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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (129150)	4/13/2004 6:00:45 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

Editorial: More dots/Bush didn't follow up April 13, 2004 President Bush has now confirmed, in his own words, that he was as ineffectual in responding to the threat from Al-Qaida prior to Sept. 11 as his harshest critics assert. Asked Sunday about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief, Bush said it gave "no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack." That is an unbelievable statement. In essence, he's saying that because there was no information available about terrorists hijacking a jetliner in city X for use as a bomb in city Y on such and such a date, there was nothing he could do. And nothing is precisely what he did. Talking with reporters the very next day, Aug. 7, 2001, at his Texas ranch, Bush worried aloud about the threat posed by . . . Saddam Hussein. The Aug. 6 memo from the CIA needs to be put in context. All through June and July, U.S. intelligence agencies were collecting an enormous amount of chatter that Al-Qaida was planning something "very, very, very big," in the words of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. This was the period, according to counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, when CIA Director George Tenet was running around Washington with his "hair on fire" trying to figure out what was going to happen, because he knew it would be big and it would be soon. In that context, Bush asks the CIA for a briefing paper on the domestic threat posed by Al-Qaida. It comes to him on Aug. 6 with the alarming headline, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." The body of the memo says Bin Laden is going to exploit an Egyptian operative's access to the United States "to mount a terrorist attack." It says "Bin Laden prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks." Most ominously it warns that "FBI information since (1998) indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations of hijackings . . . ." Rice told the 9/11 Commission that all 56 FBI field offices were tasked with checking out the information in the daily briefing. But commission members said they could not find, in millions of pages of documents, any evidence that a single field office was alerted to this domestic threat or tasked with investigating it. The director of the FBI at the time told the commission he certainly didn't tell field offices to take up this task. You'd better believe he would have, had the president ordered it. Just 10 days later, FBI officers in the Minneapolis field office arrested Zacarias Moussaoui following a tip from a Twin Cities flight school. Moussaoui was behaving suspiciously; it seems he wanted to learn to pilot a 747 jet, even though he had no pilot's license and really not a clue about flying large airplanes. The Minneapolis FBI office tried as hard as it could to get the Washington headquarters staff to allow it to pursue an aggressive investigation of Moussaoui, including digging into his computer. This does not sound like a headquarters staff that had been alerted to the possibility that Al-Qaida members might be planning airliner hijackings in the United States. The Minneapolis FBI staff was frustrated at every turn, according to Agent Coleen Rowley, to the point they began to joke that their headquarters was an "unwitting accomplice" in Bin Laden's efforts to attack the United States. Intelligence is almost always fragmentary and frequently inconclusive. You find the end of a string, and if it looks promising (and especially if your superiors take great interest in it), you pull hard. If you are skillful, you gather more string, and your effort widens. More string pullers use the clues you've developed to look for similar string in new places. If they, too, are skillful, you begin to gather enough string to draw some tentative conclusions, and perhaps to take action. That's what Bush failed to do during the summer of 2001. No one's saying conclusively that Bush could have prevented 9/11. What critics are saying is that the president should have rattled a few cages and forced his administration to take the information at hand seriously. Yes, there is a possibility they might have happened on a couple of the hijackers, and perhaps that would have revealed the Al-Qaida plot to use hijacked airplanes to attack New York and Washington. But whether they prevented the attacks or not, given the extreme threat level in the summer of 2001, Bush and his team owed the American people a great deal more vigilance than they provided. startribune.com