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Alarms ignored panel told by clark Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0304/25tercommission.htmlhttp://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0304/25tercommission.html
Alarms ignored, 9/11 panel told
By DAN EGGEN and WALTER PINCUS
Washington Post
Published on: 03/25/04
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's top counterterrorism adviser warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al-Qaida network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed Wednesday.
Richard Clarke, who served as a senior White House counterterrorism official under three successive presidents, wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, urging "policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier," according to a summary of the letter included in a commission staff report. Clarke also cites the same plea in his new book.
Clarke told the commission in testimony Wednesday afternoon that while the Clinton administration treated terrorism as its highest priority, the Bush administration did not consider it to be an urgent issue before the attacks.
"I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue," Clarke told the 10-member panel. ". . . There was a process under way to address al-Qaida. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way."
Clarke's appearance before the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, climaxed days of furor over claims in his book that the Bush administration did not do enough to pursue al-Qaida before Sept. 11, 2001, and has neglected the war on terrorism since then because of an obsession with waging war on Iraq.
Emotional apology
The second day of this week's commission hearings also produced revelations about events before the attacks, including a denial of the White House's long-standing claim that President Bush requested a briefing on the domestic threat posed by al-Qaida in August 2001.
But perhaps the day's most dramatic moment came at the start of Clarke's testimony, when he issued an apology that prompted sobs and cheers from the front rows of the packed hearing room, which were filled with relatives of victims of the terrorist attacks.
"To the loved ones of the victims of 9/11, to them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you," he said. "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."
Administration officials inside and outside the commission's meeting room continued to wage fierce attacks Wednesday on Clarke's motives and credibility. The White House authorized identifying Clarke as the official who anonymously gave a background briefing for reporters in 2002 that included positive comments about Bush's anti-terrorism strategies.
At the hearings, top officials of the Clinton and Bush administrations resumed sparring over details of their counterterrorism policies and defending their respective efforts to guard against attacks.
The charged political climate enveloped the commission as well. Key Democrats and Republicans on the panel dropped the neutral posture they had shown in previous hearings and were openly partisan in questioning Clarke and other witnesses.
Three Republican members of the group, for example, grilled Clarke on his motivations, suggesting that he had been contradictory in his statements and dishonest in the past about his misgivings about counterterrorism policies.
CIA report explained
The drama of Clarke's appearance nearly overshadowed a series of notable disclosures at Wednesday's hearing. Among them:
• The CIA now says that a controversial August 2001 briefing summarizing potential attacks on the United States by al-Qaida was not requested by Bush, as Rice and others had long claimed.
The Aug. 6, 2001, document, known as the President's Daily Brief, has been the focus of intense scrutiny because it reported that Osama bin Laden advocated airplane hijackings, that al-Qaida supporters were in the United States and that the group was planning attacks here.
After the highly classified document's existence was revealed in news reports in May 2002, Rice held a news conference in which she suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer. But Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the 9/11 Commission, disclosed at the hearing Wednesday that the CIA informed the panel last week that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA.
• Commission investigators disclosed that during the Clinton administration, the president and other White House officials signed a series of secret orders for covert action that, according to the top Clinton aides, authorized the killing of bin Laden by CIA proxies.
But CIA Director George Tenet and others in the spy agency, including agents in the field, told commission investigators that they interpreted the orders as requiring them to attempt a "credible capture" of bin Laden and to kill him only if it were necessary as a part of that attempt. When the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban was briefed on the restrictions, he laughed and said, "You Americans are crazy. You guys never change," according to the staff report.
Worried about threats
The report also found that Tenet and others at the CIA never told anyone in the Clinton White House that they felt constrained. Tenet testified Wednesday that he would have done so if he had thought it were necessary.
• In the summer of 2001, veteran counterterrorism officers privy to reports on al-Qaida threats "were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns," according to one of two staff reports issued by the commission Wednesday.
Senior CIA officials were also frustrated by some Bush appointees who were not familiar with surges in terrorist threat information and questioned their veracity, the report said.
Tenet also said Wednesday that the death of bin Laden, even in the summer of 2001, probably would not have stopped the attacks on New York and Washington because the plot was already "up and running."
The two staff reports issued Wednesday appeared to confirm many of Clarke's key allegations and criticisms, including his assertion that the Bush administration halted use of Predator surveillance drones over Afghanistan in order to conduct tests on arming the aircraft.
Similar to Clinton plan
In his testimony, Clarke described the Sept. 4, 2001, National Security Presidential Directive, a strategy for addressing al-Qaida that administration officials have characterized as a bold departure from the Clinton years. But Clarke said the three-stage plan differed little from strategies already in place under Clinton that included first warning the Taliban government in Afghanistan, then pressuring it to turn over bin Laden and finally ousting it through third parties.
It was only after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that the introduction of American forces was added, though contingent plans by both the CIA and the Pentagon existed, Clarke said.
Clarke also said that he had wanted the directive to say "that our goal should be to eliminate al-Qaida," but Bush officials called that "overly ambitious." It was reworded to say the goal was to "significantly erode" bin Laden's network. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the word "eliminate" was restored, Clarke said.
Former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic member of the commission, asked Clarke whether Rice's recent statement that the Bush plan "called for military options to attack al-Qaida and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets, taking the fight to the enemy where he lived" was accurate.
Clarke responded, "No, it's not."
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