9/11 Panel Chronicles Bush and Clinton Failures...

[yoda]

You can pin the blame on BOTH CLINTON AND BUSH...


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... _2004jul22

The U.S. government was utterly unprepared on Sept. 11, 2001, to protect the American people from al Qaeda terrorists, who outwitted and outmaneuvered a bureaucracy that had never seriously addressed them as a threat and had never fathomed the possibility of such a calamitous assault on U.S. soil, according to a searing account of failures and missteps released yesterday.

The 567-page final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks chronicles in exhaustive detail the sporadic and failed attempts of the CIA (news - web sites), the FBI (news - web sites) and other intelligence agencies to track some of the Sept. 11 plotters and their associates. Although it stops short of blaming President Bush (news - web sites) or former president Bill Clinton (news - web sites) for the attacks, the document concludes that both administrations were lackluster in their efforts to combat Islamic terrorism and derides congressional oversight of the issue as "dysfunctional."

Many of the vulnerabilities and missed chances outlined revolved around two of the leading Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, who evaded serious detection by the CIA and, later, the FBI, despite numerous opportunities. Although the mistakes by the CIA, in particular, have been documented previously in the case of these two hijackers, the commission report provides a definitive and damning look at the details.

From the emergence of Alhazmi and Almihdhar at an al Qaeda operations meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000, the CIA repeatedly lost track of the pair and failed to properly follow up on their whereabouts, the report said. And once the CIA finally placed their names on a terrorist watch list in August 2001, the two had already entered the United States and the FBI was laggard in its efforts to find them, according to the commission account.

The report also chronicles the missteps of the FBI in its handling of Zacarias Moussaoui, whose arrest in August 2001 was suspicious enough that the then-director of the CIA, George J. Tenet, was briefed. Yet senior FBI managers never received word of the case and headquarters officials wrongly believed they could not gain a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings. The commission concluded that Moussaoui was probably being prepared as a replacement Sept. 11 pilot.

Among the many other historical topics addressed by the commission:

• The report concludes that the stated intent of the Clinton administration to kill Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) "was never well communicated or understood within the CIA."

Clinton and his national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger told the commission that by 1999, the president "wanted him dead." Tenet, however, testified that he believed the CIA was authorized to kill bin Laden only if force became necessary in an attempt to capture him.

A former chief of the unit pursuing bin Laden said that was a crucial difference. "We always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him," the former unit chief said.

• Bush and Clinton, both interviewed by the commission, disagreed in their recollection of a two-hour meeting on national security and foreign policy issues in December 2000. Clinton recalls telling Bush that "by far your biggest threat is Bin Ladin and the al Qaeda" and that he regretted not capturing or killing the al Qaeda leader.

Bush told the commission "that he felt sure President Clinton (news - web sites) had mentioned terrorism, but did not remember much being said about al Qaeda." Bush said Clinton emphasized other issues, such as North Korea (news - web sites) and the Israeli peace process.

• In a long footnote, the 10 commissioners upbraid Attorney General John D. Ashcroft for claiming during commission testimony that a 1995 memo had laid the foundation for a legal wall between intelligence and criminal investigations that hampered counterterrorism. The memo's author, former deputy attorney general Jamie S. Gorelick, is a Democratic member of the commission.

Ashcroft's testimony "does not fairly or accurately reflect the significance of the 1995 documents" and the memo had no bearing on key decisions made in the summer of 2001 related to the Sept. 11 plot, the report said.

The panel did not draw conclusions about another dispute involving Ashcroft, who denied telling former acting FBI director Thomas J. Pickard in the summer of 2001 that he did not want to hear about terrorist threats. The panel identifies additional witnesses who support Pickard's account, but Ashcroft aides have disputed it.

• The panel sharply criticized both the Bush and Clinton administrations for failing to respond to the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole (news - web sites) in Yemen that killed 17.

• The commission also concluded that the failed airstrikes in 1998 against bin Laden camps in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and an alleged chemical weapons plant in Sudan may have made the Clinton administration overly wary of using military force against al Qaeda. The panel noted allegations by some Republicans that Clinton may have ordered the strikes to distract attention from the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, echoing the plot of the 1997 movie "Wag the Dog." "The failure of the strikes, the 'wag the dog' slur, the intense partisanship of the period and the nature of the al Shifa evidence, likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against Bin Ladin."