Bush Administration Was Slow to Approve Drones to Kill Bin Laden

When President Bush took office in January 2001, the White House was told that Predator drones had recently spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times and officials were urged to arm the unmanned planes with missiles to kill the al Qaeda leader.

But the administration failed to get drones back into the Afghan skies until after the Sept. 11 attacks later that year, current and former U.S. officials say.

Top administration officials discussed the mission to kill bin Laden as late as one week before the suicide attacks on New York and Washington, but they had not yet resolved a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators and whether the missiles would be sufficiently lethal, officials told The Associated Press.

In the month before that meeting, the Pentagon and CIA successfully tested an armed Predator on at least three occasions — including once when it destroyed a mockup home resembling an Afghan structure bin Laden supposedly used, the officials said.

The disappearance in 2001 of U.S. Predators from the skies over Afghanistan is discussed in classified sections of Congress' report into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and is expected to be examined by an independent commission appointed by the president and Congress, officials said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days — and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror.

In November 2001, a drone helped confirm a high-level al Qaeda meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan, and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the attack.

Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP the extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using an armed Predator to kill bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the information. Two former national security aides also cite some of the discussion inside the Bush White House in a recent book they published on terrorism.

The officials said that within days of President Bush taking office in January 2001, his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights to track down bin Laden, citing the successes of late 2000.

The drones were one component of a broader plan that Clarke, a career government employee, had devised in the final days of the Clinton administration to go after al Qaeda after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton officials decided just before Christmas 2000 to forward the plan to the incoming Bush administration rather than implement it during Clinton's final days, the officials said.

Propeller-driven Predators first flew for the military in July 1995 over Bosnia, but early versions couldn't transmit high-quality live video. The Air Force gradually improved camera resolution and first successfully fired a Hellfire missile from a Predator on Feb. 16, 2001.

By summer 2001, the Predator was armed for another test in the Nevada desert that destroyed a mockup of a home bin Laden was suspected of using in Afghanistan, Clarke told executives in a recent speech at a technology conference.

Some U.S. officials, however, worried that an anti-tank missile with just a 27-pound warhead might not be powerful enough to kill everyone inside a building, and the military worked to modify the warhead to be more lethal, officials said.

Cruise missile warheads, by comparison, weigh 1,000 pounds, and traditional bombs typically range from 500 to 2,000 pounds.

Hellfire missiles were attached to the drone after unarmed Predators flown by the CIA from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan spotted a man that several U.S. intelligence analysts believed was bin Laden, or his trademark Japanese truck, as many as three times in September and October 2000, the officials said.

"They were operating them before the United States military was involved … and doing a good job," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said, explaining why CIA operated the armed drones in Afghanistan. "And so rather than changing that, we just left it."

During the fall 2000 sightings, the United States was unable to launch a strike with submarine-based cruise missiles in time to kill bin Laden, officials said.

With powerful winter winds over the mountains affecting the drones' flights, the Predators were taken out of action in Afghanistan after October 2000 and retrofitted with weapons. One was repaired after it crashed on landing, sparking debate whether CIA or the Pentagon would pay the damage. Officials said they planned to put the drones back into the air as early as March 2001 after the winds subsided.

Of 11 successful Predator flights sent across the mountains from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan in September and October 2000, three spotted a person that several U.S. intelligence analysts concluded was bin Laden.

"Different people came to different conclusions. You couldn't see facial characteristics. But there were several who concluded it was bin Laden," one senior U.S. official said, explaining those assessments were based on size, clothing, a beard and human intelligence.

Officials said the delay was due in part to arming the Predator with enough lethal force and resolving the debate over which agency was legally and practically best equipped to carry out an attack.

Another official said the CIA was opposed in the interim to running too many unarmed Predator flights for fear that would lead Afghan and al Qaeda leaders to be on the lookout for the drones and to flee sites before bombs or missiles could be launched.

"The agency wanted to keep it under wraps and catch them by surprise once they were armed," the official explained.

That official noted that during one of the unarmed 2000 Predator flights, MiG jets were scrambled by Afghanistan's then-ruling Taliban government and they tried unsuccessfully to shoot down one of the drones. Another time, al Qaeda operatives spotted a drone and pointed to it, officials said.

A former administration official said U.S. officials watched some of the Predator missions live on a television screen inside CIA headquarters, including the one in which Taliban pilots roared past.

After Clarke's briefing in January, the drone plan was discussed again in late April by national security deputies and the test on the mockup of bin Laden's home was conducted in July. A Bush administration official said Rice was generally supportive of the idea as part of a broader strategy.

At a White House meeting of Bush's national security principals on Sept. 4, 2001, senior officials discussed several ideas, including use of the drones, as they finalized a plan to accelerate efforts to go after al Qaeda amid signs of a growing threat of a domestic attack.

Among those present were Rice, CIA Director George Tenet, soon-to-be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Clarke, then Bush's anti-terrorism chief inside the White House.

Though CIA had operated the unmanned Predators in Afghanistan in 2000, Tenet expressed strong reservation about his agency running the armed drones for an attack mission, suggesting it was the purview of the military, according to officials who witnessed or were briefed about the meeting.

"Generally it was understood [inside CIA] that aircraft firing weapons is the province of the military. This was a discussion about what the appropriate agency was to carry out the mission, but it was not a matter of the technology," said one official familiar with Tenet's comments at the meeting.

Defense officials suggested they be given an objective — kill bin Laden — and be left to make their own decisions about whether to use a drone or other weapons like cruise missiles and B-1 bombers, officials said.

Targeting bin Laden was legally permitted under secret orders and presidential findings that Clinton had signed.

Officials at the Sept. 4 meeting put off recommending the armed drone as a solution. Instead, they finalized a series of other measures to rout al Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan, including re-arming the rebel Northern Alliance.

Those recommendations were being forwarded from Rice to Bush when the Sept. 11 hijackers struck, officials said.

http://www.newsmax.com/showinside.shtml?a=2003/3/16/24709
Sunday, March 16, 2003 2:33 a.m. EST
Book Bombshell: Iraq Attack Scrubbed for Clinton Golf Game
Ex-President Bill Clinton kept a squadron of F-117 stealth fighter-bombers and B-52s waiting to launch a critical 1996 airstrike on Iraq while he finished watching a golf tournament - dithering so long that U.S. pilots lost the cover of darkness and the mission had to be scrubbed.
That's the explosive charge leveled in a brand new book by Lt. Col. Robert Patterson, a key Clinton military aide from 1996 through 1998 whose primary mission was to carry the president's copy of America's nuclear launch codes.
"We dispatched eight F-117 stealth fighter-bombers capable of carrying 2,000-pound bombs into the region and sent B-52s to Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, in preparation for action," reveals Lt. Col. Patterson in his bombshell security scandal tell-all, "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security."
The Sept. 13, 1996, air strike was planned as the U.S.'s response to an Aug. 31 tank attack launched by Saddam Hussein on the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, a blatant violation of the 1991 Gulf War surrender accords that had an estimated 300,000 Kurdish refugees fleeing for their lives.
At the same time, Saddam's Republican Guard had executed an estimated 100 Iraqi dissidents and arrested 1,500 more - extinguishing whatever opposition the Iraqi dictator might have faced from within.
Two days before he attended the President's Cup golf tournament, Clinton had warned the world that "action is imminent" and that "the determination of the United States in dealing with the problem of Iraq should not be underestimated," reports the national security whistle-blower.
With the F-117s and B-52s ready to take off and the cover of darkness in Iraq slipping away, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger placed a series of desperate phone calls to the Manassas, Va., golf course seeking clearance from Clinton. But the president refused to come to the phone.
"Sir, Mr. Berger is on the line and needs a decision about the proposed attack on Iraq," Lt. Col. Patterson remembers telling the president.
Clinton's response? "Tell him I'll get back with him later."
As mission-critical minutes evaporated, an anxious Berger called again.
"This time he was animated, obviously upset," remembers Patterson. "Pilots were in the cockpits waiting to launch, targets were identified, everything was in place, all he needed was the go-ahead."
The presidential military aide promised the national security adviser that he would do everything he could to get Clinton to pay attention to the mission at hand.
"This time, the president was engaged in conversations with several people and was less approachable," Patterson reports. "I maneuvered through the crowd and caught his eye. When President Clinton saw me, he seemed disturbed at being interrupted again with something unimportant. He frowned as I neared him."
Still Patterson persisted. "'Mr. President, Mr. Berger has called again and needs a decision soon.' I explained in a low tone, 'We have our pilots in cockpits, ready to launch, and we're running out of the protective cover of nighttime over there.'"
But Clinton seemed unmoved. "I'll call Berger when I get the chance," he told the aide.
Less than 15 minutes later Berger called back. "This time he was irate," Patterson recalls.
"Where is the president? What is he doing? Can I talk to him?"
The presidential military aide was forced to explain:
"Sir, he is watching the golf tournament with several friends. I've approached him twice with your request. I've communicated your concerns about the window of opportunity and about the pilots being prepared and ready to go.
"I'm an Air Force pilot myself, sir." Patterson told Berger. "I understand the ramifications. I'll try again."
For the third time in an hour, the military aide desperately tried to get Clinton to focus on the mission - hoping he would appreciate that further delay could jeopardize the lives of U.S. pilots now waiting for his order.
But Clinton remained oblivious. "Tell Berger that I'll give him a call on my way back to the White House," he said, in what Patterson describes as an "indifferent" tone of voice. "That's all," Clinton added, in words the military man understood to mean the president didn't want to hear any more about the problem.
"I called Mr. Berger and explained that the president would contact him from the limo," Patterson recalled. "We both knew what that meant. We'd missed our opportunity."
The trusted soldier says he remains haunted by the episode. "Human lives were at stake - the lives of American service members and the lives of our allies who opposed Saddam at our behest and were now under attack.
"At a time when America's honor and grander principles were being challenged and the world was watching our every move ... the president was watching golf."

Miniter responds
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030922-090028-4916r.htm

By Richard Miniter
    Denial is more than a river in Egypt. It runs through the Clinton administration's Sudan policy.
    As the media attention on my book "Losing bin Laden" grows and it climbs the New York Times bestseller list, some former Clinton officials have emerged to deny the undeniable. (See Op-Ed at left.) They deny that Sudan ever offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to American justice, they deny that Sudan ever offered to share its intelligence files on bin Laden's terror network, and they offer excuses for President Clinton's failure to retaliate following bin Laden's attack on the USS Cole (which killed 17 sailors). Since the facts and the on-the-record accounts of senior Clinton officials are against them, they are reduced to parsing words and obfuscatory statements. That's unfortunate. The point of examining Mr. Clinton's flawed war on terror is not to condemn the former president, but to learn from his successes and his setbacks and apply those lessons to the current phase of America's war on terror.
    In that spirit, let's examine the record and see how well those denials hold up.
    Arresting bin Laden. They write nearby that "no offer was ever conveyed to any senior official in Washington." Does Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor, count as a senior official in Washington? Here is what Mr. Berger told the Washington Post's Barton Gellman: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." If there was no offer, just what offer was the FBI evaluating and opposing? Or is Mr. Berger telling tall tales?
    Other senior Clinton officials are on the record debating the merits of taking bin Laden into custody from Sudan. Susan Rice, an assistant secretary of state under Mr. Clinton, told the Village Voice: "They [the Sudanese] calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer."
    You can't doubt the sincerity of an offer that doesn't exist. Perhaps the Clinton administration overlooked that Sudan had handed over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, to the French. He now sits in a French prison, while bin Laden is free. As Ambassador Timothy Carney argued in 1996, even if the offer wasn't serious, why not call Sudan's bluff? If Sudan failed to deliver, then the skeptics are proven right. If Sudan did hand bin Laden over, then Mr. Clinton would strike a blow against international terrorism.
    And, of course, Sudan did make good on its word to expel bin Laden from that country in May 1996 — at the Clinton administration's request. If Sudan could expel bin Laden, why couldn't it arrest him?
    Sudan's intelligence files. Some Clinton administration officials deny that Sudan offered to provide its intelligence files on bin Laden. In my research, I've uncovered letters by senior Sudanese officials, including one from that nation's president, addressed to President Clinton, top Clinton officials and senior members of Congress expressly offering those files. Besides, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced in September 1997 that she was sending a team to Sudan to re-engage Sudan on terrorism issues. They planned to examine those files. That promising initiative was overturned by the White House six days later. Whose fault was that?
    The USS Cole. They admit that "al Qaeda was a prime suspect," but say more investigation was needed to prove bin Laden guilty. They ignore that the CIA had traced phone calls from the attackers to a house in Yemen and from that house to bin Laden's satellite phone, and traced $5,000 sent to the terrorists from bin Laden. Yes, the investigation was ongoing, but that should have been enough. They forget that America's enemies are not in a court of law, but are waging war on us. And, even if they weren't sure that bin Laden was behind the attack, there was blood on his hands. Bin Laden's network killed 59 Americans in the Clinton years. The retaliation plan developed by the Clinton administration would have smashed all of his terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — less than a year before September 11.
    After September 11, some Clinton officials admitted their mistakes. Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, told the Boston Globe: "Clearly, not enough was done. We should have caught this. Why this happened, I don't know . . . We should have prevented this." Nancy Soderberg, a member of Clinton's National Security Council, added: "In hindsight, it wasn't enough, and anyone involved in policy would have to admit that."
    Madeleine Albright recently told Bill O'Reilly, "?do you think we're so stupid that, if somebody had offered us Osama bin Laden, we would haven't taken it?"
    Madam Secretary, that is now for the American people to judge.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/16/223109.shtml
Tuesday, Mar. 16, 2004 10:26 PM EST
NBC: Clinton Ordered Bin Laden Spared
A secret CIA videotape shows that the Clinton administration had pinpointed the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden a year before the 9/11 attacks, but declined to kill him because of White House orders that he should be taken alive.
The video, obtained and broadcast by NBC News, "illustrates an enormous opportunity the Clinton administration had to kill or capture bin Laden," the network reported Tuesday.
Images filmed in Afghanistan by CIA Predator Drones show a man clad in white robes who towers over his entourage. [Bin Laden is 6' 5" tall.]
The film was shot over Tarnak Farm, the walled compound where bin Laden was believed to live at the time. The layout of the buildings in the Predator video perfectly matches previous photos and diagrams of Tarnak Farm prepared by U.S. intelligence.
The clip left CIA analysts convinced they had located the man who in 1998 had bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa and whose agents, four years earlier, had detonated a bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center.
"It’s dynamite. It’s putting together all of the pieces, and that doesn’t happen every day," said William Arkin, a former intelligence officer and now military analyst for NBC.
Though President Clinton has boasted repeatedly that he issued orders to kill bin Laden, no action was taken when the White House finally got its chance.
Why not?
Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, told NBC that the White House had in fact ordered the CIA to do just the opposite - take bin Laden alive or not at all.
The order "reduced the odds from, say, a 50 percent chance down to, say, 25 percent chance that we were going to be able to get him,” Schroen told the network.
The directive effectively killed the plan and, along with it, the U.S.'s best chance to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

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