Clinton warned about AQ plans in 1998

[Evil_One]

This made the news last Friday. Three years is a long time. Did his administration do enough to try to prevent the attacks? Much has been made of the perceived failures of the Bush administration prior to 9/11. How much blame should the Clinton adminsitration share?

[Hamlet]

IIRC (and correct me if I’m wrong) the 1998 memo to Clinton was referred to in the memo to Bush that was made back in August of 2001, before the attack. Contrary to the finger-pointing and idiotic conclusion-drawing heard on conservative talk radio about this memo, it is nothing we didn’t know about back when they released Bush’s memo about the threat that Al-Queda wanted to attack the United States. It’s just another attempt to deflect any potential blame from Bush.

[Evil_One]

The memo cuts both ways. Either both administrations share blame or neither does. To assign blame to the Bush administration we must say that the memo was an unmistakeable clarion call for action. This would mean that the Clinton administration ignored it for three years before telling the Bush administration “Oh by the way, there is this whole Al Qaeda thing, but we didn’t do much about it.”

If the memo was regarded as one threat among many and below the Clinton administration radar screen for three years, then how is it a failure by the Bush administration not to deal with it for eight months?

[cheddarsnax]

Of course, your cite also says: “[Philip Zelikow, executive staff director at the commission,] told Reuters [the brief] referred to a specific hijacking threat in the United States. The commission report will also ‘describe an energetic response to that (1998) report,’ Zelikow said.”

[Evil_One]

I’m sure the 9/11 commission report will be thread fodder for months. It will be interesting to see what that “energetic response” was. It obviously wasn’t “energetic” enough.

[LonesomePolecat]

I am sick to death of all the attempts )by both the right and the left) to politicize the immense national tragedy that took place on September 11, 2001. Have these people no shame?

[Zagadka]

@Evil One

I’m sure the 9/11 commission report will be thread fodder for months. It will be interesting to see what that “energetic response” was. It obviously wasn’t “energetic” enough.

Well, if it dealt with a “specific” thread that wasn’t 9/11, it presumably was “energetic” enough to prevent it without alerting us.

[Evil_One]

Good point. We will never know what successes either administration had when it came to preventing terror attacks. Success means silence. Nobody is going to say “Guess what almost happened, folks!” because it would expose a weakness. Failures are obvious to everyone. That said, the Bush record post-9/11 has been a good one. The strategy of fracturing Al Qaeda seems to be working. However, since I don’t have a top secret (or higher) security clearance, the lack of attacks is the only wayt I can judge anti-terrorism success. The point of the OP, once again, is to address the folks who want to absolve Clinton and blame Bush for everything. Either they are both at fault, or neither one is. I choose to believe that better choices could have been made by both administrations, but hindsight is easy. I also feel that if Bush had tightened airport security pre-9/11, the same people that are blaming him for not preventing the attack now would have been screaming about having their civil liberties “trampled” without just cause.

[Marley23]

@Evil One

The strategy of fracturing Al Qaeda seems to be working.

Tell that to the Spanish and Iraqis. It’s true of course that we haven’t been attacked in 2 1/2 years. Then on the other hand, the government seems pretty certain something is coming (but on another hand, if I have one, we’ve heard that to some degree before with nothing happening). So I guess what I’m saying is ‘who knows?’

I also feel that if Bush had tightened airport security pre-9/11, the same people that are blaming him for not preventing the attack now would have been screaming about having their civil liberties “trampled” without just cause.

Provided nobody ever went public about the averted attack, and that there had been no escalation of terrorist attacks worldwide or any other reason to think the country was threatened, and anybody found JUST the tightening of airport security to be ‘trampling’ (as opposed to the PATRIOT Act), maybe. But that’s quite a collection of ‘ifs’ we have there.

[Equipoise]

@Evil One

The memo cuts both ways. Either both administrations share blame or neither does. To assign blame to the Bush administration we must say that the memo was an unmistakable clarion call for action. This would mean that the Clinton administration ignored it for three years before telling the Bush administration “Oh by the way, there is this whole al Qaeda thing, but we didn’t do much about it.”

If the memo was regarded as one threat among many and below the Clinton administration radar screen for three years, then how is it a failure by the Bush administration not to deal with it for eight months?

I’d highly recommend Richard Clarke’s book Against All Enemies. According to him, Clinton DID take an aggressive stance toward al Qaeda, but of course it wasn’t enough. It was still more than Bush did.

It’s been a while since I read the book so I don’t remember if he mentions this memo. I’d like to hear what he says about it.

Here’s an interesting bit from the book:

Time was running out on the Clinton administration. There was going to be one last major national security initiative and it was going to be a final try to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. It really looked like that long-sought goal was possible. The Israeli Prime Minister had agreed to major concessions. I would like to have tried both, Camp David and blowing up the al Qaeda camps. Nonetheless, I understood. If we could achieve a Middle East peace much of the popular support for al Qaeda and much of the hatred for America would evaporate overnight. There would be another chance to go after the camps. The Principals asked me to update the Pol-Mil Plan for the Transition, flagging the issues where there was not consensus, where decisions had not been agreed. I listed aiding the Northern Alliance, eliminating the camps, and flying armed Predators to eliminate the al Qaeda leadership.

Clinton left office with bin Laden alive, but having authorized actions to eliminate him and to step up the attacks on al Qaeda. He had defeated al Qaeda when it had attempted to take over Bosnia by having its fighters dominate the defense of the breakaway state from Serbian attacks. He had seen earlier than anyone that terrorism would be the major new threat facing America, and therefore had greatly increased funding for counterterrorism and initiated homeland protection programs. He had put an end to Iraqi and Iranian terrorism against the United States by quickly acting against the intelligence services of each nation.

Because of the intensity of the political opposition that Clinton engendered, he had been heavily criticized for bombing al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, for engaging in “Wag the Dog” tactics to divert attention from a scandal about his personal life. For similar reasons, he could not fire the recalcitrant FBI Director who had failed to fix the Bureau or to uncover terrorists in the United States, He had given the CIA unprecedented authority to go after bin Laden personally and al Qaeda, but had not taken steps when they did little or nothing. Because Clinton was criticized as a Vietnam War opponent without a military record, he was limited in his ability to direct the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct. He had tried that in Somalia, and the military had made mistakes and blamed him. In the absence of a bigger provocation from al Qaeda to silence his critics, Clinton thought he could do no more. Nonetheless, he put in place the plans and programs that allowed America to respond to the big attacks when they did come, sweeping away the political barriers to action.

When Clinton left office many people, including the incoming Bush administration leadership, thought that he and his administration were overly obsessed with al Qaeda. After all, al Qaeda had killed only a few Americans, nothing like the hundreds of Marines who died at the hands of Beirut terrorists during the Reagan administration or the hundreds of Americans who were killed by Libya on Pan Am 103 during the first Bush’s administration. Those two acts had not provoked U.S. military retaliation. Why was Clinton so worked up about al Qaeda and why did he talk to President-elect Bush about it and have Sandy Berger raise it with his successor as National Security Advisor, Condi Rice? In January 2001, the new administration really thought Clinton’s recommendation that eliminating al Qaeda be one of their highest priorities, well, rather odd, like so many of the Clinton administration’s actions, from their perspective.

[Equipoise]

This is from another book I have, “The Age of Sacred Terror” by Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin,who were both directors for counterterrorism on the National Security Council. I haven’t started reading it yet, but I was flipping through and saw it.

Clinton himself had been speaking frequently about terrorism for some time. After the June 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, the United States had insisted on short notice that the agenda for the July meeting of the G-7 be scrapped and an emergency session on international cooperation to combat terrorism be held. The President gave a major speech on the subject in early August 1996 at George Washington University, and afterward, his speechwriters had a standing order to include warnings about the rising threat of terror in virtually every foreign policy speech he gave. These were not just perfunctory mentions: Clinton devoted a significant portion of his public speaking on foreign policy to the issue, including his 1998 commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy. (One service academy each year typically gets a presidential visit at graduation, and it is the occasion for a major foreign and security policy statement.) Thus, three months before the East Africa bombings, Clinton spoke about the task of reorganizing the government to meet the terrorist threat and the growing danger of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction and cyberattacks. A month after the bombings, he devoted his annual address to the UN General Assembly to the issue, warning that “It is a grave misconception to see terrorism as only, or even mostly, an American problem. Indeed, it is a clear and present danger to tolerant and open societies and innocent people everywhere. No one in this room, nor the people you represent, are immune.”

During the months that impeachment was hanging in the balance, Clinton did not grant newspaper interviews because of the proceedings, but afterward he gave his first interview to The New York Times’s Judith Miller to discuss the threat of terrorist attacks with biological weapons, which, of all the different strands within the issue, was the one he cared about most deeply. Whether anyone saw Clinton’s efforts as more than an attempt to change the subject is impossible to judge but they certainly made little impact on reporters. He continued speaking about terrorism, and it became a personal preoccupation. When Clinton gave his final State of the Union address in January 2000, he added, out of the blue, an improvised aside: “I predict to you, when most of us are long gone, but sometime in the next ten to twenty years, the major security threat this country will face will come from the enemies of the nation-state: the narcotraffickers and the terrorists and the organized criminals, who will be organized together, working together, with increasing access to ever more sophisticated chemical and biological persons.” His timing was wrong; the point was right.

NSC officials, ourselves among them, also tried to convince those who would listen that bin Laden was a different kind of terrorist, uniquely dangerous, and that militant Islam posed a growing, serious threat. In the months after the 1998 embassy bombings, this was done, in keeping with the White House practice, without Attribution by name. Time and again we spoke with journalists and tried to impress on them that al-Qaeda presented a genuine threat to American national security. At a time when it would have been easy to join the masses of goverment officials who were decrying the bombing of al-Shifa, we and others maintained in conversation after conversation that targeting the plant was the right thing to do.

Wow, it doesn’t pertain to this thread, but after reading their account of al-Shifa, I take back what I said in another thread about it being a fuckup. Their evidence is compelling, at least good enough for reasonable doubt.

Clinton talked about bin Laden so much, he was criticized for it!

But he [bin Laden] was not fundamentally a new and more dangerous kind of terrorist. By treating him as such, some argued, the United States was only helping him. Mary Anne Weaver, writing in The New Yorker in January 2000, suggested that Washington had “mythologized” the terrorist. (more such crap…)

Another argument, often heard from Europeans, was that the United States was obsessed with bin Laden because, having lost its longtime nemesis with the collapse of the Soviet Union, another needed to be invented.

[Polycarp]

Does anyone remember 1998? I seem to recall the Clinton Administration raising issues of problems overseas, and that effort being condemned by the Republican leadership as an attempt to deflect attention from the important issue of impeaching him because he lied about getting a blowjob.

My apologies if that sounds terribly politically slanted. I don’t object to anyone’s attaching blame where it is due – but I find the entire self-righteous stance of the Republican Party since 1994 as terribly insulting to the traditions of a free nation. We are, I get the impression, supposed to focus on what they consider the most important issues at the time they consider them to be the most important issues, and not disagree with their stance. That’s downright annoying.

If Mr. Clinton was wrong for bringing up Middle Eastern affairs during the impeachment process, as they said then, then by any reasonable standard no Republican should hold him at fault for 9/11. Conversely, if he was merely doing his job as Chief Executive charged with the defense and security of this nation then, then they owe the American people an abject apology for what they said then.

Granted, I’m a registered Democrat these days. I was raised Republican and spent the first 20 years of my adult life a Republican. But I think that justice is not subject to playing power politics – and they were wrong one place or the other – there’s no two ways about that.

[rjung]

The only people who believe Clinton was ineffective against terrorism are the folks who think the war in Iraq is effective against terrorism.

[Zagadka]

@Polycarp

Does anyone remember 1998? I seem to recall the Clinton Administration raising issues of problems overseas, and that effort being condemned by the Republican leadership as an attempt to deflect attention from the important issue of impeaching him because he lied about getting a blowjob.

Either that, or bitching about how fighting terrorism was only going to cause more terrorism and get everyone killed.

[XT]

@rjung

The only people who believe Clinton was ineffective against terrorism are the folks who think the war in Iraq is effective against terrorism.

Horseshit. I think Clinton was pretty ineffective against terrorism while still thinking Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism, let alone that its ‘effective against terrorism’. Or am I the only one, rjung??

Clinton WAS ineffective against terrorism…so was Bush prior to 9/11 (and arguably after 9/11 as well but we are talking pre-9/11 here). However the underlieing problems pre-date both administrations IMO, and only a radical shake-up would change things. So, I don’t necessarily blame either administration for 9/11…taken realistically there was not a lot either adminstration could do to make agencies like the CIA and FBI work and play well together, nor could they radically alter the focus of either agency in any meaningful way. Only a disaster could break either one (or NSA or other agencies) out of their ruts and force them to work and play well together. Now, if someone wants to make the case that Bush missed a golden oppurtunity to make this happen, we could debate that I suppose.

-XT