IPW Daily Report – Monday, March 22, 2004
Clarke: White House’s response
By Condoleezza Rice
60 Minute bombshell
Iraq: unprovoked invasion?
Or, how I learned
to love the bomb
By: Roger Wm. Hughes
Clarke: White House’s response
By Condoleezza Rice
Monday, March 22, 2004
The al Qaeda terrorist network posed a threat to
the United States for almost a decade before the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Throughout that period
-- during the eight years of the Clinton
administration and the first eight months of the
Bush administration prior to Sept. 11 -- the U.S.
government worked hard to counter the al Qaeda
threat.
During the transition, President-elect Bush's
national security team was briefed on the Clinton
administration's efforts to deal with al Qaeda.
The seriousness of the threat was well understood
by the president and his national security
principals. In response to my request for a
presidential initiative, the counterterrorism
team, which we had held over from the Clinton
administration, suggested several ideas, some of
which had been around since 1998 but had not been
adopted. No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the
new administration.
We adopted several of these ideas. We committed
more funding to counterterrorism and intelligence
efforts. We increased efforts to go after al
Qaeda's finances. We increased American support
for anti-terror activities in Uzbekistan.
We pushed hard to arm the Predator unmanned aerial
vehicle so we could target terrorists with greater
precision. But the Predator was designed to
conduct surveillance, not carry weapons. Arming it
presented many technical challenges and required
extensive testing. Military and intelligence
officials agreed that the armed Predator was
simply not ready for deployment before the fall of
2001. In any case, the Predator was not a silver
bullet that could have destroyed al Qaeda or
stopped Sept. 11.
We also considered a modest spring 2001 increase
in funding for the Northern Alliance. At that
time, the Northern Alliance was clearly not going
to sweep across Afghanistan and dispose of al
Qaeda. It had been battered by defeat and held
less than 10 percent of the country. Only the
addition of American air power, with U.S. special
forces and intelligence officers on the ground,
allowed the Northern Alliance its historic
military advances in late 2001. We folded this
idea into our broader strategy of arming tribes
throughout Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban.
Let us be clear. Even their most ardent advocates
did not contend that these ideas, even taken
together, would have destroyed al Qaeda. We judged
that the collection of ideas presented to us were
insufficient for the strategy President Bush
sought. The president wanted more than a laundry
list of ideas simply to contain al Qaeda or "roll
back" the threat. Once in office, we quickly began
crafting a comprehensive new strategy to
"eliminate" the al Qaeda network. The president
wanted more than occasional, retaliatory cruise
missile strikes. He told me he was "tired of
swatting flies."
Through the spring and summer of 2001, the
national security team developed a strategy to
eliminate al Qaeda -- which was expected to take
years. Our strategy marshaled all elements of
national power to take down the network, not just
respond to individual attacks with law enforcement
measures. Our plan called for military options to
attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground
forces and other targets -- taking the fight to
the enemy where he lived. It focused on the
crucial link between al Qaeda and the Taliban. We
would attempt to compel the Taliban to stop giving
al Qaeda sanctuary -- and if it refused, we would
have sufficient military options to remove the
Taliban regime. The strategy focused on the key
role of Pakistan in this effort and the need to
get Pakistan to drop its support of the Taliban.
This became the first major foreign-policy
strategy document of the Bush administration --
not Iraq, not the ABM Treaty, but eliminating al
Qaeda.
Before Sept. 11, we closely monitored threats to
our nation. President Bush revived the practice of
meeting with the director of the CIA every day --
meetings that I attended. And I personally met
with George Tenet regularly and frequently
reviewed aspects of the counterterror effort.
Through the summer increasing intelligence
"chatter" focused almost exclusively on potential
attacks overseas. Nonetheless, we asked for any
indication of domestic threats and directed our
counterterrorism team to coordinate with domestic
agencies to adopt protective measures. The FBI and
the Federal Aviation Administration alerted
airlines, airports and local authorities, warning
of potential attacks on Americans.
Despite what some have suggested, we received no
intelligence that terrorists were preparing to
attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles,
though some analysts speculated that terrorists
might hijack airplanes to try to free U.S.-held
terrorists. The FAA even issued a warning to
airlines and aviation security personnel that "the
potential for a terrorist operation, such as an
airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated
in the United States, remains a concern."
We now know that the real threat had been in the
United States since at least 1999. The plot to
attack New York and Washington had been hatching
for nearly two years. According to the FBI, by
June 2001 16 of the 19 hijackers were already
here. Even if we had known exactly where Osama bin
Laden was, and the armed Predator had been
available to strike him, the Sept. 11 hijackers
almost certainly would have carried out their
plan. So, too, if the Northern Alliance had
somehow managed to topple the Taliban, the Sept.
11 hijackers were here in America -- not in
Afghanistan.
President Bush has acted swiftly to unify and
streamline our efforts to secure the American
homeland. He has transformed the FBI into an
agency dedicated to catching terrorists and
preventing future attacks. The president and
Congress, through the USA Patriot Act, have broken
down the legal and bureaucratic walls that prior
to Sept. 11 hampered intelligence and law
enforcement agencies from collecting and sharing
vital threat information. Those who now argue for
rolling back the Patriot Act's changes invite us
to forget the important lesson we learned on Sept.
11.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the
president, like all Americans, wanted to know who
was responsible. It would have been irresponsible
not to ask a question about all possible links,
including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported
terrorism and had tried to kill a former
president. Once advised that there was no evidence
that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the
president told his National Security Council on
Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that
the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to
target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Because of President Bush's vision and leadership,
our nation is safer. We have won battles in the
war on terror, but the war is far from over.
However long it takes, this great nation will
prevail.
[The writer is the U.S. National Security
Adviser]
60 Minute bombshell
CBS’s 60 Minutes dropped a bombshell on its
Sunday broadcast. It wasn’t the Richard Clarke
interview that had the former terrorist expert say
that President Bush was responsible for 9/11. It
was the story by Ed Bradley about Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri,
the man most intelligence analysts believe is the
brain behind bin Laden, that reveals Zawahri
visited the United States in 1997 and recruited
volunteers and raised money from Americans to help
him kill us.
The surprising thing is that if you go to CBS’s
webpage on the story Ed Bradley did for 60
Minutes there is no mention of this fact.
Could it be because this was during President
Clinton’s watch when Richard Clarke was the same
terrorist expert serving in the Clinton
administration who now blames President Bush for
9/11?
Zawahri is the person attributed with planning the
9/11 attacks. After the planes flew into the trade
towers a monitored call stated, “tell the Doctor
that the NY part of his plan has been completed.”
Today
Australia media reports that Zawari claims to
have a nuclear briefcase bomb:
in an interview scheduled to be televised on
Monday, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir said Ayman
al-Zawahri claimed that "smart briefcase bombs"
were available on the black market. It was not
clear when the interview between Mir and al-Zawahri
took place.
U.S. intelligence agencies have long believed that
al-Qaida attempted to acquire a nuclear device on
the black market, but say there is no evidence it
was successful.
They also report:
Earlier, Mir told Australian media that al-Zawahri
also claimed to have visited Australia to recruit
militants and collect funds.
"In those days, in early 1996, he was on a mission
to organize his network all over the world," Mir
was quoted as saying. "He told me he stopped for a
while in Darwin (in northern Australia), he was
... looking for help and collecting funds."
In Bradley’s story an Egyptian official reports on
how Europe and America did not take seriously
their request to deport Zawahri back to Egypt
where he was under sentence of death. European
countries knew where Zawahri was and did not
deport him because of their opposition to the
death penalty. This part of Sunday’s show is also
not on the CBS webpage.
No mention or discussion was made during the
program about the Clinton administration’s failure
to apprehend Zawahri when he came to America in
1997 to raise funds and recruit terrorist
initiates.
Iraq: unprovoked
invasion?
Or, how I learned to love the bomb
By: Roger Wm. Hughes
"Nothing America could have done would have
provided al-Qaida and its new generation of cloned
groups a better recruitment device than our
unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country,"
Richard A. Clarke writes in "Against All
Enemies."
Did we invade Iraq unprovoked and without merit?
No, there is no more felicitous canard than the
only reason we invaded Iraq was for weapons of
mass destruction.
It is troubling that we still do not know what
happened to the unaccounted for weapons of mass
destruction. However with time, we will find out
whether these chemical and biological weapons were
previously destroyed, became unstable and
denigrated to the point of being useless, were
transported to Syria, given to terrorists, are
hidden still in Iraq or whatever happened.
The fact is, Saddam Hussein was given an ultimatum
with a deadline to account for these weapons, and
he did not comply. In fact, Hussein was given
several ultimatums and failed to comply with all
of them. Hussein’s noncompliance grew to the point
that the United Nations resolutions no longer
meant anything, and the U N. was becoming a
ridiculous debating society. The United Nations
had already proven itself a failure in Rwanda and
Serbia where they once again allowed holocausts
resulting in deaths in the 100 of thousands. And
the U.N. is still the central authority
responsible for Palestine following the British
withdrawal in 1948. How are they doing?
Clearly, Iraq is in one of the most explosive
parts of the world. And headed by Saddam Hussein,
Iraq was one of the most serious threats to
America’s safety, and the safety of Iraq’s
neighboring countries. Saddam’s failure to comply
with one more U.N. resolution to come clean on
weapons of mass destruction was beyond the last
straw. This does not even take into consideration
Saddam’s firing on American planes who were there
to enforce the No Fly zone.
The fabrication that Saddam Hussein was not linked
to terrorists is equally ludicrous. Hussein gave
the surviving families of Hamas suicide bombers
$10,000. Hussein, while not connected with the
religious Islamic fundamentalists because of his
secularism, had the express desire to create as
much harm to the U.S. as possible. Iraq was ideal
as a possible terrorist base and eventually, if
not a currently, an alliance to fundamentalist
Islamic jihad groups. After all, Hussein tried to
assassinate an American President. There was
obviously nothing that Hussein was not capable of
doing.
Yet, someone who ought to know better about that
part of the world – Former President Jimmy Carter
-- has once again weighed in on the question of
Iraq.
Carter said, "There was no reason for us to become
involved in Iraq recently. That was a war based on
lies and misinterpretations from London and from
Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein
was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming
falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
And I think that President Bush and Prime Minister
Blair probably knew that many of the allegations
were based on uncertain intelligence ... a
decision was made to go to war [then people said]
'Let's find a reason to do so'."
Those arguments move us past the question of
internationalizing American foreign policy and
shift it into the premise that Iraq was an
unnecessary war with no geopolitical benefit to
the United States.
On the face of it, this argument is flatly
contradictory to the facts on the ground. First of
all, since the removal of Saddam Hussein from
power, our enemies Iran, Syria and Libya are all
acting with less hostility. In the case of Libya
and Iran they are eliminating and diminishing
their nuclear threat.
In addition, there is a good chance with our help
that Iraq will form a pluralistic democratic
government that recognizes to some extent minority
rights. It has already drawn up a temporary
constitution that requires at least 25 percent of
the elected representatives to be women. This is
unparalleled in the region and would be a great
defeat to the fundamentalist jihad. They have said
so themselves.
Democracy would also inevitably spread in the
region. Just as West Germany next to East Germany
was the best example of Communism’s failure so,
Iraq could be the best example of Islamic
fundamentalist’s failures.
We are, after all, in a clash of civilizations.
This is why Iraq is not divorced from the fighting
of terrorists. Iraq is at the center of the fight
against terrorism.
There are those who would have us take the
European approach. However, Europe is finding out
that fighting terrorism is not a police action.
European citizens will learn that Islamic
terrorists are not just interested in destroying
America. They are interested in destroying our
kind of civilization, which includes them.
Ronald Brownstein writes in his column concerning
Tom Bentley’s (director of Demos, a London-based
think tank close to the Labor government)
observations on Europe:
… European governments critical of Bush's strategy
for combating terror. Those who maintain Bush has
relied too much on military force … will have to
show they can protect their countries with
alternatives that place greater emphasis on
alliances, law enforcement, diplomacy and
encouraging social progress in the Islamic world.
The prediction here is that it will not work,
because it has not worked in the past. To quote
John Kerry quoting Bill Clinton, "Stop digging."
[The writer is chairman of the Iowa
Presidential Watch PAC]
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