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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FACT CHECK: Condi Rice's 60 Minutes Interview, 3/28/04

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes in an effort to quell growing questions surrounding the Administration's inconsistent claims about its pre-9/11 actions. Not only did Rice refuse to take Richard Clarke's lead and admit responsibility for her role in the worst national security failure in American history, but she continued to make unsubstantiated and contradictory assertions:



RICE CLAIM: "The administration took seriously the threat" of terrorism before 9/11.



FACTS: President Bush himself acknowledges that, despite repeated warnings of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, before 9/11 "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism. Similarly, Newsweek reports that his attitude was reflected throughout an Administration that was trying to "de-emphasize terrorism" as an overall priority. As proof, just two of the hundred national security meetings the Administration held during this period addressed the terrorist threat, and the White House refused to hold even one meeting of its highly-touted counterterrorism task force. Meanwhile, the Administration was actively trying to cut funding for counterterrorism, and "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism" despite a serious increase in terrorist chatter in the summer of 2001.

Source: "Bush At War" by Bob Woodward

Source: Newsweek & vetoed request
- http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorismfoi/whatwentwrong.html

Source: Refusal to hold task force meeting
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8734-2002Jan19?language=printer

Source: Only two meetings out of 100
- http://www.detnews.com/2002/politics/0207/01/politics-526326.htm



RICE CLAIM: "I don't know what a sense of urgency any greater than the one we had would have caused us to do anything differently. I don't know how...we could have done more. I would like very much to know what more could have been done?"



FACTS: There are many things that could have been done: first and foremost, the Administration could have desisted from de-emphasizing and cutting funding for counterterrorism in the months before 9/11. It could have held more meetings of top principals to get the directors of the CIA and FBI to share information, especially considering the major intelligence spike occurring in the summer of 2001. As 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick said on ABC this morning, the lack of focus and meetings meant agencies were not talking to each other, and key evidence was overlooked. For instance, with better focus and more urgency, the FBI's discovery of Islamic radicals training at flight schools might have raised red flags. Similarly, the fact that "months before Sept. 11, the CIA knew two of the al-Qaeda hijackers were in the United States" could have spurred a nationwide manhunt. But because there was no focus or urgency, "No nationwide manhunt was undertaken," said Gorelick. "The State Department watch list was not given to the FAA. If you brought people together, perhaps key connections could have been made."

Source: Slash counterterrorism funding
- http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/transcrime/articles/How%20Sept_%2011%20Changed%20Goals%20of%20Justice%20Dept.htm

Source: CIA knew 2 hijackers in the U.S.
- http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/6/2/111044.shtml



RICE CLAIM:“Nothing would be better from my point of view than to be able to testify, but there is an important principle involved here it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisors do not testify before the Congress.”



FACTS: Republican Commission John F. Lehman, who served as Navy Secretary under President Reagan said on ABC this morning that "This is not testimony before a tribunal of the Congress…There are plenty of precedents for appearing in public and answering questions…There are plenty of precedents the White House could use if they wanted to do this.” 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick agreed, saying “Our commission is sui generis…the Chairman has been appointed by the President. We are distinguishable from Congress.” Rice's remarks on 60 Minutes that the principle is limited to "sitting national security advisers" is also a departure from her statements earlier this week, when she said the principle applied to all presidential advisers. She was forced to change this claim for 60 Minutes after 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste “cited examples of non-Cabinet presidential advisers who have testified publicly to Congress." Finally, the White House is reportedly moving to declassify congressional testimony then-White House adviser Richard Clarke gave in 2002. By declassifying this testimony, the White House is breaking the very same "principle" of barring White House adviser's testimony from being public that Rice is using to avoid appearing publicly before the 9/11 commission.

Source: Quote from Tony Snow Show
- http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-03-23-911-rice-usat_x.htm



RICE CLAIM: "Iraq was put aside" immediately after 9/11.



FACTS: According to the Washington Post, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by a CBS News, which reported on 9/4/02 that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." The President therefore did not put Iraq aside -- he merely deferred it to a second phase, after Afghanistan. To the question of Iraq or Afghanistan, Bush replied: let's do both, starting with Afghanistan. In terms of resources, the Iraq decision had far-reaching effects on the efforts to hunt down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As the Boston Globe reported, "the Bush administration is continuing to shift highly specialized intelligence officers from the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to the Iraq crisis."

Source: September 17th directive
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43909-2003Jan11?language=printer

Source: Rumsfeld orders Iraq plan
- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtml

Source: Shifting special forces
- http://www.iht.com/articles/106783.html



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Bush's Secret Budget: $4.5 Trillion in Secret Spending

BUSH FICTION: Bush is fiscally responsible.

FACT: In just four years as President, George Bush has overseen the largest spending increase since World War II. Adjusted for inflation, total spending has increased by $354 billion annually – that’s the largest four-year spending increase since World War II. Of this total, $98 billion annually is in non-defense discretionary programs – the largest four-year spending increase on record.

BUSH'S BROKEN PROMISES ON SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE

In 2000, America had a historic opportunity to use surpluses to save Social Security and Medicare. Instead, George W. Bush squandered the surplus on a large tax cut for the wealthy. Today’s Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report shows that under President Bush the outlook for Social Security and Medicare has not improved and in fact gotten worse under President Bush. Also, George W. Bush has a secret budget plan for the future that will spend more than $4.5 trillion.

TAX CUTS COST MORE THAN THREE TIMES AS MUCH AS SAVING SOCIAL SECURITY: Instead of taking advantage of his historic opportunity, George Bush passed tax cuts for the wealthy that cost three times as much as the 75 year deficit in Social Security. The cost of making the tax cuts permanent is more than the cost of saving Social Security and Medicare combined for the next 75 years. [Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “Understanding the Social Security and Medicare Projections,” 3/22/04]

THE TRUE COST OF THE MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG BILL MAKES THINGS WORSE: As has been widely reported, the Bush Administration hid from Congress and the American people the true cost of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. That extra $136 billion only exacerbates the fiscal challenges facing Medicare. [Wall Street Journal, 3/18/04]

GEORGE BUSH HAS WORSENED MEDICARE, BILL CLINTON IMPROVED IT: When Bill Clinton took office, Medicare was scheduled to go broke in 1999 and because of the fiscal responsibility and prudent choices of the Democrats, the program was strengthened nearly 30 years to 2029. Today’s Trustees report revealed that Medicare will be insolvent by 2019 – ten years earlier than its solvency date under President Clinton and seven years earlier than last year’s estimate. [Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports, 2001 & 2004].

GEORGE BUSH HASN’T IMPROVED SOCIAL SECURITY: Both Social Security and Medicare are projected to be unable to pay the full benefits they have promised to members of the baby boom generation. The new Trustees Report projects that Social Security will be insolvent by 2042 George Bush has done nothing to extend the solvency of Social Security or Medicare.

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BUSH’S SECRET BUDGET: $4.5 TRILLION IN SECRET SPENDING

George Bush is only going to put entitlements more at risk with his secret budget plan.

· $411 BILLION – THE MISSING YEARS IN THE BUSH BUDGET. George W. Bush only tells Americans about 5 years of his spending plans – although his campaign’s false attacks estimates Kerry’s plans over 10 years. Including the missing five years adds $411 billion to the Bush budget.

· $280 BILLION – IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN AND WAR ON TERROR. Despite the fact that the Administration’s acknowledgement that we are not leaving Iraq or Afghanistan any time soon, the President’s budget does not have any money to pay for the war on Iraq. This could cost $280 billion over ten years, based on analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

· $936 BILLION – EXTENDING THE TAX CUT FOR THE WEALTHY. Bush buries the cost of extending his tax cut for the wealthy. But you can find the number buried in his budget – and it’s nearly $1 trillion. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office thinks extending the tax cut will cost even more.

· $555 BILLION – 455 EXPLCIT ADDITIONAL SPENDING INCREASES IN THE BUDGET. Look through the fine print of the Bush budget, and you’ll find 455 explicit spending increases for programs, not even including defense or homeland security. The price tag for these programs adds up to $555 billion. Like the Bush “analysis” of the Kerry budget this does not count any budget cuts or savings that Bush proposes.

· $2,005 BILLION – SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM. President Bush has repeatedly called for Social Security reform, but his budget does not have any money for it. His Commission developed a plan – all but endorsed in his Economic Report of the President – that the independent Social Security actuary estimated would add over $2 trillion to the deficit from 2005 to 2014.

· $250 BILLION – MARS MISSION. The President does not include the full ten year cost of the Mars mission in his budget, including it could add $250 billion.

· $24 BILLION – ENERGY BILL. The President promised to sign the Congressional energy bill, costing $31 billion. But he only included $7 billion for energy in his budget. Thus another $24 billion is missing.

Bush Taxes the Truth

BUSH FICTION: Bush is a straight talker when it comes to taxes.

FACT: On the stump and in a series of deceptive attack ads, Bush has taken a leading role in misleading America about John Kerry’s record.

THE PRESIDENT: My opponent has a different view of tax relief. When we passed an increase in the child credit to help families, he voted against it.

THE TRUTH: Kerry 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 PRESIDENT: When we reduced the marriage penalty, he voted against it.

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

THE PRESIDENT: When we created a lower 10-percent tax rate for working families, he voted against it.

THE TRUTH: Kerry voted to EXPAND the 10 percent bracket [2003; #168]

THE PRESIDENT: When we gave small businesses a tax incentive to expand and to hire, he voted against it.

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]

· Kerry voted to extend the business research and development tax credit through 2013. [2003, #154]

· Kerry voted to extend R&D tax credit and increase first-year write-off for small business. ($4.3 billion tax cut) [1993, #326]

THE PRESIDENT: When tax increases are proposed, it's a lot easier to get a "yes" vote out of him. Over the years, he's voted over 350 times for higher taxes on the American people --

THE TRUTH: Bush’s 350 tax increases charge is completely made up

· “The President misled voters and reporters in a March 20 speech when he claimed that Kerry “voted over 350 times for higher taxes on the American people” during his 20-year Senate career. Bush spoke of “yes” votes for “tax increases.” But in fact, Kerry has not voted 350 times for tax increases, something Bush campaign officials have falsely accused Kerry of on several occasions.” [factcheck.org]

· “The documentation on the GOP Web site about Kerry's supposed 350 votes to increase taxes lists only 67 votes "for higher taxes." Most of these are votes against a tax cut, not in favor of a tax increase. The 67 include nine votes listed twice, three listed three times, and two listed four times. …The only tax increase on Bush's list (counted twice, but hey . . .) is Kerry's support for Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction plan. That's the one that raised rates in the top bracket and led to a decade of such fabulous prosperity that even its most affluent victims ended up better off.” [Kinsley, Washington Post, 3/24/2004]

Bush-Cheney Tax Claims Misleading and Dishonest

The misleading rhetoric of Bush and his Republican allies has not gone unnoticed. Whether it’s an unsupportable $900 billion in tax increases -- which suddenly grew to a ridiculous $1.7 billion – or the phony numbers that they have put on John Kerry’s tax increases, independent sources are growing skeptical.

· New York Times: Bush “commercial’s assertion is misleading”
”Even Mr. Bush's campaign cites figures saying that such a move would bring in (or cost taxpayers) $250 billion over a 10-year period — not $900 billion. . . . Though independent analysts have questioned how Mr. Kerry can play for his plan, the commercial's assertion is misleading.” [New York Times, 3/13/2004]

· Washington Post: Bush ads fall short of minimum level of honesty
”Voters are entitled to a minimum level of honesty in the argument. On that score, Mr. Bush's initial attacks fall short. … Likewise, it's fair to ask how Mr. Kerry's spending plans can be squared with his pledge to cut the deficit and whether he's overpromising. But the Bush campaign takes an unjustified leap in accusing Mr. Kerry of plotting to "raise taxes by at least $900 billion" because that is the estimated cost of his health care program.” [Washington Post, 3/14/2004]

· Bush uses a “made up number”
"The Bush administration now has an old-fashioned credibility gap. If numbers are released saying that the economy is perking up, why should anyone believe them? After all, it counts hamburger flippers as manufacturing jobs. The context of the election only magnifies the issue. New Bush ads charge that Kerry wants to raise taxes by $900 billion. This is a made-up number; Kerry has no such proposal. But even if he did, voters would not be able to take the Bush campaign's word on it, because its word is no longer good. The challenge for the Democrats is to resist the temptation to make their own phony claims, or to hype the usual petty distortions of politics into "lies." The truth is damaging enough." [Alter, Newsweek, 3/29/2004]

· Bush statements “ridiculous” and “phony”
Bush’s most recent misleading statements about John Kerry’s record on taxes is “unfair,” “ridiculous, and “phony.” [Kinsley, Washington Post, 3/24/2004]

· Campaign accusations are false
“In fact, Kerry has not voted 350 times for tax increases, something Bush campaign officials have falsely accused Kerry of on several occasions.” [Brooks Jackson, FactCheck.org, 3/23/2004]



_____________________________________________________________________________

Bush Inventing Numbers to Distort Kerry's Tax Record

BUSH FICTION: John Kerry has voted to raise taxes 350 times.

FACT: FactCheck.org looked into the "350" claim and said this: "The President misled voters and reporters in a March 20 speech when he claimed that Kerry “voted over 350 times for higher taxes on the American people” during his 20-year Senate career."

"Kerry has not voted 350 times for tax increases, something Bush campaign officials have falsely accused Kerry of on several occasions. On close examination, the Bush campaign’s list of Kerry’s votes for “higher taxes” is padded. It includes votes Kerry cast to leave taxes unchanged (when Republicans proposed cuts), and even votes in favor of alternative Democratic tax cuts that Bush aides characterized as “watered down.” [Emphasis added]

The "350" claim is part of a pattern of deceptive statistics used by the Bush team to paint John Kerry as a tax-raiser. It's a transparent tactic: make a false or misleading allegation and force your opponent to spend time and resources rebutting it.

This is not the first time that Republicans have used phony tax numbers to attack Democrats. Time and again, their numbers have been rejected by independent analyses:

Arkansas: “Throw that out”
Republicans accused Sen. Mark Pryor of voting for higher taxes a dozen times. In fact, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that “[Pryor Campaign manager] said the [Arkansas] House unanimously passed six of the 12 tax increases cited in supporting material issued late Friday by the GOP, meaning "all the Republicans voted for them, too, so throw that out." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 5/12/02]

Georgia: Republican ad flunked truth test
Republicans accused Sen. Max Cleland of voting “in favor of higher taxes 116 times.” WMAZ TV analyzed the ad and said: “After seeing the ad, we asked the Republican party to back up its accusations,” reported Savage. “We got this, five and a half pages listing Cleland’s congressional votes. But it doesn’t say what any of the votes were for…At best, the facts we found just don’t support the charges against Cleland in the ad, so this ad FLUNKS the truth test.” [WMAZ-13 9/19/2002]

Louisiana: “Voters might be a little annoyed” by false ads
Republicans accused Sen. Mary Landrieu of voting “in favor of higher taxes over 120 times.” When a nearly identical ad ran in Louisiana against Sen. Mary Landrieu, the Shreveport Times wrote, “Before accepting this alleged voting record as fact, voters ought to ask where these numbers came from - said voters might be a little annoyed to discover just how gullible the ad generators believe state citizens to be.” After finally obtaining the list of the 128 votes, WWL-TV in New Orleans found that 119 of the votes were either votes for lower taxes or procedural votes.

Oregon: Republican ads “Tried to mislead you”
In Oregon, Republicans accused Secretary of State Bill Bradbury of voting “in favor of sales tax legislation 8 times. And as Senate President, Bradbury pushed for the “biggest tax increase in Oregon history.” [NRSC TV Ad, 4/13/02] An NBC political analyst said the ad “stretches (the truth) almost to the point of tearing it … there’s a lot that (the ad) doesn’t tell you and it tries to mislead you,” and “in fact, 5 of those votes happened before Bradbury was even born.” [KGW News (NBC); 6:00 p.m., 4/16/02]

South Dakota: They even attacked a Senator who supported Bush on taxes
In South Dakota Republicans said that “Tim Johnson voted 141 times for higher taxes.” [NRSC TV ad in South Dakota, 7/19/02] In fact, Tim Johnson voted WITH President Bush on his 2001 tax cut.




________________________________________________________________

THE ONLINE BEAT by John Nichols

Striking Where Bush Is Weakest

Clarke finds a more powerful weapon than Administration spin: an apology.

Every day in every city and town across America, progressives get up in the morning and go about the work of fighting racism and homophobia, defending the environment, organizing trade unions and tackling corporate hegemony. Sometimes they win--on the picket line, at the ballot box, in the streets and outside the WTO meetings in Seattle.

The purpose of The Online Beat is to report regularly and with immediacy on the political, social, economic and cultural activism that too often goes unremarked in so much of the mainstream media. The ultimate goal? To reveal the hidden reality that there is a left in America, and that it's active, growing and winning more consistently than the pundits or the politicians want you to know.


Striking Where Bush Is Weakest
03/25/2004 @ 12:37am

If the Bush administration had gone after Osama bin Laden with anything akin to the energy it is expending to discredit Richard Clarke, the story of America's response to terrorism might have been dramatically different. That, of course, is the point that Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, makes when he says that Bush and his aides "ignored" the terrorist threats before September 11, 2001, and, even more significantly, when he suggests that the administration diverted attention from the real war on terrorism with an unnecessary war on Iraq.

Those are powerful charges, and Clarke has made them convincingly in his testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, in various media appearances over the past few days, and in his book, Against All Enemies. Predictably, the White House spin machine has been churning out increasingly-visceral attacks on Clarke, a self-described Republican who still praises Bush's father as a masterful leader. Amid the tit-for-tat that has developed, however, Clarke has already prevailed. No matter what the Bush administration throws at the man who served in four White Houses, Clarke has already trumped his attackers.

Clarke did so by opening his testimony before the commission on Wednesday not with a bold pronouncement about the failings of the administration, but with an apology: "I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurrence. I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11," he began. "To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness."

In that statement, Clarke proved to be a more masterful political strategist -- and, be clear, a duel between a renegade aide and a president in an election year is about politics -- than White House electoral strategist Karl Rove. Why? Because Clarke recognized the ultimate vulnerability of the Bush administration: An absolute inability on the part of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, to admit when they have failed, when they have been proven wrong and when they have been caught in lies.

The administration that began by neglecting George Bush's popular-vote deficit in the 2000 and claiming a mandate for radical change has been consistent in nothing so much as its refusal to accept unpleasant realities. Bush and his aides always refuse to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. As such, they are always pointing fingers of blame at others. September 11? Blame evil or Bill Clinton -- pretty much the same thing in the Bush administration's collective mind. False information about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction program gets into the State of the Union Address? Blame the CIA or someone, anyone, in Europe. Economic downturn? Blame Democrats in Congress for not backing bigger tax cuts for corporations and more-of-the-same trade policies. False figures on the cost of Medicare reform go to Congress? Blame, well, er, gee, gay marriage?

No matter what goes wrong, the ironclad rule of the Bush administration has been to find someone outside the administration -- preferably a Democrat or a foreigner -- to blame. And if there is no way to blame someone else, the policy has been to keep expressing an Orwellian faith in the prospect that the failure will become a success, or that the lie will be made true -- witness Cheney's refusal to back away from his pre-war "they'll greet us with flowers" fantasy about the Iraqi response to a U.S.-led invasion.

Supposedly, this refusal to bend in the face of reality is smart politics. But a constant pattern of avoiding responsibility tends, eventually, to catch up even with the smartest politicians. Richard Nixon never recognized that fact and it destroyed his presidency. Bill Clinton, for all of his failings, did recognize it and, with his televised apology for mishandling of the Monica Lewinsky mess, thwarted Republican attempts to destroy his presidency.

Richard Clarke, who lived inside the belly of the beast that is the Bush administration, recognizes its many vulnerabilities. And, by reminding the American people that apologies are owed for failings before 9/11 and since, he struck Bush and his aides where they are weakest.



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War Rationale: Version 10.0


P.J. Crowley is senior fellow and director of national defense and homeland security and Robert O. Boorstin is senior vice president of national security at the Center for American Progress

In the year since the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has repeatedly shifted its justification for going to war and constantly changed its story on intelligence, the United Nations, reconstruction, political transition and the cost to the American taxpayer. More than anything, the administration's war in Iraq resembles a software program that, at first, works brilliantly, but then catches the user in a cycle of "fatal error" messages.

Here then, in Silicon Valley terms, is a review of the Bush administration's year in Iraq:

Saddam Hussein poses an 'imminent threat' to the American people.

Version 1.0 - Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat
Version 1.01 - Saddam Hussein is a gathering threat
Version 1.02 - Saddam Hussein poses a real and dangerous threat
Version 1.1 - The smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud
Version 1.2 - We can't afford to wait
Version 1.3 - We never said imminent
Version 1.3.1 - OK, maybe we did say it once or twice
Version 1.4 - We should have been more precise

Saddam Hussein is ready to use weapons of mass destruction.

Version 2.1 - Saddam has weapons of mass destruction
Version 2.2 - Saddam has nuclear weapons
Version 2.3 - Saddam has biological agents he's never accounted for
Version 2.3.1 - The trailers are mobile labs for producing chemical weapons
Version 2.3.2 - Unmanned aircraft are ready to spread Saddam's biological weapons
Version 2.4 - Saddam's going to make more of all these weapons
Version 2.5 - We all know where the weapons are
Version 2.5.1 - Well, Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction
Version 2.5.2 - Iraq is a big country. We'll find the weapons eventually.
Version 2.5.3 - Saddam had weapons of mass destruction programs
Version 2.5.4 - Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities"
Version 2.5.5 - David Kay? Who's David Kay?
Version 2.6 - It's not about misleading the American people—Saddam Hussein is gone and that's the most important thing

The intelligence is clear.

Version 3.0 - We based our statements on our available intelligence
Version 3.1 - Saddam tried to buy uranium ore in Niger
Version 3.1.2 - Well, that was what the British told us
Version 3.1.3 - Did we tell you about Joe Wilson's wife?
Version 3.1.4 - Do you know a good lawyer?
Version 3.2 - The intelligence is absolutely clear
Version 3.2.1 - Intelligence is never 100 percent certain
Version 3.2.2 - We didn't manipulate the intelligence
Version 3.3 - There was no consensus within the intelligence community
Version 3.3.1 - We saw the same intelligence the last administration did

Saddam Hussein has deep ties to Al Qaeda.

Version 4.0 - Saddam has long-standing ties to Al Qaeda
Version 4.0.1 - You can't distinguish between Saddam and Al Qaeda
Version 4.0.2 - There is an Al Qaeda terrorist network in Iraq
Version 4.0.3 - Saddam has provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.
Version 4.0.4 - Saddam will give his weapons to Al Qaeda
Version 4.0.5 - Colin Powell: I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection [between Al Qaeda and Iraq]
Version 4.0.6 - Vice President Cheney: I still believe there's a connection.
Version 4.0.7 - CIA Director George Tenet: I told Dick not to say that.

The United Nations just can't handle this.

Version 5.0 - The UN had 12 years to deal with this
Version 5.1 - We don't trust the UN to handle this
Version 5.1.1 - We don't need the UN's help
Version 5.1.2 - The UN should play a vital, but not central role
Version 5.1.3 - You there, UN, tell Ayatollah Sistani that elections aren't possible
Version 5.1.4 - UN, please oversee the election process
Version 5.1.5 - Pretty please? We'll pay our dues

The war in Iraq won't hurt our efforts in Afghanistan or the hunt for bin Laden.

Version 6.0 - Iraq won't affect our hunt for bin Laden
Version 6.1 - Assets have been moved from Afghanistan to Iraq
Version 6.1.1 - Assets are being returned to Afghanistan
Version 6.2 - We're mounting a spring offensive against bin Laden
Version 6.2.1 - We'll catch bin Laden this year
Version 6.2.2 - We hope to catch bin Laden this year
Version 6.3 - Even if we catch bin Laden, the threat will still exist.

Mission accomplished.

Version 7.0 - We won't need hundreds of thousands of troops—that's wildly off the mark
Version 7.1 - Mission accomplished
Version 7.1.1 - We'll stay as long as needed and not one day more
Version 7.1.2 - The troops will be home in six months
Version 7.1.3 - The Iraqi Army will provide security
Version 7.1.4 - Where's the Iraqi Army?
Version 7.1.5 - We've disbanded the Iraqi Army
Version 7.1.3 - The troops will stay a year and be replaced
Version 7.2 - We're training the Iraqi army—Iraqification will work
Version 7.2.1 - We don't need any more American troops
Version 7.2.2 - Well, maybe we do
Version 7.2.3 - We're keeping 30,000 more troops on active duty than were authorized
Version 7.2.4 - We don't know if this increase in troops is a spike or a plateau
Version 7.2.5 - We're establishing stop loss so troops can't leave
Version 7.2.6 - The Army is planning multi-year rotations

The cost to the American taxpayer.

Version 8.0 - Economic advisor Larry Lindsey: The war will cost $200 billion
Version 8.0.1 - President Bush: You're fired!
Version 8.1 - The war will pay for itself very quickly
Version 8.1.1 - Iraqi oil revenue will pay for reconstruction
Version 8.2 - Our allies will help us
Version 8.3 - We'll pay for the war through supplementals
Version 8.3.1 - Congress wouldn't let us put it in the budget
Version 8.3.2 - Can we please have $87 billion?
Version 8.3.3 - Well, we really can't calculate what it will cost...
Version 8.3.4 - Well, maybe we can—$50 billion may be on the low side
Version 8.3.5 - Ask us after November 2...

Democracy comes to Iraq.

Version 9.0 - We will be greeted as liberators
Version 9.0.1 - We'll establish democracy in Iraq
Version 9.1 - We'll turn this back to the Iraqis quickly
Version 9.1.1 - President Chalabi will be welcomed with open arms
Version 9.1.2 - Well, not so fast—we're prohibiting political parties
Version 9.2 - We have the November 15 agreement—it's unchangeable
Version 9.2.1 - We will appoint a small governing council
Version 9.2.2 - Well, maybe a larger one
Version 9.3 - We don't favor elections
Version 9.3.1 - Caucuses work in Iowa, why not Iraq?
Version 9.3.2 - OK fine, we'll have elections
Version 9.4 - We can't return sovereignty until there is a constitution
Version 9.4.1 - Never mind, we'll turn over sovereignty first
Version 9.4.2 - We need to return this to the Iraqis—How about June 30?
Version 9.4.3 - We're still focused on elections—the ones on November 2

The bottom line.

Version 10.0 - Trust us. We know what we're doing

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared on the Center For American Progress website on March 19, 2004.



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Progressive Air America Radio, featuring Al Franken, will launch on March 31st!

Tune in. Get the stream online. Do something about Rush, Hannity, and the rest of those right wing nut cases! Here's the link:

AIR AMERICA RADIO

Air America Radio's program lineup is as follows:

Monday-Friday

Morning Sedition: 6:00-9:00am

This is a fast paced morning show that will entertain and engage audiences with wit and political satire. It will feature the latest news, offering up to-the-minute interviews with newsmakers, analysis and strong opinions.

Co-Host: Marc Maron

Co-host: Sue Ellicott

Co-host: Mark Riley



Unfiltered: 9:00am- 12:00pm

Air America ’s midmorning program is a showcase for conversation about the political and culture state of the union. Unfiltered introduces listeners to fresh new voices not available in mainstream media.

Co-host: Lizz Winstead

Co-host: Chuck D

Co-host: Rachel Maddow



The O’ Franken Factor: 12:00-3:00pm

After debunking right-wing propaganda in his bestselling books Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot , Al Franken is taking the fight to America 's airwaves--and he's doing it drug-free. With his co-host, veteran radio personality Katherine Lanpher, Franken will deliver three hours a day of fearlessly irreverent commentary, comedy, and interviews. Franken and Lanpher have a mean streak a smile wide. The O'Franken Factor will energize fans, infuriate liars, and deliver the truth--in what Al Franken likes to call the Zero Spin Zone .

Host: Al Franken

Co-host: Katherine Lanpher

Producer: Billy Kimball



The Randi Rhodes Show: 3:00-7:00pm

Randi Rhodes has spent the last 20 years burning up the airwaves in southern Florida with her pointed and provocative brand of talk radio. Combining live interview, call-in and commentary, Randi engages her audience with a passionate presentation.

Host: Randi Rhodes



So What Else is News?: 7:00-8:00pm

Based in Los Angeles , this is a one-hour program showcasing the intersection of politics, media and popular culture. This program will feature analysis and reports from the presidential campaign, as well as a daily reporters’ roundtable on how the news of the day is affected and reflected by the media. Marty will also cover the spinning of the news with a regular segment called “The Corrections.” This is also the place to hear the political voice of Hollywood , with celebrity guest interviews from the entertainment industries.

Host: Marty Kaplan



The Majority Report: 8:00pm-11:00pm

This program will introduce new, younger voices and opinions, with live guests from the world of politics, the arts and entertainment.

Host: Janeane Garofalo

Co-host: Sam Seder



Saturday and Sunday

Air America Radio’s weekend line-up will offer more original programming, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papatanio’s “Champions of Justice,” a program that brings a fresh and entertaining perspective to talk radio from the top legal and social issues focused minds in the country. Additional programming will include Best-of Air America Radio and Best-of-O’Franken Factor as well as other original programming to be announced soon.



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At last. Some honesty and grace about what happened.


March 25, 2004 NY TIMES
Assessing the Blame for 9/11

The seminal moment of this week's hearings on 9/11 surely came yesterday when Richard Clarke, the former antiterrorism chief in the Bush and Clinton administrations, opened his testimony by apologizing to the families whose loved ones died in the terror attacks. The government, Mr. Clarke said, had failed them, "and I failed you." He added, "We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed." It suddenly seemed that after the billions of words uttered about that terrible day, Mr. Clarke had found the ones that still needed saying.

The two days of hearings by the commission investigating the attacks have been invaluable in helping the American people better understand the chain of miscommunications, wrong guesses and misplaced priorities that left the nation so poorly defended against the terrorists. Mr. Clarke, by accepting responsibility, offered the American people the freedom to hold their leaders accountable for an event most had come to see as an unstoppable bolt from the blue.

Mr. Clarke is clearly haunted by the thought that if things had gone differently, the attacks might have been averted. That seems like the longest of long shots. But there are still plenty of questions to be answered about what happened, particularly about the apparent lack of urgency in the Bush administration's antiterrorism efforts before 9/11.

The Clinton administration also made mistakes. Although aware of the danger posed by Osama bin Laden, it was somehow unable to create and carry out an effective strategy to deal with him. Bill Clinton, distracted by the threat of impeachment, failed to educate the American people adequately about the nature of the danger, and what it might take to fight it. Senior officials from the Clinton and Bush administration testified, one after another, that in the pre-9/11 world, they could not have gone further in trying to run down Mr. bin Laden because, they believed, the country and our allies would not have supported it.

But there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism, and on occasion, like the December 1999 alert that appears to have averted an attack on the Los Angeles airport, it produced results.

The attitude of the Bush administration seems harder to pin down. Mr. Clarke's conclusion was that after George Bush became president, neither he nor the terrorism agenda got the same top-level attention. The Bush administration officials who testified denied that vociferously. Their arguments suffered from the absence of Condoleezza Rice, the person to whom Mr. Clarke reported. Ms. Rice has been doing the rounds of talk shows in an attempt to bolster her argument that the administration had found Mr. Clarke's plans wanting and immediately began a full-bore effort to come up with a new antiterrorism strategy. What the nation deserved to hear her address publicly before the commission is why that process took eight months. A new plan was not approved by the White House until the eve of the terror attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

The real impression gleaned from the hearings is not that the Bush administration was indifferent to the threat of terror, but that its officials had trouble fully understanding it. Ms. Rice was trained as a Sovietologist. Many of Mr. Bush's other top advisers are also former cold warriors who remained loyal to the agenda of the gulf war era, the early 1990's. Their mind-set did not allow for the possibility of an extranational threat not orchestrated by any one particular government. Once 9/11 happened, they organized an effective attack on Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden had been operating, but they then turned their attention to Iraq, a country that no one in Mr. Clarke's operation regarded as an incubator of international terrorism.

Despite attempts by a few commission members to paint Mr. Clarke as a disgruntled former employee trying to get publicity for his new book, the former counterterrorism chief was an impressive, reasonable witness. He has done the country a service in focusing attention on the failures leading up to 9/11. The only problem with his apology was that so few of those failures really seemed to be his.



_______________________________________________________________

Commission on 9/11 Paints Picture of Failure

Wed Mar 24, 5:40 PM ET

By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON - Two days of testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks have revealed that U.S. officials from President Bush (news - web sites) down failed to respond adequately to growing signs that a terror strike was imminent in the summer of 2001.


Senior officials of both the Bush and Clinton administrations have faced tough questioning by commissioners, suggesting that the bipartisan body could issue an extremely critical report in late July.

For Clinton officials, that may affect the way historians judge their tenure. But it could be a much bigger problem for Bush, coming at the height of his re-election campaign.

This week's testimony has made it much clearer that there was a wealth of intelligence available in the summer of 2001 indicating that a major terrorist attack was coming.

Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton (news - web sites), said she read the intelligence briefings given to Bush before Sept. 11 and the information on the gathering threats "would set your hair on fire."

But Richard Clarke, the head of counterintelligence under both Bush and Clinton, said he could not get the incoming Bush administration in 2001 to convene a top level meeting to even discuss the threat.

Finally, Clarke wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) asking her to imagine how she and others would feel if an attack did happen and killed hundreds of Americans. The letter was sent on Sept. 4 -- one week before hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (news - web sites).

American University historian Allan Lichtman said the commission's report in July would be all the more damaging if it is unanimous. "Much will depend on whether the commission divides along partisan lines or whether it remains unified in its conclusions," he said.

Commission co-chairman Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, clearly intends to try to present a united report, even in the pressure cooker atmosphere of a presidential campaign.

"We have been meeting for over a year. We haven't yet had a vote where five Democrats were on one side and five Republicans on the other," Kean told Fox News.

10 GOOD AMERICANS

"Does somebody make a partisan comment every now and then? Yes. Do I wish they wouldn't? Yes. But I think at the end of the day these are 10 good Americans who are going to give the best report possible and hopefully make it unanimous so the American people can get the answers to all these questions."

The Bush administration has been nervous about the commission all along, but was forced to go along with it, largely because of pressure from family members of some of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush initially insisted he would answer questions for only one hour and then only from Kean and commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton, not the full commission. When Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) criticized that decision, the White House said Bush would give more time if necessary.

Republican political consultant Rick Davis said it was important for Bush and his aides and supporters to avoid getting into a dispute with the commission, however damaging its conclusions.

"They need to be able to work with whatever they say and not to become too defensive. Whatever happens, they need to avoid getting into name calling," Davis said.

A commission report criticizing his administration for failing to anticipate the 2001 attack, despite ample warnings, could damage Bush, whose re-election campaign is leaning heavily on his record of "keeping the country safe."

The other dangerous accusation is Clarke's contention that Bush and his top advisers were obsessed with attacking Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and did not take the threat from Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) seriously enough.

In their defense, administration officials said they spent several months devising a comprehensive strategy against bin Laden which was completed just before Sept. 11.

However, former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a commission member, shot holes in that argument, saying he had seen the plan, which is still classified, and there was "almost nothing in it ... It's not in my judgment what it was sold to be."



______________________________________________________________

OPINION L.A. TIMES
Harsh Light on 9/11 Errors

March 24, 2004

Top national security officials of two consecutive administrations agreed Tuesday before the 9/11 commission headed by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean that they weren't responsible for the failure to disrupt Al Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001. Witnesses from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to her successor, Colin L. Powell, from former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen to his successor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, offered spin control. Their words contrasted weakly with allegations about Bush administration inaction on terrorism in Richard Clarke's new book, "Against All Enemies."



Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who made complaints similar to Clarke's, was dismissed by critics as a crank. Clarke is undoubtedly doing his best to promote his book, and administration officials have questioned his motives and veracity, but as counterterrorism chief under presidents Clinton and Bush, he holds strong credentials. In the book, he denounces the Iraq war as a diversion from terrorism, a sideshow that he says is creating "the next generation of Al Qaedas." Clarke also traces a bipartisan decade of bungling in identifying and targeting Al Qaeda — much as the 9/11 commission does in its preliminary finding, released Tuesday.

Clinton, Clarke says, was willing to authorize military action against Al Qaeda but the government bureaucracy, including the military, balked. The 9/11 commission reaches the same conclusion in its new report, stating that the CIA and FBI "tended to be careful in discussing the attribution for terrorist attacks. The time lag between terrorist act and any definitive attribution grew to months, then years."

Powell testified that the current administration had prepared a plan to go on the offensive against Osama bin Laden. "We wanted to destroy Al Qaeda," he said. But what Powell and other officials don't want to concede is that in its essentials, the plan for targeting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan that landed on Bush's desk Sept.10, 2001, was much like the diplomatic strategy the Clinton administration had pursued, and that reinventing it delayed action.

It's likely that, as Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday, killing Bin Laden would have done little to stop the airplane attacks, already planned for years. But that doesn't settle the question, bluntly raised by Clarke and backed with examples from his service in the administration, of whether Bush and his subordinates, in their determination to go after Saddam Hussein, actually increased the international terrorist threat. "There have been far more major terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and its regional clones … since Sept. 11," Clarke says.

As the 9/11 commission reconvenes today, with Clarke scheduled to testify, it will not provide the final word on the terror threat before and after Sept. 11. But it and Clarke's book have provided new information for an urgent debate, not fully engaged before the war in Iraq, over the effectiveness of the current administration's approach to terrorism.




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March 23, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL

Debating 9/11

Richard Clarke is an angry man. Mr. Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator for the Bush and Clinton administrations, seemed to be seething during an interview on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, when he said the president had "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism." The more colorful anecdotes he offered up in support of that judgment are bound to be cited over and over in the presidential campaign — like his contention that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued for post-9/11 strikes against Iraq rather than the Taliban's Afghanistan by saying "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan."

Mr. Clarke is scheduled to testify this week before the special presidential commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, as are members of the Clinton administration who warned top Bush officials during the transfer of power about the terrorism threat. The hearings are sure to produce fireworks — both from Mr. Bush's critics and his defenders, who will demand to know why the Democratic administration didn't act more aggressively against Al Qaeda if the Clinton White House was so aware of the threat it posed to the United States.

Since the hearing is taking place during a presidential campaign, it's unlikely that a spirit of bipartisan decorum will prevail. Nevertheless, it's good to bring this debate out in the open. The memories of Sept. 11, 2001, are still so raw that it has been hard to regard anything about that terrible day as a subject for political debate. But now President Bush is running for re-election on his record in responding to the terrorist attack, and that transition needs to take place.

Richard Clarke has served honorably under presidents of both parties, going back to Ronald Reagan. His words are very much worth listening to, but it's not necessary to find all of his criticisms of the current administration equally persuasive. Mr. Clarke's central complaint — that the president failed to respond to his urgent request for a cabinet-level meeting on terrorism until days before 9/11 — is far from conclusive evidence that the administration failed to take the threat seriously until disaster struck. (Sam Note: Bull$#@*! The president dumped the bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security's recommendations, almost a three year study on exactly the threats such as 9/11 prior to the attacks and then congress RUSHED most of it into law afterwards. Conclusion: Bush ineptly handled national security when given a chance to do something right about it when handled to him on a BIPARTISAN silver platter. Hell, he could have also proven to be a "uniter" as he campaigned but we all know what a lie that was.)

The most persuasive part of the critique by the former anti-terrorism czar concerns the administration's obsession with Iraq. Mr. Clarke says he and intelligence experts repeatedly assured top officials — and Mr. Bush himself — that Iraq was not involved in 9/11 or in supporting Al Qaeda. This fall, when the public has to judge Mr. Bush's decision to invade, voters will know that the president's own counterterrorism adviser had warned him that he was on the wrong track.



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March 23, 2004

Lifting the Shroud
By PAUL KRUGMAN

From the day it took office, U.S. News & World Report wrote a few months ago, the Bush administration "dropped a shroud of secrecy" over the federal government. After 9/11, the administration's secretiveness knew no limits — Americans, Ari Fleischer ominously warned, "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." Patriotic citizens were supposed to accept the administration's version of events, not ask awkward questions.

But something remarkable has been happening lately: more and more insiders are finding the courage to reveal the truth on issues ranging from mercury pollution — yes, Virginia, polluters do write the regulations these days, and never mind the science — to the war on terror.

It's important, when you read the inevitable attempts to impugn the character of the latest whistle-blower, to realize just how risky it is to reveal awkward truths about the Bush administration. When Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress that postwar Iraq would require a large occupation force, that was the end of his military career. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV revealed that the 2003 State of the Union speech contained information known to be false, someone in the White House destroyed his wife's career by revealing that she was a C.I.A. operative. And we now know that Richard Foster, the Medicare system's chief actuary, was threatened with dismissal if he revealed to Congress the likely cost of the administration's prescription drug plan.

The latest insider to come forth, of course, is Richard Clarke, George Bush's former counterterrorism czar and the author of the just-published "Against All Enemies."

On "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Mr. Clarke said the previously unsayable: that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed "war president," had "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism." After a few hours of shocked silence, the character assassination began. He "may have had a grudge to bear since he probably wanted a more prominent position," declared Dick Cheney, who also says that Mr. Clarke was "out of the loop." (What loop? Before 9/11, Mr. Clarke was the administration's top official on counterterrorism.) It's "more about politics and a book promotion than about policy," Scott McClellan said.

Of course, Bush officials have to attack Mr. Clarke's character because there is plenty of independent evidence confirming the thrust of his charges.

Did the Bush administration ignore terrorism warnings before 9/11? Justice Department documents obtained by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, show that it did. Not only did John Ashcroft completely drop terrorism as a priority — it wasn't even mentioned in his list of seven "strategic goals" — just one day before 9/11 he proposed a reduction in counterterrorism funds.

Did the administration neglect counterterrorism even after 9/11? After 9/11 the F.B.I. requested $1.5 billion for counterterrorism operations, but the White House slashed this by two-thirds. (Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has been attacking John Kerry because he once voted for a small cut in intelligence funds.)

Oh, and the next time terrorists launch an attack on American soil, they will find their task made much easier by the administration's strange reluctance, even after 9/11, to protect potential targets. In November 2001 a bipartisan delegation urged the president to spend about $10 billion on top-security priorities like ports and nuclear sites. But Mr. Bush flatly refused.

Finally, did some top officials really want to respond to 9/11 not by going after Al Qaeda, but by attacking Iraq? Of course they did. "From the very first moments after Sept. 11," Kenneth Pollack told "Frontline," "there was a group of people, both inside and outside the administration, who believed that the war on terrorism . . . should target Iraq first." Mr. Clarke simply adds more detail.

Still, the administration would like you to think that Mr. Clarke had base motives in writing his book. But given the hawks' dominance of the best-seller lists until last fall, it's unlikely that he wrote it for the money. Given the assumption by most political pundits, until very recently, that Mr. Bush was guaranteed re-election, it's unlikely that he wrote it in the hopes of getting a political job. And given the Bush administration's penchant for punishing its critics, he must have known that he was taking a huge personal risk.

So why did he write it? How about this: Maybe he just wanted the public to know the truth.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com



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US business group slams Bush 'deception' over Iraq war

Mon Mar 22,12:22 PM ET

NEW YORK (AFP) - A US business group that monitors federal spending took out a full-page advert in The New York Times, likening President George W. Bush to a corrupt chief executive officer who has forfeited public trust.

Timed to coincide with the weekend anniversary of the US-led war against Iraq, the advertisement -- paid for by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities -- said Bush's case for invasion "was built entirely out of falsehoods."

Highlighting the cost of the war in terms of hundreds of US casualties and tens of billions of dollars, the ad said the "state-sponsored deception" underpinning the conflict dwarfed the damage caused by the series of corporate scandals that recently rocked Wall Street.

"It's past time for finger pointing," it said.

"It's time for someone in this government to step forward and take personal responsibility for the deadly deceptions used to mislead this great nation into war.

"And that someone must be George W. Bush."

Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities was formed in 1996 on concerns that federal government spending priorities were undermining national security.

The group's 500 members include the present or former CEOs of Bell Industries, Eastman Kodak and Goldman Sachs, as well as CNN founder Ted Turner.




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PHILADELPHIA, PA: On CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday, Sen. Arlen Specter told America that the Bush Administration NEVER CLAIMED a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.



Specter Claim:

“The Bush administration never made any claim that there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.” – Senator Arlen Specter, 3/21/04



Bush Administration Claims:

“You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam.” – President Bush, 9/25/02



“There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties.” – President Bush, 9/17/03



"There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship there." - Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04



“There was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.” – Vice President Cheney, 9/14/03



"Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq, reciprocal nonaggression discussions." – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 9/26/02



"There clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented." – National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, 9/25/02



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From the Center for American Progress:


CLAIM #1: “Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to.” - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked “urgent” asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending Al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says “principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat.” No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11. - White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM #2: “The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.” - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: If this is true, then why did the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11? President Bush sent a letter to Congress on 3/19/03 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against “nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11.” Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on 9/14/03 that “It is not surprising that people make that connection” between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said “we don’t know” if there is a connection.

CLAIM #3: "[Clarke] was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things." - Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh, 3/22/04

FACT: "Dick Clarke continued, in the Bush Administration, to be the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and the President's principle counterterrorism expert. He was expected to organize and attend all meetings of Principals and Deputies on terrorism. And he did." - White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM #4: “In June and July when the threat spikes were so high…we were at battle stations…The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11.” – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: “Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's ‘Strategic Plan’ from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism ‘the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.’” - Washington Post, 3/22/04

CLAIM #5: “The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11.” – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: “In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks.” – Washington Post, 3/22/04

CLAIM #6: "Well, [Clarke] wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff…” - Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/22/04

FACT: "The Government's interagency counterterrorism crisis management forum (the Counterterrorism Security Group, or "CSG") chaired by Dick Clarke met regularly, often daily, during the high threat period." - White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM #7: "[Bush] wanted a far more effective policy for trying to deal with [terrorism], and that process was in motion throughout the spring." - Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh, 3/22/04

FACT: “Bush said [in May of 2001] that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and 'I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts.' Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place.” - Washington Post, 1/20/02




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9/11: Internal Government Documents Show How the Bush Administration Reduced Counterterrorism

March 22, 2004

Backgrounder: TRUTH & CONSEQUENCES, The Bush Administration and September 11
Download: (Click on link above for rest of article and downloads)

Since September 11, President Bush and his supporters have repeatedly intimated that many of the President's political opponents are soft on terrorism. In his State of the Union address, the President declared: "We can go forward with confidence and resolve, or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us." In comments aimed at those who seek changes in the Patriot Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft said: "Your tactics only aid terrorists." One recent ad asserts, "Some call for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others."

But the real story is far different, as the following internal Department of Justice (DoJ) documents obtained by the Center for American Progress demonstrate. The Bush Administration actually reversed the Clinton Administration's strong emphasis on counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Attorney General John Ashcroft not only moved aggressively to reduce DoJ's anti-terrorist budget but also shift DoJ's mission in spirit to emphasize its role as a domestic police force and anti-drug force. These changes in mission were just as critical as the budget changes, with Ashcroft, in effect, guiding the day to day decisions made by field officers and agents. And all of this while the Administration was receiving repeated warnings about potential terrorist attacks...



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Bush dumped the bipartisan Hart Rudman Commission on Terrorism BEFORE 9/11 after they spent almost three years creating a report WARNING of just such an attack! So this is not anything new to me!

Bush Accused of Ignoring Al Qaeda Until After 9/11
Mon Mar 22, 2004 01:17 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush ignored the threat of al Qaeda for months and did too little to stop the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, a former administration counterterrorism official said Sunday.

Richard Clarke's accusations, aired in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview, drew a detailed point-by-point rebuttal from the White House as it attempted to defend Bush's standing as a presidential candidate who is tough on terrorism.

In the program on his book to be launched Monday, Clarke charged that Bush had done "a terrible job" in addressing the threat from terrorism.

"I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11," Clarke told CBS.

"I think the way he has responded to al Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11, has made us less safe," said Clarke, who was Bush's top counterterrorism expert until he resigned in February 2003 after serving in every U.S. government since the Reagan administration.

In an unusually detailed statement seeking to debunk what it labeled "myths" from Clarke's book, the White House denied the assertion that Bush did not treat al Qaeda as a serious threat before it attacked the United States.

"The president specifically recognized the threat posed by al Qaeda and immediately after taking office the White House began work on a comprehensive new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda," the White House said.

"The president specifically told (national security adviser) Dr. (Condoleezza) Rice that he was 'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al Qaeda, rather than simply waiting to respond."

Rice defended the administration's response to the terrorism threat in a Washington Post op-ed column Monday, saying that through the spring and summer of 2001, Bush's national security team developed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda.

"This became the first major foreign-policy strategy document of the Bush administration -- not Iraq, not the ABM Treaty, but eliminating al Qaeda," Rice said.

Clarke, who headed a cybersecurity board before resigning, is set to testify this week before the independent commission investigating the 2001 hijacked airplane attacks in New York and on the Pentagon that killed some 3,000 people.

The White House rebutted Clarke's charge that before the Sept. 11 attacks the administration was focused on Iraq rather than on al Qaeda and that immediately after the attacks it searched for a way to blame Saddam Hussein.

Clarke said Bush took him aside the day after the 9/11 attacks and ordered him to "see if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."

Clarke said he responded that al Qaeda was responsible and that Iraq was not linked to the attacks. However, he agreed to look into Bush's request and again found no cooperation between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley disputed Clarke's characterization of the president's request.

"The point, I think, is that of course the president was trying to find out who caused 9/11. ... And he couldn't rule out the possibility that it might have been Iraq, and he asked for the intelligence that we had on a possible link between Iraq and 9/11," Hadley told "60 Minutes."

Clarke also said the day after the Sept. 11 attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested bombing Iraq, despite the lack of any evidence of Baghdad's involvement.

When told al Qaeda's bases were in Afghanistan, not Iraq, Clarke said Rumsfeld responded that there were no good bombing targets in Afghanistan, but there were plenty of such targets in Iraq. Clarke said he thought at first that Rumsfeld was joking, but quickly realized that he was serious.

Among other claims in Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," is that the Bush administration ignored intelligence "chatter" in 2001 about possible terror attacks, according to CBS.

© Copyright Reuters 2004. All rights reserved



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