Posted on 05/19/2002 6:28:35 PM PDT by Gillmeister
"[A]n attack that must have required extensive preparations and a substantial support network appears to have gone entirely undetected by the FBI and intelligence community. These are large failings, the causes of which will have to be meticulously identified and remedied.
"The challenge ahead will require strengthening U.S. defenses and intelligence . . ." (Editorial, "September 11, 2001," The Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2001).
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THE SEPTEMBER 11 hijack-bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon bared a multiplicity of holes in America's intelligence fabric.
As author Tom Clancy has pointed out, "The best defense against terrorist incidents is to prevent them from happening," and "You do that by finding out what a potential enemy is thinking before he is able to act" ("How We Got Here: First we crippled the CIA. Then we blamed it," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 2001). But we had no spies within al Qaeda, no key to its encrypted communications and insufficient analytical capacity to seize on its unencrypted messages. We don't even have a modicum of intelligence agents who speak or understand the languages, like Arabic, Urdu and Farsi, al Qaeda members speak.
Yet September 11 could have been worse. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was intended to be much worse, for the World Trade Center was just one of five terrorist targets that day. The other targets were the federal building in downtown Manhattan, the UN headquarters in midtown and two commuter tunnels where bombs were to go off during rush hour (Congressional Record, Aug. 3, 1993, page H5700).
September 11 could have been even worse than that. "[I]n early 1997, Steven Emerson[ [1] told the Middle East Quarterly that the threat of terrorism 'is greater now than before the [1993] World Trade Center bombing as the numbers of these [terrorist] groups and their members expand. In fact, I would say that the infrastructure now exists to carry off 20 simultaneous [1993] World Trade Center-type bombings across the United States" (quoted in Daniel Pipes, "Mistakes Made the Catastrophe Possible; What went wrong with U.S. antiterrorism policy," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2001) (emphasis added).
September 11 could have been a lot worse. Radio, television, newspapers and magazines are replete with experts' accounts of how the same intelligence failings that allowed the September 11 bombings also make us vulnerable to terrorists -- and not just al Qaeda terrorists -- using weapons of mass destruction.
It could get worse still. The possibility of further terrorist attacks by al Qaeda and/or other terrorist organizations looms right now.
It's not as though America wasn't warned.
There has been a long succession of articles and reports, dating at least to 1993 ("Taking heed; Warnings, and reality, of terrorism ignored," Daily Press, Sept. 13, 2001), that called attention to the deficiencies in our intelligence operations and sought to spur remedial action.
For fully 18 years, since the van-bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, we have witnessed repeated successful penetration of our defenses by terrorists. Other examples include the December 29, 1992 bombing of the Yemen hotel where U.S. troops bound for Somalia had been staying; the already-mentioned February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that left six dead and more than 1,000 injured; the car-bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 that killed 168 people; the truck-bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996 that killed 19 American servicemen and injured some 500 more; the nearly simultaneous car-bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998 that killed 224 and injured 4,600; and the motorboat-bombing of the Navy destroyer U.S.S. Cole in a Yemen port on October 12, 2000 that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. [2]
And every single year, when the U.S. House of Representatives has debated the Intelligence authorization bills that budget money for our intelligence agencies, the House's experts on terrorism, the members of its Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, have told the House in no uncertain terms that America faces grave threats -- specifically including terrorist threats -- for which it is badly unprepared and for the detection and prevention of which funding is inadequate.
Most House Members have heeded their Intelligence Committee colleagues' warnings enough to support the budgets the committee has recommended.
But each year from 1993 through 1999 a minority of House Members disregarded those warnings and voted to cut intelligence funding even further.
From 1993 through 1999 there were ten recorded House floor votes on amendments to reduce authorized funding for intelligence.
Every one was defeated. Most were trounced, like 104-323, 106-315, 93-325 or 68-343. The average vote was 128-293. The closest vote was 192-235, or 45.0 percent to 55.0 percent.
Most of the Members who voted for those amendments to cut intelligence funding did so sight unseen. The funding levels of Intelligence authorization bills are classified information (Congressional Record, Aug. 3, 1993, page H5685) and do not appear in the copies of the bills the Members receive. That information was readily available, however, in the offices of the Intelligence Committee just a two-minute walk from the House floor -- but very few of the Members who voted to slash intelligence funding had taken the time to find out how much the bills provided for intelligence, or for what specific activities. Neither had they bothered to learn the line-by-line justifications for the various amounts sought.
In short, those Members voted blind to cut the budget for functions as important as terrorism detection and prevention.
That's willful ignorance, and it's irresponsible.
Who were those Members?
By party, 83.6 percent of those voting to reduce funding for intelligence were Democrats; just 15.6 percent were Republicans. (The balance of the votes to cut intelligence spending were cast by Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who authored seven of the ten cutting amendments.)
Five of the amendments attracted a majority of voting Democrats. On one, 64.2 percent of voting Democrats voted to cut; on a second, 78.6 percent; on a third, 80.2 percent. The highest percentage of voting Republicans any of the amendments received was 16.1 percent.
The Democrats who voted to cut intelligence funding weren't just back-benchers, either. The House Democratic leadership, and the senior Democrats on the committees responsible for our national security, supported [3] the cut-funding amendments in force.
Leadership. Dick Gephardt (D-MO), the House Democratic leader, voted to cut on five of the seven amendments on which he was recorded. He appears to have "taken a walk" on two other votes. David Bonior (D-MI), the number-two Democratic leader who as Whip enforces the party position, voted for every single one of the ten cutting amendments. Chief Deputy Whips John Lewis (D-GA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) voted to cut intelligence funding every time they voted. (DeLauro is now running for the number-three position in the House Democratic leadership.) Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), just elected to replace Bonior as Whip when Bonior leaves early in 2002, voted to cut intelligence funding three times, even though she was a member of the Intelligence Committee and should have known much better. Two cut-funding amendments got the votes of every single member of the elected House Democratic leadership. In all, members of the House Democratic leadership, elected and appointed, supported cut-funding amendments 56.9 percent of the time.
Senior Democrats on the Key Committees. [4] Many of the Democrats whose committee positions give them immense say over our national security likewise voted for most or all of the cut-funding amendments. Ron Dellums (D-CA), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee [5] from 1993 through 1997, cast all eight of his votes on cut-funding amendments in favor of less intelligence funding. Three persons who chaired or were ranking Democrats on Armed Services subcommittees for part of the 1993-99 period -- Pat Schroeder (D-CO), Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) and Marty Meehan (D-MA) -- also voted for every funds-cutting amendment that was offered during their tenures. Dave Obey (D-WI), the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee that holds the House's keys to the federal checkbook, voted seven out of eight times to reduce intelligence funding.
By contrast, no member of the House Republican leadership ever voted for any of the cut-funding amendments and only one Republican in a key committee post ever did.
There were four other recorded floor votes on intelligence-funding issues: a vote on passage of the FY 1995 authorization; two votes on conference reports; and one vote on the rule governing floor debate of the FY 98 authorization. The results of all four were wildly lopsided: 410-16, 385-36, 337-83 and 425-2, respectively. But even on each of those lopsided votes one or more key Democrats opposed the budget for our intelligence operations.
As the vote margins indicate, those were truly extremist stands.
Two conclusions are clear. First, on funding the nation's intelligence operations, there's a clear difference between House Republicans and House Democrats. Second, large numbers of House Democrats, including their elected leaders, appointed leaders and committee and subcommittee chieftains, regularly tried to cut funding for intelligence. For them, September 11 should have been a personal embarrassment that led to public apologies.
End Notes [1] Emerson is a terrorism expert and author of the prize-winning television documentary, "Jihad in America." For an article on Emerson see "The Man Who Gives Terrorism a Name," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2001.
[2] There were also a number of attempted terrorist attacks that were thwarted. The details of most of U.S. intelligence's successes have been classified to preserve the secrecy of our agents' sources and methods, but two successes are public information. First, as noted above, our intelligence enabled authorities to defuse most of the attacks planned for New York City on February 26, 1993. Second, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was involved in the 1993 attack, was later captured while plotting to bomb a dozen airplanes simultaneously as they crossed the Pacific (Congressional Record, July 9, 1997, page H4988). Information about other terrorist efforts that were defeated -- information that would have further underscored the danger posed by terrorism -- was available to every Member of Congress who took the time to go to the House Intelligence Committee offices and be briefed.
[3] The only votes cast by a member of one of the parties' leaderships or in a key committee slot that are tallied in this report are the votes they cast when they were in a leadership or key committee position. Votes before and after are not tallied. Thus, the only Pat Schroeder (D-CO) votes tallied here are those she cast when she chaired an Armed Services subcommittee in 1993-94. When, in and after 1995, she left her position as the senior Democrat on an Armed Services subcommittee for a similar position on a committee with only occasional involvement with national-security issues (Judiciary), her votes were no longer tallied for this report.
[4] "Key" committee posts are: chair or ranking minority member ("RMM") of the Appropriations Committee; member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee; chair or ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee or one of its subcommittees; and member of the Intelligence Committee.
[5] For a while it was renamed the National Security Committee. For the sake of simplicity, though, it's referred to herein as the Armed Services Committee. Similarly, the Defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, although for a period formally the National security subcommittee, is herein consistently called the Defense subcommittee.
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