From day one, the U.S. and Bill Clinton was well aware that al Qaeda was behind the attack on the Cole. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. When attacked, you strike back immediately and hard. You don't wait four or five months. I am absolutely convinced that if Bill Clinton had immediately launched an aggressive attack on al Qaeda within days of the Cole bombing, whether or not he was successful in killing bin Laden, that Al Gore would have won the election. Clinton's non-response cost Gore the election.
Meanwhile in Washington neither CIA or FBI would state the obvious: al Qaeda did it. We knew there was a large al Qaeda cell in Yemen. There was also a large cell of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but that group had no announced its complete merger into al Qaeda, so what difference did it make which group did the attack? Lisa Gordon-Haggerty, Paul Kurtz, and Roger Cressey had worked around the clock piecing together the evidence and had made a very credible case against al Qaeda. CIA would agree only months later.
In the meantime in Principals discussions, it was difficult to gain support for a retaliatory strike when neither FBI nor CIA would say that al Qaeda did it. Once again I proposed bombing all of the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, without tying the operation to getting bin Laden or even to retaliating for the Cole. There was no support for bombing.
Mike Sheehan could not believe what took place in the Principals meeting following the attack on the Cole. He had grown up in the military: West Point, Korea, Special Forces school, hostage team in Panama, fighting in El Salvador, Command and General Staff School, peacekeeping in Somalia and Haiti, two years with the NSC at the White House. He had always assumed that when U.S. forces were attacked and killed, U.S. government leaders would want to avenge the attacks. Sheehan knew these leaders. Now out of the Special Forces and a civilian serving as the State Department’s leading counter terrorism official, he had worked with these Principals for years. He had energized the State Department from within to use all its diplomatic assets against al Qaeda. Yet now, with seventeen dead sailors, the Principals had decided to do nothing, to wait for proof of who had committed the attack. Sheehan was particularly outraged that the highest-ranking U.S. military officer had not even suggested that the U.S. employ existing retaliation plans against al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and against their Taliban hosts. Sheehan detested the Taliban, who representatives had lied to his face.
On a brisk October day in 2000, Sheehan stood with me on West Executive Avenue and watched as the limousines left the White House meeting on the Cole to go back to the Pentagon. ”What’s it going to take, Dick?” Sheehan demanded, “What the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell, they won’t even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”
--- “Against All Enemies” by Richard A. Clarke, pages 223-224 |
