Clinton Has No Clothes
What 9/11 revealed about the ex-president.
By Byron York, NR White House Correspondent
From the December 17, 2001, issue of National Review
On June 25, 1996, a powerful truck bomb exploded outside the Khobar
Towers barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, tearing the front from the
building, blasting a crater 35 feet deep, and killing 19 American
soldiers. Hundreds more were injured. When news reached Washington,
Presi dent Bill Clinton vowed to bring the killers to justice. "The
cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished," he
said angrily. "Let me say again: We will pursue this. America takes
care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished." The next
day, leaving the White House to attend an economic summit in France,
Clinton had more tough words for the attackers. "Let me be very clear:
We will not resist" — the president corrected himself — "we will not
rest in our efforts to find who is responsible for this outrage, to
pursue them and to punish them."
As Clinton spoke, his top political strategist, Dick Morris, was hard
at work conducting polls to gauge the public's reaction to the
bombing. "Whenever there was a crisis, I ordered an immediate poll,"
Morris recalls. "I was concerned about how Clinton looked in the face
of [the attack] and whether people blamed him." The bombing happened
in the midst of the president's re-election campaign, and even though
Clinton enjoyed a substantial lead over Republican Bob Dole, Morris
worried that public dissatisfaction with Clinton on the terrorism
issue might benefit Dole.
Indeed, Morris's first poll showed less support for Clinton than he
had hoped. But by the time Morris presented his findings to the
president and top staffers at a political-strategy meeting a few days
later, public approval of Clinton's response had climbed — something
Morris noted in his written agenda for the session:
SAUDI BOMBING — recovered from Friday and looking great
Approve Clinton handling 73-20
Big gain from 63-20 on Friday
Security was adequate 52-40
It's not Clinton's fault 76-18
The numbers were a relief for the re-election team. But soon there was
another crisis when, on July 17, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed
into the Atlantic Ocean on its way from New York to Paris. There was
widespread suspicion that the crash was the result of terrorism (it
was later ruled to be an accident), and Morris's polling found the
public growing uneasy not only about air safety but also about
Clinton's performance in the Khobar investigation. Morris found that
the number of people who believed Clinton was "doing all he can to
investigate the Saudi bombing and punish those responsible" was just
54 percent, while 32 percent believed he could do more. Morris feared
that White House inaction would allow Dole to portray Clinton as soft
on national security.
"We tested two alternative defenses to this attack: Peace maker or
Toughness," Morris wrote in a memo for the president. In the
"Peacemaker" defense, Morris asked voters to respond to the statement,
"Clinton is peacemaker. Brought together Arabs and Israelis. Ireland.
Bosnia cease fire. Uses strength to bring about peace." The other
defense, "Tough ness," asked voters to respond to "Clinton tough.
Stands up for American interests. Against foreign companies doing
business in Cuba. Sanctions against Iran. Anti-terrorist legislation
held up by Republicans. Prosecuted World Trade Center bombers." Morris
found that the public greatly preferred "Toughness."
So Clinton talked tough. But he did not act tough. Indeed, a review of
his years in office shows that each time the president was confronted
with a major terrorist attack — the February 26, 1993, bombing of the
World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers attack, the August 7, 1998,
bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the October 12,
2000, attack on the USS Cole — Clinton was preoccupied with his own
political fortunes to an extent that precluded his giving serious and
sustained attention to fighting terrorism.
At the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, his administration
was just beginning, and he was embroiled in controversies over gays in
the military, an economic stimulus plan, and the beginnings of Hillary
Clinton's health-care task force. Khobar Towers happened not only in
the midst of the president's re-election campaign but also at the end
of a month in which there were new and damaging developments in the
Whitewater and Filegate scandals. The African embassy attacks occurred
as the Monica Lewinsky affair was at fever pitch, in the month that
Clinton appeared before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand
jury. And when the Cole was rammed, Clinton had little time left in
office and was desperately hoping to build his legacy with a
breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Whenever a serious
terrorist attack occurred, it seemed Bill Clinton was always busy with
something else.
The First WTC Attack
Clinton had been in office just 38 days when terrorists bombed the
World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.
Although it was later learned that the bombing was the work of
terrorists who hoped to topple one of the towers into the other and
kill as many as 250,000 people, at first it was not clear that the
explosion was the result of terrorism. The new president's reaction
seemed almost disengaged. He warned Americans against "overreacting"
and, in an interview on MTV, described the bombing as the work of
someone who "did something really stupid."
From the start, Clinton approached the investigation as a
law-enforcement issue. In doing so, he effectively cut out some of the
government's most important intelligence agencies. For example, the
evidence gathered by FBI agents and prosecutors came under the
protection of laws mandating grand-jury secrecy — which meant that the
law-enforcement side of the investigation could not tell the
intelligence side of the investigation what was going on. "Nobody
outside the prosecutorial team and maybe the FBI had access," says
James Woolsey, who was CIA director at the time. "It was all under
grand-jury secrecy."
Another problem with Clinton's decision to assign the investigation
exclusively to law enforcement was that law enforcement in the new
administration was in turmoil. When the bomb went off, Clinton did not
have a confirmed attorney general; Janet Reno, who was nominated after
the Zoë Baird fiasco, was awaiting Senate approval. The Justice
Department, meanwhile, was headed by a Bush holdover who had no real
power in the new administration. The bombing barely came up at Reno's
Senate hearings, and when she was finally sworn in on March 12,
neither she nor Clinton mentioned the case. (Instead, Clinton praised
Reno for "sharing with us the life-shaping stories of your family and
career that formed your deep sense of fairness and your unwavering
drive to help others to do better.") In addition, at the time the
bombing investigation began, the FBI was headed by William Sessions,
who would soon leave after a messy forcing-out by Clinton. A new
director, Louis Freeh, was not confirmed by the Senate until August 6.
Amid all the turmoil at the top, the investigation missed some
tantalizing clues pointing toward a far-reaching conspiracy. In April
1995, for example, terrorism expert Steven Emerson told the House
International Relations Committee that there was information that
"strongly suggests . . . a Sudanese role in the World Trade Center
bombing. There are also leads pointing to the involvement of Osama bin
Laden, the ex-Afghan Saudi mujahideen supporter now taking refuge in
Sudan." Two years later, Emerson told the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee the same thing. In recent years, according to an exhaustive
New York Times report, "American intelligence officials have come to
believe that [ringleader Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman] and the World Trade
Center bombers had ties to al-Qaeda."
But the Clinton administration stuck with its theory that the bombing
was the work of a loose network of terrorists working apart from any
government sponsorship. Intelligence officials who might have thought
otherwise were left out in the cold — "I made repeated attempts to see
Clinton privately to take up a whole range of issues and was
unsuccessful," Woolsey recalls — and some of the nation's most
critical intelligence capabilities went unused. In the end, the U.S.
tried six suspects in the attack. All were convicted and sentenced to
life in prison. Another key suspect, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was released
after being held by the FBI in New Jersey and fled to Baghdad, where
he is living under the protection of the Iraqi government. Today, with
many leads gone cold, intelligence officials concede they will
probably never know who was behind the attack.
Khobar Towers
"In June of 1996, it felt like an entire herd was converging on the
White House," wrote Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos in his memoir,
All Too Human. A herd of scandals, that is: In late May, independent
counsel Kenneth Starr had convicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy
Tucker in the first big Whitewater trial; in June, the Filegate story
first broke into public view, and Sen. Alphonse D'Amato issued his
committee's Whitewater report recommending that several administration
officials be investigated for perjury. It was also in June that the
White House went into full battle mode against a variety of
allegations contained in Unlimited Access, a book by former FBI agent
Gary Aldrich.
All these developments were heavy on the minds of Clinton, Dick
Morris, and the other members of the re-election strategy team when
the bomb went off at Khobar Towers on June 25. As it had after the
World Trade Center bombing, a distracted White House gave the case to
law enforcement. But there is significant evidence to suggest that the
White House was even less interested in finding answers than it had
been in the World Trade Center case. In the Khobar investigation, the
Clinton administration not only failed to follow potentially
productive leads but in some instances actively made the
investigators' job more difficult.
From the beginning, the administration ran into significant Saudi
resistance (the Saudis quickly identified a few low-level suspects and
beheaded them, hoping to end the matter there). According to a long
account of the case by Elsa Walsh published earlier this year in The
New Yorker, FBI director Louis Freeh on several occasions urged the
White House to pressure the Saudis for more cooperation. More than
once, Walsh reports, Freeh was frustrated to learn that the president
barely mentioned the case in meetings with Saudi leaders.
Freeh — whose own relations with the White House had deteriorated
badly in the wake of the Filegate and campaign-finance scandals —
became convinced that the White House didn't really want to push the
Saudis for more information, which Freeh believed would confirm strong
suspicions of extensive Iranian involvement in the attack. Walsh
reports that in September 1998, Freeh, angry and losing hope, took the
extraordinary step of secretly asking former president George H. W.
Bush to intercede with the Saudi royal family. Acting without
Clinton's knowledge, Bush made the request, and the Saudis began to
provide new information, which indeed pointed to Iran.
In late 1998, Walsh reports, Freeh went to national security adviser
Sandy Berger to tell him that it appeared the FBI had enough evidence
to indict several suspects. "Who else knows this?" Berger asked Freeh,
demanding to know if it had been leaked to the press. Freeh said it
was a closely held secret. Then Berger challenged some of the evidence
of Iranian involvement. "That's just hearsay," Berger said. "No,
Sandy," Freeh responded. "It's testimony of a co-conspirator . . ."
According to Walsh's account, Freeh thought that "Berger . . . was not
a national security adviser; he was a public-relations hack,
interested in how something would play in the press. After more than
two years, Freeh had concluded that the administration did not really
want to resolve the Khobar bombing."
Ultimately, Freeh never got the support he wanted from the White
House. Walsh writes that "by the end of the Clinton era, Freeh had
become so mistrustful of Clinton that, although he believed he had
developed enough evidence to seek indictments against the masterminds
behind the attack, not just the front-line suspects, he decided to
wait for a new administration." Just before Freeh left office, Walsh
reports, he met with new president George W. Bush and gave him a list
of suspects in the bombing. In June, attorney general John Ashcroft
announced the indictment of 14 suspects: 13 Saudis and one Lebanese.
It is not clear whether any of them are the "masterminds" of Khobar;
none is in American custody and no Iranian officials were named in the
indictment.
Both the Khobar investigation and the World Trade Center bombing
presented Clinton with daunting challenges; there were sensitive
political issues involved, and in each case it was not immediately
clear who was behind the violence. But in neither instance did Clinton
press hard for answers and demand action; Berger would not have taken
the position he did if the president fully supported a vigorous
investigation. In the coming years, Clinton would be faced with clear
acts of terrorism carried out by an organization with undeniable state
support. But again, busy with other things, he did little.
The Embassies
On August 7, 1998, bombs exploded at U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya,
and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. More than 200 people were killed,
including 12 Americans. The morning of the attacks, Clinton said, "We
will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to
justice, no matter what or how long it takes. . . . We are determined
to get answers and justice."
Investigators quickly discovered that bin Laden was behind the
attacks. On August 20, Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on a bin
Laden camp in Afghanistan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in
Sudan. But the strikes were at best ineffectual. There was little
convincing evidence that the pharmaceutical factory, which admin
istration officials believed was involved in the production of
material for chemical weapons, actually was part of a weapons-making
operation, and the cruise missiles in Afghanistan missed bin Laden and
his deputies.
Instead of striking a strong blow against terrorism, the action set
off a howling debate about Clinton's motives. The president ordered
the action three days after appearing before the grand jury
investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair, and Clinton's critics
accused him of using military action to change the subject from the
sex-and-perjury scandal — the so-called "wag the dog" strategy. Some
of Clinton's allies, suspecting the same thing, remained silent. Even
some of those who, after briefings by administration officials,
publicly defended the strikes privately questioned Clinton's decision.
The accusations came as no surprise to the White House. "Everyone knew
the 'wag the dog' charge was going to be made," recalls Daniel
Benjamin, a terrorism expert on the National Security Council. But
Benjamin and others believed — mistakenly, as it turned out — that
they could convince the skeptics the attacks were fully justified. "I
remember being shocked and deeply depressed over the fact that no one
would take seriously what I considered a grave national-security
problem," says Benjamin. "Not only were they not buying it, they were
accusing the administration of essentially playing the most shallow
and foolish kind of game to deflect attention from other issues. It
was astonishing."
In particular, reporters and some members of Congress were not
convinced by the administration's evidence that the al-Shifa plant was
involved in chemical-weapons production. The attack came to be viewed,
by consensus, as a screw-up. In a new article in The New York Review
of Books, Benjamin suggests that that skepticism, particularly on the
part of reporters, scared Clinton away from any more tough action
against bin Laden. "The dismissal of the al-Shifa attack as a blunder
had serious consequences, including the failure of the public to
comprehend the nature of the al-Qaeda threat," Benjamin writes. "That
in turn meant there was no support for decisive measures in
Afghanistan — including, possibly, the use of U.S. ground forces — to
hunt down the terrorists; and thus no national leader of either party
publicly suggested such action."
After the cruise-missile raids, the administration restricted its work
to covert actions breaking up terrorist cells. Benjamin and others say
a significant number of terrorist plots were short-circuited,
preventing several acts of violence. "I see no reason to doubt their
word on that," says James Woolsey. "They may have been doing a lot of
stuff behind the scenes." But breaking up individual cells while
avoiding larger-scale action probably had the effect of postponing
terrorist acts rather than stopping them. Woolsey believes that such
an approach was part of what he calls Clinton's "PR-driven" approach
to terrorism, an approach that left the fundamental problem unsolved:
"Do something to show you're concerned. Launch a few missiles in the
desert, bop them on the head, arrest a few people. But just keep
kicking the ball down the field."
The Cole
The last act of terrorism during the Clinton administration came on
October 12, 2000, when bin Laden operatives bombed the USS Cole in
Aden, Yemen. Seventeen American sailors were killed, 39 others were
wounded, and one of the U.S.'s most sophisticated warships was nearly
sunk.
Clinton's reaction to the Cole terrorism was more muted than his
response to the previous attacks. While he called the bombing "a
despicable and cowardly act" and said, "We will find out who was
responsible and hold them accountable," he seemed more concerned that
the attack might threaten the administration's work in the Middle East
(the bombing came at the same time as a new spate of violence between
Israelis and Palestinians). "If [the terrorists'] intention was to
deter us from our mission of promoting peace and security in the
Middle East, they will fail utterly," Clinton said on the morning of
the attack. The next day, the Washington Post's John Harris, who had
good connections inside the administration, wrote, "While the apparent
suicide bombing of the USS Cole may have been the more dramatic
episode for the American public, the escalation between Israelis and
Palestinians took the edge in preoccupying senior administration
officials yesterday. This was regarded as the more fluid of the two
problems, and it presented the broader threat to Clinton's foreign
policy aims."
As in 1998, U.S. investigators quickly linked the bombing to bin Laden
and his sponsors in Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Together with the
embassy bombings, the Cole blast established a clear pattern of
attacks on American interests carried out by bin Laden's organization.
Clinton had a solid rationale, and would most likely have had solid
public support, for strong military action. Yet he did nothing.
Perhaps he didn't want to endanger the cherished goal of Middle East
peace. Perhaps he didn't want to disrupt the 2000 presidential
campaign, then in its last days. Perhaps he didn't know quite what to
do. But in the end, the ball was kicked a bit farther down the field.
In early August 1996, a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing,
Clinton had a long conversation with Dick Morris about his place in
history. Morris divided presidents into four categories: first tier,
second tier, third tier, and the rest. Twenty-two presidents who
presided over uneventful administrations fell into the last category.
Just five — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin
Roosevelt — made Morris's first tier.
Clinton asked Morris where he stood. "I said that at the moment he was
at the top of the unrated category," Morris recalls. Morris says he
told the president that one surprising thing about the ratings was
that a president's standing had little to do with the performance of
the economy during his time in office. "Yeah," Clinton responded, "It
has so much to do with whether you get re-elected or not, but history
kind of forgets it."
Clinton then asked, "What do I need to do to be first tier?" "I said,
'You can't,'" Morris remembers. "'You have to win a war.'" Clinton
then asked what he needed to do to make the second or third tier, and
Morris outlined three goals. The first was successful welfare reform.
The second was balancing the budget. And the third was an effective
battle against terrorism. "I said the only one of the major goals he
had not achieved was a war on terrorism," Morris says. (This is not a
recent recollection; Morris also described the conversation in his
1997 book, Behind the Oval Office.)
But Clinton never began, much less finished, a war on terrorism. Even
though Morris's polling showed the poll-sensitive president that the
American people supported tough action, Clinton demurred. Why?
"He had almost an allergy to using people in uniform," Morris
explains. "He was terrified of incurring casualties; the lessons of
Vietnam were ingrained far too deeply in him. He lacked a faith that
it would work, and I think he was constantly fearful of reprisals."
But there was more to it than that. "On another level, I just don't
think it was his thing," Morris says. "You could talk to him about
income redistribution and he would talk to you for hours and hours.
Talk to him about terrorism, and all you'd get was a series of
grunts."
And that is the key to understanding Bill Clinton's handling of the
terrorist threat that grew throughout his two terms in the White
House: It just wasn't his thing. Clinton was right when he said
history might care little about the prosperity of his era. Now, as he
tries to defend his record on terrorism, he appears to sense that he
will be judged harshly on an issue that is far more important than the
Nasdaq or 401(k) balances. He's right about that, too. |
