Here's an unedited posting of the original Washington Post article, on an independent site. No sign-up necessary.
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.
If the stroy is ciruclating that Osama was sited by a Predator prior to 9/11, consider it another attempt by the Clinton Apologists (the fastest growing industry in America, btw) to deflect error in judgment from their guy.
Two other things. There can never be 100% assurance that anyone is identified by a Predator. And, secondly, prior to 9/11, we had no good reason to rain-down a missle on a group of unidentifiable Arabs, suspecting Osama was in the group.
Here's an unedited posting of the original Washington Post article, on an independent site. No sign-up necessary.
I couldn't agree more with your assessment of this. Will be mass emailing to all my non-freepers friends.
These problems needed to be addressed before 9/11, and that lack of foresight was obvious to all by nightfall that day. Yet, it continues, as a calculated matter of policy. When it hits the fan again, that buck will stop on a desk in an office without corners, and "we had no way of knowing" isn't going to wish that reality away.
On a related note:(On the Hunt: An interview with Col. David Hunt)
NRO: How are we doing in the war on terrorism?
HUNT: Al Qaeda is in 80 different countries. We need to harass these terrorist groups, everywhere — in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, North Korea, the Sudan, Algeria, and Zimbabwe. And then there's the Russian mafia. We need to screw around with their banks, to squeeze them. A lot of these groups get money through laundering and drug trafficking. Here's an example: poppy-producers in Afghanistan. We need to destroy all those poppy fields. We could be much more aggressive in that area.
The point is to make it painful on states that sponsor terrorism. If I go after the bank, that hurts a lot of people. We want to go into the towns and kill these terrorists, in their homes. We're doing that, but we need to do it more. This is the first time we've had a president who wants to do this, aggressively.
NRO: What about the turf wars between FBI and CIA. Has that gotten any better since 9/11?
HUNT: The turf wars continue. Because of the 9/11 commissions, people are sweating scared about what happened. We sucked! We sucked, and we got hurt. 800 Americans were killed over 20 years in terrorist actions, and what did we do? We shot a couple of missiles.
We have not solved the bureaucracy and, because of the war, the Bush administration has been understandably focused on that. But these agencies are still at each other's throats. The FBI is a fabulous crime-fighter, the best in the world, but they need to get out of the terrorism business. We need something to fight terrorism domestically that's not fighting banks. Maybe like the British MI-5.
NRO: What about the Homeland Security department? How's Tom Ridge doing?
HUNT: Don't even get me started on "homeland security"! It was courageous for Bush to do, but you can't do anything without intel. They talk about "sharing" — we know they don't share. You can't get the job done without intel. They get what the FBI and the CIA want to give them. To be effective, a security agency must have what's called "tasking authority." This is probably the most important thing I'll tell you today: I've got to be able to tell you what to do. If I don't have that, I come to you and say, "Would you mind doing X and we'll have a meeting about it." Guess what? Nothing gets done. The Homeland Security department doesn't have tasking authority in the intelligence community. They can ask for stuff, but they can't direct anything except inside their bureau.
And the other problem: You still see public relations playing a role, which is so frustrating. We're not profiling. We know who's attacking us, but we pull over grandmothers so that when we go to court we can show that we're treating white women the same way. Everyone knows that's the wrong thing to do. On the Hunt: An interview with Col. David Hunt National Review ^ | 06/25/03 | Sarah Maserati
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"You can be someone or you can do something"
Colonel John Boyd
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Hmm, maybe we need the Taliban to retake power since that is exactly what they were doing. ;-)
The Bush administration did not fly Predator drones over Afghanistan even though the UAVs spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000. The administration was still refining a plan to use one armed with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader when Sept. 11 unfolded. The unmanned Predator B taxis back to the hangar in El Mirage, Calif., Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001, after a test flight over the Mojave Desert. (AP Photo/Doug Benc)
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