September 30, 2006
Wall Street Journal Piece on Clinton's Record
What President Clinton Didn't Do . . .
By RICHARD MINITER
September 27, 2006; Page A18
Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats -- the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war -- is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap -- air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects -- there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton's policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush's.
It is vital that this debate be honest, but so far this has not been the case. Both Mr. Clinton's outrage at Chris Wallace's questioning and the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11" are attempts to polarize the nation's memory. While this divisiveness may be good for Mr. Clinton's reputation, it is ultimately unhealthy for the country. What we need, instead, is a cold-eyed look at what works against terrorists and what does not. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations ought to be put to the same iron test.
With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.
In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.
By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.
• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.
• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.
• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.
• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.
• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.
Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.
• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.
• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.
When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record -- how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.
Mr. Miniter, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, is author of "Losing Bin Laden”
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115931778776275048.html
Posted by Richard Miniter at 04:48 PM
September 25, 2006
French Faux Pas
Okay, you probably don’t read L’est Republicain on a regular basis – but this weekend medialand was abuzz with the regional French newspaper report – based on a leaked French intelligence agency report – that Osama bin Laden had died of typhoid. Here are six reasons I think that the report is not credible:
1) To state the obvious, no one has produced bin Laden’s body or offered reliable eyewitness testimony of death. What we have instead is a fourth hand account: a French newspaper writing about a French intelligence report that is writing about a Saudi intelligence officer who said he heard from a colleague about bin Laden being dead.
2) The leaked French intelligence memo is based on a single Saudi intelligence source – neither the French nor CIA have been able to confirm that the Saudis actually believe bin Laden is dead, let alone is actually dead. And, of course, Saudi beliefs about bin Laden are meaningless – absent evidence.
3) Jihadi websites that post messages from al Qaeda figures have not even mentioned that bin Laden is ailing, let alone dead. Given al Qaeda’s proven desire manage the news about itself, it is extremely unlikely that there would be no sign of bin Laden’s passing on the web.
4) If bin Laden were dead, there would be an internal power struggle to see who runs al Qaeda. There is no sign of any such struggle. One obvious sign that has not appeared: Zawahiri issuing a tape that he is in control of al Qaeda.
5) This past week, Pakistan released some 2,500 al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. It is unlikely that it would have cut a deal with that terrorist network to release those prisoners if Pakistan intelligence service believed bin Laden was dancing with his 72 virgins. (The French newspaper story said bin Laden had died in Pakistan.)
6) The French newspaper that published the story is a regional daily, not one of the national Paris-based newspaper that usually gets leaks from French intelligence. As far as I am aware, this newspaper before has never received a leak from French intelligence. If this story was an “official leak”—a specialty of France’s intelligence apparatus -- then it would have been given to a major newspaper.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 01:21 PM
November 30, 2005
LGF’s Foul Ball
Little Green Footballs scores more editorial touchdowns than The New York Times, but it recently dropped the ball. In Nov. 18 post, a Duke University professor for "demonstrating once again that special moral obtuseness that marks so many of America’s college professors." What was the professor’s offense? Praising bin Laden’s prose style in Arabic. (Prof. Bruce Lawerence reads Arabic and recently translated a collection of bin Laden’s speeches and recordings.) So how did LGF step out of bounds? It turns that Prof. Lawerence’s remarks, printed in a student newspaper (!), were taken out of context. In a recent radio interview I read from LGF’s post and questioned Lawerence about his praise of bin Laden’s prose style. He pointed that Che Guevara and other human monsters can speak beautifully, while doing evil. He made it quite clear that he is not pro-bin Laden, referring to him as "evil" and his message as "poison" among other things. The professor’s anti-bin Laden statements seemed genuine, not a mere rhetorical flourishes. And, while Lawerence is a man of the left, he is an unusual one: he repeatedly described himself as a "24-7 Christian," later adding that he an ordained minister who reveres the orthodox 1928 Book of Common Prayer. LGF could have done better...
Posted by Richard Miniter at 08:48 AM
July 27, 2005
The Master of Terrorism
Hassan al-Turabi, the former speaker of the Sudanese parliament—the architecture of which is nearly identical to the Israeli Knesset (I guess the architect was fairly confident that the two nations' officials would never visit each other)—and later enemy of government and inciter-in-chief of the butchers of Darfur, is now hailed as "the pope of terrorism" in the Weekly Standard.
Most readers of this site will know most of the facts in this piece, but there are few noteworthy surprises: the connections between Saddam Hussein and the radical Islamist thinker and that the express purpose of the infamous Popular and Islamic Conferences in Khartoum—which included every murder-minded Muslim terror group in the world and every major Arab intelligence service—was to weld together the Islamists and the seemingly secular Arab Nationalists. This pokes a pretty big hole in the idea that Salafis like Osama bin Laden and secular socialists like Saddam Hussein would never form alliances of convenience. I have never met Turabi on my various visits to Sudan (though I tried to see him when he was under house arrest), but I did talk to a number of his friends and former associates. Gutbi, who when I met him in 2002 was the head of Sudan's intelligence services, said that Turabi was bored of bin Laden because he could only talk about two subjects, jihad and horses. So Turabi's extensive help for bin Laden was nothing personal, just business. For whatever that it worth. Gutbi did not mention what Turabi thought of Iraq, but he personally hated it. He and his wife were followed constantly by the secret police and he, as Sudan's ambassador, was forbidden to leave Baghdad. Turabi's son used to go to horse races with bin Laden, who plugged his ears when the horns sounded because music is "un-Islamic." Neither Turabi nor his son covered their ears. Sure, they were radicals who believed that killing infidels just gives them another chance to convert to Allah, but sometimes a horse race is just a horse race. Other friends of Turabi fill in other details. The onetime Peace and Development Minister (the man in charge of the two things that Sudan doesn't have much of) is a charming man named Ghazi. He points out that Turabi changed after a sudden beating in a Canadian airport; after that, his thoughts were more erratic and less connected. This was the reason that Turabi was pushed out of power in 1996; he could no longer be trusted to follow government policy and was endlessly scheming against his onetime student, President Bashir. (Anyway, any serious consideration of Turabi needs to take account of this beating and of the feminist views of his wife). Another friend of Turabi's said that he is more fond of revolution than rule; that is why he fomented the crisis in Darfur that has killed and displaced millions. The role of Turabi and perhaps al Qaeda in causing the misery in Darfur is also largely unexplored. Thomas Joscelyn's piece in the Standard would have been improved if he offered a fuller picture of the master of terrorism.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 10:45 PM
June 13, 2005
One more piles on
Kenneth Timmerman, a former Reader's Digest writer who warned readers about the threat from bin Laden in July 1998 entitled "This man wants you dead," has a new book that also claims that bin Laden is in Iran. As with Rep. Weldon, I believe Timmerman's source is a man I interviewed in 2004 for my book Shadow War. The case that bin Laden is in Iran is far from certain, but it would explain why the archterrorist has not been captured.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 02:24 PM
What took them so long?
A senior Bush Administration official publicly acknowledged that there is an emerging minority view in the intelligence community that bin Laden is in Iran. Of course, readers of Shadow War were already ahead of the curve on that one.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 10:16 AM
May 25, 2005
In the Mail
My friend, in the Washington sense of the word, Joel Rosenberg, has sent along an advance copy of his latest thriller, The Ezekiel Option. I have not read it yet, but I know that Joel's bestseller The Last Jihad was a real page-turner. It appears in book stores in July 2005.
Also in the mail, Gary C. Schroen's First In: An Insider's account of how the CIA spearheaded the war on terror in Afghanistan. Schroen ran Operation Jawbreaker, which hunted bin Laden in the days after 9-11. The pictures alone should answer the question, "why haven't we caught bin Laden yet." I actually looking forward to reading Schroen's book, which one CIA source tells me in "the most detailed description of a field operation written by a participant
that" he has ever seen. While the source doesn't like Schroen, he says there are a lot of "eye-popping details" that insiders are surprised to see. I'll read it and tell you what I think. Sometimes these intel guys get worked up over things that seem very small, yet other times...
Posted by Richard Miniter at 08:31 AM
May 15, 2005
I bet they know
In an article in Pakistan's Daily Times, several military officials admit that the political risks of arresting bin Laden in Pakistan are huge. The press and other observers too easily forget that radical Islamic parties claim up to 40 percent of the vote in local Pakistani elections and that bin Laden is indeed a popular figure there.
There is also a hint that the feared Inter-Services Institute, Pakistan's CIA, knows where bin Laden is. Unlike the Israelis, it does seem quite likely that Pakistani intelligence knows where he is or could find out if they really wanted to know. It was the ISI that helped create the Taliban, al Qaeda's strongest ally, and it was the ISI that asked U.S. forces to stop shelling Kunduz, Afghanistan, where some 2000 al Qaeda and Taliban fighters here holed up in the Fall of 2001, so that it could bring in two fixed-wing aircraft to fly out its intelligence officers. Must have been quite a few embedded with the enemy... Add to that that nearly every high-level al Qaeda target captured was seized in Pakistan as well as more than 700 al Qaeda footsoldiers, more than any other single nation on Earth (including Iraq and Afghanistan).
Posted by Richard Miniter at 08:14 AM
Where is bin Laden?
This article, in The Jerusalem Post, suggests that some Israeli officials believe they know where the archterrorist is hiding. I don't believe it, but it is, as the British Foreign Office used to say, "interesting if true."
Posted by Richard Miniter at 06:54 AM
March 28, 2005
Miniter on TV
I will appear on Fox & Friends at 8:50 AM Tuesday morning, to discuss this front-page story in the New York Sun.
Posted by Richard Miniter at 11:26 PM