Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist at The Washington Post, can always be depended on not to tell the truth when a simple lie will do.
Recently, he exhibited his underscored his offensive blend of tone-deafness and historical ignorance when he.wrote: President George W. Bush “inherited a world where terrorists had been permitted safe haven in terrorist states and were engaged in a virtually unimpeded offensive.” (My italics and a blatant lie.) “Under his predecessor, they had launched a string of attacks against the United States: the first effort to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993; the murder of 19 American airmen at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later; the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, which caused the deaths of 17 American sailors. In none of these cases was there a forceful U.S. response.” (Another blatant lie.) “As a result, al-Qaeda was convinced that the United States was soft and that if they hit us hard enough, we could be forced to retreat and withdraw as we had in Beirut and Somalia.” 195
All this is rock-headed --, it’s as stupid as a stone. The last paragraph is especially dishonest. Thiessen belongs to the Bush neocons whose members include Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, James Woolsey, Fred Hiatt, Max Boot, et al. Said Steve Walt, “No, the real problem is that the neoconservative worldview — one that still informs the thinking of many of the groups and individuals who are most vocal in opposing the Iran deal — is fundamentally flawed. Getting Iraq wrong wasn’t just an unfortunate miscalculation, it happened because their theories of world politics were dubious and their understanding of how the world works was goofy…Once again we see put on display the neocons’ stubborn and morally dubious refusal to admit they were wrong and take responsibility for the lives and money they squandered.”
President Clinton’s Impotence
President Clinton was a tough, remorseless leader when it came to foreign policy. It was Clinton who spearheaded the fight against Slobodan Milosevic, bombed Saddam Hussein, outing a coup against him; and Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden, and prevented al-Qaeda from establishing a stronghold in the incendiary Balkans region. Ultimately, Clinton emerged as a tough-as-nails commander in chief in the same vein as Ronald Reagan.
The Emergence of Mass Casualty Terrorism
Up until 1996, the U.S. government mainspring worked only spasmodically when it came to the subject of terrorism. Part of this was due to President Clinton’s management style that seemed to thrive on disarray. When Clinton came to power, Osama bin Laden was a dim figure for many Americans. A certain fuzziness came to cloud people’s minds when they first heard his name. I first heard about him from Israeli intelligence. In 1999, I began to study him, and even in early 2000, when I wrote a story for UPI saying that the NSA was reading his communications, few seemed concerned. Instead, when I spoke to some U.S. intelligence officials about the threat he posed, some dismissed the danger as trifling. One former senior State Department official said that the Israelis were using bin Laden as the next threat to world security, and that such a threat was bogus. This official had formerly headed a group of 20 antiterrorist agencies.
At the beginning of Clinton’s second term, a new figure began to loom and gain traction in the White House. Richard A. Clarke. He was a man of ruthless drive that liked to work outside of the chain of command and relied on back channels to obtain his aims. He was expert at getting money from the federal budget that was used to finance causes that he championed. Among his major talents was his ability to sense when a topic was about to be transformed into a major issue. From the first, he took bin Laden seriously.
Clinton soon initiated the Counterterrorism Security Group which included members of the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the State Department, among others, led by the unbridled Clarke. He quickly became a “Principal,” a cabinet position with unprecedented authority.
The U.S. war against bin Laden had begun with a grave mistake. In 1995, the U.S. strategy against al-Queda had allowed bin Laden to move from Khartoum to Afghanistan to obtain a secure base of operations. Two years later, the government of Pakistan alerted the White House that bin Laden had ordered the assassination of a U.S. Senator, Mark Brown. In 1998, U.S. government apathy had ended and U.S. intelligence on bin Laden was at flood tide, with reports of all kinds pouring in. by 1996, an enduring anxiety about terrorism had sunk deep roots in the U.S. intelligence communistyh and the White House. A total of $5.7 billion was allocated to fgtht terrorism and that total would soon arch up like a rocket. The CIA had a program of “rendition” under whose terms terrorists wre arrested and sent to Egypt for interrogation. By Christmas of 1997, the “Small Group” of White House counterterrists said that clear effective measures to counter bin Laden had to be put in place. Conscious of American vulnerability began to increase. Iran was still the number one threat to the U.S. but bin Laden was going notice.
The Fateful Fatwa.
In February of 1998, terrorist Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States. He published his proclamation, “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” a document that basically declared war on America. The CIA saw this as a clear escalation and issued “a memo of alert,” but when it came to the subject of terrorism, the State Department was consumed by apathy. Bin Laden’s fatwa never penetrated the narrow, hard horizon of the State Department which was focused on such things as the nuclear competition between India and Pakistan and the poverty of Bangladesh. When it came to terrorism the department snoozed away like so many fetuses.
But by early 1998, President Clinton approved a plan to use tribal proxies to capture the Arab by going to his house and yanking him from his bed. The plan was pursued until June of 1998 when tensions erupted between the CIA and Richard Clarke. The CIA hedged, claiming that innocent civilians might be killed, and some called the plan “reckless.” The scheme fell apart like wet blotting paper.
On August 7, 1998, everything changed.
Two teams of bin Laden operatives blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; 213 people were killed, only 12 of them Americans. Some staffers were found dead sitting at their desks. Clinton’s advisors became aware of the event when all their beepers went off at once. Immediately, in the Situation Room, members of the military and intelligence communities who route cables, monitor communications and intelligence reports to the White House, met to deal with countermeasures, rescue coordination and intelligence review. The CIA had seized faxes and satellite phone calls between Africa and Afghanistan, and its specialists, mainly women, began assessing the evidence. It took only one week before CIA Director George Tenet delivered the verdict to Clinton that bin Laden was responsible for the embassy atrocities.
The meaning of the attacks was chilling and unhittable except to the blind. Steve Simon, a member of Clarke’s staff said, “No previous terrorist operation had shown the kind of skill that was evident in the destruction, within minutes of two embassy buildings separated by hundreds of miles.”
The FBI also felt a momentous new phase in the war on terror had begun. (875)Within eight hours, FBI investigators arrived at the scene. Acting on a tip, they went to a hotel where they encountered a wounded, slender Arab whose name was Rasheed. His pants were spotless, but his face leaked blood from cuts. The FBI agents had flown for many hours, and their clothes were wrinkled, but the Arab was immaculate. This bothered one agent who was alert for the illogical. The agent pointed down to his own shoes which were scuffed and worn. The Arab’s shoes were clean, new and his pants had no blood stains.
The Arab jeered, “Arab men are cleaner than American men.”
“I'll give you that,” the agent said, adding “Maybe you have a magic soap that gets blood out of your clothes.” The agent then stood up and put his hand on his belt which was old and worn. The agent told the Arab that there were two things that a man never washed, his belt and his shoes. He ordered the Arab to take off his belt and shoes. Both were pristine.
Another agent came in and ordered the Arab to write down the first telephone number he called after the bombing.
The Arab, stunned by surprise, gave the number which proved to be a priceless intelligence. It was the number of a huge villa from which a call had been made a half hour before the bombings took place.
Under more questions, the slender Arab lost his cool. Rasheed began screaming that he was not Rasheed but Mohammed al Owhali. He was a Saudi and if he had any regrets it was that the attacks had not taken place in the United States. Then he warned, “The big attack is coming. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
After the East Africa attacks, hesitation was swept away, and Clinton began to direct a campaign of increasing scope and lethality that only ended when he left office. Under the provisions of the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, Clinton authorized the intelligence agencies to fund covert activities against bin Laden. In addition, he also signed three highly classified Memoranda of Notification designated as compartmented intelligence, Top Secret/Codeword.
The first MON authorized bin Laden’s arrest, capture and rendition for trial, using whatever force was required. The last MON authorized the shooting down of any aircraft carrying bin Laden. Capture was the first priority but the U.S. government would kill the Arab if it had do. And a new plan was approved,
At a Principal’s meeting on Aug. 19, Clinton asked if the group should decide to attack bin Laden the next day. The NSA had been listening in on bin Laden’s phone calls. Clinton decided to attack bin Laden by launching ship-based tomahawk missiles in an operation called “Infinite Reach.” Sixty-six missiles costing $750 million each were launched but a leak from Pakistani intelligence warned bin Laden off, so instead of going to Khost, he headed for Kabul. Soon, the missiles exploded, killing six jihadis at a cost of a half a billion dollars while bin Laden exulted, “By the grace of God, I am alive.” Operation Infinite reach was a flat fizzle, and its failure distressed many of Clinton’s anti-terrorist officials. Clinton said publicly that bin Laden had launched a terrorist war against the United States, but his critics said the strike was his biggest foreign policy blunder.
In spite of Thiessen’s misleading propaganda, the Clinton distraction inflicted a huge defeat in Bosnia. Thiessen ignores this. Bin Laden saw Bosnia the perfect location for various terrorist groups to congregate and grow, and his followers were training inside the U.S. The Dayton Accords destroyed the effort, but that is another story.
Bush Downgrades the Threat
Clarke said in his memoir: “Within a week of the inauguration, I wrote to Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, asking ‘urgently’ for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent al-Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been ‘framed’ by her Deputies.”
Of particular significance, the memo also suggested strategies for combating al-Queda that might be adopted by the new Bush administration.
In his memoir, “Against All Enemies,” Clarke wrote that Rice made a decision that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism should be downgraded. By demoting the office, the Bush Administration sent a signal through the national security bureaucracy about the urgent and looming threat of terrorism. No longer would Clarke's memos go directly to the President; instead they had to pass through a chain of command of Rice and Hadley who “bounced every one of them back.”
At the first Deputies Committee meeting on Terrorism held in April 2001, Clarke strongly suggested that the U.S. put pressure on both the Taliban and al-Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other Afghani groups to keep bin Laden from roaming free. Simultaneously, he suggested that they target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the MQ-1 Predators.
The response from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who would in a few years become a visiting follow at Thiessen’s outfit, the American Enterprise Institute, was astounding. “Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden.” Clarke replied that he was talking about bin Laden and his network because it posed “an immediate and serious threat to the United States.” According to Clarke, Wolfowitz turned to him and said, “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because the FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist.” No matter, and never mind.
From that ignorant misconception, sprang another: the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein must have strong ties with bin Laden and possessed weapons of mass destruction. 704
Clarke wrote in “Against All Enemies” that in the summer of 2001, the intelligence community was convinced of an imminent attack by al-Qaeda, but could not get the attention of the highest levels of the Bush administration; most famously writing that Director of the CIA Tenet was running around with his “hair on fire.” At a July 5, 2001, White House gathering of the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, Secret Service and INS, Clarke stated that “something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon.”
On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified briefing pertaining to the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. That morning’s “presidential daily brief,” the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies, featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief, and only that daily brief, in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of al-Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. Historians considered that claim absurd. Further, an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
Enter Wolfie
Wolfowitz was the first senior Bush official to bring up Iraq after the 9/11 attacks during a meeting at the presidential retreat at Camp David, when U.S. military assets were already being diverted from Afghanistan to the coming invasion of Iraq. Clarke charged that before and during the 9/11 crisis, many in the Administration were distracted from efforts against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization by a pre-occupation with toppling Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq. Clarke had written that on September 12, 2001, President Bush pulled him and a couple of aides aside and "testily" asked him to try to find evidence that Saddam was connected to the terrorist attacks. In response he wrote a report stating there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement and got it signed by all relevant agencies, including the FBI and the CIA. The paper was quickly returned by a deputy with a note saying "Please update and resubmit."
After initially denying that such a meeting between the President and Clarke took place, the White House later reversed its denial when others present backed Clarke's version of the events
In the end, Wolfie would be employed by the World Bank and would resign in scandal over a woman he had employed.
Richard Sale