The 9/11 Commission Series, Part 3

This is the third part of my continuing series on Philip Shenon's excellent book on the 9/11 Commission.  You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.  This part focuses on the failures of the Bush administration, in particular Condoleezza Rice, to prevent the 9/11 attacks.  Here's her interview during her public hearing, made only after months of stonewalling by the White House and only after damaging information about her was found in the PDBs ...

Nice.

It occurred to more than a few people at the CIA that the world would be different if Sandy Berger had still been national security adviser in the spring and summer of 2001 -- and not Condoleezza Rice, Berger's successor, who had seemed so astonishingly incurious about the agency's drumbeat of warnings in the months before 9/11.

Repeatedly in 2001, [counter terrorism expert Richard] Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden.  The threat, Clarke argued, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.

Rice had admirably resisted calls [by Bush loyalists] to remove Clarke entirely from the White House staff, a fact she would recall repeatedly after 9/11 [while] defending herself.  But she had pushed Clarke so far away from the center of power that his warnings through 2001 about an imminent terrorist attack could be -- and were -- ignored.

By comparison, Berger had forwarded Clarke's emails and memos directly to President Clinton, often without changing a word.  At Berger's recommendation, Clarke was made a de facto member of the White House Principals Committee when it discussed terrorist threats (along with the secretaries of state and defense and CIA director George Tenet).  Rice removed Clarke from the Principals Committee and had all communication go through her.

Philip Zelikow, who ran the 9/11 commission, recommended Clarke's demotion to Rice during the transition to the Bush presidency.  Even so, Berger stressed to both Rice and Bush that al Qaeda would be the biggest potential threat to U.S. security during Bush's term.   He was ignored. 

As the commission's staff had learned, Berger had organized almost daily meetings at the White House in December 1999 [in preparation for a potential Y2K attack by al Qaeda], where he demanded that intelligence officials "shake the trees" within their agencies every day for the smallest bit of evidence about al-Qaeda plans.  There had been nothing like that in the months before 9/11.

According to John Lehman, a former official on the NSC under Kissinger who was part of the commission's investigation:

Rice, like the others [in the White House], had failed to understand that the world had changed radically in the eight years that Republicans had been out of power at the White House -- that terrorism was the great and growing threat of the new century.  She was focused instead on missile defense, U.S.-Russian relations [Ed. Note: her only area of foreign affairs expertise], and the purported threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq [Ed. Note: the focus of the neo-con wing, headed by Cheney and Rumsfield, due to oil reserves and a hope to establish permanent hegemony over the Middle East]. 

"What I don't understand is how they had totally left terrorism out of their grand strategy," Lehman said of the White House team.

Former Senator Slade Gorton (Republican from Washington) was also part of the commission. 

"Hindsight is always 20-20," said Gorton.  But in failing to act on what it was being told in the spring and summer of 2001 by the CIA and by its staff, especially by Clarke, the Bush White House was "spectacularly wrong," Gorton said.  "They screwed up."

Clarke became increasingly frustrated at the complete inaction by the Bush administration on the seeming avalanche of warnings about the threat from bin Laden in the summer of 2001.  He was an abrasive personality and that probably didn't help, but he wasn't the only one telling Rice this information.  It was also coming through the CIA and in the president's daily briefs.

"Are we serious about dealing with the al Qaeda threat?" Clarke asked Rice [in a memo he produced for the commission].  "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S." 

This email was sent to Rice on September 4, 2001.

This flood of warnings were coming from the CIA and Richard Clarke and international terrorism experts, mostly through Condi Rice.  But there were a whole host of additional warnings during the same period coming from other government agencies, including the FBI.

• In August 2001, the FBI arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, in Minnesota, on immigration charges, after instructors were alarmed at a Minneapolis flight school by his bizarre request to learn how to take off and land a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, even though he had no basic knowledge of flying.  On his laptop was evidence linking him to the hijacking plot.  It wasn't checked until after 9/11.

• In July of 2001, FBI agent Kenneth Williams from Phoenix urged FBI headquarters to open a nationwide investigation of why so many young Arab men connected to radical Muslim groups were seeking commercial flight training.

• In San Diego in 2000, a veteran FBI informant allowed two mysterious young Saudi men to board at his house.  These men were among the hijackers on the American Airlines jet that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11.  One of them, Nawaf al-Hazmi had his name, address, and home phone number listed in the San Diego phone book.  Both had been identified as al-Qaeda terrorists before their arrival in the U.S. in January 2000.

• In the days and hours before 9/11, the NSA intercepted messages from al-Qaeda sympathizers that included "Tomorrow is zero day" and "The match is tomorrow".  These messages were not translated from the original Arabic until after the attacks.

• There were even several reports within the CIA, the FAA, and elsewhere in government about the threat of planes as missiles.  In the Moussaoui case, the Minnesota FBI agent in charge warned specifically that he might be involved in a plot to "crash a plane into the World Trade Center."

Former Republican Senator Warren Rudman (R-NH) had been one of the Republican members on Bill Clinton's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and had co-chaired a Pentagon-chartered commission on terrorist threats that released a report in January 2001 that predicted a catastrophic terrorist strike on American soil.  The so-called Hart-Rudman report warned that "in the face of this threat, our nation has no coherent or integrated governmental structures" to respond to it.

Rudman had wanted to deliver a "very blunt and very direct" warning to President Bush that he needed to deal early in his presidency with the question of domestic terrorist threats.  He could not get past Condoleezza Rice.  She met with Rudman at the White House, heard his presentation about the committee's findings, and agreed to pass on his request to see the president.  After that, Rudman heard nothing.  He contacted Rice's office again several more times to push for a meeting with Bush.  But there was no invitation.

"There's no question in my mind that somebody at the White House dropped the ball on this," Rudman said.

Again, this is a former Republican senator.  But he had supported McCain for President in 2000.  Any connection there?  Would politics have played a role in the Bush administration's policies?  Would Bush risk American lives just to spite someone for supporting his rival in 2000?  Would he not?

Of course, in the end, it came down to Rice once more.  Rudman at least met with her and gave his report.  She knew, from him, from the CIA, from Clarke, from George Tenet personally, from the PDBs, and from the SEIBs, that al Qaeda was planning a massive terrorist attack on the United States in 2001, possibly and maybe even probably, inside the U.S.  She may not have known about the activities of the Muslims taking flight training, but she definitely should have.  And yet, 8 months after the attack, Rice feigned ignorance when discussing the plot.

Asked if 9/11 didn't represent an intelligence failure by the administration, she replied almost testily, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon -- that they would use an airplane as a missile."

I'm sorry, Ms. Rice, but an FBI agent in Minnesota predicted just that.  And if "anybody" should have predicted it -- who was the center of communication for all of these facts about al Qaeda's potential attacks -- it was you.  You didn't.  You failed.  And 3000 people died.  And then we invaded Iraq, with your approval, and 4000 American soldiers have died, plus hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in what is now an unending catastrophe.  But no, this wasn't a failure by you or anyone in the administration.  Of course not.

Richard Clarke gave his public testimony to the commission on March 24, 2004.  He opened with this statement:

"I have only a very brief opening statement.  I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a re-occurrence.  I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11.  For those who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you.  Those entrusted with protecting you failed you.  And I failed you.  We tried hard.  But that doesn't matter.  Because we failed.  And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness."

To date, Richard Clarke is the only member of the Bush administration to issue an apology for 9/11.

Comments

[Switsky]

I have one question for you Bill. Does the book ever get into why so many warnings from so many people/agencies go ignored? I see that everything is being funneled through Rice but doesnt anyone else see these things and try and go above her to get it noticed?

It almost seems the Bush administration wanted this to happen.

[Bill]

No, it doesn't specifically blame Bush or Cheney. There was no one higher than Rice in the administration, at least on foreign affairs. The investigation does not uncover whether or not Bush and Cheney were aware of these warnings, but it is clear that they did nothing about it in either case.

Details about Bush's role specifically will be dealt with in Part 5. John Ashcroft's role will be explained in Part 4 -- he got similar warnings as Rice, and ignored them equally.

Whether or not the administration actively wanted an attack on U.S. soil? Probably not. But their willful ignorance did lead to the justification for their invasion of Iraq, which is something that Cheney and Rumsfield and all the neocon architects of the war who ended up influencing the administration wanted all along.