Second Day of Clarke Testimony

[Pontiuth Pilate]

Just keeping folks updated.

The Latest From the 9-11 Inquiry

Former official Clarke warned of "hundreds dead"
By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON, March 24 (Reuters) - The Bush administration's former top counterintelligence official warned one week before the Sept. 11 attacks that hundreds of Americans could die in a terrorist strike, but said on Wednesday that the president did not consider terrorism an urgent issue.

Richard Clarke, who served four U.S. presidents, told the national commission investigating the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: "I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue."





On the second of two dramatic days of open testimony, one of the most charged moments came when commissioner Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked Clarke about a letter he wrote to Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, one week before the attacks.

"You urge policymakers to imagine a day after hundreds of Americans lay dead at home and abroad after a terrorist attack and ask themselves what else they could have done. You write this on Sept. 4, seven days before Sept. 11." Clarke simply replied, "Yes."


Clarke, who has given 15 hours of testimony to the commission in closed session, was making his first public appearance. The former official, who served three Republican and one Democratic administrations, created a stir this week by publishing a book accusing the Bush administration of failing to recognize the urgency of the threat posed by bin Laden's al Qaeda network.


In his letter to Rice, Clarke blasted the Pentagon and the CIA for failing to act against al Qaeda.


The commission of five Republicans and five Democrats, most of them former legislators or senior officials, is due to report in late July at the height of the presidential campaign. Its findings could have large implications for President George W. Bush's re-election hopes.


COULD HAVE DONE MORE


In earlier testimony on Wednesday, CIA Director George Tenet admitted more could have been done to foil the Sept. 11 attacks attributed to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. But he dismissed criticism his agency was too cautious, too risk-averse, to meet the challenges of al Qaeda.


Asked repeatedly why the agency failed to thwart the attacks, Tenet said: "We didn't integrate all the data we had properly, and probably we had a lot of data that we didn't know about that if everybody had known about maybe we would have had a chance. I can't predict to you one way or another."


Commission staff issued a report that said CIA officials from the top down were under the impression before Sept. 11 that the agency was only allowed to kill bin Laden as part of a covert operation to capture him.


"The idea that they (CIA's clandestine unit) are risk-averse, couldn't get the job done, weren't forward leaning. I'm sorry, I've heard those comments and I just categorically reject it," Tenet told the panel.


Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey expressed frustration that numerous military strikes were not conducted. "I don't see in the record any request for additional military operations."


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


But Kerrey shot holes in that argument. He said he had seen the plan, which remains classified, and there was "almost nothing in it ... It's not in my judgment what it was sold to be."


The hearings have rattled Bush administration officials, who have been out in force defending their record.


Tenet said there was no system in place to protect the country. Throughout the 1990s, agencies rushed to deflect one threat after another but "the country was not systematically protected."


"You must have a defense that links visa measures, border security, infrastructure protection and domestic warnings in a way that increases security, closes gaps and serves a society that demands high level of both safety and freedom," Tenet told the commission.


"We collectively did not close those gaps rapidly or fully enough before Sept. 11th."


The staff report issued on Tuesday said that during the summer of 2001 the volume of intelligence about threats at home and abroad grew alarming.


"By late July, there were indications of multiple, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attacks being planned against American interests overseas," it said.


It also said there were four times from late 1998 to 1999 when bin Laden possibly could have been targeted, once when he was near a hunting lodge in Afghanistan frequented by United Arab Emirates officials.


Tenet said it was unclear whether bin Laden was there and another complicating factor was that "you might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I'm sure entered into everybody's calculation in all this."

 

[Pontiuth Pilate]

The current Yahoo! article:

Ex-Adviser: Terrorism Not Urgent for Bush
1 hour, 57 minutes ago

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Bush White House scaled back the struggle against al-Qaida after taking office in 2001 and spurned suggestions that it retaliate for the bombing of a U.S. warship because "it happened on the Clinton administration's watch," a former top terrorism adviser testified Wednesday.

The Clinton administration had "no higher priority" than combatting terrorists while the Bush administration made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, said Richard Clarke, who advised both presidents. He testified before the commission investigating the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.


Clarke's turn in the witness chair transformed what has been a painstaking, bipartisan probe of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and bureaucratic missteps into a nationally televised criticism of President Bush (news - web sites) on the terrorism issue at the core of his campaign for re-election.


The White House redoubled efforts to undermine Clarke, the author of a recent book critical of the president.


Officials also took the unusual step of identifying him as the senior official who had praised the president's anti-terrorism efforts in an anonymous briefing for reporters the year following the attacks.


"He needs to get his story straight," said Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), Bush's national security adviser and Clarke's boss while he served in the administration.


Former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, a Republican, took up the president's cause inside the commission hearing. "We have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?" he challenged the witness.


Despite the flare-up, commission members worked later to distance themselves from the sort of partisanship that could undermine the credibility of the final report they are expected to release this summer.


"Nobody has clean hands in this one," said former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a Republican and the commission chairman, referring to the Bush and Clinton administrations. "It was a failure of individuals. The question now is whether or not we learned from our mistakes."


Clarke began his appearance with an apology to "the loved ones of the victims of 9-11. ... Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you," he added, as some relatives of those killed in the attacks dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs.


The appearance of the white-haired former official overshadowed the release of a commission staff report that said bureaucratic disagreements about the extent of the CIA (news - web sites)'s authority to kill Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) hampered efforts to eliminate al-Qaida's leader during the Clinton era. The result was a continued reliance on local forces in Afghanistan (news - web sites) that all sides recognized reduced the chance of success, both before and after Bush took office, the report added.


"If officers at all levels questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy the policy-makers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy, the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged throughout the period leading up to 9-11," it concluded.


Officials from Clinton's National Security Council told investigators the CIA had sufficient authority to assassinate al-Qaida, the report said, but Director George Tenet and other spy agency officials "believed the only acceptable context for killing bin Laden was a credible capture operation."


Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, testified that the former president gave the CIA "every inch of authorization that it asked for" to kill bin Laden.


"There could have not been any doubt about what President Clinton (news - web sites)'s intent was after he fired 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at bin Laden in August 1998," Berger said, referring to strikes at a camp in Afghanistan where the al-Qaida leader was believed present. Bin Laden escaped.


Tenet, who preceded Berger in the witness chair, also was asked about the issue of authorization to kill bin Laden.


"I never went back and said, 'I don't have all the authorities I need,'" he replied.





Tenet said that even if bin Laden had been captured or killed in 2001, he did not think it would have prevented the 9-11 attacks, an assertion that mirrored testimony by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) on Tuesday.

Tenet's tenure has spanned two administrations. And unlike Clarke, he praised aides to both presidents. "Clearly there was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced" after the Bush administration took office, he said.

In the course of his testimony, Clarke criticized the FBI (news - web sites), the CIA and Congress as well as the Bush administration.

Despite his catalogue of complaints, he said under questioning by former GOP Sen. Slade Gorton that nothing he proposed to Bush officials would have prevented the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. More than 3,000 people were killed that day when terrorists flew hijacked planes into the twin World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon (news - web sites) outside Washington. Another plane crashed in a field outside Pittsburgh as passengers struggled with the terrorists aboard.

Clarke said that early in the Bush administration, he had tried to persuade officials to make the elimination of al-Qaida official government policy.

"I was told ... that was overly ambitious and that we should take the word 'eliminate' out and say `significantly erode,'" he recalled. Later, after the terrorists struck, he said, "we were able to go back to my language of eliminate, rather than significantly erode."

A second question from Gorton prompted Clarke to raise the issue of the USS Cole (news - web sites), a warship bombed while refueling in a harbor at Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the attack, later blamed on al-Qaida.

The former White House aide said he suggested the month Bush took office that "the Cole case was still out there" and suggested retaliation.

He added, "I was told on a couple of occasions, 'Well, you know, that happened on the Clinton administration's watch.'"

Clarke shook off Thompson's attack on his credibility regarding the 2002 White House briefing. "I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done," he said. "I've done it for several presidents."

Later he said his criticism had nothing to do with politics. "I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration should there be one," he said, adding that he voted Republican in the 2000 election.

 

[amadeus]

Yeah, he's a real Nauseadamus.

Just so you all know, I designed the first personal computer and graphic user interface. I don't have any facts to back it up, but it must be true, since I might put it in a book.

 

[carlosMM]

rmsharpe:

interestingly, you and the White House have one thing in common here: all you do is throw dirt.

 

[IglooDame]

For what it's worth, I've thought this guy was a complete a**-clown for the last six or seven years. His primary focus as "terrorism czar" was preventing a "Digital Pearl Harbor," and trying to browbeat the IT industry under heavy security regulations even while the FBI was being infected by email viruses and government agencies were failing IT security audits left and right. He was pissed off about getting demoted by the Bush administration and apparently has managed to find a pretty good way to stick it to them. I despise Clinton and don't much like Bush, but I can't believe either of them kept this schmuck on the payroll at all.

 

[Peri]

You have only just noticed Carlos?
The simple truth is that the Bush adminsitration never does anything wrong and you are undemocratic if you think otherwise.

The fact that they are working overtime to discredit Clarke rather that provide evidence that he is wrong demonstrates that his criticisms are valid.

 

[MrPresident]

The following transcript documents a background briefing in early August 2002 by President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to a handful of reporters, including Fox News' Jim Angle. In the conversation, cleared by the White House on Wednesday for distribution, Clarke describes the handover of intelligence from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration and the latter's decision to revise the U.S. approach to Al Qaeda. Clarke was named special adviser to the president for cyberspace security in October 2001. He resigned from his post in January 2003.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

Second point is that the Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998. And there were a number of issues on the table since 1998. And they remained on the table when that administration went out of office — issues like aiding the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, changing our Pakistan policy -- uh, changing our policy toward Uzbekistan. And in January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.

And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, in late January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we've now made public to some extent.

And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.

So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.

The sixth point, the newly-appointed deputies — and you had to remember, the deputies didn't get into office until late March, early April. The deputies then tasked the development of the implementation details, uh, of these new decisions that they were endorsing, and sending out to the principals.

Over the course of the summer — last point — they developed implementation details, the principals met at the end of the summer, approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance assistance.

And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline.

QUESTION: When was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: Well, the president was briefed throughout this process.

QUESTION: But when was the final September 4 document? (interrupted) Was that presented to the president?

CLARKE: The document went to the president on September 10, I think.

QUESTION: What is your response to the suggestion in the [Aug. 12, 2002] Time [magazine] article that the Bush administration was unwilling to take on board the suggestions made in the Clinton administration because of animus against the — general animus against the foreign policy?

CLARKE: I think if there was a general animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the same team in place. That doesn't sound like animus against uh the previous team to me.

JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that's correct.

ANGLE: OK.

QUESTION: Are you saying now that there was not only a plan per se, presented by the transition team, but that it was nothing proactive that they had suggested?

CLARKE: Well, what I'm saying is, there are two things presented. One, what the existing strategy had been. And two, a series of issues — like aiding the Northern Alliance, changing Pakistan policy, changing Uzbek policy — that they had been unable to come to um, any new conclusions, um, from '98 on.

QUESTION: Was all of that from '98 on or was some of it ...

CLARKE: All of those issues were on the table from '98 on.

ANGLE: When in '98 were those presented?

CLARKE: In October of '98.

QUESTION: In response to the Embassy bombing?

CLARKE: Right, which was in September.

QUESTION: Were all of those issues part of alleged plan that was late December and the Clinton team decided not to pursue because it was too close to ...

CLARKE: There was never a plan, Andrea. What there was was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table.

QUESTION: So there was nothing that developed, no documents or no new plan of any sort?

CLARKE: There was no new plan.

QUESTION: No new strategy — I mean, I don't want to get into a semantics ...

CLARKE: Plan, strategy — there was no, nothing new.

QUESTION: 'Til late December, developing ...

CLARKE: What happened at the end of December was that the Clinton administration NSC principals committee met and once again looked at the strategy, and once again looked at the issues that they had brought, decided in the past to add to the strategy. But they did not at that point make any recommendations.

QUESTIONS: Had those issues evolved at all from October of '98 'til December of 2000?

CLARKE: Had they evolved? Um, not appreciably.

ANGLE: What was the problem? Why was it so difficult for the Clinton administration to make decisions on those issues?

CLARKE: Because they were tough issues. You know, take, for example, aiding the Northern Alliance. Um, people in the Northern Alliance had a, sort of bad track record. There were questions about the government, there were questions about drug-running, there was questions about whether or not in fact they would use the additional aid to go after Al Qaeda or not. Uh, and how would you stage a major new push in Uzbekistan or somebody else or Pakistan to cooperate?

One of the big problems was that Pakistan at the time was aiding the other side, was aiding the Taliban. And so, this would put, if we started aiding the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, this would have put us directly in opposition to the Pakistani government. These are not easy decisions.

ANGLE: And none of that really changed until we were attacked and then it was ...

CLARKE: No, that's not true. In the spring, the Bush administration changed — began to change Pakistani policy, um, by a dialogue that said we would be willing to lift sanctions. So we began to offer carrots, which made it possible for the Pakistanis, I think, to begin to realize that they could go down another path, which was to join us and to break away from the Taliban. So that's really how it started.

QUESTION: Had the Clinton administration in any of its work on this issue, in any of the findings or anything else, prepared for a call for the use of ground forces, special operations forces in any way? What did the Bush administration do with that if they had?

CLARKE: There was never a plan in the Clinton administration to use ground forces. The military was asked at a couple of points in the Clinton administration to think about it. Um, and they always came back and said it was not a good idea. There was never a plan to do that.

(Break in briefing details as reporters and Clarke go back and forth on how to source quotes from this backgrounder.)

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you're saying is that there was no — one, there was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That's right.

QUESTION: It was not put into an action plan until September 4, signed off by the principals?

CLARKE: That's right.

QUESTION: I want to add though, that NSPD — the actual work on it began in early April.

CLARKE: There was a lot of in the first three NSPDs that were being worked in parallel.

ANGLE: Now the five-fold increase for the money in covert operations against Al Qaeda — did that actually go into effect when it was decided or was that a decision that happened in the next budget year or something?

CLARKE: Well, it was gonna go into effect in October, which was the next budget year, so it was a month away.

QUESTION: That actually got into the intelligence budget?

CLARKE: Yes it did.

QUESTION: Just to clarify, did that come up in April or later?

CLARKE: No, it came up in April and it was approved in principle and then went through the summer. And you know, the other thing to bear in mind is the shift from the rollback strategy to the elimination strategy. When President Bush told us in March to stop swatting at flies and just solve this problem, then that was the strategic direction that changed the NSPD from one of rollback to one of elimination.

QUESTION: Well can you clarify something? I've been told that he gave that direction at the end of May. Is that not correct?

CLARKE: No, it was March.

QUESTION: The elimination of Al Qaeda, get back to ground troops — now we haven't completely done that even with a substantial number of ground troops in Afghanistan. Was there, was the Bush administration contemplating without the provocation of September 11th moving troops into Afghanistan prior to that to go after Al Qaeda?

CLARKE: I can not try to speculate on that point. I don't know what we would have done.

QUESTION: In your judgment, is it possible to eliminate Al Qaeda without putting troops on the ground?

CLARKE: Uh, yeah, I think it was. I think it was. If we'd had Pakistani, Uzbek and Northern Alliance assistance.

Source

 

[hawai_74]

The Bush era is gonna end [dance] finally, welcome back US

 

[CurtSibling]

I find it hard to see why so many people are willing to defend Bush to the end.

I personally find him to be at best a highly mediocre president, albeit surrounded by some able helpers like Powel.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Hawai, dont uncork the champagne yet, 8 months is a looonnngg time in a presidential election campaign. Alot can happen. The RNC has plenty of time to produce doctored photos of Kerry unloading a truck full of dead babies with a pitchfork.