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AT WAR
An Unheeded Warning

When al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, Bill Clinton shrugged.

BY RICHARD MINITER
From "Losing bin Laden"

Can be found on Opinion Journal (Wall Street Journal) at this link below:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004081

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The White House:
On a Saturday morning, a day after the World Trade Center explosion, there was no sense of crisis in the White House. The bombers of the Twin Towers had changed little in the routine of President Clinton. The sheer scale of the blast had not sunk in. The few presidential aides in the West Wing were casually dressed and focused on the president's economic policy. The few reporters hanging around the briefing room were there to cover the president's radio address, which would focus on his economic stimulus package. Later that day, Chelsea's friends would arrive from Little Rock to celebrate her 13th birthday; Hillary had planned a party on the second floor of the White House residence.
President Clinton sat in the Oval Office scribbling. He was preparing for his weekly radio address and, as usual, making last-minute revisions.

It was the 39th day of his presidency, and so far it wasn't going well. The president's military salute--a few fingers sheepishly and momentarily touching his forehead--was faulted. National Security Adviser Tony Lake went to see the president about the "salute issue" and they had practiced for a few minutes in the Oval Office. Now his military salute photographed well as he walked across the South Lawn to board Marine One, the presidential helicopter.

Yet few press complaints were so easily resolved.

Mr. Clinton had lost his second attorney-general nominee, Kimba Wood, when nanny-payment problems raised a red flag. The president's offhand remarks about Iraq and his subsequent "don't ask, don't tell" fudge on his controversial plan to integrate homosexuals into the military had also touched off rounds of critical newspaper stories. The Clinton administration--the first Democrats in the White House since 1981--seemed to be crumbling.

Now Mr. Clinton was trying to regain the initiative. He was finally ready to announce the details of his economic stimulus package, the centerpiece of his 1992 campaign. Then the World Trade Center was attacked. Should he depart from his plans and his script and say something about the headline-making attack on New York's tallest towers? At first, he couldn't decide.

New York's Gov. Mario Cuomo telephoned the president while the Twin Towers were still being evacuated. Messrs. Clinton and Cuomo had a difficult relationship. Mr. Clinton had spent much of 1991 wondering if the New York governor was going to challenge him in the Democratic presidential primaries, and much of 1992 trying to get Mr. Cuomo's full-throated support.

But this phone call was surprisingly simple: Mr. Cuomo simply wanted to brief the president and get his assurance that New York State would enjoy the full support of the federal government. Mr. Clinton must have quickly realized that this was a common kind of phone call that governors made after disasters. He had made a few of these calls himself. Perhaps this was the reason Mr. Clinton didn't seem to fully grasp that this disaster was not natural, but man-made. That it was terrorism.

Mr. Cuomo told Mr. Clinton that a bomb had most likely caused the World Trade Center blast--a conclusion that the Clinton White House still chose to consider "speculation." After conferring with his aides, the president asked his press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, to put out the cautious line that the New York authorities "have reason to believe it was a bomb but are not definite." This was a grudging admission of the obvious, but it gave Mr. Clinton time to decide whether to act.

Why was Mr. Clinton so anxious to discount the idea that the Twin Towers had been bombed? A bomb suggested a terrorist act. A terrorist act of this magnitude required a strong response. And strong action was politically dangerous if it misfired. So, from the day of the World Trade Center bombing until the last day of the Clinton administration, the president demanded absolute proof before acting against terrorists. Ambiguity suited his purposes.
To preserve that ambiguity, either Mr. Clinton ignored the overwhelming evidence that the towers were bombed or the White House staff failed to keep him fully informed. Perhaps the president had not yet been told that the FBI's top bomb expert believed that the World Trade Center was bombed or that the New York FBI investigation was proceeding on that basis. Or perhaps the president had not been told that the bomb was planted by terrorists, although the FBI had made that determination within hours.

The president knew that he would have to add something about the World Trade Center explosion to his Saturday radio address. But what? His staff had spent much of Friday working on the speech. Now, on Saturday morning, Mr. Clinton was doing some reworking of his own. Strangely, despite the mounting evidence, Mr. Clinton still wasn't willing to say that New York's tallest towers had been bombed.

While he worked on his speech, the president was told that FBI Director William Sessions was on the line. The president didn't relish this call either. Sessions, a Bush appointee, was plagued by petty scandals, and Mr. Clinton planned to replace him.

Mr. Clinton picked up the receiver. The director told the president that the FBI's New York office now felt confident that a bomb had caused the blast at the World Trade Center. The president probably wasn't listening very closely; he had come to see Mr. Sessions as a political time bomb, not a source of information about an actual bomb.

After a few minutes, Mr. Clinton hung up and went back to scribbling. He kept crossing out words and writing new ones--but "bomb" was not one of them. Mr. Clinton's radio address reflected his beliefs about the World Trade Center attack. He treated it like a disaster, a humanitarian crisis, like a twister in Arkansas, but not as an attack. Indeed, the bombing was a sideshow, a distraction from what the president really wanted to discuss--his economic agenda.

This would be Mr. Clinton's first and last extended speech on the plot to topple the Twin Towers. Frankly, this is surprising. How does a president shrug away a major terror attack with a few words in a radio address heard by a fraction of the American people? The president's speech clearly demonstrated that he did not sense the importance of the 1993 bombing. Because they reveal so much, Mr. Clinton's remarks on the attack follow in full:
"Good morning. Before I talk with you about our economic program this morning, I want to say a word to the good people of New York City and to all Americans who've been so deeply affected by the tragedy that struck Manhattan yesterday." This opening suggests that Mr. Clinton didn't want to shift away from his campaign-winning "it's the economy, stupid" theme, referring to the attack as a "tragedy," a sad event, not an aggressive act requiring a strong response.

Mr. Clinton continued: "A number of innocent people lost their lives. Hundreds were injured, and thousands were struck with fear in their hearts when an explosion rocked the basement of the World Trade Center. To their families, you're in the thoughts and prayers of my family and in the synagogues and churches last night; today and tomorrow, you will be remembered and thought of again and again." This is an admirable attempt at reassurance, reminiscent of President Bush's consoling words following the Sept. 11 attacks. But again, it misses the mark: these people were murdered, not struck by lightning.

The young president hammered away at his compassionate theme, anxious to leave no one out. "My thoughts are also with the police, the firefighters, the emergency response teams and the citizens whose countless acts of bravery averted even more bloodshed. Their reaction and their valor reminds us of how often Americans are at their best when we face the worst."

Next, Mr. Clinton came to the place where he had to report on his administration's actions and plans. These amounted to phone calls--and only phone calls. "I thank all the people who reached out to the injured and the frightened amid the tumult that shook lower Manhattan. Following the explosion, I spoke with New York's Governor Mario Cuomo and New York City Mayor David Dinkins to assure them that the full measure of federal law-enforcement resources will be brought to bear on this investigation." This was a pivotal decision, though Mr. Clinton did not seem to realize its full implications at the time. The terror attack would be treated as a criminal matter, not a threat to national security. This approach would hobble Clinton's war on terror for years.

Mr. Clinton expanded on the law-enforcement theme, signaling that terrorists need not fear an armed response. "Just this morning I spoke with FBI Director Sessions, who assured me that the FBI and the Treasury Department are working closely with the New York City police and fire departments. Working together we'll find out who was involved and why this happened. Americans should know we'll do everything in our power to keep them safe in their streets, their offices and their homes. Feeling safe is an essential part of being secure. And that's important to all of us."

Then, Mr. Clinton suddenly shifted the subject. "I also want to take this opportunity this morning to talk about another crucial aspect of our security, our economic security . . ."

As the president shifted to discuss his economic package, which consumed the bulk of his speech, his voice warmed up and slowed down. It was clear to listeners, certainly those in the press, where the president's real interests lay. Almost every contemporary press account of President Clinton's Saturday radio speech leads with the details of the president's economic package and the support that he was garnering around the country. And, of course, the bulk of the radio address was on Mr. Clinton's economic plan.

But note that his remarks on the bombing were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kind of things governors say after floods or tornadoes. Significantly, President Clinton said nothing about hunting down or punishing the perpetrators. Not even a ritualistic denunciation of "these cowardly acts" or a mention of the shock value of an attack on a skyscraping symbol of America.

Why were his words so thin? President Clinton believed that he had a historic opportunity to restore American prosperity and reposition the Democrats as the party of growth and hope. This was partly achieved over the next eight years, ironically with the help of a Republican-led Congress. Mr. Clinton also had an opportunity to transform his party on national-security issues--to overcome its 1960s-era hesitancy to use force and to remake it as a strong defender of freedom, justice and security. Instead, Mr. Clinton shrank back. He had an opportunity to stop an escalating wave of terror attacks, guided by Osama bin Laden, in the first weeks of his administration. But tragically for the nation, he didn't see it.
Of course, presidents are not clairvoyant. Yet at the time, the president's political opponents may have seen more clearly the pivotal role the World Trade Center bombing would play in American history. On the day after the bombing, the minority whip of the House, Newt Gingrich, said that the president should be "cautious" in cutting the defense budget, as Mr. Clinton planned to do. Citing the Twin Towers bombing, Mr. Gingrich said, "There's a very real requirement for human intelligence and military strength. Every time we have any display of weakness, any display of timidity . . . here are people on the planet eager to take advantage of us." These would prove to be prescient words--words, unfortunately, that Mr. Clinton did not heed.

Mr. Clinton's first historic opportunity to wage war on terrorism did not quickly drift away like a plume of smoke after the World Trade Center bombing. It lingered for days and weeks. Within days, evidence quickly accumulated that an Islamic terror cell, supported from abroad, had carried out the attack. There were front-page newspaper stories about the arrest of Mohammed Salameh and the presence of a network of dangerous Islamic radicals, with a hub in Jersey City. Yet the president appeared uninterested.

President Clinton did not visit the World Trade Center in 1993. Perhaps if he had, he might have understood the enormity of the damage. What might have happened if Mr. Clinton had seen the immense crater or talked to the family of Monica Smith?
Four days after the attack, Mr. Clinton was across the Hudson River in New Brunswick, N.J., discussing job-training programs. There, he urged the public not to "overreact" to the World Trade Center bombing. But he didn't cross the river and see the damage for himself.

It would have taken a few minutes, but Mr. Clinton did not bother.

Why didn't he go? One implausible rationale offered by Clinton officials is that unnamed New York officials urged the president to avoid the site. One senior Clinton official--through an anonymous quote in the Boston Globe--noted that "Clinton had a full schedule in New Jersey, with no opening for a visit to the site in Manhattan." Full schedule. The site in Manhattan. The sheer clinical distance of those words, days after the attack, speaks volumes.

Dick Morris, a former Clinton adviser, offers two more-likely explanations. Mr. Clinton saw himself as a comforter who needed to reassure an anxious public (in New Jersey, he urged Americans to "keep your courage up and go about your lives"), and he saw the attack as a criminal matter, not a terror strike. "In what is likely, in retrospect, to be judged the single greatest omission of his presidency, Clinton chose to treat the Trade Center attack as an isolated criminal act, devoid of serious foreign policy or military implications," writes Mr. Morris. President Clinton just didn't get it.

Over the next month, the president made four fateful decisions. He did not keep the bombing before the public with speeches and actions. He left the case in the hands of the FBI, which was headed by a man he did not trust and was waiting to fire. He treated the bombing as a law-enforcement matter, not a counterintelligence investigation, thus cutting the CIA out of the fight against terrorism. And he did not even meet with his handpicked CIA director to consider alternative approaches to combating international terrorism aimed at Americans. This ensured future victories for bin Laden.

Langley, Va.:
Frustration was growing at CIA headquarters. The Counter-Terrorism Center was kept away from the World Trade Center investigation--even though the CTC was designed to be the center of information on terrorist threats. The State Department, the FBI and the Secret Service had detailed personnel to the CTC to make sure that important information was shared, not hidden behind bureaucratic bulwarks. Indeed, one of the reasons that the deputy director of the CTC was an FBI official was to guarantee that information was shared among the institutions.
If the Clinton administration wanted to conduct a joint counterterrorism operation to discover the full breadth of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy and to take action against the perpetrators overseas, the CTC would have been the perfect vehicle. That is what it was designed to do. It also had a secret presidential "finding," written by President Reagan and still in force, that specifically authorized covert operations to smash terrorist cells.

But the FBI, with the president's tacit acceptance, was treating the World Trade Center attack as a law-enforcement matter. That meant that everything the FBI gathered, every lab-test result, every scrap of paper, every interview, every lead, every clue from overseas was theirs alone. No one outside of the FBI's New York office would see it for years.

How could the FBI keep the evidence from other terror-fighting agencies? This was actually standard procedure when the FBI conducted criminal cases, as opposed to strictly counterterrorism investigations. The bureau invoked rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. If the FBI shared the information with other federal agencies, then a judge could rule the evidence inadmissible in a court or require the government to share it with the accused terrorists, so that they could mount an effective legal defense. That would provide the accused terrorists with vital information about what the federal government knew and what it didn't. So Rule 6E was designed to prevent information sharing--and preserve the government's evidence for trial. "It is not that they [the FBI and CIA] don't get along--it's that they can't share information by legal statute" in criminal cases, said Christopher Whitcomb, an FBI veteran who worked on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation.

Jim Woolsey, the director of central intelligence, fumed. Any 24-year-old junior agent in the FBI's New York office knew more about the largest-ever terrorist attack on American soil than he did. "It was frustrating," Mr. Woolsey told me. "Nobody outside the prosecutorial team and maybe the FBI had access" to information about the case.
The CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center itself could only follow a few scattered scraps of intelligence. And even though the agency passed information on to the FBI, the CIA had no way of knowing if it was supplying the FBI with redundant data or vital clues.

As a result, both the CIA and the FBI missed several key connections between Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden. Yousef had stayed in bin Laden-owned guesthouses in Pakistan, both before and after the World Trade Center attack. When he was finally arrested in 1995, Yousef had several pictures of Osama bin Laden (posing with machine guns) in his baggage and a business card from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a relative of bin Laden's, in his wallet.

The CIA would not learn the full details of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing until the FBI made its evidence public--at the end of the first trial in 1996. And even then, the critical evidence was supplied to the CIA by an independent investigator, Laurie Mylroie, who told the author that she photocopied it and handed it to the agency.

New York:
The FBI worked quickly. On the same day as Mr. Clinton's speech, investigators found the differential housing from the bomb van. A vehicle identification number stamped on it allowed them to trace it to the leasing agency in New Jersey. The manager said one Arab man had stopped in to collect his $400 deposit. That man turned out to be Mohammed Salameh, who desperately needed the money to pay for a plane ticket. The few dollars Yousef had given him was for an infant's plane fare; without the money to upgrade the ticket he would be trapped. That was what Yousef wanted. This is how "expendables" are used.
The FBI arrested Salameh in a sting operation at the leasing office. His phone records and storage-unit keys connected the rest of the dots. But Yousef escaped, and the quick initial successes of the investigation masked missed clues of a wider conspiracy, including intriguing connections between bin Laden and the World Trade Center bombing.

For years, the New York FBI office knew about a growing network of Islamic extremists in the New York area, but until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the agents couldn't even open a full investigation. Again, bureaucracy got in the way. To begin an investigation--according to both the official Justice Department guidelines and various statutes passed by Congress--required that agents have evidence that a crime had been committed or was under way. Sometimes, supervisors would not approve an investigation even if there was evidence of criminal activity, if the crime seemed insignificant. In practical terms, that meant that the FBI could investigate terrorists after Americans were dead, but not before.

And in 1993, the idea of punishing small, seemingly insignificant crimes as a way of preventing larger ones had not yet taken hold. The FBI was aware that many Islamic radicals were training with weapons at Connecticut and Pennsylvania gun ranges. Indeed, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Mohammed Salameh, was identified as one of those participants. But arresting these men on weapons charges or investigating the wider purposes behind such "training" was shrugged off as a minor affair. Target shooting is not a crime, while owning a gun without a proper permit is a minor one. The FBI was also barred from monitoring the mosque in Jersey City where the World Trade Center bombers met, on the grounds of religious freedom. All of these internal, bureaucratic restrictions made life easier for bin Laden's cells, both inside and outside the United States.

Still, individual FBI agents valiantly tried to make a difference. A number of special agents knew that some Brooklyn and Jersey City residents--many from the same two mosques that were frequented by Salameh and other bombers--were taking their "vacations" in Afghanistan to wage jihad, even years after the Soviet Union had retreated. Some New York agents considered investigating these men for violating the Neutrality Act, which makes it a crime for an American citizen to fight in another nation's war. But, the agents soon discovered, most of the suspects were legal residents or illegal aliens, not citizens. The Neutrality Act did not apply to them. So, in most terrorism cases before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could do little to counter the growing network of militants training and arming themselves in its midst.

And no one at the FBI--at headquarters or in the New York office--realized that one of the FBI's most-trusted informants was a "double agent," working for both the Feds and Osama bin Laden.
An Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohammed received a U.S. visa in 1985. He later became a U.S. citizen and obtained a military security clearance. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of violent Islamic radicals and had been a very helpful source for both the CIA and the FBI. At the time, those agencies did not know why Mohammed was so well informed.

By 1987, Mohammed was working at the U.S. Army's warfare planning center at Fort Bragg, N.C. Part of his job was to lecture American soldiers about Muslim terrorists. He certainly knew his subject.

Mohammed did not mention that he was still an active member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. That terrorist group was run by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who soon became a top bin Laden deputy. Nor did Mohammed mention that he had played host and tour guide to Zawahiri on his two visits to America. Mohammed had also met Osama bin Laden many times in Khartoum and had trained bin Laden's bodyguards, according to his own admissions in court documents.

Concedes Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and a counterterrorism official at the State Department, "He was an active source for the FBI, a double agent."

The FBI had good reason to be suspicious of Mohammed--if its agents had been paying attention.

When Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, was gunned down by El Sayyid Nosair in 1990, the murder was treated as a hate crime, not terrorism. The New York City Police Department eventually uncovered enough evidence to indict Nosair. The FBI monitored the case but did not intervene. "I was in charge of bureau operations at the time," Buck Revell explained, "and I never received any information that the assassin of Meir Kahane was connected with any sort of organization that might have a terrorist agenda."

The FBI was in the dark because, tragically, the NYPD and the FBI's own special agents missed several important clues. In the course of the investigation of the Kahane murder, documents were seized from Nosair's apartment that, when finally translated years later, proved to be U.S. Army manuals--some marked "top secret"--that had been translated into Arabic by Mohammed. Since the police and the FBI had not yet translated the documents, they did not investigate exactly how Nosair came into possession of them. If they had, they would have learned that Nosair was introduced to Mohammed by a man named Khalid Ibrahim, who had run a fundraising operation for Osama bin Laden's various organizations since 1989. They also would have learned that Mohammed had conducted weapons training--sometimes using semiautomatic rifles--for Nosair, Ibrahim and Abouhalima. (Abouhalima drove the getaway car for the 1993 World Trade Center attack.)

Abouhalima was also tied to Ibrahim's Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, where money for bin Laden was raised. Finally, Abouhalima was a part-time driver for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was later convicted of "seditious conspiracy" in a wide-ranging plot to blow up the Holland Tunnel--when it was packed with rush-hour traffic--and other plans to destroy New York landmarks.

Indeed many of the World Trade Center bombers met each other though the blind cleric's mosque, a dark, dirty series of rooms located over a cheap Chinese restaurant in Jersey City. The mosque where the bombers met was called Masjid al-Salaam, the "mosque of peace."

But all of these connections eluded the FBI, in large part because the bureau did not translate Nosair's mysterious documents for several years and because of the bureaucratic barriers on their proposed investigations. Nor did the FBI fully investigate phone calls to Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations made by the World Trade Center bombers. So the terrorist conspiracy continued--under the nose of the FBI.

Meanwhile, Mohammed continued to work for bin Laden. He flew to Sudan to train bin Laden's personal bodyguard. According to U.S. District Court documents, he also taught small-unit tactics and helped survey several U.S. embassies in East Africa in late 1993, which would be bombed five years later. Those blasts would kill hundreds in a few fiery minutes.

Khartoum, Sudan:
Osama bin Laden, safe and unsuspected, heard the news of the World Trade Center bombing at his palatial house in the Riyadh section of Khartoum. He was thrilled and ordered that special prayer services of thanksgiving be held that night.
In some subsequent interviews, bin Laden claimed he didn't know Yousef. "Ramzi Yousef, after the World Trade Center bombing, became a well-known Muslim personality, and all Muslims know him. Unfortunately, I did not know him before the incident," bin Laden told ABC News in 1998. "America will see many youths who will follow Ramzi Yousef."

Bin Laden's claim that he didn't know of Yousef before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is probably another expedient lie. Certainly, Yousef traveled in circles of people who knew bin Laden before the bombing and worked alongside al Qaeda operatives after the bombing. And bin Laden does not appear to have personally known the Sept. 11 hijackers either. Today federal court indictments and an array of publicly available FBI documents list bin Laden's attacks on America. Nearly every such list includes the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Meanwhile, bin Laden was planning another attack, one far closer to home. As he celebrated the first World Trade Center bombing, bin Laden was waiting for a report from Abu Hafs, the commander of his military wing. Hafs had just returned from Mogadishu, Somalia.

Mr. Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe and author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror" (Regnery, 2003), from which this is excerpted. You can buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

Also from JAWBREAKER

The Attack on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda:

A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
By Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020901687.html?referrer=emailarticle

"In 2000, Berntsen had led a promising effort to work with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance "to capture a bin Laden lieutenant." But the operation was called off, for which he blasts CIA Director George Tenet and President Clinton for lacking "the will to wage a real fight against terrorists who were killing U.S. citizens." Berntsen was withdrawn and sent to a comfortable position as CIA station chief in a country in Latin America. After 9/11, Berntsen immediately began jostling to get to the center of the strike against al Qaeda. He got his wish and was one of the first senior CIA officials inserted into Afghanistan."