Juan Cole: Why Clinton Did a Better Counter-Terrorism Job Than Bush

Juan Cole, on his blog (March 28, 2004):

The pundits and politicians who keep saying that Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and Bush's are the same are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The policy outline was the same, but the implementation was very different.

Hint: The key piece of evidence is the Millennium Plot. This was an al-Qaeda operation timed for late December 1999. Forestalling this plot was the biggest counter-terrorism success the US has ever had against al-Qaeda.

the plot involved several key elements:

*Los Angelese International Airport would be blown up.

*(Possibly: The Needle in Seattle would be blown up).

* The Radisson Hotel in Amman Jordan, a favorite of American and Israeli tourists, would be blown up. A lot of the tourism for the millennium was Christian evangelicals wanting to be in the holy land.

* Bombs would go off at Mt. Nebo, a tourist site in Jordan associated with Moses.

* The USS The Sullivans would be targeted by a dinghy bomb off Yemen.

The story of how the LAX bombing was stopped on December 14 has been told in an important series in the Seattle Times. Extra security measures were implemented by US customs agents, leading to the apprehension of an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, with a trunk full of nitroglycerin, heading for LAX (he wanted to start his journey by ferry from Port Angeles, Washington).

Ressam grew up fishing in the Mediterranean and going to discos. But like many Algerians, he was radicalized in 1991. The government had allowed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamist party, to contest elections. FIS unexpectedly won, however. The military feared that they would never allow another election, and would declare an Islamic state. They cancelled elections. FIS went into opposition, and the most radical members formed the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which got money from Usama Bin Laden, then in the Sudan. Ressam seems to have been GIA.

Ressam fought in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Then he settled in France and became part of the terrorist Groupe Roubaix, which carried out attacks in that city (pop. 98,000, near Lille in the north). In spring of 1998 he flew to Afghanistan and was trained in two camps under the direction of Palestinian-Saudi Abu Zubaida. Abu Zubaida recruited Ressam into an Algerian al-Qaeda cell headed from London by Abu Doha al-Mukhalif. Ressam was assigned to form a forward cell in Montreal, from which he and several other Algerians plotted the attack on LAX.

What Clarke's book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather, Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority to call other key cabinet members and security officials to "battle stations," involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton's approval in December of 1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi's cell in Amman.

Early in 2001, in contrast, Bush demoted Clarke from being a cabinet member, and much reduced his authority. Clarke wanted the high Bush officials or "principals" to meet on terrorism regularly. He couldn't get them to do it. Rice knew what al-Qaeda was, but she, like other administration officials, was disconcerted by Clarke's focus on it as an independent actor. The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes from the states that allegedly harbor them. That funny look she gave Clarke wasn't unfamiliarity, it was puzzlement that someone so high in the system should be so wrongly focused.

In summer of 2001 the chatter was much greater and more ominous than in fall of 1999. Clarke wanted to go to battle stations and have daily meetings with the "principals" (i.e. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet). He wanted to repeat the procedures that had foiled the Millennium Plot. He could not convince anyone to let him do that.

Note that an "institution" is defined in sociology as a regular way of getting certain collective work done. Clarke is saying that Clinton had institutionalized a set of governmental routines for dealing with heightened threats from terrorists. He is not saying that Clinton bequeathed a "big think" plan to Bush on terrorism. He is saying that he bequeathed the Bush administration a repertoire of effective actions by high officials.

He thinks going to such a heightened level of alert and concerted effort in 2001 might have shaken loose much earlier the information that the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in the US. As it is, the INS wasn't informed of this advent and did not start looking for them until Aug. 21, 2001, by which time it was too late. Since they made their plane reservations for September 11 under their own names, names known to the USG, a heightened level of alert might have allowed the FBI to spot them.

So it just is not true that Bush was doing exactly the same thing on terrorism that Clinton was. He didn't have a cabinet-level counter-terrorism czar; he didn't have the routine of principals' meetings on terrorism; he didn't authorize Clarke to go to 'battle stations' and heightened security alert in summer of 2001 the way Clinton had done in December, 1999.

The key to understanding Clarke's argument is to understand how exactly the Millennium Plot was foiled.

Meanwhile, the Bush slime machine has thrown up the charge that Clarke admitted that there was an al-Qaeda-Saddam connection in Sudan in the early 1990s. This is such a non-story that it is incredible to me that anyone even bothers with it.

Clarke is straightforward that he suspected an Iraq-Bin Laden link in the very early 1990s in Khartoum. He also admits that Saddam tried to have Bush senior assassinated in Kuwait in 1993. What he told Wolfowitz in spring of 2001 was that there hadn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the US in ten years. Note that he does not say "there never had been." I am personally skeptical that even the early 1990s Khartoum-Baghdad links are based on good intelligence. But Clarke is entirely consistent if you read him knowing the whole story of al-Qaeda in the 1990s. His critics still don't get it.