QUAGMIRE ALERT!
Posted on 06/24/2003 7:41:47 PM PDT by chichipow
WASHINGTON - 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-Qaida 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 mock-up 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-Qaida 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-Qaida 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 mock-up 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.
The Predators, however, were not put back in the air before Sept. 11.
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-Qaida 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-Qaida 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 mock-up 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-Qaida 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-Qaida 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.
It was, after all, them Hebrews who FAILED to kill ALL the evil people presently living in the 'Promised Land' when Joshua, under GOD's command, led them into it.
But we have free education for illegal aliens, and lower-priced instate tuition when they go to college in California.
EVERYONE of these things were voted for by the citizens of that great state: either directly by referendum or through their lawfully elected representatives.
If it is 'costing' too much, then either quit whining and cough up the dough, or else undo what the 'laws' have done and get rid of the expensive drain on limited resources.
QUIT BLAMING DAVIS!!!
Oh please. Plenty of folks predicted an attack on our soil long before 9/11. For over 30 years this country had a head-in-the-sand mentality against terrorist threats, and unfortunately it took 9/11 to wake us out of it. Sure Clinton did all he could do to set us up for 9/11, but those before him - Reagan, Bush, Carter, were just as culpable. Ask yourself what retaliation was taken after the attacks on our people in Beirut, or after Lockerbie, or after numerous other attacks over the last thirty years. I proudly applaud the actions our President has taken since 9/11, but that doesn't excuse him, and all who came before him, for their mistakes prior to that fateful day.
Sorry, I don't buy your premise. But I would argue that Browne wouldn't have our military fighting in places like Columbia and the Philipenes where we have no business being.
Is that close enough to issue a "Quagmire alert?"
QUAGMIRE ALERT!
Maybe so but...
Had the drones been weaponized a year earlier, the September 11 terrorist onslaught on the United States may never have happened. The Wall Street Journal reports that the drones had bin Laden under surveillance on more than one occasion. "CIA drones spotted Bin Laden in camps but couldn't shoot," the paper said.
More info:
When they began to look into the issue in late 2000, CIA officials say they were surprised to discover that the Air Force was already trying to solve the same problem. Gen. John Jumper, formerly head of the Air Force's Air Combat Command, had been working for months to figure out how his growing fleet of reconnaissance planes could be armed to attack tanks on the ground. Unclear was whether the Hellfire missile, which is normally fired from helicopters, would work from the much lighter and more fragile Predator. The first success came in late February, when a Predator-fired missile flying at low altitude destroyed a tank at a test site in Nevada.
By early spring this year [2001], the CIA had brought the Predators back to the United States and was actively pushing the Air Force to equip them with Hellfire missiles for a possible redeployment in Afghanistan. Tests in Nevada dragged on through the summer as technicians tried to refine the plane's ability to fire accurately at targets from high altitudes. By August [2001], officials say, the kinks had been worked out and the planes were ready to go.
But even then, the Bush administration was riddled with doubts about whether it wanted to go forward with a new, more forceful mission over Afghanistan. The risks, officials say, were huge. Top Bush Cabinet officials convened several times in late summer to discuss the pros and cons of going forward.
The White House and the State Department, still raw after the downing of a United States spy plane over China, feared the international repercussions if one of the armed drones crashed or was otherwise discovered. The CIA and the Pentagon had resolved the money dispute — neither side will say how — but were now tussling over who would have the authority to pull the trigger and who would take the flak if the mission failed.
CIA officials, feeling that their agency had little room for error, were particularly on edge. One senior CIA official complained that up to early September, the administration still had no clear concept of the "consequences of failure." He said that "there was some saber rattling, but at the end of the day, the policy didn't evolve to the point where we were going to do something about it."
Another administration official says the CIA was prepared to take the international heat if it successfully struck at Mr. bin Laden. But still reeling from a decade of mishaps topped by the mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war, it deeply feared another botched mission. "They most dreaded being seen as the gang that couldn't shoot straight," the official said.
The debate wound on unresolved until the morning of Sept. 11, when nearly all concerns of a failed mission disappeared. The armed CIA Predators were still on American soil, awaiting transport back to Afghanistan, when the hijacked jets hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
So in other words, the testing for armed drones was not even complete until August 2001. If you will notice the following lines:
"One senior CIA official complained that up to early September, the administration still had no clear concept of the "consequences of failure." He said that "there was some saber rattling, but at the end of the day, the policy didn't evolve to the point where we were going to do something about it."
...so in other words, after the testing, the administration was ready to play "drone cowboy", but the CIA was holding things up because of their own fear of failure in view of past screwups.
Take the lead...
"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-Qaida leader."
A more accurate variation of this story has been on Free Republic for over a year and a half. However, bin Laden wasn't sighted by unarmed drones while Clinton was in office; we had the capacity to take him out at the time, and the Clinton Administration chose not to do so.
I can only speculate that the article at the top of this thread is some sort of pre-emptive spin for the purpose of shielding the Clintons from responsibility for their negligence, which led directly to 9/11. There is probably a worse bombshell waiting to drop.
Go here and here for a better understanding.
Notice that in all accounts, we had bin Laden "three times."
It's very important the damning information that Clinton could have taken bin Laden out on three occasions is disseminated to as many people as possible, so please pass it along.
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