The Fruits of Negligence - The Clinton Administration's Security Legacy

In the initial shock of the September 11 Massacre, one small notion lodged itself into the mass psyche. It's perhaps best summed up by the phrase, "Who could have seen that coming?" Because of the sheer audacity of the attack, its novel use of kamikaze-style airplanes, its uniquely horrendous death-toll, most of us tended to exculpate the leaders of the United States for any responsibility for the lax security and failure of intelligence and foreign policy it represented. We put the blame - rightly - on the terrorists who bear sole responsibility for the massacre.

But more than two weeks later, as the sheer extent of America's unpreparedness and vulnerability comes into better focus, one other conclusion is inescapable. The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face, and if we are to be successful in rectifying the errors, it's essential we acknowledge as plainly as possible what went wrong.

Two questions come to mind: How was it that the Osama bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the American government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly for good reasons. There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. No good is accomplished by playing a blame game now. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness on September 11 is already slowing our capacity to bring Osama bin Laden to justice and constricting some of the military and diplomatic options in front of us. And with a president only a few months yet in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus and is now trying to repair the damage. Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries - say, the invasion of the Falkland Islands - ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled?

The most plausible answer is that no-one has been fired and no fingers pointed because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in our security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Osama bin Laden already attacked the United States, its embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been more than completely frank about his war with the United States. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993! Same guy, same building. To say that this attack came out of the blue is simply belied by any rudimentary examination of the facts. And to say that we couldn't have anticipated this type of attack is simply to say that our intelligence wasn't good enough to have found it out.

How prominent were the warnings of the danger of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s? Here's one: "The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these [Islamic] extremists can be." This was written by Salman Rushdie in the New York Times in 1993. Did the Clinton administration overhaul its intelligence and defense priorities in response to the 1993 warning? The answer is clearly no. No effort was made to coordinate the various mess of agencies designed to counter terrorism - the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the airlines, local law enforcement, the Coast Guard. No effort was made to recruit more spies who could speak Arabic or go effectively undercover to preempt such terrorist attacks. Under the Clinton administration, a law was passed actually making it more difficult for the U.S. to use spies who had sleazy or criminal pasts - exactly the kind needed to infiltrate bin Laden's tight terrorist cells. The debacle of the Somalia expedition in 1992 and 1993 - which led to Delta Force units being humiliated - dramatically chilled the military's willingness to use such units in action again. This occurred despite the fact that aggressive use of those units - as we are seeing today - was critical to any successful effort to regain the initiative against terrorism.

In a remarkably revealing and over-looked article in last week's New Yorker, Joe Klein argues that "there seems to be near-unanimous agreement among experts: in the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost every aspect of American national-security policy-from military operations to intelligence gathering, from border control to political leadership-has been marked by ... institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance." The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: the clueless, stately secretary of state Warren Christopher; the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council, Anthony Lake; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but above all president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to foreign affairs, especially when it meant military and security matters, now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter earlier this month.

Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other President in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than it was in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was severely constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks." It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that.

Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after bin Laden struck again at U.S. embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly serious. He responded with a couple of fitful missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which killed or seriously impacted Osama bin Laden. Clinton's own former Defense Secretary, John Deutch, wrote in the New York Times that August: "We must insist on superior intelligence that will warn of potential terrorist actions. We must insist on tough and prompt responses to such acts and on developing an effective capability to manage the consequences of these acts when they occur. These are major challenges and, in general, public and private experts have concluded that our country is not fully prepared to act effectively on these matters." Clinton largely ignored the warning. The Post's Jim Hoagland warned in the same month: "There are troubling signs that this president could once again stage a pinprick raid, announce the problem solved and turn back to his own domestic and personal preoccupations. A single night of missile strikes against remote desert sites will not leave America's self-declared enemies off balance for long." Give that man a medal for foresight.

Again in the Washington Post that August, the following prescient words were written by L. Paul Bremer III, former anti-terrorism chief in the Reagan administration: "The ideology of such groups [as bin Laden's] makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures. They hate America, its values and its culture and proudly declare themselves to be at war with us. We cannot seek a "political solution" with them." Bremer then set out a list of what the U.S. should do: "Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad, especially "softer" targets such as American businesses overseas. Attack the enemy. Keep the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Ladin's operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government should order further military strikes against the remaining terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive. This might work and at the least would exacerbate the paranoia common to all terrorists." Sound familiar? It's exactly what we're doing now, three years too late, with no element of surprise, and with far from adequate human intelligence.

This brings Bremer to the most critical point in his recommendations: "Improve our intelligence operations. Effective counterterrorism depends on good intelligence... We must preempt and disrupt attacks before they happen. This requires improved coordination of intelligence collection against terrorist groups. While it is difficult, we should expand the use of deep cover agents on the ground to infiltrate terrorist organizations." None of this happened. Agencies bickered, the president was too concerned with sexual harassment lawsuits, the C.I.A.'s feckless record went uncorrected.

Perhaps the most farsighted critic was a man called Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and the author, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, of "Know thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran." In the Atlantic Monthly this past summer, he emphasized the extreme need for trained spies to go underground in the Muslim world of Afghanistan and Pakistan if the West were ever to get adequate intelligence on bin Laden's operation. But as late as 1999, not a single such "non-official-cover" spy had been trained or used for such a purpose. A former senior Near East Division operative told Gerecht, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer summed up the policy to Gerecht thus: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."

Gerecht also reported the following devastating fact: "Robert Baer, one of the most talented Middle East case officers of the past twenty years (and the only operative in the 1980s to collect consistently first-rate intelligence on the Lebanese Hizbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad), suggested to headquarters in the early 1990s that the CIA might want to collect intelligence on Afghanistan from the neighboring Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Headquarters' reply: Too dangerous, and why bother? The Cold War there was over with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Afghanistan was too far away, internecine warfare was seen as endemic, and radical Islam was an abstract idea. Afghanistan has since become the brain center and training ground for Islamic terrorism against the United States, yet the CIA's clandestine service still usually keeps officers on the Afghan account no more than two or three years." If you want to know why it seems unlikely that the United States knows enough about bin Laden's whereabouts to mount an immediate attack today, then re-read those sentences. This is an intelligence failure of colossal proportions. What happened to the man who presided over that massive failure? George Tenet, director of the CIA since 1997, is still in his job.

Not everyone in Washington was asleep at the switch. In response to the African embassy bombings, a National Commission on Terrorism was set up to propose changes. It was headed by a top-notch group of former officials and got plenty of press attention. The panel argued that the United States was extremely vulnerable to a massive attack by a group like al Quaeda and recommended better espionage, more Arabic-speaking spies, better intelligence sharing between the FBI and the CIA, wider wiretapping, and much of what is now on the table. The report was even prescient enough to have a picture of the World Trade Center on its cover, as Franklin Foer reports in the current New Republic.

The report died the death of a thousand quibbles. Civil liberties advocates complained about a threat to individual freedom. The Arab American Institute's James Zogby said the proposals were like "the darkest days of the McCarthy era." A writer in the liberal online magazine Salon described the warnings of a domestic attack as "a con job with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel." As Foer details, the CIA opposed lowering its squeaky clean standards for spies, and the FBI was desperate, under Clinton, to avoid any Reagan-like dirty tricks in its operation. When the report came to the Congress, it was attacked by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy who distrusted the CIA and wanted to avoid what he called "risks to important civil liberties we hold dear." The proposal picked up momentum after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, but was so watered down by the end of the legislative process that it was virtually useless. Its supporters let it die. The Clinton administration did next to nothing to rescue it. The president was busy preparing pardons for multi-millionaire criminals on the lam.

Former Clinton National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, defended Clinton's record to Joe Klein in the New Yorker. He argued that after the embassy bombings there was a concerted effort to find and kill bin Laden and that the cruise missile in Afghanistan missed its target by an hour, after which bin Laden disappeared from view. Anonymous Clinton officials also blame former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for resisting measures to cut off bin Laden's financing and to use cyber warfare to crack down generally on the terrorists' money network. Others blame the FBI: "[The FBI's] standard line was that Osama bin Laden wasn't a serious domestic-security threat," one source told Klein. "They said that bin Laden had about two hundred guys on the ground and they had drawn a bead on them." But whatever the nuances of blame here, it's clear that no-one from the top intervened, imposed order and reorganization, and took the terrorist threat seriously enough to defeat it, or even put it on the defensive.

Earlier this year, yet another report, chaired by respected former Senators Hart and Rudman, came to yet another definitive conclusion that the United States was vulnerable. They made exactly the same recommendations that are now finally being implemented; the report was well advertized and disseminated in the press - and still nothing was done.

Hindsight is easy of course. In the halcyon and feckless climate of the 1990s, it would have required real political leadership to dragoon various, stubborn government agencies into a difficult reorganization to counter terrorism. It would have been extremely hard to persuade a sceptical public and a prickly civil liberties lobby that vast new government powers were necessary to prevent catastrophe. This much is true. But it's also true that there were several clear, loud, unmistakable attacks on the U.S. by the very forces that have now launched a war. It is also true that many, many people recognized this and were brave enough to warn about it. In August 1998, Milton Bearden, the former C.I.A. chief in Pakistan and the Sudan, wrote in the New York Times: "The case against Osama bin Laden, who occupies a stronghold in Afghanistan, is clear-cut. Through his self-proclaimed sponsorship of terrorism against the United States, he has, in effect, declared war on us." In July of 1999, William Cohen, Clinton's own Defense Secretary, wrote in the Washington Post, that, "In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes. Someday, one will be real." Whatever excuses the Clinton administration may have for its failure, they cannot trot out of the excuse of not having been warned. We were all warned. We just preferred to look the other way.

If we look today as Michael Foot did after the outbreak of the Second World War, it is clear that there are many in the United States government who, while not being "guilty men," in sympathizing with and appeasing the enemy threatening their country, were nevertheless at the very least "negligent men." They deserve some sympathy. They were imperfect human beings in a world where September 11 was still an abstraction. But we pay our politicians to see through abstractions and assess the possibility of an actual threat. That's what they are there for. And on that critical task, they failed. If the security manager of a nuclear power plant presides over a massive external attack on it, then it's only right that he should be held responsible in part for what happened. Over 6000 people are now living with the deadly consequences of the negligence of the government of the United States. There is no greater duty for such a government than the maintenance of national security, and the physical protection of its own citizens from harm. When a senior Clinton official can say of his own president that he "spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other President in recent memory," and when this presidency is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting.

Clinton is not alone. The list of people who resisted or thwarted the measures needed to have avoided this catastrophe are many. They reach back to president George H.W. Bush, who balked at removing Saddam Hussein from power at the end of the Gulf War, thus leaving the single most dangerous abettor of international terrorism at large on the world stage. They include Bush and Clinton officials who failed to see the danger in the vacuum left in Afghanistan after the successful insurgency against the Soviets. They include Colin Powell, who crafted the Gulf campaign, and who followed it with the Somalia debacle that helped neuter the military's anti-terrorism campaign thereafter. They include senators and congressmen and lobbyists and civil liberties advocates and journalists - all of whom failed to see the danger staring us in the face. Very few of us are free from blame, but the most blame must surely be attributed to the top.

We thought for a long time that the Clinton years would be seen in retrospect as a mixed blessing. He was sleazy and unprincipled, we surmised, but he was also competent, he led an economic recovery, and he conducted a foreign policy of multilateral distinction. But the further we get away from the Clinton years, the more damning they seem. The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of an America absent without leave in the world was fomented from the top. The boom at the end of the decade turned out to include a dangerous bubble which the administration did little to prevent. The "peace-making" in the Middle East and Ireland merely intensified the conflicts. The sex and money scandals were not just debilitating in themselves. They meant that even the minimal attention that the Clinton presidency paid to strategic military and intelligence work was skimped on. We were warned. But we were coasting. We were deluding ourselves. And the main person primarily tasked with correcting that delusion, with ensuring our national security - the president himself - was part of the problem. Through the dust clouds of September 11 and during the difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage - and that's Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker and darker with each passing day. Additional research by Reihan Salam.

What happened to your right to fly?

It just recently was revoked. I used to be able to take off from TIX [Titusville, FL, on the East Coast by the Kennedy Space Center] and fly over to Orlando, or Lakeland, for breakfast. Or to show the passengers Disney World and Epcot Center. Or just to go out to the "practice area" between TIX and ORL and hone my flying skills.

All that is now forbidden - not by law, but by bureaucratic fiat. It's the same all over the country. VFR Pilots within thirty miles of large cities have been totally grounded - probably forever. And for what reason? Because we could "harm" someone? If that line of logic is allowed to stand, guns will certainly be the next item to be forbidden. Folks should re-read Pastor Niemoller [sp?] if they think the New Gestapo will stop with pilots.

In summary, I have spent a whole bunch of money and fifteen years of my life building an airplane that I am now forbidden to use. I want my money back!

Or what other particular right have you lost?

I have lost the right to be compensated when the government takes my property (see above).
I have lost the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, now that all searches are considered "reasonable", and every American is a suspect.
But worst of all, I have lost the right to a representative form of government that my ancestors gave their lives to protect, now that the executive branch makes up "the law" as it goes along.

We FReepers laughed at Paul Begala when he said "stroke of the pen, law of the land - pretty cool!", but cheer, beat the drum, and wave the flag when Bush creates the New American Gestapo [Homeland Defense] the same way.

Bush doesn't have the constitutional authority to create a cabinet post by himself - let alone one with unspecified and probably unlimited powers. Under Article II, section 2, only congress can do that. But apparently nobody here is concerned with little technicalities like that. We're at war with evil, you see, so anything goes.

The U.S. Constitution - the document that our forefathers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to protect - has just been used for toilet paper by G.W. Bush. But apparently that's OK because he's on "our side".

what would you have done in Bush's place?

For a start, On September 12th I would have nuked Kabul and Bagdhad as a warning to any other nations that were possibly thinking about killing any more Americans.

While the dust was settling, I would rescind all environmental regulations prohibiting drilling for oil and building refineries within the U.S. I would put the middle east on notice that we wouldn't be needing their oil any more in about a year or two.

I would call up the militias of the various states (as First_Salute has suggested) and train them in emergency response, first aid, marksmanship, and chemical/biological/radiological response. They would be the modern equivalent of the Civil Defense Department of the 50's. I would make gas masks, potassium iodide pills, and antibiotics which are effective against Anthrax available to anybody which wanted them.

I would stop all immigration for a period of five years.

I would cut off foreign aid to every nation except Israel, and use the balance to arm Israel.

I would rescind the absurd federal rules which disarm honest citizens in public places, especially on the airlines.

In short, I would perform my prime function as the head of a constitutional republic by defending our borders from attack, and then make it possible for the people and the states to protect themselves.

Re: #25. Well said, John.

If I might vent, just a little, on your 'I would cut off foreign aid to every nation except Israel, and use the balance to arm Israel' ....

There are some Middle East experts, and political pundits, who are espousing (albeit gingerly, for now) the theory that our longstanding alliance with Israel played a large part in the targeting of America on 9/11. To them, America's support for what is seen by some as Israel's occupation of what should be Palestinian territory apparently was at least a partial catalyst for the holocaust of 9/11. It would appear that, in order to curry favor with the increasingly agitated Arab world, and, co-incidentally, in order to protect ourselves from (Arab, and other) madmen, America had better (and the quicker the better) divest herself from any further interest in defending Israel, or her interest in preserving her very existence.

It's called extortion. And it stinks. Always has; always will.

The media, and the current administration, are pushing the viewpoint that the demands that the Arab world is making of Israel are reasonable, and that it's about time the US stopped cow-towing to the Israelis and started playing fair in the Middle East. They would have us believe that it's time to pressure Israel to make peace with the Arab world (translated into Arabic: capitulate completely; sign one's own death warrant) so that we, in turn, can pressure the more moderate members of the Arab world to come over to our side in our battle against the terrorists.

It's called compromise. And it stinks. Always has; always will.

The Arab world's quarrel with Israel has little to do with settlements on the West Bank, or anything else geographic or territorial. The Arab world's quarrel with Israel is over the fact that Israel chooses to continue to exist. And so long as America holds fast to her belief that Israel has a right to exist, she will be viewed as a co-conspirator.

The Arab states are, simply put, tyrannical. They believe in employing suppression, fear, brutality, and corruption to achieve an end. And they do not want an Israel in their midst. It simply cramps their radical, no-holds-barred style.

Our alliance with Israel no doubt creates a schism between America and the Arab world. But deserting Israel is not the solution to Arab aggression. Nor is the American/Israeli alliance the cause of the madmen's hatred of America. It simply fans an already existing flame. Bin Laden and his ilk are consumed with the desire to mold the world to their specifications, and freedom/capitalism/civility stand in their way. That the Israeli state exists, and that America intends to see to it that she continues to do so, is simply one of many of the extremists' agonies.

And capitulating to extortion will only make their agony list grow shorter by one.

clinton CYA-ing BUMP

Because the frequency and intensity of pathetic CYA maneuvers by clinton and his gang are increasing in direct proportion to the increasing frequency and intensity of editorial comment blaming clinton for 9-11, I suspect clinton CYA-ing will soon reach critical mass. At that historic moment, Sandy Berger (along with his smarmy revisionism) will implode by virtue of his pressure-deflating "uhs", taking his inept, corrupt, cowardly, self-serving leader down with him.

As Martha Stewart might say, this is a good thing; clinton CYA-ing is compromising Bush's anti-terror campaign.

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