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The 9-11 Commission Part 2
by Joe Duarte
April 5, 2004
Originally posted on March 25, 2004
at www.joe-duarte.com.

There was a major confrontation in front of the 9-11 Commission in Washington D.C., on 3-24. The star witness was former White House aide Richard A. Clarke.

On March 21, 2004, CBS News’ 60 minutes made major headlines with its exclusive interview with Clarke. The tone of the interview was very critical, and raised significant amounts of political activity, on both sides of the aisle.

According to CBS News: Clarke told “CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda. ["Frankly,"] he said, ["I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."] Clarke went on to say, ["I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."]

The Clarke Transcript

A transcript of an interview, found at Fox News.com, between several reporters, including Fox’s Jim Angle, and Richard Clarke, the author of the controversial new book reflecting negatively on the Bush administration’s handling of al-Qaeda, revealed some interesting information. The transcript was described by Fox as one that “documents a background briefing in early August 2002 by President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to a handful of reporters, including Fox News' Jim Angle. In the conversation, cleared by the White House on Wednesday for distribution, Clarke describes the hand-over of intelligence from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration and the latter's decision to revise the U.S. approach to Al Qaeda. Clarke was named special adviser to the president for cyberspace security in October 2001. He resigned from his post in January 2003.”

In his book, according to much of the press coverage, and even during his testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission, Mr. Clarke has remarked that the Bush administration did not take the threat of terrorism seriously enough to make it urgent.

Mr. Clarke was interviewed by Larry King on CNN after his 9/11 commission testimony, though, and made it clear that he felt that both the Bush and Clinton administrations deserved criticism for not having done enough to put al-Qaeda out of business.

Mr. Clarke’s media odyssey, though, offers often contradicting views of what life in the White House, and big time Washington politics is like, making for an interesting analysis of what happened and what’s coming next.

In the Fox transcript Clarke’s introductory remarks noted the following: 1) “there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. 2) “the Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998. And there were a number of issues on the table since 1998. And they remained on the table when that administration went out of office — issues like aiding the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, changing our Pakistan policy -- uh, changing our policy toward Uzbekistan. And in January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.” 3) “the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, mid-January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we've now made public to some extent. And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. 4) The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.”

Clarke continued: 5) “So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.” 6) “The sixth point, the newly-appointed deputies — and you had to remember, the deputies didn't get into office until late March, early April. The deputies then tasked the development of the implementation details, uh, of these new decisions that they were endorsing, and sending out to the principals.“ 7) “Over the course of the summer — last point — they developed implementation details, the principals met at the end of the summer, approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance assistance.”

Clarke then added: “And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course [of] five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline.”

When questioned about the President's involvement, in the transcript, Clarke answered: “the president was briefed throughout this process.”

When questioned before the 9-11 commission, about his apparent flip-flop on the Bush administration with regards to the war on terrorism, Mr. Clarke, suggested that the Bush administration had asked him to participate “in a press backgrounder” to explain things in a way that seemed favorable to the press, in order to take the heat off of the White House. This backgrounder was the source of the Fox transcript.

Clarke suggested, to the commission, on CNN live, that it was not the first time he had in effect been asked to, in effect, spin a story positively for the press by a president. He elaborated by saying that the backgrounder was meant to answer charges leveled at the White House, in a “sensational” article in Time magazine, which depicted the Bush administration in a negative light with regards to the 9/11 disaster.

Clarke also described recent statements by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice in a recent op-ed piece for the Washington Post, as inaccurate when asked by commission member Gorelick about them. He was answering a question about the passage in the op-Ed piece by Rice which stated: “Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures. Our plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived.”

When the commission asked Mr. Clarke if he was suggesting that there was a different moral standard for Presidential aids than for the rest of the population, he answered that in his view, it was not a question of morality, but of “politics.” His remarks attracted applause from the crowd in the room.

Here is an interesting excerpt from the Fox transcript :

“QUESTION: But when was the final September 4 document? (interrupted) Was that presented to the president?”

CLARKE: The document went to the president on September 10, I think.” The date referred to is in 2001, one day prior to the 9/11 attacks.

We want to be very precise here, so we will excerpt questions and answers directly:

QUESTION: What is your response to the suggestion in the [Aug. 12, 2002] Time [magazine] article that the Bush administration was unwilling to take on board the suggestions made in the Clinton administration because of animus against the — general animus against the foreign policy?

CLARKE: I think if there was a general animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the same team in place. That doesn't sound like animus against uh the previous team to me.

JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that's correct.

Later in the backgrounder transcript, Clarke was pressed about the existence of a plan against al-Qaeda in the Clinton administration.

QUESTION: Were all of those issues part of alleged plan that was late December and the Clinton team decided not to pursue because it was too close to ...

CLARKE: There was never a plan, Andrea. What there was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table.

The questioning became more specific and intense:

QUESTION: So there was nothing that developed, no documents or no new plan of any sort?

CLARKE: There was no new plan.

QUESTION: No new strategy — I mean, I don't want to get into a semantics ...

CLARKE: Plan, strategy — there was no, nothing new.

QUESTION: 'Til late December, developing ...

CLARKE: What happened at the end of December was that the Clinton administration NSC principals committee met and once again looked at the strategy, and once again looked at the issues that they had brought, decided in the past to add to the strategy. But they did not at that point make any recommendations.

Clarke was then pressed as to why the Clinton team had done little other than debate the issue and counteract in a defensive manner:

He described the situation as one being composed of “tough issues. You know, take, for example, aiding the Northern Alliance. Um, people in the Northern Alliance had a, sort of bad track record. There were questions about the government, there were questions about drug-running, there was questions about whether or not in fact they would use the additional aid to go after Al Qaeda or not. Uh, and how would you stage a major new push in Uzbekistan or somebody else or Pakistan to cooperate? One of the big problems was that Pakistan at the time was aiding the other side, was aiding the Taliban. And so, this would put, if we started aiding the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, this would have put us directly in opposition to the Pakistani government. These are not easy decisions. “

The questioning became more direct as follows:

ANGLE: And none of that really changed until we were attacked and then it was ...

CLARKE: No, that's not true. In the spring, the Bush administration changed — began to change Pakistani policy, um, by a dialogue that said we would be willing to lift sanctions. So we began to offer carrots, which made it possible for the Pakistanis, I think, to begin to realize that they could go down another path, which was to join us and to break away from the Taliban. So that's really how it started.

QUESTION: Had the Clinton administration in any of its work on this issue, in any of the findings or anything else, prepared for a call for the use of ground forces, special operations forces in any way? What did the Bush administration do with that if they had?

CLARKE: There was never a plan in the Clinton administration to use ground forces. The military was asked at a couple of points in the Clinton administration to think about it. Um, and they always came back and said it was not a good idea. There was never a plan to do that.

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you're saying is that there was no — one, there was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That's right.

QUESTION: It was not put into an action plan until September 4, signed off by the principals?

The final question is extremely thought provoking.

QUESTION: In your judgment, is it possible to eliminate Al Qaeda without putting troops on the ground?

CLARKE: Uh, yeah, I think it was. I think it was. If we'd had Pakistani, Uzbek and Northern Alliance assistance.

20/20 hindsight suggests that Mr. Clarke’s assumption at the end of the interview was off the mark. To be sure, it is unfair to Monday morning quarterback a highly ranked National Security aide with access to the best information possible, in a humble forum such as ours. His response to the morality vs. politics question on live television says more about Mr. Clarke and the politics of Washington than anything else. He is obviously an adroit Washington insider.

We think that his answer was just as indicative of the lack of overall insight of both the Bush and Clinton administrations into the hornet’s nest that is al-Qaeda, and the intrinsic hatred of America espoused by the beliefs that it claims to represent.

In our view, the interview suggests that the Clinton team debated the issue to death, and left it for the next administration. But Clarke’s testimony before the commission, suggests, that he was instructed to frame the discussion in just that fashion.

Thus, it seems, that in true Bush fashion, the problem was then attacked as a corporation would attack the development of a new product, or the launch of a takeover of a competing firm, with feasibility studies, meetings, plans and the eventual launch of operations once a decision had been made.

In the end, it would seem that “the board of directors” decided to launch a hostile bid. But as faith would have it, they ran out of time, and got blindsided.

Conclusion

The 9-11 commission results have peeled yet another layer of tradition, illusion, and secret from the White House, once again baring the dark side of the venerable institution. Just as Watergate opened the floodgates into the dishonesty and pettiness of the Nixon years, this report is showing that mistrust and personal agendas run rampant there, and that judgment is often cloudy on Pennsylvania avenue, on both sides of the aisle. And that even though the U.S. is superior to other countries in many respects, it is not infallible, and in fact, the feeling that indeed it is a more fortunate place, may set it up as a place where complacency runs high and leads to bad decision making. Most of all, the results show that even the “best and brightest” have bad days, and that when many bad days are strung together, terrible things tend to follow.

The early results of the commission’s proceedings indicate that the big time decision makers in both the Bush and Clinton administrations got caught napping on some respects of the situation, as the adversarial nature of the intelligence community did what it always does, pit one side against the other, in this case the FBI and the CIA, which were at the time prevented by law from sharing information. A case can be made for Clinton’s greater culpability, mostly based on the fact that he had 8 years in which to do something about al-Qaeda. But, that would be less than fair in many respects, and would be highly influenced by 20/20 hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking.

The New York Times offered as good a summary as we found on the subject when, based on the 9/11 commission’s report, it wrote:

“In 1996, the CIA secretly created a special operational unit devoted to tracking a single man, a Saudi-born exile named Osama bin Laden, then living in Sudan and considered a major terrorist financier. By early 1997, the office, known as the bin Laden station, had concluded that he was also a terrorist organizer, based in Afghanistan, with a military committee planning operations against American interests worldwide.”

“What happened over the nearly five years from that moment until the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is the story of bureaucratic miscommunication, diplomatic dead ends, military hesitation, intelligence failures, political rivalries and policy miscalculations at the highest levels of two presidential administrations — a trail of fumbles presented in sweeping new detail in two days of commission hearings and four staff reports made public this week.

“The commission's work provides the government's first comprehensive account of how the Clinton and Bush administrations assessed and responded to the growing threat presented by the bin Laden network before Sept. 11. Previous government accounts, and testimony by national security officials, focused more narrowly on specific failings of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. In the last years of Bill Clinton's administration, the commission's findings show, there were deep misunderstandings between White House officials, who believed the president had clearly authorized actions that would kill Mr. bin Laden, and C.I.A. officers who thought that they were only permitted to kill him in a capture attempt. There were a half-dozen frustrating efforts to use Afghan proxies to attack Mr. bin Laden, and a series of successively more ambitious plans for military strikes that proved unworkable, diplomatic pressure that failed and bitter disputes about how best to use unmanned Predator drone aircraft to gather intelligence.”

“In the first months of the Bush administration, the commission found, there was sharp skepticism about the Clinton approach — a conviction that it had ["run out of gas,"] as Stephen Hadley, the Bush deputy national security adviser, put it.

Early indications of public opinion, as in the Wall Street Journal poll, we cited on 3-24, suggest that Clinton may take the brunt of the blame, although, more scientific polls are likely to follow, and that this early indication may change.

The bottom line seems to be that while the U.S. was busy with the business of being the U.S., meaning doing business, and advancing capitalism, al-Qaeda was busy plotting its master stroke.

Perhaps Mr. Clarke’s view on the way America works sums it up best of all, when he noted in his testimony before the commission, that America rarely acts preemptively, unless there are “body bags” involved.

History, thus might show that 9/11 was a classic revival of the “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” scenario.

Although many people saw the possibilities of an al-Qaeda attack on the U.S., because of the nature of the political system, nobody that could make a real decision really saw it coming, although there were subtle and not so subtle signs and indications that perhaps it was coming.

And that may be the biggest reason, as Mr. Clarke put it, that the U.S. “failed,” in its ability to prevent 9/11.

Few saw Pearl Harbor coming either.

It is possible, though, that the United States as a whole has just gathered a significant new understanding of what really happened, and that the grim reality of what al-Qaeda stands for may have been given an even broader platform.

And if history is any guide as to what’s next, many things, mostly unpleasant, are about to happen, to many people, inside and outside the United States, the CIA, the FBI, and the White House.

The War on Terrorism, inside, and outside the beltway, is just beginning.

PART 1   l   PART 2   l   PART 3

© 2004 Dr. Joe Duarte
Dr. Duarte's Bio and Archive

Joe Duarte, M.D.

Joe Duarte M.D. is founder and Editor in Chief of Joe-Duarte.com. Dr. Duarte is a board certified anesthesiologist, a registered investment advisor, and President of River Willow Capital Management, where he manages individual client accounts. His latest books "Successful Energy Sector Investing" and "Successful Biotech Investing" (Prima/Random House) are available on line at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, borders.com, Traders Press, and all major online and brick and mortar bookstores in the U.S., U.K. Europe, and Australia. Dr. Joe Duarte’s Daily Market I.Q. is a subscriber service that provides daily intelligence, trading strategies, and technical analysis at www.joe-duarte.com.