Gore Meets Privately With 9/11 Commission

Former Vice President Al Gore met with the Sept. 11 panel privately Friday, a day after President Clinton told commissioners that intelligence wasn't strong enough to justify a retaliation against al-Qaida for the 2000 bombing of a Navy ship.

Gore met with the 10-member bipartisan commission in a three-hour meeting it described as candid and forthcoming. "We thank him for his continued cooperation with the commission," the panel said in a statement.

On Thursday, the commission interviewed Clinton behind closed doors for nearly four hours after the conclusion of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's public testimony, broadcast live on national television.

Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and now a member of the commission, said Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America" he believes Clinton should have been more aggressive in going after al-Qaida following the ship attack.

"I think he did have enough proof to take action," Kerrey said. "That's a difference of opinion."

A person familiar with the session said Clinton told the commission he did not order retaliatory military strikes after the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 because he could not get "a clear, firm judgment of responsibility" from U.S. intelligence before he left office the following January.

It wasn't until after the Bush administration took power that U.S. intelligence concluded al-Qaida had sponsored the attack on the ship in the harbor at Aden, Yemen. Some commissioners have been critical of the decision not to launch a retaliatory military strike.

The person, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because Clinton's testimony delved into classified materials, also said the former president explained the rationale for many of the terror-fighting policies that his administration instituted and the message his administration left behind to the incoming Bush administration.

Clinton "did not indicate anything fundamentally that he would have done differently" given what U.S. intelligence knew about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida threat, the person said.

Commission chairman Thomas Kean said Clinton told the commission he has wrestled with the issue of whether his administration could have done more.

"He said he's going back in his mind over and over again about whether there was something more he could've done," Kean told PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

The panel said it didn't plan to release details of the meeting, saying much of it involved classified information.

"He was adamant about trying to work in a bipartisan way to fix the problems," said Democratic commissioner Timothy Roemer, a former U.S. representative from Indiana. "He was quite honest and frank."

"He did very well," Lehman told CNN. "He gave us a lot of very helpful insights into things that happened, policy approaches."

A spokesman for Clinton, Jim Kennedy, said the former president was pleased to talk to the commission "and believed it was a very constructive meeting."

Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore consented in February to separate private interviews; Gore is scheduled to meet the panel soon.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney also will meet privately with the full panel in a joint session in coming weeks. They initially restricted the interview to one hour with two panel members, but under mounting public pressure agreed last week to a joint session without time constraints.

As the 9/11 Commission does its work, it might be good to review this excerpt from Dick Morris' new book: "Off With Their Heads - Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists In American Politics, Media, Business."

This chapter is entitled, "How Clinton Left Ticking Terror Time Bombs For Bush To Discover."

On the war on terror, Clinton was an utter and total failure. His record of inaction is bad enough, but his inability to grasp the dimensions of the issue, as I witnessed it in our conversations, was worse. In our time this may have become a trite phrase, but there's simply no other way to put it: He just didn't get it.

Clinton knew every statistic, argument, and nuance of the issues he had made his own: welfare reform, deficit reduction, student performance, Head Start availability, crime, export promotion, and so on. But on terrorism, during his first term, the period I witnessed firsthand, he knew little and cared less.

All our terrorist problems were born during the Clinton years.

All three critical situations America faces today -- al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea -- were either incubated or exacerbated on Bill Clinton's watch.

As I first became aware of this situation, I believed Bill Clinton was guilty of negligence and oversight. As I read the evidence, however, the picture darkened significantly. Clinton's attitude probably started as neglect of global terrorism -- a field alien to the Arkansas governor's experience and worldview. But as his administration evolved and entered its second term, its failure to deal with these three looming threats began to seem more and more conscious, even deliberate.

Sapped by the effort to resist impeachment, focused on burnishing his legacy through his phantom deal with North Korea, anxious to avoid the political risk of major military action on the ground against al Qaeda, and eager to avoid stirring up things in Iraq, Bill Clinton deliberately postponed dealing with this trio of threats so he could leave office under a seemingly sunny sky.

The World Trade Center Bombing: First Shot Across the Bow

President Bill Clinton's uneasy history with terrorism began thirty-six days after he swore to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." On February 26, 1993, a terrorist bomb exploded in the B-2 parking garage under One World Trade Center. The blast was triggered by twelve hundred pounds of urea nitrate, found in fertilizer, and three tanks of compressed hydrogen. This attack, the first foreign terrorist bombing on U.S. soil in modern times, ripped a five-floor hole in the building, instantly killing six people and injuring a thousand others.

The fact that this was the first foreign terrorist attack on American soil seems to have set off no alarm bells at the young Clinton White House. The president treated it as a crime rather than as a foreign policy emergency. He defined terrorism as a law enforcement problem, not as a matter of national security. To Bill Clinton, it was not unlike any other homicide.

There was no effort to mobilize the nation, to sound the alarm, to reequip the military and intelligence apparatus to cope with the new threat. The government did nothing. Indeed, the director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, later said he had not had a single private meeting with President Clinton through all of 1993 and 1994. Incredible.

In June 1993, when the FBI arrested Sheikh Rahman and nine of his followers, President Clinton must have been told that the terrorist groups in and around New York City were actively plotting massive destruction of high-profile targets. The World Trade Center had already been bombed, the United Nations and bridges and tunnels had been targeted. What else did the president need to grasp the gravity of the situation? Yet he never ordered any major shakeup of the antiterror apparatus. No extra tools were given to the FBI. No massive mobilization was declared. The government simply shrugged its shoulders; the bank robbers had been caught, after all; why make a fuss?

The most important link in the chain of evidence that should have alerted Clinton to the growing threat came in January 1995, when Yousef himself was finally arrested in Pakistan, two years after orchestrating the World Trade Center bombing. Under interrogation, Emerson writes, the terrorist leader said he had "hoped [WTC] Tower One would fall sideways into Tower Two" as a result of the bombing, "knocking over both and killing 250,000 people."

More important, an examination of Yousef's laptop computer revealed that he had "also participated in a plan to blow up eleven American jetliners within 48 hours -- a disaster that was only barely avoided by chance."

One would have imagined that, at the very least, the president would have responded to the evidence of such a plan with a major air-safety initiative. Even if he wanted to avoid alarming the traveling public and jeopardizing airline revenues, one would think he would still have moved vigorously to tighten security, concealing the reason for his actions if necessary. Instead, there was nothing. No action, no proposals, no initiatives, no direction. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had been unearthed by the FBI.

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