecast, would have to churn out well over 220,000 new jobs each month for the rest of the year, economists say.” Nationally, the economy has lost 2.9 million private sector jobs under Bush-Cheney team. Almost 2.8 million of those are in the manufacturing sector. [Associated Press, 2/11/2004; Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov]
2. Bush-Cheney Solution: Tax Cuts for the Rich. The Bush administration’s solution to economic problems was tax cuts for the richest Americans. They said their tax cuts would create about 4 million jobs over the course of Bush’s first 4 years. Instead the country lost 3 million jobs, and the richest 1% of taxpayers received about 50% of the total amount from tax cuts. Bush’s next solution? More tax cuts for the rich. [www.ctj.org; Associated Press, 2/19/2004; NBC, “Meet the Press,” 2/8/2004]
3. Bush-Cheney Team Presided Over “Biggest Gusher of Red Ink In History.” “President George W. Bush has now presided over the biggest gusher of red ink in the nation's history, from a surplus of $127 billion when he entered office for fiscal 2001 to a 2004 deficit projection of $521 billion. …” [Business Week Online, 2/3/2004]
4. As Gas Prices Soar and Consumers Suffer, Cheney Keeps Collecting from Oil Company. Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Texas-based Halliburton from 1995-2000. In addition to providing a massive salary and bonus for only eight months of work in 2000, Halliburton’s board of directors voted to give Dick Cheney a $20 million retirement package when he resigned. [New York Times, 8/12/2000; Los Angeles Times, 7/24/2000; Associated Press, 7/18/2002]
Oil-Industry Execs Argued for Ways to Create Higher Gas Prices. “A 400-page report in 2002 by the staff of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, then chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, uncovered several internal memos in which oil-industry execs advocated measures to hold back refinery output to keep gas prices high. [Business Week, 3/29/2004]
5. Cheney’s Firm Also Won No-Bid Contract, Then Billed Taxpayers. “Because Cheney served from 1995 to 2000 as CEO of Halliburton, which has been the biggest winner in landing Iraq work, the West Wing's ties to the company invite extra scrutiny. Cheney, who earned about $44 million during his tenure at Halliburton, has asserted that he has cut ‘all my ties with the company,’ but Halliburton confirms that he receives on average about $180,000 of deferred compensation annually from the company. Since the onset of the Iraq war, critics have decried the unusual no-bid contract that a Halliburton subsidiary received and the apparently inflated bills the company submitted to the government for some of its work.” [National Journal, 2/14/2004]
REALITY CHECK: CHENEY’S NOT TELLING THE TRUTH; KERRY HAS CONSISTENTLY SUPPORTED MIDDLE CLASS TAX CUTS
“In a speech planned for delivery to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Cheney questions Kerry's commitment to extending tax cuts due to expire: an increase in the child tax credit; tax reductions for some married couples who would pay more than they would as individuals; and an expansion of the bottom 10 percent tax bracket. Kerry has said he would keep those tax cuts in place. Cheney was to say that Kerry voted against creating the new 10 percent bracket; against repealing the inheritance tax; against cutting taxes on dividend income; and against raising the amount of investment expenses that businesses can write off.” [Lindlaw, Associated Press, 3/28/2004]
Once again, Dick Cheney is telling less than half of the truth. Today the Vice President has cherry-picked a handful of votes that were part of the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 and 2003, which John Kerry opposed because they primarily benefited the wealthy and contributed to record deficits. What Cheney didn’t say was that Kerry supported the middle class alternatives to the Bush Tax Cuts. Here are just a few examples of things that were included in those alternatives, which, again, Cheney failed to mention:
THE TRUTH: Kerry actually voted he actually voted to EXPAND the child credit by lowering the eligibility threshold for a refundable child tax credit from $10,500 to $5,000. [2003, #153]
THE TRUTH: Kerry actually voted for FASTER marriage penalty relief; casting a YES vote for Conrad’s amendment to cause marriage penalty relief for those in the 15 percent bracket to take effect in 2002. [HR 1836, 5/17/2001, #112]
THE TRUTH: Kerry voted to EXPAND the 10 percent bracket. [2003; #168]
THE TRUTH: Kerry voted to ELIMINATE the estate tax for small businesses and family farms. He voted to exempt family owned farms and businesses immediately, raise the exemptions and cut the estate tax rate for estates under $10 million. [HR 8, 6/12/2002, #149, 150]
THE TRUTH: Kerry voted to CUT taxes for small businesses.
Kerry voted to allow businesses for one year to write off $75,000 in investment, create a 50 percent tax credit for small business health care expenses, [2003, #167] voted to extend the business research and development tax credit through 2013, [2003, #154] and voted to extend R&D tax credit and increase first-year write-off for small business (a $4.3 billion tax cut) [1993, #326]
____________________________________________________________________
Monday, March 29, 2004
Police Chief Responds to Desperate Bush Radio Ad
Washington, DC – Today, Lowell (Mass.) Chief of Police Ed Davis made the following statement in response to a Bush/Cheney national radio ad.
“As a law enforcement officer, I have worked with John Kerry since he was a prosecutor here in Lowell. From his years as a prosecutor to his fight to expand the crime bill to add more police on the streets right here in Lowell, across the state and the nation, he had been a fighter for protecting our neighbors.
“John Kerry has a plan that will cut taxes for middle class families and get us the support we need from Washington to defend the homeland.”
“John Kerry will also fight to get health care costs lowered for working families. While there are many misleading charges by the Bush campaign, John Kerry has been a fighter for law enforcement all his life and he will be a fighter for us in the White House.”
“John Kerry came to Lowell in 1994 to tour our most troubled precincts, he understands the crime problem. Senator Kerry and I conferred while he was preparing the first crime bill. His work gave us the resources we needed to reduce the crime rate over 60%. The city of Lowell is a better place because of the Senator Kerry’s commitment to law enforcement. When John Kerry continues this type of success when he gets to the White House, America will be a much safer place.”
_________________________________________________________________________
Washington, DC – Today, Lowell (Mass.) Chief of Police Ed Davis made the following statement in response to a Bush/Cheney national radio ad.
“As a law enforcement officer, I have worked with John Kerry since he was a prosecutor here in Lowell. From his years as a prosecutor to his fight to expand the crime bill to add more police on the streets right here in Lowell, across the state and the nation, he had been a fighter for protecting our neighbors.
“John Kerry has a plan that will cut taxes for middle class families and get us the support we need from Washington to defend the homeland.”
“John Kerry will also fight to get health care costs lowered for working families. While there are many misleading charges by the Bush campaign, John Kerry has been a fighter for law enforcement all his life and he will be a fighter for us in the White House.”
“John Kerry came to Lowell in 1994 to tour our most troubled precincts, he understands the crime problem. Senator Kerry and I conferred while he was preparing the first crime bill. His work gave us the resources we needed to reduce the crime rate over 60%. The city of Lowell is a better place because of the Senator Kerry’s commitment to law enforcement. When John Kerry continues this type of success when he gets to the White House, America will be a much safer place.”
_________________________________________________________________________
March 26, 2004
It's Midnight in America
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
We have moved from Reagan's "Morning in America" to Bush's "Midnight in America" in less than 20 years.
This is the darkest hour for our nation, when lies, deception and political vengeance -- at the expense of our national security -- are the primary skill set of the executive branch and its subsidiaries: a Republican controlled Congress and an increasingly Republican controlled judiciary, with five Supreme Court votes lined up to side with the GOP on important partisan issues, like the theft of a presidency.
What happens during this midnight hour will determine if democracy continues to exist in our country. It will determine if we will survive as a nation of laws -- based on our Constitution -- or become a nation ruled by an extremist, elitist, dishonest one-party system, whose brazen arrogance is the veil that is used by them to conceal their chronic incompetence.
The brutal attacks on the character of Richard Clarke represent the standard Bush defense against the truth: assassinate and undermine the character of the truth teller. In so doing, the Bush Cartel has generally been successful in diverting the media from analyzing the facts and details of the Bush Administration's betrayal of America -- and of their incompetence -- by questioning the motives of the truth tellers, as they emerge one by one.
As a result, the mainstream media, generally echoing the White House character assassination message points, has betrayed America too. It has forgotten that this was an administration that outed a CIA operative who specialized in the tracking of illicit WMDs, just to wreak vengeance on her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, because he had the temerity to tell the truth about a Bush lie. This is a mainstream media that has, just within weeks, forgotten that the recollections of the former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, corroborate the gist of Clarke's memories about the White House's obsession with Iraq at the expense of preventing 9/11 and fighting Al-Qaeda. This is a media that has forgotten John DiIulio, who wrote a scathing letter detailing that the Bush Administration was solely a cynical political administration, run by "Mayberry Machiavellis," until the White House junkyard dog squad slimed him into submission. And others who have dared stand up for the truth have shared similar fates. These are tactics worthy of Stalin, not an American president.
Shortly before the Iraq War we wrote this about the Bush Administration:
In the end the Bush Cartel is banking on making the kind of impression on the world that a thug makes with a baseball bat on a car.
It's all about image and firepower. It's how the playground bully establishes himself. Pick the weakest guy in the school -- the one nobody likes much anyway -- and beat the living daylights out of him. Keep all the kids nervous and on edge. Let them think that you are a little bit mad and might just beat up on them for the fun of it. Tell them that you will protect them from the gang that lives in the next neighborhood in return for their loyalty. Make an example of anyone who challenges your leadership by denouncing them and bloodying them up. Establish a system of stool pigeons. Rummage through lockers, at your will, for any signs of betrayal. Issue warnings from time-to-time about how you have information that the other gang has plans to rape your mothers and sisters, and lay waste to your homes -- and that is why you need to trust in the playground bully from your school, because he will protect your mothers and sisters from the gang that few have ever actually encountered.
It's governance by brazen muscle power, by unfailing commitment to picking a target to destroy as an example of your ruthlessness, and your will to use any means necessary to establish and preserve your leadership. And if your attack is successful, you will enjoy the spoils of war -- the second largest oil reserves in the world. This is all the better, because you double up your goal of displaying raw, harsh military power, by combining it with additional natural resources that reinforce your dominance. You will be sitting on top of the world, masters of the universe, controlling almost everything on the Monopoly board.
And to accomplish this goal, you never blink, you never apologize, you never let facts get in the way of your mission. You remain steadfast and focused. Getting distracted by truth and ethics is a sign of weakness. And weakness is something you can smell and feel in a man. [LINK]
The mainstream press is still playing the Clarke story, for the most part, as if it is a game of whose spin will prevail -- Clarke's or the White House's -- rather than exploring the validity of Clarke's charges that the Bush White House failed to seriously try to prevent 9/11 from occurring. The media covers the issue as if it is some sort of sporting event.
But it is not. It is a battle for our nation's security. It is a battle over whether we will be ruled by a dishonest, deceiving anti-democracy executive branch of thugs. It is a battle for the truth and for the preservation of our Constitutional democracy.
At least this battle is out in the open now. The Democratic nominee for President of the United States is now challenging the mob-like tactics, credibility and competence of the Bush Cartel. In what could have been a BuzzFlash quotation, Kerry charged this weekend: "It's interesting, every time somebody comes up and says something that this White House doesn't like, they don't answer the questions about it or show the truth about it. They go into character assassination mode," Kerry said. [The Buffalo News]
Kerry is bringing out in the open the Karl Rove/Lee Atwater school of gangland political tactics. That, for the Democrats, counts as a major breakthrough during this hour of darkness for our Constitutional democracy. In the same week, Tom Daschle, marking a milestone, emerged from a record of timid political leadership to call the Bush administration to account for its tactics and record -- in three separate speeches. And West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller apologized for voting to allow Bush to go to war with Iraq -- and revealed that Cheney had put pressure on three senate committee chairmen not to investigate the Bush administration.
Kerry, Daschle and Rockefeller follow belatedly in the foot steps of Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Dick Durbin and a handful of other Democratic Senators -- along with the likes of people like Henry Waxman, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and Jan Schakowsky (to name a few) in the House of Representatives -- who have led a valiant, lonely effort to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its brutal anti-democracy actions and for its core ineptitude in governing and in combating terror.
But BuzzFlash holds no grudges. Kerry has broken through the threshold that leaders of the Democratic Party previously would not cross. He has publicly reprimanded the Bush Administration for its gutter political tactics. He has drawn attention to the gap between Bush's supposed morality and the actual immorality of an administration that builds its governance on a pyramid of lies, deception and zealous ideology.
Karl Rove knows that the American media lives and dies by sensational headlines and patriotic visual images, not details. But it is the details that make up the foundation of democracy.
Rove knows that truth tellers such as Richard Clarke are a danger because they shed light on the activities of betrayal that occur in the dark spider hole from which Dick Cheney rules -- sending instructions by courier to our dauphin prince, George W. Bush.
It is the midnight hour for America. The battle over Richard Clarke represents the battle for the future of majority rule in America, for the right of American citizens to receive the truth from their government, and for the right of Americans to have a government that defends them from external and internal threats.
It is time for America to wake up to a future where democracy, majority rule, honesty, integrity and reverence for the Constitution are restored to the White House.
God knows we deserve it, but it will only be achieved by increasing the intensity of our efforts. The backbone of the Bush Cartel's dishonest and cynical rule must be broken.
The barbarians are no longer at the gates. They are in the White House.
____________________________________________________________________________
It's Midnight in America
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
We have moved from Reagan's "Morning in America" to Bush's "Midnight in America" in less than 20 years.
This is the darkest hour for our nation, when lies, deception and political vengeance -- at the expense of our national security -- are the primary skill set of the executive branch and its subsidiaries: a Republican controlled Congress and an increasingly Republican controlled judiciary, with five Supreme Court votes lined up to side with the GOP on important partisan issues, like the theft of a presidency.
What happens during this midnight hour will determine if democracy continues to exist in our country. It will determine if we will survive as a nation of laws -- based on our Constitution -- or become a nation ruled by an extremist, elitist, dishonest one-party system, whose brazen arrogance is the veil that is used by them to conceal their chronic incompetence.
The brutal attacks on the character of Richard Clarke represent the standard Bush defense against the truth: assassinate and undermine the character of the truth teller. In so doing, the Bush Cartel has generally been successful in diverting the media from analyzing the facts and details of the Bush Administration's betrayal of America -- and of their incompetence -- by questioning the motives of the truth tellers, as they emerge one by one.
As a result, the mainstream media, generally echoing the White House character assassination message points, has betrayed America too. It has forgotten that this was an administration that outed a CIA operative who specialized in the tracking of illicit WMDs, just to wreak vengeance on her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, because he had the temerity to tell the truth about a Bush lie. This is a mainstream media that has, just within weeks, forgotten that the recollections of the former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, corroborate the gist of Clarke's memories about the White House's obsession with Iraq at the expense of preventing 9/11 and fighting Al-Qaeda. This is a media that has forgotten John DiIulio, who wrote a scathing letter detailing that the Bush Administration was solely a cynical political administration, run by "Mayberry Machiavellis," until the White House junkyard dog squad slimed him into submission. And others who have dared stand up for the truth have shared similar fates. These are tactics worthy of Stalin, not an American president.
Shortly before the Iraq War we wrote this about the Bush Administration:
In the end the Bush Cartel is banking on making the kind of impression on the world that a thug makes with a baseball bat on a car.
It's all about image and firepower. It's how the playground bully establishes himself. Pick the weakest guy in the school -- the one nobody likes much anyway -- and beat the living daylights out of him. Keep all the kids nervous and on edge. Let them think that you are a little bit mad and might just beat up on them for the fun of it. Tell them that you will protect them from the gang that lives in the next neighborhood in return for their loyalty. Make an example of anyone who challenges your leadership by denouncing them and bloodying them up. Establish a system of stool pigeons. Rummage through lockers, at your will, for any signs of betrayal. Issue warnings from time-to-time about how you have information that the other gang has plans to rape your mothers and sisters, and lay waste to your homes -- and that is why you need to trust in the playground bully from your school, because he will protect your mothers and sisters from the gang that few have ever actually encountered.
It's governance by brazen muscle power, by unfailing commitment to picking a target to destroy as an example of your ruthlessness, and your will to use any means necessary to establish and preserve your leadership. And if your attack is successful, you will enjoy the spoils of war -- the second largest oil reserves in the world. This is all the better, because you double up your goal of displaying raw, harsh military power, by combining it with additional natural resources that reinforce your dominance. You will be sitting on top of the world, masters of the universe, controlling almost everything on the Monopoly board.
And to accomplish this goal, you never blink, you never apologize, you never let facts get in the way of your mission. You remain steadfast and focused. Getting distracted by truth and ethics is a sign of weakness. And weakness is something you can smell and feel in a man. [LINK]
The mainstream press is still playing the Clarke story, for the most part, as if it is a game of whose spin will prevail -- Clarke's or the White House's -- rather than exploring the validity of Clarke's charges that the Bush White House failed to seriously try to prevent 9/11 from occurring. The media covers the issue as if it is some sort of sporting event.
But it is not. It is a battle for our nation's security. It is a battle over whether we will be ruled by a dishonest, deceiving anti-democracy executive branch of thugs. It is a battle for the truth and for the preservation of our Constitutional democracy.
At least this battle is out in the open now. The Democratic nominee for President of the United States is now challenging the mob-like tactics, credibility and competence of the Bush Cartel. In what could have been a BuzzFlash quotation, Kerry charged this weekend: "It's interesting, every time somebody comes up and says something that this White House doesn't like, they don't answer the questions about it or show the truth about it. They go into character assassination mode," Kerry said. [The Buffalo News]
Kerry is bringing out in the open the Karl Rove/Lee Atwater school of gangland political tactics. That, for the Democrats, counts as a major breakthrough during this hour of darkness for our Constitutional democracy. In the same week, Tom Daschle, marking a milestone, emerged from a record of timid political leadership to call the Bush administration to account for its tactics and record -- in three separate speeches. And West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller apologized for voting to allow Bush to go to war with Iraq -- and revealed that Cheney had put pressure on three senate committee chairmen not to investigate the Bush administration.
Kerry, Daschle and Rockefeller follow belatedly in the foot steps of Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Dick Durbin and a handful of other Democratic Senators -- along with the likes of people like Henry Waxman, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and Jan Schakowsky (to name a few) in the House of Representatives -- who have led a valiant, lonely effort to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its brutal anti-democracy actions and for its core ineptitude in governing and in combating terror.
But BuzzFlash holds no grudges. Kerry has broken through the threshold that leaders of the Democratic Party previously would not cross. He has publicly reprimanded the Bush Administration for its gutter political tactics. He has drawn attention to the gap between Bush's supposed morality and the actual immorality of an administration that builds its governance on a pyramid of lies, deception and zealous ideology.
Karl Rove knows that the American media lives and dies by sensational headlines and patriotic visual images, not details. But it is the details that make up the foundation of democracy.
Rove knows that truth tellers such as Richard Clarke are a danger because they shed light on the activities of betrayal that occur in the dark spider hole from which Dick Cheney rules -- sending instructions by courier to our dauphin prince, George W. Bush.
It is the midnight hour for America. The battle over Richard Clarke represents the battle for the future of majority rule in America, for the right of American citizens to receive the truth from their government, and for the right of Americans to have a government that defends them from external and internal threats.
It is time for America to wake up to a future where democracy, majority rule, honesty, integrity and reverence for the Constitution are restored to the White House.
God knows we deserve it, but it will only be achieved by increasing the intensity of our efforts. The backbone of the Bush Cartel's dishonest and cynical rule must be broken.
The barbarians are no longer at the gates. They are in the White House.
____________________________________________________________________________
Jimmy Breslin
Rice keeps door closed to the public NEWSDAY
Richard Ben-Veniste of the 9/11 committee was pretty exciting as prosecutor in the Watergate case. Now, during a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, he suddenly asked only one question of a witness and then turned to another commission member and said, "You can have all my time if I can have yours with Condoleezza Rice." Swinging a sash weight in a light-hearted warm-up. He is interested in a couple of discrepancies.
Condoleezza Rice sure heard that. She made a private appearance in front of the 9/11 commission, but won't make a public appearance under oath. Watch how far away she stays from Ben-Veniste. She says she preserves the confidentiality of the White House. Yet she goes on any television. Tonight she is scheduled for the "60 Minutes" show. There is no precedent stopping presidential advisers from testifying in front of a committee. Just in recent times, you had Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sanford Berger, John Podesta and Charles Ruff appear.
And right now you are entitled to think that by refusing to appear under oath, Rice has something to hide.
Already, she has us mixed up by saying in a private meeting that she never heard anybody mention that planes could be used as missiles. Then she asked to change that story and said that intelligence might have or did mention this two years before. Good and vague. For somebody in New York, this deepens the suspicion that because this was about New York, where they don't visit or even campaign, not with our population, the Bush people could care less about us.
Rice says that if everybody is nice, she might make another private appearance before the committee. Keep the door closed. She likes a set pattern for her appearances, a television interview with no crowd in which she speaks and smiles and the announcer says thank you. She is not made for a back and forth on a public stage with somebody like Ben-Veniste. She is a symbol of why people are starting not to believe the White House.
This all started on the streets of Manhattan in June 2003 with an outline of a book proposal by Richard B. Clarke, who had been a national security adviser for Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. Clarke said that in the months before the World Trade Center attack Bush had ignored the idea of any immediate threat from the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden. Bush was obsessed with Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center attack.
Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights for $600,000. Clarke wrote three drafts over the summer and into the fall. Then a fourth draft, finished in November, was readable.
The White House took months for a security clearance. In January 2004, they asked for some changes. Then on Feb. 4, 2004, the book was given clearance.
The publisher worked as fast as possible to get the first printing of 300,000 out.
The book is out a day and there are furious attacks from the White House. They said the book was timed for the election. If they had read it faster it would have been gone by now. How could they be so upset? All Clarke said was that Bush and his administration missed the World Trade Center attack.
Clarke said that Bush went into Iraq to get Saddam Hussein. And he kept saying that was the man who tried to kill Bush's dad. They ignored Afghanistan, where bin Laden was, giving bin Laden the chance to settle into some rock garden and do his voice-overs. And our 20-year-olds get killed in Iraq, where there they have no reason to be.
The attacks on Clarke went on. On Friday, Frist of Tennessee, the Senate Republican majority leader, said he wanted to get Clarke for perjury at a congressional committee hearing.
He described Clarke as a "former State Department civil servant." He used the word lie at least six times. Like Clarke or not, he has a record of serving his government at its highest levels and most dangerous moments. Frist has turned his medical profession into that of a cheap shill. But if he cries perjury, then there should be a trial of Clarke for perjury. He'll show. Frist might not like it.
A transcript reader said yesterday, "Everything Clarke said is in the transcript and the book and the testimony he gave at the 9/11 hearing on Wednesday. It looks like the guy is right. That's why they're screaming."
Clarke writes and testifies that when he told Condoleezza Rice how dangerous al-Qaida was, she answered that his office staff was too large. She said that Clarke's position should be downgraded. He would have meetings with deputies and nobody higher. And months went by and nothing was done about bin Laden.
Sitting with his book and listening to him at the hearing in Washington on Wednesday, I could hear stories I heard about Rice in the past. Condoleezza Rice always is introduced as a former provost of Stanford University. You can't get anything to sound much better. Provost! She must be in charge of science you can't even imagine. Ancient literature. Anything ancient. If it is impossible to understand, she knows it.
It turns that as provost she was in charge of assigning lecture halls. If they were for decent right wing visiting lecturers, they were given good halls. A liberal had to speak with one foot in the bay. A Stanford scientist brought out Paul Glimscher from NYU to lecture. Rice found him to be a dastardly New York liberal and they couldn't get a place for three days.
She is now in the White House squalling that Clarke is a liar. If she knows anything about history, she might recognize Clarke as the new Whitaker Chambers. You could look it up.
________________________________________________________________________________
Rice keeps door closed to the public NEWSDAY
Richard Ben-Veniste of the 9/11 committee was pretty exciting as prosecutor in the Watergate case. Now, during a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, he suddenly asked only one question of a witness and then turned to another commission member and said, "You can have all my time if I can have yours with Condoleezza Rice." Swinging a sash weight in a light-hearted warm-up. He is interested in a couple of discrepancies.
Condoleezza Rice sure heard that. She made a private appearance in front of the 9/11 commission, but won't make a public appearance under oath. Watch how far away she stays from Ben-Veniste. She says she preserves the confidentiality of the White House. Yet she goes on any television. Tonight she is scheduled for the "60 Minutes" show. There is no precedent stopping presidential advisers from testifying in front of a committee. Just in recent times, you had Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sanford Berger, John Podesta and Charles Ruff appear.
And right now you are entitled to think that by refusing to appear under oath, Rice has something to hide.
Already, she has us mixed up by saying in a private meeting that she never heard anybody mention that planes could be used as missiles. Then she asked to change that story and said that intelligence might have or did mention this two years before. Good and vague. For somebody in New York, this deepens the suspicion that because this was about New York, where they don't visit or even campaign, not with our population, the Bush people could care less about us.
Rice says that if everybody is nice, she might make another private appearance before the committee. Keep the door closed. She likes a set pattern for her appearances, a television interview with no crowd in which she speaks and smiles and the announcer says thank you. She is not made for a back and forth on a public stage with somebody like Ben-Veniste. She is a symbol of why people are starting not to believe the White House.
This all started on the streets of Manhattan in June 2003 with an outline of a book proposal by Richard B. Clarke, who had been a national security adviser for Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. Clarke said that in the months before the World Trade Center attack Bush had ignored the idea of any immediate threat from the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden. Bush was obsessed with Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center attack.
Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights for $600,000. Clarke wrote three drafts over the summer and into the fall. Then a fourth draft, finished in November, was readable.
The White House took months for a security clearance. In January 2004, they asked for some changes. Then on Feb. 4, 2004, the book was given clearance.
The publisher worked as fast as possible to get the first printing of 300,000 out.
The book is out a day and there are furious attacks from the White House. They said the book was timed for the election. If they had read it faster it would have been gone by now. How could they be so upset? All Clarke said was that Bush and his administration missed the World Trade Center attack.
Clarke said that Bush went into Iraq to get Saddam Hussein. And he kept saying that was the man who tried to kill Bush's dad. They ignored Afghanistan, where bin Laden was, giving bin Laden the chance to settle into some rock garden and do his voice-overs. And our 20-year-olds get killed in Iraq, where there they have no reason to be.
The attacks on Clarke went on. On Friday, Frist of Tennessee, the Senate Republican majority leader, said he wanted to get Clarke for perjury at a congressional committee hearing.
He described Clarke as a "former State Department civil servant." He used the word lie at least six times. Like Clarke or not, he has a record of serving his government at its highest levels and most dangerous moments. Frist has turned his medical profession into that of a cheap shill. But if he cries perjury, then there should be a trial of Clarke for perjury. He'll show. Frist might not like it.
A transcript reader said yesterday, "Everything Clarke said is in the transcript and the book and the testimony he gave at the 9/11 hearing on Wednesday. It looks like the guy is right. That's why they're screaming."
Clarke writes and testifies that when he told Condoleezza Rice how dangerous al-Qaida was, she answered that his office staff was too large. She said that Clarke's position should be downgraded. He would have meetings with deputies and nobody higher. And months went by and nothing was done about bin Laden.
Sitting with his book and listening to him at the hearing in Washington on Wednesday, I could hear stories I heard about Rice in the past. Condoleezza Rice always is introduced as a former provost of Stanford University. You can't get anything to sound much better. Provost! She must be in charge of science you can't even imagine. Ancient literature. Anything ancient. If it is impossible to understand, she knows it.
It turns that as provost she was in charge of assigning lecture halls. If they were for decent right wing visiting lecturers, they were given good halls. A liberal had to speak with one foot in the bay. A Stanford scientist brought out Paul Glimscher from NYU to lecture. Rice found him to be a dastardly New York liberal and they couldn't get a place for three days.
She is now in the White House squalling that Clarke is a liar. If she knows anything about history, she might recognize Clarke as the new Whitaker Chambers. You could look it up.
________________________________________________________________________________
From TIME back in August 2002. Only now we have more evidence of how Bush, Rice, etc. all dropped the ball on national From TIME back in August, 2002, only now we have the intelligence officers like Clarke stepping forward to explain how Bush and Rice screwed up with security dealing with terrorism and through their negligence allowed the opening for the WTC and Pentagon attacks to happen.
Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
Long before the tragic events of September 11th, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda. It didn't happen and soon it was too late. The saga of a lost chance.
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT
Sunday, Aug. 04, 2002
Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it.
One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. 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. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.
Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other 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."
And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11-that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.
The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to institute its own "policy review process" on the terrorist threat. Clarke told Time that the review moved "as fast as could be expected." And Administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it was more aggressive than anything contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was designed not to "roll back" al-Qaeda but to "eliminate" it. But that delay came at a cost. The Northern Alliance was desperate for help but got little of it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone-an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror camps-should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11. No single person was responsible for all this. But "Washington"-that organic compound of officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown-failed horribly.
Could al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash-not wire transfers-wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored, Atta's team might still never have been caught.
But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended-just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Berger was determined that when he left office, Rice should have a full understanding of the terrorist threat. In a sense, this was an admission of failure. For the Clinton years had been marked by a drumbeat of terror attacks against American targets, and they didn't seem to be stopping.
In 1993 the World Trade Center had been bombed for the first time; in 1996 19 American servicemen had been killed when the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was bombed; two years later, American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked. As the millennium celebrations at the end of 1999 approached, the CIA warned that it expected five to 15 attacks against American targets over the New Year's weekend. But three times, the U.S. got lucky. The Jordanians broke up an al-Qaeda cell in Amman; Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian based in Montreal, panicked when stopped at a border crossing from Canada while carrying explosives intended for Los Angeles International Airport; and on Jan. 3, 2000, an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. The Sullivans in Yemen foundered after terrorists overloaded their small boat.
From the start of the Clinton Administration, the job of thwarting terror had fallen to Clarke. A bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's office on cyberterrorism, he has served four Presidents from both parties-staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two sides, one for a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat. Aggressive and legendarily abrasive, Clarke was desperate to persuade skeptics to take the terror threat as seriously as he did. "Clarke is unbelievably determined, high-energy, focused and imaginative," says a senior Clinton Administration official. "But he's totally insensitive to rolling over others who are in his way." By the end of 2000, Clarke didn't need to roll over his boss; Berger was just as sure of the danger.
The two men had an ally in George Tenet, who had been appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1997. "He wasn't sleeping on the job on this," says a senior Clinton aide of Tenet, "whatever inherent problems there were in the agency." Those problems were immense. Although the CIA claims it had penetrated al-Qaeda, Republican Congressman Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, doubts that it ever got anywhere near the top of the organization. "The CIA," he says, "were not able to recruit human assets to penetrate al-Qaeda and the al-Qaeda leadership." Nobody pretends that such an exercise would have been easy. Says a counterterrorism official: "Where are you going to find a person loyal to the U.S. who's willing to eat dung beetles and sleep on the ground in a cave for two or three years? You don't find people willing to do that who also speak fluent Pashtu or Arabic."
In the absence of men sleeping with the beetles, the CIA had to depend on less reliable allies. The agency attempted to recruit tribal leaders in Afghanistan who might be persuaded to take on bin Laden; contingency plans had been made for the CIA to fly one of its planes to a desert landing strip in Afghanistan if he was ever captured. (Clinton had signed presidential "findings" that were ambiguous on the question of whether bin Laden could be killed in such an attack.) But the tribal groups' loyalty was always in doubt. Despite the occasional abortive raid, they never seemed to get close to bin Laden. That meant that the Clinton team had to fall back on a second strategy: taking out bin Laden by cruise missile, which had been tried after the embassy bombings in 1998. For all of 2000, sources tell Time, Clinton ordered two U.S. Navy submarines to stay on station in the northern Arabian Sea, ready to attack if bin Laden's coordinates could be determined.
But the plan was twice flawed. First, the missiles could be used only if bin Laden's whereabouts were known, and the CIA never definitively delivered that information. By early 2000, Clinton was becoming infuriated by the lack of intelligence on bin Laden's movements. "We've got to do better than this," he scribbled on one memo. "This is unsatisfactory." Second, even if a target could ever be found, the missiles might take too long to hit it. The Pentagon thought it could dump a Tomahawk missile on bin Laden's camp within six hours of a decision to attack, but the experts in the White House thought that was impossibly long. Any missiles fired at Afghanistan would have to fly over Pakistan, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was close to the Taliban. White House aides were sure bin Laden would be tipped off as soon as the Pakistanis detected the missiles.
Berger and Clarke wanted something more robust. On Nov. 7, Berger met with William Cohen, then Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. The time had come, said Berger, for the Pentagon to rethink its approach to operations against bin Laden. "We've been hit many times, and we'll be hit again," Berger said. "Yet we have no option beyond cruise missiles." He wanted "boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces deployed inside Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he would look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were dead set against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One, the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in Iran during an abortive mission to rescue American hostages.
It wasn't just Pentagon nerves that got in the way of a more aggressive counterterrorism policy. So did politics. After the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, the secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., drew up plans to have Delta Force members swoop into Afghanistan and grab bin Laden. But the warriors were never given the go-ahead; the Clinton Administration did not order an American retaliation for the attack. "We didn't do diddly," gripes a counterterrorism official. "We didn't even blow up a baby-milk factory." In fact, despite strong suspicion that bin Laden was behind the attack in Yemen, the CIA and FBI had not officially concluded that he was, and would be unable to do so before Clinton left office. That made it politically impossible for Clinton to strike-especially given the upcoming election and his own lack of credibility on national security. "If we had done anything, say, two weeks before the election," says a former senior Clinton aide, "we'd be accused of helping Al Gore."
For Clarke, the bombing of the Cole was final proof that the old policy hadn't worked. It was time for something more aggressive-a plan to make war against al-Qaeda. One element was vital. The Taliban's control of Afghanistan was not yet complete; in the northeast of the country, Northern Alliance forces led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla leader who had fought against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s, were still resisting Taliban rule. Clarke argued that Massoud should be given the resources to develop a viable fighting force. That way, terrorists leaving al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan would have been forced to join the Taliban forces fighting in the north. "You keep them on the front lines in Afghanistan," says a counterterrorism official. "Hopefully you're killing them in the process, and they're not leaving Afghanistan to plot terrorist operations. That was the general approach." But the approach meant that Americans had to engage directly in the snake pit of Afghan politics.
THE LAST MAN STANDING
In the spring of 2001, afghanistan was as rough a place as it ever is. Four sets of forces battled for position. Most of the country was under the authority of the Taliban, but it was not a homogeneous group. Some of its leaders, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the self-styled emir of Afghanistan, were dyed-in-the-wool Islamic radicals; others were fierce Afghan nationalists. The Taliban's principal support had come from Pakistan-another interested party, which wanted a reasonably peaceful border to its west-and in particular from the hard men of the isi. But Pakistan's policy was not all of a piece either. Since General Pervez Musharraf had taken power in a 1999 coup, some Pakistani officials, desperate to curry favor with the U.S.-which had cut off aid to Pakistan after it tested a nuclear device in 1998-had seen the wisdom of distancing themselves from the Taliban, or at the least attempting to moderate its more radical behavior. The third element was the Northern Alliance, a resistance movement whose stronghold was in northeast Afghanistan. Most of the Alliance's forces and leaders were, like Massoud, ethnic Tajiks-a minority in Afghanistan. Massoud controlled less than 10% of the country and had been beaten back by the Taliban in 2000. Nonetheless, by dint of his personality and reputation, Massoud was "the only military threat to the Taliban," says Francesc Vendrell, who was then the special representative in Afghanistan of the U.N. Secretary-General.
And then there was al-Qaeda. The group had been born in Afghanistan when Islamic radicals began flocking there in 1979, after the Soviets invaded. Bin Laden and his closest associates had returned in 1996, when they were expelled from Sudan. Al-Qaeda's terrorist training camps were in Afghanistan, and bin Laden's forces and money were vital to sustaining the Taliban's offensives against Massoud.
By last spring, the uneasy equilibrium among the four forces was beginning to break down. "Moderates" in the Taliban-those who tried to keep lines open to intermediaries in the U.N. and the U.S.-were losing ground. In 2000, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, thought to be the second most powerful member of the Taliban, had reached out clandestinely to Massoud. "He understood that our country had been sold out to al-Qaeda and Pakistan," says Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary. But in April 2001, Rabbani died of liver cancer. By that month, says the U.N.'s Vendrell, "it was al- Qaeda that was running the Taliban, not vice versa."
A few weeks before Rabbani's death, Musharraf's government had started to come to the same conclusion: the Pakistanis were no longer able to moderate Taliban behavior. To worldwide condemnation, the Taliban had announced its intention to blow up the 1,700-year-old stone statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Musharraf dispatched his right-hand man, Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider, to plead with Mullah Omar for the Buddhas to be saved. The Taliban's Foreign Minister and its ambassador to Pakistan, says a Pakistani official close to the talks, were in favor of saving the Buddhas. But Mullah Omar, says a member of the Pakistani delegation, listened to what Haider had to say and replied, "If on Judgment Day I stand before Allah, I'll see those two statues floating before me, and I know that Allah will ask me why, when I had the power, I did not destroy them." A few days later, the Buddhas were blown up.
By summer, Pakistan had a deeper grievance. The country had suffered a wave of sectarian assassinations, with gangs throwing grenades into mosques and murdering clerics. The authorities in Islamabad knew that the murderers had fled to Afghanistan (one of them was openly running a store in Kabul) and sent a delegation to ask for their return. "We gave them lists of names, photos and the locations of training camps where these fellows could be found," says Brigadier Javid Iqbal Cheema, director of Pakistan's National Crisis Management Cell, "but not a single individual was ever handed over to us." The Pakistanis were furious.
As the snows cleared for the annual spring military campaign, a joint offensive against Massoud by the Taliban and al-Qaeda seemed likely. But the influence of al-Qaeda on the Taliban was proving deeply unpopular among ordinary Afghans, especially in the urban centers. "I thought at most 20% of the population supported the Taliban by early summer," says Vendrell. And bin Laden's power made Massoud's plea for outside assistance more urgent. "We told the Americans-we told everyone-that al-Qaeda was set upon a transnational program," says Abdullah Abdullah, once a close aide to Massoud and now the Afghan Foreign Minister. In April, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, seeking support for the Northern Alliance. "If President Bush doesn't help us," he told a reporter, "these terrorists will damage the U.S. and Europe very soon."
But Massoud never got the help that he needed-or that Clarke's plan had deemed necessary. Most of the time, Northern Alliance delegates to Washington had to be satisfied with meeting low-level bureaucrats. The Alliance craved recognition by the U.S. as a "legitimate resistance movement" but never got it, though on a visit in July, Abdullah did finally get to meet some top National Security Council (NSC) and State Department officials for the first time. The best the Americans seemed prepared to do was turn a blind eye to the trickle of aid from Iran, Russia and India. Vendrell remembers much talk that spring of increased support from the Americans. But in truth Massoud's best help came from Iran, which persuaded all supporters of the Northern Alliance to channel their aid through Massoud alone.
Only once did something happen that might have given Massoud hope that the U.S. would help. In late June, he was joined in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, by Abdul Haq, a leading Pashtun, based in Dubai, who was opposed to the Taliban. Haq was accompanied by someone Massoud knew well: Peter Tomsen, a retired ambassador who from 1989 to '92 had been the U.S. State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance. Also present was James Ritchie, a successful Chicago options trader who had spent part of his childhood in Afghanistan and was helping bankroll the groups opposed to the Taliban. (Haq was captured and executed by the Taliban last October while on a quixotic mission to Afghanistan.) Tomsen insists that the June 2001 trip was a private one, though he had told State Department officials of it in advance. Their message, he says, was limited to a noncommittal "good luck and be careful."
The purpose of the meeting, according to Tomsen, was to see if Massoud and Haq could forge a joint strategy against the Taliban. "The idea," says Sayeed Hussain Anwari, now the Afghan Minister of Agriculture, who was present at the meeting, "was to bring Abdul Haq inside the country to begin an armed struggle in the southeast." Still hoping for direct assistance from Washington, Massoud gave Tomsen all the intelligence he had on al-Qaeda and asked Tomsen to take it back to Washington. But when he briefed State Department officials after his trip, their reaction was muted. The American position was clear. If anything was to be done to change the realities in Afghanistan, it would have to be done not by the U.S. but by Pakistan. Massoud was on his own.
CLARKE: CRYING WOLF
In Washington, dick clarke didn't seem to have a lot of friends either. His proposals were still grinding away. No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way as the U.S.-new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker with even the most sensible of existing policies. The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear. "If we hadn't had a transition," says a senior Clinton Administration official, "probably in late October or early November 2000, we would have had (the plan to go on the offensive) as a presidential directive."
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."
For other observers, however, the real point was not that the new Administration dismissed the terrorist theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, "all got that it was important." The question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda "was in the top tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration." But other topics got far more attention. The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to keep in line a national-security team-including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell-whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. "Terrorism," says a former Clinton White House official, speaking of the new Administration, "wasn't on their plate of key issues." Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, "had to learn about (al-Qaeda) and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy." But doing so meant delay.
Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush Administration's dilatory response. Clarke's paper, says an official, "was a Clinton proposal." Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat. Clarke dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death.
This was, after all, a White House plan, which means it was resented from the moment of conception. "When you look at the Pentagon and the cia," says a former senior Clinton aide, "it's not their plan. The military will never accept the White House staff doing military planning." Terrorism, officials from the State Department suggested, needed to be put in the broader context of American policy in South Asia. The rollback plan was becoming the victim of a classic Washington power play between those with "functional" responsibilities-like terrorism-and those with "regional" ones-like relations with India and Pakistan. The State Department's South Asia bureau, according to a participant in the meetings, argued that a fistful of other issues-Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, Musharraf's dictatorship-were just as pressing as terrorism. By now, Clarke's famously short fuse was giving off sparks. A participant at one of the meetings paraphrases Clarke's attitude this way: "These people are trying to kill us. I could give a f___ if Musharraf was democratically elected. What I do care about is Pakistan's support for the Taliban and turning a blind eye to this terrorist cancer growing in their neighbor's backyard."
It was Bush who broke the deadlock. Each morning the CIA gives the Chief Executive a top-secret Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on pressing issues of national security. One day in early spring, Tenet briefed Bush on the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's head of international operations, who was suspected of having been involved in the planning of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. After the PDB, Bush told Rice that the approach to al-Qaeda was too scattershot. He was tired of "swatting at flies" and asked for a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. According to an official, Rice came back to the nsc and said, "The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda." Clarke reminded her that he already had one.
But having a plan isn't the same as executing it. Clarke's paper now had to go through three more stages: the Deputies' Committee, made up of the No. 2s to the main national-security officials; the Principals' Committee, which included Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Powell and Rumsfeld; and finally, the President. Only when Bush had signed off would the plan become what the Bush team called a national-security presidential directive.
On April 30, nearly six weeks after the Administration started holding deputies' meetings, Clarke presented a new plan to them. In addition to Hadley, who chaired the hour-long meeting, the gathering included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; Richard Armitage, the barrel-chested Deputy Secretary of State; Paul Wolfowitz, the scholarly hawk from the Pentagon; and John McLaughlin from the cia. Armitage was enthusiastic about Clarke's plan, according to a senior official. But the CIA was gun-shy. Tenet was a Clinton holdover and thus vulnerable if anything went wrong. His agency was unwilling to take risks; it wanted "top cover" from the White House. The deputies, says a senior official, decided to have "three parallel reviews-one on al-Qaeda, one on the Pakistani political situation and the third on Indo-Pakistani relations." The issues, the deputies thought, were interrelated. "They wanted to view them holistically," says the senior official, "and not until they'd had three separate meetings on each of these were they able to hold a fourth integrating them all."
There was more. Throughout the spring, one bureaucratic wrangle in particular rumbled on, poisoning the atmosphere. At issue: the Predator.
The Predator had first been used in Bosnia in 1995. Later, the CIA and the Pentagon began a highly classified program designed to produce pictures-viewable in real time-that would be fine-grained enough to identify individuals. The new, improved Predator was finally ready in September 2000, and the CIA flew it over Afghanistan in a two-week "test of concept." First results were promising; one video sent to the White House showed a man who might have been bin Laden. For the first time, the CIA now had a way to check out a tip by one of its agents among the Afghan tribes. If there was a report that bin Laden was in the vicinity, says a former aide to Clinton, "we could put the Predator over the location and have eyes on the target."
But in October 2000, the Predator crashed when landing at its base in a country bordering Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle needed repairs, and in any event, the CIA and the Pentagon decided that the winter weather over Afghanistan would make it difficult to take good pictures. The Clinton team left office assuming that the Predator would be back in the skies by March 2001.
In fact, the Predator wouldn't fly again until after Sept. 11. In early 2001 it was decided to develop a new version that would not just take photos but also be armed with Hellfire missiles. To the frustration of Clarke and other White House aides, the CIA and the Pentagon couldn't decide who controlled the new program or who should pay for it-though each craft cost only $1 million. While the new uav was being rapidly developed at a site in the southwestern U.S., the CIA opposed using the old one for pure surveillance because it feared al-Qaeda might see it. "Once we were going to arm the thing," says a senior U.S. intelligence official, "we didn't want to expose the capability by just having it fly overhead and spot a bunch of guys we couldn't do anything about." Clarke and his supporters were livid. "Dick Clarke insisted that it be kept in the air," says a Bush Administration official. The counterterrorism team argued that the Taliban had shot at the uav during the Clinton test, so its existence was hardly a secret. Besides, combined with on-the-ground intelligence, a Predator might just gather enough information in time to get a Tomahawk off to the target. But when the deputies held their fourth and final meeting on July 16, they still hadn't sorted out what to do with the Predator. Squabbles over who would pay for it continued into August.
Administration sources insist that they were not idle in the spring. They set up, for example, a new center in the Treasury to track suspicious foreign assets and reviewed Clinton's "findings" on whether the CIA could kill bin Laden. But by the summer, policy reviews were hardly what was needed.
Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top officials. On June 22, the Defense Department put its troops on full alert and ordered six ships from the Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, to steam out to sea, for fear that they might be attacked in port. U.S. officials thought an attack might be mounted on American forces at the nato base at Incirlik, Turkey, or maybe in Rome or Belgium, Germany or Southeast Asia, perhaps the Philippines-anywhere, it seems, but in the U.S. When Independence Day passed without incident, Clarke called a meeting and asked Ben Bonk, deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, to brief on bin Laden's plans. Bonk's evidence that al-Qaeda was planning "something spectacular," says an official who was in the room, "was very gripping." But nobody knew what or when or where the spectacular would be. As if to crystallize how much and how little anyone in the know actually knew, the counterterrorism center released a report titled "Threat of Impending al- Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely."
Predictably, nerves frayed. Clarke, who was widely loathed in the cia, where he was accused of self-aggrandizement, began to lose credibility. He cried wolf, said his detractors; he had been in the job too long. "The guy was reading way too many fiction novels," says a counterterrorism official. "He turned into a Chicken Little. The sky was always falling for Dick Clarke. We had our strings jerked by him so many times, he was simply not taken seriously." Clarke wasn't the only one living on the edge. So, say senior officials, was Tenet. Every few days, the CIA director would call Tom Pickard, who had become acting director of the FBI in June, asking "What do you hear? Do you have anything?" Pickard never had to ask what the topic was.
In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. "George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack," says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet broke out a huge wall chart ("They always have wall charts") with dozens of threats. Tenet couldn't rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas. One date already worrying the Secret Service was July 20, when Bush would arrive in Genoa for the G-8 summit; Tenet had intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to attack Bush there. The Italians, who had heard the same report (the way European intelligence sources tell it, everyone but the President's dog "knew" an attack was coming) put frogmen in the harbor, closed airspace around the town and ringed it with antiaircraft guns.
But nothing happened. After Genoa, says a senior intelligence official, there was a collective sigh of relief: "A lot of folks started letting their guard down." After the final deputies' meeting on Clarke's draft of a presidential directive, on July 16, it wasn't easy to find a date for the Principals' Committee to look at the plan-the last stage before the paper went to Bush. "There was one meeting scheduled for August," says a senior official, "but too many principals were out of town." Eventually a date was picked: the principals would look at the draft on Sept. 4. That was about nine months after Clarke first put his plan on paper.
A BURNED-OUT CASE
Clarke wasn't the only person having a bad year. In New York City, John O'Neill led the FBI's National Security Division, commanding more than 100 experienced agents. By spring they were all overloaded. O'Neill's boss, Assistant FBI Director Barry Mawn, spent part of his time pleading with Washington for more agents, more linguists, more clerical help. He got nowhere. O'Neill was a legend both in New York, where he hung out at famous watering holes like Elaine's, and in the counterterrorism world. Since 1995, when he helped coordinate the arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Yousef, the man responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, O'Neill had been one of the FBI's leading figures in the fight against terrorism. Brash, slick and ambitious, he had spent the late 1990s working closely with Clarke and the handful of other top officials for whom bin Laden had become an obsession.
Now O'Neill was having a lousy few months. The New York City field office had primary responsibility for the investigation of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. But the case had gone badly from the start. The Yemeni authorities had been lethargic and uncooperative, and O'Neill, who led the team in Aden, had run afoul of Barbara Bodine, then the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, who believed the FBI's large presence was causing political problems for the Yemeni regime. When O'Neill left Yemen on a trip home for Thanksgiving, Bodine barred his return. Seething, O'Neill tried to supervise the investigation from afar. At the same time, his team in New York City was working double time preparing for the trial in January 2001 of four co-conspirators in the case of the 1998 African embassy bombings. That involved agents shuttling between Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and New York, escorting witnesses, ferrying documents and guarding al-Qaeda turncoats who would give evidence for the prosecution.
Yet the FBI as a whole was ill equipped to deal with the terrorist threat. It had neither the language skills nor the analytical savvy to understand al-Qaeda. The bureau's information-technology capability dated to pre-Internet days. Chambliss says the counterterrorism investigations were decentralized at the bureau's 56 field offices, which were actually discouraged from sharing information with one another or with headquarters.
That was if the cases ever got started. An investigation by Chambliss's subcommittee found that the FBI paid "insufficient attention" to tracking terrorists' finances. Most agents in the field were assigned to criminal units; few field squads were dedicated to gathering intelligence on radical fundamentalists. During the Clinton Administration, says a former senior aide, Clarke became so frustrated with the bureau that he began touring its field offices, giving agents "al- Qaeda 101" classes. The bureau was, in fact, wiretapping some suspected Islamic radicals and debriefing a few al-Qaeda hands who had flipped. But at the end of the Clinton years, the aide says, the FBI told the White House that "there's not a substantial al-Qaeda presence in the U.S., and to the extent there was a presence, they had it covered." The FBI didn't, and O'Neill must have known that it didn't. So, as it happens, did some of his key allies, who were not in the U.S. at all but overseas. In Europe and especially in France the threat of Islamic terrorism had been particularly sharp ever since the Algerian Armed Islamic Group launched a bombing campaign in Paris in 1995. By 2000, counterterrorism experts in Europe knew the Islamic diaspora communities in Europe were seeded with cells of terrorists. And after the arrest of Ressam, European officials were convinced that terrorists would soon attack targets in the U.S. Jean-Louis Bruguire, a French magistrate who has led many of the most prominent terrorist cases, says Ressam's arrest signaled that the U.S. "had to join the rest of the world in considering itself at acute risk of attack."
Throughout the winter and spring of 2001, European law-enforcement agencies scored a series of dramatic hits against al-Qaeda and associated radical Islamic cells, with some help from the cia. The day after Christmas 2000, German authorities in Frankfurt arrested four Algerians on suspicion of plotting to bomb targets in Strasbourg. Two months later, the British arrested six Algerians on terrorism charges. In April, Italian police busted a cell whose members were suspected of plotting to bomb the American embassy in Rome. Two months later, the Spanish arrested Mohammed Bensakhria, an Algerian who had been in Afghanistan and had links to top al-Qaeda officials, including bin Laden. Bensakhria, the French alleged, had directed the Frankfurt cell involved in the Strasbourg plot. And in the most stunning coup of all, on July 28, Djamel Beghal, a Frenchman of Algerian descent who had been on France's terrorist watch list since 1997, was arrested in Dubai on his way back from Afghanistan. After being persuaded of terrorism's evil by Islamic scholars, Beghal told of a plot to attack the American embassy in Paris and gave investigators new details on al-Qaeda's top leadership, including the international-operations role of Abu Zubaydah. (Now back in France, he has tried to recant his confession.) French sources tell Time they believe U.S. authorities knew about Beghal's testimony.
This action by cops in Europe was meat and drink to O'Neill. The problem was that it convinced some U.S. antiterrorism officials that if there was going to be an attack on American interests that summer, it would take place outside the U.S. In early June, for example, the FBI was so concerned about threats to investigators left in Yemen that it moved the agents from Aden to the American embassy in Sana'a. Then came a second, very specific warning about the team's safety, and Washington decided to pull out of Yemen entirely. "John (O'Neill) would say, 'There's a lot of traffic,'" recalls Mawn. "Everybody was saying, 'The drumbeats are going; something's going to happen.' I said, 'Where and what?' And they'd say, 'We don't know, but it seems to be overseas, probably.'"
Some didn't lose sight of the threat at home. On Aug. 6, while on vacation in Crawford, Texas, Bush was given a PDB, this one on the possibility of al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S. And not one but two FBI field offices had inklings of al-Qaeda activity in the U.S. that, had they been aggressively pursued, might have fleshed out the intelligence chatter about an upcoming attack. But the systemic weaknesses in the FBI's bureaucracy prevented anything from being done.
The first warning came from Phoenix, Ariz. On July 10, agent Kenneth Williams wrote a paper detailing his suspicions about some suspected Islamic radicals who had been taking flying lessons in Arizona. Williams proposed an investigation to see if al-Qaeda was using flight schools nationwide. He spoke with the voice of experience; he had been working on international terrorism cases for years. The Phoenix office, according to former FBI agent James Hauswirth, had been investigating men with possible Islamic terrorist links since 1994, though without much support from the FBI's local bosses. Williams had started work on his probe of flight schools in early 2001 but had spent much of the next months on nonterrorist cases. Once he was back on terrorism, it took only a few weeks for alarm bells to ring. He submitted his memo to headquarters and to two FBI field offices, including New York City. In all three places it died.
Five weeks after Williams wrote his memo, a second warning came in from another FBI field office, and once again, headquarters bungled the case. On Aug. 13, Zacarias Moussaoui, a 33-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan ancestry, arrived at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota for simulator training on a Boeing 747. Moussaoui, who had been in the U.S. since February and had already taken flying lessons at a school in Norman, Okla., was in a hurry. John Rosengren, who was director of operations at Pan Am until February this year, says Moussaoui wanted to learn how to fly the 747 in "four or five days." After just two days of training, Moussaoui's flight instructor expressed concern that his student didn't want it known that he was a Muslim. One of Pan Am's managers had a contact in the FBI; should the manager call him? "I said, 'No problem,'" says Rosengren. "The next day I got a call from a Minneapolis agent telling me Moussaoui had been detained at the Residence Inn in Eagan."
Though Moussaoui is the only person to be indicted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, his role in them is as clear as mud. (He is detained in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial in federal district court.) German authorities have confirmed to Time that-as alleged in the indictment-Ramzi Binalshibh, a Hamburg friend of Atta and Al-Shehhi, wired two money transfers to Moussaoui in August. Binalshibh, who was denied a visa to visit the U.S. four times in 2000, is thought to have been one of the conduits for funds to the hijackers, relaying cash that originated in the Persian Gulf. But no known telephone calls or other evidence links the hijackers directly to Moussaoui.
Whatever Moussaoui's true tale may be, the Minnesota field office was convinced he was worth checking out. Agents spent much of the next two weeks in an increasingly frantic-and ultimately fruitless- effort to persuade FBI headquarters to authorize a national-security warrant to search Moussaoui's computer. From Washington, requests were sent to authorities in Paris for background details on the suspect. Like most things having to do with Moussaoui, the contents of the dossier sent over from Paris are in dispute. One senior French law-enforcement source told Time the Americans were given "everything they needed" to understand that Moussaoui was associated with Islamic terrorist groups. "Even a neophyte," says this source, "working in some remote corner of Florida, would have understood the threat based on what was sent." But several officials in FBI headquarters say that before Sept. 11 the French sent only a three-page document, which portrayed Moussaoui as a radical but was too sketchy to justify a search warrant for his computer.
The precise wording of the French letter isn't the issue. The extraordinary thing about Moussaoui's case-like the Phoenix memo-is that it was never brought to the attention of top officials in Washington who were, almost literally, sleepless with worry about an imminent terrorist attack. Nobody in the FBI or CIA ever informed anybody in the White House of Moussaoui's detention. That was unforgivable. "Do you think," says a White House antiterrorism official, "that if Dick Clarke had known the FBI had in custody a foreigner who was learning to fly a plane in midair, he wouldn't have done something?"
In blissless ignorance, Clarke and Tenet waited for the meeting of the Principals. But the odd little ways of Washington had one more trick to play. Heeding the pleas from the FBI's New York City office, where Mawn and O'Neill were desperate for new linguists and analysts, acting FBI director Pickard asked the Justice Department for some $50 million for the bureau's counterterrorism program. He was turned down. In August, a bureau source says, he appealed to Attorney General Ashcroft. The reply was a flat no.
Pickard got Ashcroft's letter on Sept. 10. A few days before, O'Neill had started a new job. He was burned out, and he knew it. Over the summer, he had come to realize that he had made too many enemies ever to succeed Mawn. O'Neill handed in his papers, left the FBI and began a new life as head of security at the World Trade Center.
THE TWO VISITORS
As the first cool nights of fall settled on northeast Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud was barely hanging on. His summer offensive had been a bust. An attempt to capture the city of Taloqan, which he had lost to the Taliban in 2000, ended in failure. But old allies, like the brutal Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, had returned to the field, and Massoud still thought the unpopularity of the Taliban might yet make them vulnerable. "He was telling us not to worry, that we'd soon capture Kabul," says Shah Pacha, an infantry commander in the Northern Alliance.
Around Sept. 1, Massoud summoned his top men to his command post in Khoja Bahauddin. The intention was to plan an attack, but Zahir Akbar, one of Massoud's generals, remembers a phone call after which Massoud changed his plans. "He'd been told al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis were deploying five combat units to the front line," says Akbar. Northern Alliance soldiers reported a buildup of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces; there was no big push from the south, although there were a number of skirmishes in the first week in September. "We were puzzled and confused when they didn't attack," says a senior Afghan intelligence source. "And Taliban communications showed the units had been ordered to wait."
What were they waiting for? Some of Massoud's closest aides think they know. For about three weeks, two Arab journalists had been waiting in Khoja Bahauddin to interview Massoud. The men said they represented the Islamic Observation Center in London and had a letter of introduction from its head, Yasser al-Siri. The men, who had been given safe passage through the Taliban front lines, "said they'd like to document Islam in Afghanistan," recalls Faheem Dashty, who made films with the Northern Alliance and is editor in chief of the Kabul Weekly newspaper. By the night of Sept. 8, the visitors were getting antsy, pestering Massoud's officials to firm up the meeting with him and threatening to return to Kabul if they could not see Massoud in the next 24 hours. "They were so worried and excitable they were begging us," says Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary.
The interview was finally granted just before lunch on Sunday, Sept. 9. Dashty was asked to record it on his camera. Massoud sat next to his friend Masood Khalili, now Afghanistan's ambassador to India. "The commander said he wanted to sit with me and translate," says Khalili. "Then he and I would go and have lunch together by the Oxus River." The Arabs entered and set up a TV camera in front of Massoud; the guests, says Khalili, were "very calm, very quiet." Khalili asked them which newspaper they represented. When they replied that they were acting for "Islamic Centers," says Khalili, he became reluctant to continue, but Massoud said they should all go ahead.
Khalili says Massoud asked to know the Arabs' questions before they started recording. "I remember that out of 15 questions, eight were about bin Laden," says Khalili. "I looked over at Massoud. He looked uncomfortable; there were five worry lines on his forehead instead of the one he usually had. But he said, 'O.K. Let's film.'" Khalili started translating the first question into Dari; Dashty was fiddling with the lighting on his camera. "Then," says Dashty, "I felt the explosion." The bomb was in the camera, and it killed one of the Arabs; the second was shot dead by Massoud's guards while trying to escape. Khalili believes he was saved by his passport, which was in his left breast pocket-eight pieces of shrapnel were found embedded in it. Dashty remembers being rushed to a helicopter with Massoud, who had terrible wounds. The chopper flew them both to a hospital in Tajikistan. By the time they arrived, Massoud was dead. The killers had come from Europe, and they were members of a group allied with al-Qaeda. Massoud's enemies had been waiting for the news. Within hours, Taliban radio began to crackle: "Your father is dead. Now you can't resist us." "They were clever," says a member of Massoud's staff. "Their offensive was primed to begin after the assassination." That night the Taliban attacked Massoud's front lines. One last time, his forces held out on their own.
As the battle raged, Clarke's plan awaited Bush's signature. Soon enough, the Northern Alliance would get all the aid it had been seeking-U.S. special forces, money, B-52 bombers, and, of course, as many Predators as the CIA and Pentagon could get into the sky. The decision that had been put off for so long had suddenly become easy because a little more than 50 hours after Massoud's death, Atta, sitting on American Airlines Flight 11 on the runway at Boston's Logan Airport, had used his mobile phone to speak for the last time to his friend Al-Shehhi, on United Flight 175. Their plot was a go.
That morning, O'Neill, Clarke's former partner in the fight against international terrorism, arrived at his new place of work. He had been on the job just two weeks. After Atta and Al-Shehhi crashed their planes into the World Trade Center, O'Neill called his son and a girlfriend from outside the Towers to say he was safe. Then he rushed back in. His body was identified 10 days later.
—Reported by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington; Hannah Bloch and Tim McGirk/Islamabad; Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas; Wendy Cole and Marguerite Michaels/ Chicago; Bruce Crumley/Paris; James Graff/Brussels; David Schwartz/Phoenix; and Michael Ware/Kabul
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Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
Long before the tragic events of September 11th, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda. It didn't happen and soon it was too late. The saga of a lost chance.
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT
Sunday, Aug. 04, 2002
Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it.
One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. 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. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.
Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other 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."
And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11-that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.
The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to institute its own "policy review process" on the terrorist threat. Clarke told Time that the review moved "as fast as could be expected." And Administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it was more aggressive than anything contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was designed not to "roll back" al-Qaeda but to "eliminate" it. But that delay came at a cost. The Northern Alliance was desperate for help but got little of it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone-an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror camps-should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11. No single person was responsible for all this. But "Washington"-that organic compound of officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown-failed horribly.
Could al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash-not wire transfers-wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored, Atta's team might still never have been caught.
But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended-just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Berger was determined that when he left office, Rice should have a full understanding of the terrorist threat. In a sense, this was an admission of failure. For the Clinton years had been marked by a drumbeat of terror attacks against American targets, and they didn't seem to be stopping.
In 1993 the World Trade Center had been bombed for the first time; in 1996 19 American servicemen had been killed when the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was bombed; two years later, American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked. As the millennium celebrations at the end of 1999 approached, the CIA warned that it expected five to 15 attacks against American targets over the New Year's weekend. But three times, the U.S. got lucky. The Jordanians broke up an al-Qaeda cell in Amman; Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian based in Montreal, panicked when stopped at a border crossing from Canada while carrying explosives intended for Los Angeles International Airport; and on Jan. 3, 2000, an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. The Sullivans in Yemen foundered after terrorists overloaded their small boat.
From the start of the Clinton Administration, the job of thwarting terror had fallen to Clarke. A bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's office on cyberterrorism, he has served four Presidents from both parties-staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two sides, one for a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat. Aggressive and legendarily abrasive, Clarke was desperate to persuade skeptics to take the terror threat as seriously as he did. "Clarke is unbelievably determined, high-energy, focused and imaginative," says a senior Clinton Administration official. "But he's totally insensitive to rolling over others who are in his way." By the end of 2000, Clarke didn't need to roll over his boss; Berger was just as sure of the danger.
The two men had an ally in George Tenet, who had been appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1997. "He wasn't sleeping on the job on this," says a senior Clinton aide of Tenet, "whatever inherent problems there were in the agency." Those problems were immense. Although the CIA claims it had penetrated al-Qaeda, Republican Congressman Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, doubts that it ever got anywhere near the top of the organization. "The CIA," he says, "were not able to recruit human assets to penetrate al-Qaeda and the al-Qaeda leadership." Nobody pretends that such an exercise would have been easy. Says a counterterrorism official: "Where are you going to find a person loyal to the U.S. who's willing to eat dung beetles and sleep on the ground in a cave for two or three years? You don't find people willing to do that who also speak fluent Pashtu or Arabic."
In the absence of men sleeping with the beetles, the CIA had to depend on less reliable allies. The agency attempted to recruit tribal leaders in Afghanistan who might be persuaded to take on bin Laden; contingency plans had been made for the CIA to fly one of its planes to a desert landing strip in Afghanistan if he was ever captured. (Clinton had signed presidential "findings" that were ambiguous on the question of whether bin Laden could be killed in such an attack.) But the tribal groups' loyalty was always in doubt. Despite the occasional abortive raid, they never seemed to get close to bin Laden. That meant that the Clinton team had to fall back on a second strategy: taking out bin Laden by cruise missile, which had been tried after the embassy bombings in 1998. For all of 2000, sources tell Time, Clinton ordered two U.S. Navy submarines to stay on station in the northern Arabian Sea, ready to attack if bin Laden's coordinates could be determined.
But the plan was twice flawed. First, the missiles could be used only if bin Laden's whereabouts were known, and the CIA never definitively delivered that information. By early 2000, Clinton was becoming infuriated by the lack of intelligence on bin Laden's movements. "We've got to do better than this," he scribbled on one memo. "This is unsatisfactory." Second, even if a target could ever be found, the missiles might take too long to hit it. The Pentagon thought it could dump a Tomahawk missile on bin Laden's camp within six hours of a decision to attack, but the experts in the White House thought that was impossibly long. Any missiles fired at Afghanistan would have to fly over Pakistan, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was close to the Taliban. White House aides were sure bin Laden would be tipped off as soon as the Pakistanis detected the missiles.
Berger and Clarke wanted something more robust. On Nov. 7, Berger met with William Cohen, then Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. The time had come, said Berger, for the Pentagon to rethink its approach to operations against bin Laden. "We've been hit many times, and we'll be hit again," Berger said. "Yet we have no option beyond cruise missiles." He wanted "boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces deployed inside Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he would look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were dead set against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One, the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in Iran during an abortive mission to rescue American hostages.
It wasn't just Pentagon nerves that got in the way of a more aggressive counterterrorism policy. So did politics. After the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, the secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., drew up plans to have Delta Force members swoop into Afghanistan and grab bin Laden. But the warriors were never given the go-ahead; the Clinton Administration did not order an American retaliation for the attack. "We didn't do diddly," gripes a counterterrorism official. "We didn't even blow up a baby-milk factory." In fact, despite strong suspicion that bin Laden was behind the attack in Yemen, the CIA and FBI had not officially concluded that he was, and would be unable to do so before Clinton left office. That made it politically impossible for Clinton to strike-especially given the upcoming election and his own lack of credibility on national security. "If we had done anything, say, two weeks before the election," says a former senior Clinton aide, "we'd be accused of helping Al Gore."
For Clarke, the bombing of the Cole was final proof that the old policy hadn't worked. It was time for something more aggressive-a plan to make war against al-Qaeda. One element was vital. The Taliban's control of Afghanistan was not yet complete; in the northeast of the country, Northern Alliance forces led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla leader who had fought against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s, were still resisting Taliban rule. Clarke argued that Massoud should be given the resources to develop a viable fighting force. That way, terrorists leaving al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan would have been forced to join the Taliban forces fighting in the north. "You keep them on the front lines in Afghanistan," says a counterterrorism official. "Hopefully you're killing them in the process, and they're not leaving Afghanistan to plot terrorist operations. That was the general approach." But the approach meant that Americans had to engage directly in the snake pit of Afghan politics.
THE LAST MAN STANDING
In the spring of 2001, afghanistan was as rough a place as it ever is. Four sets of forces battled for position. Most of the country was under the authority of the Taliban, but it was not a homogeneous group. Some of its leaders, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the self-styled emir of Afghanistan, were dyed-in-the-wool Islamic radicals; others were fierce Afghan nationalists. The Taliban's principal support had come from Pakistan-another interested party, which wanted a reasonably peaceful border to its west-and in particular from the hard men of the isi. But Pakistan's policy was not all of a piece either. Since General Pervez Musharraf had taken power in a 1999 coup, some Pakistani officials, desperate to curry favor with the U.S.-which had cut off aid to Pakistan after it tested a nuclear device in 1998-had seen the wisdom of distancing themselves from the Taliban, or at the least attempting to moderate its more radical behavior. The third element was the Northern Alliance, a resistance movement whose stronghold was in northeast Afghanistan. Most of the Alliance's forces and leaders were, like Massoud, ethnic Tajiks-a minority in Afghanistan. Massoud controlled less than 10% of the country and had been beaten back by the Taliban in 2000. Nonetheless, by dint of his personality and reputation, Massoud was "the only military threat to the Taliban," says Francesc Vendrell, who was then the special representative in Afghanistan of the U.N. Secretary-General.
And then there was al-Qaeda. The group had been born in Afghanistan when Islamic radicals began flocking there in 1979, after the Soviets invaded. Bin Laden and his closest associates had returned in 1996, when they were expelled from Sudan. Al-Qaeda's terrorist training camps were in Afghanistan, and bin Laden's forces and money were vital to sustaining the Taliban's offensives against Massoud.
By last spring, the uneasy equilibrium among the four forces was beginning to break down. "Moderates" in the Taliban-those who tried to keep lines open to intermediaries in the U.N. and the U.S.-were losing ground. In 2000, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, thought to be the second most powerful member of the Taliban, had reached out clandestinely to Massoud. "He understood that our country had been sold out to al-Qaeda and Pakistan," says Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary. But in April 2001, Rabbani died of liver cancer. By that month, says the U.N.'s Vendrell, "it was al- Qaeda that was running the Taliban, not vice versa."
A few weeks before Rabbani's death, Musharraf's government had started to come to the same conclusion: the Pakistanis were no longer able to moderate Taliban behavior. To worldwide condemnation, the Taliban had announced its intention to blow up the 1,700-year-old stone statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Musharraf dispatched his right-hand man, Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider, to plead with Mullah Omar for the Buddhas to be saved. The Taliban's Foreign Minister and its ambassador to Pakistan, says a Pakistani official close to the talks, were in favor of saving the Buddhas. But Mullah Omar, says a member of the Pakistani delegation, listened to what Haider had to say and replied, "If on Judgment Day I stand before Allah, I'll see those two statues floating before me, and I know that Allah will ask me why, when I had the power, I did not destroy them." A few days later, the Buddhas were blown up.
By summer, Pakistan had a deeper grievance. The country had suffered a wave of sectarian assassinations, with gangs throwing grenades into mosques and murdering clerics. The authorities in Islamabad knew that the murderers had fled to Afghanistan (one of them was openly running a store in Kabul) and sent a delegation to ask for their return. "We gave them lists of names, photos and the locations of training camps where these fellows could be found," says Brigadier Javid Iqbal Cheema, director of Pakistan's National Crisis Management Cell, "but not a single individual was ever handed over to us." The Pakistanis were furious.
As the snows cleared for the annual spring military campaign, a joint offensive against Massoud by the Taliban and al-Qaeda seemed likely. But the influence of al-Qaeda on the Taliban was proving deeply unpopular among ordinary Afghans, especially in the urban centers. "I thought at most 20% of the population supported the Taliban by early summer," says Vendrell. And bin Laden's power made Massoud's plea for outside assistance more urgent. "We told the Americans-we told everyone-that al-Qaeda was set upon a transnational program," says Abdullah Abdullah, once a close aide to Massoud and now the Afghan Foreign Minister. In April, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, seeking support for the Northern Alliance. "If President Bush doesn't help us," he told a reporter, "these terrorists will damage the U.S. and Europe very soon."
But Massoud never got the help that he needed-or that Clarke's plan had deemed necessary. Most of the time, Northern Alliance delegates to Washington had to be satisfied with meeting low-level bureaucrats. The Alliance craved recognition by the U.S. as a "legitimate resistance movement" but never got it, though on a visit in July, Abdullah did finally get to meet some top National Security Council (NSC) and State Department officials for the first time. The best the Americans seemed prepared to do was turn a blind eye to the trickle of aid from Iran, Russia and India. Vendrell remembers much talk that spring of increased support from the Americans. But in truth Massoud's best help came from Iran, which persuaded all supporters of the Northern Alliance to channel their aid through Massoud alone.
Only once did something happen that might have given Massoud hope that the U.S. would help. In late June, he was joined in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, by Abdul Haq, a leading Pashtun, based in Dubai, who was opposed to the Taliban. Haq was accompanied by someone Massoud knew well: Peter Tomsen, a retired ambassador who from 1989 to '92 had been the U.S. State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance. Also present was James Ritchie, a successful Chicago options trader who had spent part of his childhood in Afghanistan and was helping bankroll the groups opposed to the Taliban. (Haq was captured and executed by the Taliban last October while on a quixotic mission to Afghanistan.) Tomsen insists that the June 2001 trip was a private one, though he had told State Department officials of it in advance. Their message, he says, was limited to a noncommittal "good luck and be careful."
The purpose of the meeting, according to Tomsen, was to see if Massoud and Haq could forge a joint strategy against the Taliban. "The idea," says Sayeed Hussain Anwari, now the Afghan Minister of Agriculture, who was present at the meeting, "was to bring Abdul Haq inside the country to begin an armed struggle in the southeast." Still hoping for direct assistance from Washington, Massoud gave Tomsen all the intelligence he had on al-Qaeda and asked Tomsen to take it back to Washington. But when he briefed State Department officials after his trip, their reaction was muted. The American position was clear. If anything was to be done to change the realities in Afghanistan, it would have to be done not by the U.S. but by Pakistan. Massoud was on his own.
CLARKE: CRYING WOLF
In Washington, dick clarke didn't seem to have a lot of friends either. His proposals were still grinding away. No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way as the U.S.-new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker with even the most sensible of existing policies. The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear. "If we hadn't had a transition," says a senior Clinton Administration official, "probably in late October or early November 2000, we would have had (the plan to go on the offensive) as a presidential directive."
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."
For other observers, however, the real point was not that the new Administration dismissed the terrorist theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, "all got that it was important." The question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda "was in the top tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration." But other topics got far more attention. The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to keep in line a national-security team-including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell-whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. "Terrorism," says a former Clinton White House official, speaking of the new Administration, "wasn't on their plate of key issues." Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, "had to learn about (al-Qaeda) and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy." But doing so meant delay.
Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush Administration's dilatory response. Clarke's paper, says an official, "was a Clinton proposal." Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an Administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new "policy review process" on the terrorism threat. Clarke dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death.
This was, after all, a White House plan, which means it was resented from the moment of conception. "When you look at the Pentagon and the cia," says a former senior Clinton aide, "it's not their plan. The military will never accept the White House staff doing military planning." Terrorism, officials from the State Department suggested, needed to be put in the broader context of American policy in South Asia. The rollback plan was becoming the victim of a classic Washington power play between those with "functional" responsibilities-like terrorism-and those with "regional" ones-like relations with India and Pakistan. The State Department's South Asia bureau, according to a participant in the meetings, argued that a fistful of other issues-Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, Musharraf's dictatorship-were just as pressing as terrorism. By now, Clarke's famously short fuse was giving off sparks. A participant at one of the meetings paraphrases Clarke's attitude this way: "These people are trying to kill us. I could give a f___ if Musharraf was democratically elected. What I do care about is Pakistan's support for the Taliban and turning a blind eye to this terrorist cancer growing in their neighbor's backyard."
It was Bush who broke the deadlock. Each morning the CIA gives the Chief Executive a top-secret Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on pressing issues of national security. One day in early spring, Tenet briefed Bush on the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's head of international operations, who was suspected of having been involved in the planning of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. After the PDB, Bush told Rice that the approach to al-Qaeda was too scattershot. He was tired of "swatting at flies" and asked for a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. According to an official, Rice came back to the nsc and said, "The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda." Clarke reminded her that he already had one.
But having a plan isn't the same as executing it. Clarke's paper now had to go through three more stages: the Deputies' Committee, made up of the No. 2s to the main national-security officials; the Principals' Committee, which included Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Powell and Rumsfeld; and finally, the President. Only when Bush had signed off would the plan become what the Bush team called a national-security presidential directive.
On April 30, nearly six weeks after the Administration started holding deputies' meetings, Clarke presented a new plan to them. In addition to Hadley, who chaired the hour-long meeting, the gathering included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; Richard Armitage, the barrel-chested Deputy Secretary of State; Paul Wolfowitz, the scholarly hawk from the Pentagon; and John McLaughlin from the cia. Armitage was enthusiastic about Clarke's plan, according to a senior official. But the CIA was gun-shy. Tenet was a Clinton holdover and thus vulnerable if anything went wrong. His agency was unwilling to take risks; it wanted "top cover" from the White House. The deputies, says a senior official, decided to have "three parallel reviews-one on al-Qaeda, one on the Pakistani political situation and the third on Indo-Pakistani relations." The issues, the deputies thought, were interrelated. "They wanted to view them holistically," says the senior official, "and not until they'd had three separate meetings on each of these were they able to hold a fourth integrating them all."
There was more. Throughout the spring, one bureaucratic wrangle in particular rumbled on, poisoning the atmosphere. At issue: the Predator.
The Predator had first been used in Bosnia in 1995. Later, the CIA and the Pentagon began a highly classified program designed to produce pictures-viewable in real time-that would be fine-grained enough to identify individuals. The new, improved Predator was finally ready in September 2000, and the CIA flew it over Afghanistan in a two-week "test of concept." First results were promising; one video sent to the White House showed a man who might have been bin Laden. For the first time, the CIA now had a way to check out a tip by one of its agents among the Afghan tribes. If there was a report that bin Laden was in the vicinity, says a former aide to Clinton, "we could put the Predator over the location and have eyes on the target."
But in October 2000, the Predator crashed when landing at its base in a country bordering Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle needed repairs, and in any event, the CIA and the Pentagon decided that the winter weather over Afghanistan would make it difficult to take good pictures. The Clinton team left office assuming that the Predator would be back in the skies by March 2001.
In fact, the Predator wouldn't fly again until after Sept. 11. In early 2001 it was decided to develop a new version that would not just take photos but also be armed with Hellfire missiles. To the frustration of Clarke and other White House aides, the CIA and the Pentagon couldn't decide who controlled the new program or who should pay for it-though each craft cost only $1 million. While the new uav was being rapidly developed at a site in the southwestern U.S., the CIA opposed using the old one for pure surveillance because it feared al-Qaeda might see it. "Once we were going to arm the thing," says a senior U.S. intelligence official, "we didn't want to expose the capability by just having it fly overhead and spot a bunch of guys we couldn't do anything about." Clarke and his supporters were livid. "Dick Clarke insisted that it be kept in the air," says a Bush Administration official. The counterterrorism team argued that the Taliban had shot at the uav during the Clinton test, so its existence was hardly a secret. Besides, combined with on-the-ground intelligence, a Predator might just gather enough information in time to get a Tomahawk off to the target. But when the deputies held their fourth and final meeting on July 16, they still hadn't sorted out what to do with the Predator. Squabbles over who would pay for it continued into August.
Administration sources insist that they were not idle in the spring. They set up, for example, a new center in the Treasury to track suspicious foreign assets and reviewed Clinton's "findings" on whether the CIA could kill bin Laden. But by the summer, policy reviews were hardly what was needed.
Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top officials. On June 22, the Defense Department put its troops on full alert and ordered six ships from the Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, to steam out to sea, for fear that they might be attacked in port. U.S. officials thought an attack might be mounted on American forces at the nato base at Incirlik, Turkey, or maybe in Rome or Belgium, Germany or Southeast Asia, perhaps the Philippines-anywhere, it seems, but in the U.S. When Independence Day passed without incident, Clarke called a meeting and asked Ben Bonk, deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, to brief on bin Laden's plans. Bonk's evidence that al-Qaeda was planning "something spectacular," says an official who was in the room, "was very gripping." But nobody knew what or when or where the spectacular would be. As if to crystallize how much and how little anyone in the know actually knew, the counterterrorism center released a report titled "Threat of Impending al- Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely."
Predictably, nerves frayed. Clarke, who was widely loathed in the cia, where he was accused of self-aggrandizement, began to lose credibility. He cried wolf, said his detractors; he had been in the job too long. "The guy was reading way too many fiction novels," says a counterterrorism official. "He turned into a Chicken Little. The sky was always falling for Dick Clarke. We had our strings jerked by him so many times, he was simply not taken seriously." Clarke wasn't the only one living on the edge. So, say senior officials, was Tenet. Every few days, the CIA director would call Tom Pickard, who had become acting director of the FBI in June, asking "What do you hear? Do you have anything?" Pickard never had to ask what the topic was.
In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. "George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack," says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet broke out a huge wall chart ("They always have wall charts") with dozens of threats. Tenet couldn't rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas. One date already worrying the Secret Service was July 20, when Bush would arrive in Genoa for the G-8 summit; Tenet had intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to attack Bush there. The Italians, who had heard the same report (the way European intelligence sources tell it, everyone but the President's dog "knew" an attack was coming) put frogmen in the harbor, closed airspace around the town and ringed it with antiaircraft guns.
But nothing happened. After Genoa, says a senior intelligence official, there was a collective sigh of relief: "A lot of folks started letting their guard down." After the final deputies' meeting on Clarke's draft of a presidential directive, on July 16, it wasn't easy to find a date for the Principals' Committee to look at the plan-the last stage before the paper went to Bush. "There was one meeting scheduled for August," says a senior official, "but too many principals were out of town." Eventually a date was picked: the principals would look at the draft on Sept. 4. That was about nine months after Clarke first put his plan on paper.
A BURNED-OUT CASE
Clarke wasn't the only person having a bad year. In New York City, John O'Neill led the FBI's National Security Division, commanding more than 100 experienced agents. By spring they were all overloaded. O'Neill's boss, Assistant FBI Director Barry Mawn, spent part of his time pleading with Washington for more agents, more linguists, more clerical help. He got nowhere. O'Neill was a legend both in New York, where he hung out at famous watering holes like Elaine's, and in the counterterrorism world. Since 1995, when he helped coordinate the arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Yousef, the man responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, O'Neill had been one of the FBI's leading figures in the fight against terrorism. Brash, slick and ambitious, he had spent the late 1990s working closely with Clarke and the handful of other top officials for whom bin Laden had become an obsession.
Now O'Neill was having a lousy few months. The New York City field office had primary responsibility for the investigation of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. But the case had gone badly from the start. The Yemeni authorities had been lethargic and uncooperative, and O'Neill, who led the team in Aden, had run afoul of Barbara Bodine, then the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, who believed the FBI's large presence was causing political problems for the Yemeni regime. When O'Neill left Yemen on a trip home for Thanksgiving, Bodine barred his return. Seething, O'Neill tried to supervise the investigation from afar. At the same time, his team in New York City was working double time preparing for the trial in January 2001 of four co-conspirators in the case of the 1998 African embassy bombings. That involved agents shuttling between Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and New York, escorting witnesses, ferrying documents and guarding al-Qaeda turncoats who would give evidence for the prosecution.
Yet the FBI as a whole was ill equipped to deal with the terrorist threat. It had neither the language skills nor the analytical savvy to understand al-Qaeda. The bureau's information-technology capability dated to pre-Internet days. Chambliss says the counterterrorism investigations were decentralized at the bureau's 56 field offices, which were actually discouraged from sharing information with one another or with headquarters.
That was if the cases ever got started. An investigation by Chambliss's subcommittee found that the FBI paid "insufficient attention" to tracking terrorists' finances. Most agents in the field were assigned to criminal units; few field squads were dedicated to gathering intelligence on radical fundamentalists. During the Clinton Administration, says a former senior aide, Clarke became so frustrated with the bureau that he began touring its field offices, giving agents "al- Qaeda 101" classes. The bureau was, in fact, wiretapping some suspected Islamic radicals and debriefing a few al-Qaeda hands who had flipped. But at the end of the Clinton years, the aide says, the FBI told the White House that "there's not a substantial al-Qaeda presence in the U.S., and to the extent there was a presence, they had it covered." The FBI didn't, and O'Neill must have known that it didn't. So, as it happens, did some of his key allies, who were not in the U.S. at all but overseas. In Europe and especially in France the threat of Islamic terrorism had been particularly sharp ever since the Algerian Armed Islamic Group launched a bombing campaign in Paris in 1995. By 2000, counterterrorism experts in Europe knew the Islamic diaspora communities in Europe were seeded with cells of terrorists. And after the arrest of Ressam, European officials were convinced that terrorists would soon attack targets in the U.S. Jean-Louis Bruguire, a French magistrate who has led many of the most prominent terrorist cases, says Ressam's arrest signaled that the U.S. "had to join the rest of the world in considering itself at acute risk of attack."
Throughout the winter and spring of 2001, European law-enforcement agencies scored a series of dramatic hits against al-Qaeda and associated radical Islamic cells, with some help from the cia. The day after Christmas 2000, German authorities in Frankfurt arrested four Algerians on suspicion of plotting to bomb targets in Strasbourg. Two months later, the British arrested six Algerians on terrorism charges. In April, Italian police busted a cell whose members were suspected of plotting to bomb the American embassy in Rome. Two months later, the Spanish arrested Mohammed Bensakhria, an Algerian who had been in Afghanistan and had links to top al-Qaeda officials, including bin Laden. Bensakhria, the French alleged, had directed the Frankfurt cell involved in the Strasbourg plot. And in the most stunning coup of all, on July 28, Djamel Beghal, a Frenchman of Algerian descent who had been on France's terrorist watch list since 1997, was arrested in Dubai on his way back from Afghanistan. After being persuaded of terrorism's evil by Islamic scholars, Beghal told of a plot to attack the American embassy in Paris and gave investigators new details on al-Qaeda's top leadership, including the international-operations role of Abu Zubaydah. (Now back in France, he has tried to recant his confession.) French sources tell Time they believe U.S. authorities knew about Beghal's testimony.
This action by cops in Europe was meat and drink to O'Neill. The problem was that it convinced some U.S. antiterrorism officials that if there was going to be an attack on American interests that summer, it would take place outside the U.S. In early June, for example, the FBI was so concerned about threats to investigators left in Yemen that it moved the agents from Aden to the American embassy in Sana'a. Then came a second, very specific warning about the team's safety, and Washington decided to pull out of Yemen entirely. "John (O'Neill) would say, 'There's a lot of traffic,'" recalls Mawn. "Everybody was saying, 'The drumbeats are going; something's going to happen.' I said, 'Where and what?' And they'd say, 'We don't know, but it seems to be overseas, probably.'"
Some didn't lose sight of the threat at home. On Aug. 6, while on vacation in Crawford, Texas, Bush was given a PDB, this one on the possibility of al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S. And not one but two FBI field offices had inklings of al-Qaeda activity in the U.S. that, had they been aggressively pursued, might have fleshed out the intelligence chatter about an upcoming attack. But the systemic weaknesses in the FBI's bureaucracy prevented anything from being done.
The first warning came from Phoenix, Ariz. On July 10, agent Kenneth Williams wrote a paper detailing his suspicions about some suspected Islamic radicals who had been taking flying lessons in Arizona. Williams proposed an investigation to see if al-Qaeda was using flight schools nationwide. He spoke with the voice of experience; he had been working on international terrorism cases for years. The Phoenix office, according to former FBI agent James Hauswirth, had been investigating men with possible Islamic terrorist links since 1994, though without much support from the FBI's local bosses. Williams had started work on his probe of flight schools in early 2001 but had spent much of the next months on nonterrorist cases. Once he was back on terrorism, it took only a few weeks for alarm bells to ring. He submitted his memo to headquarters and to two FBI field offices, including New York City. In all three places it died.
Five weeks after Williams wrote his memo, a second warning came in from another FBI field office, and once again, headquarters bungled the case. On Aug. 13, Zacarias Moussaoui, a 33-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan ancestry, arrived at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota for simulator training on a Boeing 747. Moussaoui, who had been in the U.S. since February and had already taken flying lessons at a school in Norman, Okla., was in a hurry. John Rosengren, who was director of operations at Pan Am until February this year, says Moussaoui wanted to learn how to fly the 747 in "four or five days." After just two days of training, Moussaoui's flight instructor expressed concern that his student didn't want it known that he was a Muslim. One of Pan Am's managers had a contact in the FBI; should the manager call him? "I said, 'No problem,'" says Rosengren. "The next day I got a call from a Minneapolis agent telling me Moussaoui had been detained at the Residence Inn in Eagan."
Though Moussaoui is the only person to be indicted in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, his role in them is as clear as mud. (He is detained in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial in federal district court.) German authorities have confirmed to Time that-as alleged in the indictment-Ramzi Binalshibh, a Hamburg friend of Atta and Al-Shehhi, wired two money transfers to Moussaoui in August. Binalshibh, who was denied a visa to visit the U.S. four times in 2000, is thought to have been one of the conduits for funds to the hijackers, relaying cash that originated in the Persian Gulf. But no known telephone calls or other evidence links the hijackers directly to Moussaoui.
Whatever Moussaoui's true tale may be, the Minnesota field office was convinced he was worth checking out. Agents spent much of the next two weeks in an increasingly frantic-and ultimately fruitless- effort to persuade FBI headquarters to authorize a national-security warrant to search Moussaoui's computer. From Washington, requests were sent to authorities in Paris for background details on the suspect. Like most things having to do with Moussaoui, the contents of the dossier sent over from Paris are in dispute. One senior French law-enforcement source told Time the Americans were given "everything they needed" to understand that Moussaoui was associated with Islamic terrorist groups. "Even a neophyte," says this source, "working in some remote corner of Florida, would have understood the threat based on what was sent." But several officials in FBI headquarters say that before Sept. 11 the French sent only a three-page document, which portrayed Moussaoui as a radical but was too sketchy to justify a search warrant for his computer.
The precise wording of the French letter isn't the issue. The extraordinary thing about Moussaoui's case-like the Phoenix memo-is that it was never brought to the attention of top officials in Washington who were, almost literally, sleepless with worry about an imminent terrorist attack. Nobody in the FBI or CIA ever informed anybody in the White House of Moussaoui's detention. That was unforgivable. "Do you think," says a White House antiterrorism official, "that if Dick Clarke had known the FBI had in custody a foreigner who was learning to fly a plane in midair, he wouldn't have done something?"
In blissless ignorance, Clarke and Tenet waited for the meeting of the Principals. But the odd little ways of Washington had one more trick to play. Heeding the pleas from the FBI's New York City office, where Mawn and O'Neill were desperate for new linguists and analysts, acting FBI director Pickard asked the Justice Department for some $50 million for the bureau's counterterrorism program. He was turned down. In August, a bureau source says, he appealed to Attorney General Ashcroft. The reply was a flat no.
Pickard got Ashcroft's letter on Sept. 10. A few days before, O'Neill had started a new job. He was burned out, and he knew it. Over the summer, he had come to realize that he had made too many enemies ever to succeed Mawn. O'Neill handed in his papers, left the FBI and began a new life as head of security at the World Trade Center.
THE TWO VISITORS
As the first cool nights of fall settled on northeast Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud was barely hanging on. His summer offensive had been a bust. An attempt to capture the city of Taloqan, which he had lost to the Taliban in 2000, ended in failure. But old allies, like the brutal Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, had returned to the field, and Massoud still thought the unpopularity of the Taliban might yet make them vulnerable. "He was telling us not to worry, that we'd soon capture Kabul," says Shah Pacha, an infantry commander in the Northern Alliance.
Around Sept. 1, Massoud summoned his top men to his command post in Khoja Bahauddin. The intention was to plan an attack, but Zahir Akbar, one of Massoud's generals, remembers a phone call after which Massoud changed his plans. "He'd been told al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis were deploying five combat units to the front line," says Akbar. Northern Alliance soldiers reported a buildup of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces; there was no big push from the south, although there were a number of skirmishes in the first week in September. "We were puzzled and confused when they didn't attack," says a senior Afghan intelligence source. "And Taliban communications showed the units had been ordered to wait."
What were they waiting for? Some of Massoud's closest aides think they know. For about three weeks, two Arab journalists had been waiting in Khoja Bahauddin to interview Massoud. The men said they represented the Islamic Observation Center in London and had a letter of introduction from its head, Yasser al-Siri. The men, who had been given safe passage through the Taliban front lines, "said they'd like to document Islam in Afghanistan," recalls Faheem Dashty, who made films with the Northern Alliance and is editor in chief of the Kabul Weekly newspaper. By the night of Sept. 8, the visitors were getting antsy, pestering Massoud's officials to firm up the meeting with him and threatening to return to Kabul if they could not see Massoud in the next 24 hours. "They were so worried and excitable they were begging us," says Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary.
The interview was finally granted just before lunch on Sunday, Sept. 9. Dashty was asked to record it on his camera. Massoud sat next to his friend Masood Khalili, now Afghanistan's ambassador to India. "The commander said he wanted to sit with me and translate," says Khalili. "Then he and I would go and have lunch together by the Oxus River." The Arabs entered and set up a TV camera in front of Massoud; the guests, says Khalili, were "very calm, very quiet." Khalili asked them which newspaper they represented. When they replied that they were acting for "Islamic Centers," says Khalili, he became reluctant to continue, but Massoud said they should all go ahead.
Khalili says Massoud asked to know the Arabs' questions before they started recording. "I remember that out of 15 questions, eight were about bin Laden," says Khalili. "I looked over at Massoud. He looked uncomfortable; there were five worry lines on his forehead instead of the one he usually had. But he said, 'O.K. Let's film.'" Khalili started translating the first question into Dari; Dashty was fiddling with the lighting on his camera. "Then," says Dashty, "I felt the explosion." The bomb was in the camera, and it killed one of the Arabs; the second was shot dead by Massoud's guards while trying to escape. Khalili believes he was saved by his passport, which was in his left breast pocket-eight pieces of shrapnel were found embedded in it. Dashty remembers being rushed to a helicopter with Massoud, who had terrible wounds. The chopper flew them both to a hospital in Tajikistan. By the time they arrived, Massoud was dead. The killers had come from Europe, and they were members of a group allied with al-Qaeda. Massoud's enemies had been waiting for the news. Within hours, Taliban radio began to crackle: "Your father is dead. Now you can't resist us." "They were clever," says a member of Massoud's staff. "Their offensive was primed to begin after the assassination." That night the Taliban attacked Massoud's front lines. One last time, his forces held out on their own.
As the battle raged, Clarke's plan awaited Bush's signature. Soon enough, the Northern Alliance would get all the aid it had been seeking-U.S. special forces, money, B-52 bombers, and, of course, as many Predators as the CIA and Pentagon could get into the sky. The decision that had been put off for so long had suddenly become easy because a little more than 50 hours after Massoud's death, Atta, sitting on American Airlines Flight 11 on the runway at Boston's Logan Airport, had used his mobile phone to speak for the last time to his friend Al-Shehhi, on United Flight 175. Their plot was a go.
That morning, O'Neill, Clarke's former partner in the fight against international terrorism, arrived at his new place of work. He had been on the job just two weeks. After Atta and Al-Shehhi crashed their planes into the World Trade Center, O'Neill called his son and a girlfriend from outside the Towers to say he was safe. Then he rushed back in. His body was identified 10 days later.
—Reported by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington; Hannah Bloch and Tim McGirk/Islamabad; Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas; Wendy Cole and Marguerite Michaels/ Chicago; Bruce Crumley/Paris; James Graff/Brussels; David Schwartz/Phoenix; and Michael Ware/Kabul
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