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Clarke: Clinton Worried about al-Qaida
The Associated Press
Thursday 18 November 2004
Washington - The Clinton administration was deeply concerned in 2000 that al-Qaida sleeper cells existed in North America and considered ways to move against them, according to newly released testimony.
"There were two simultaneous plots, one in Jordan and one in the United States, and they both involved American citizens," Bush administration critic Richard Clarke testified in June 2002 before a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The plots were of high enough interest that Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, requested a briefing.
"The conclusion was that we should ... beef up the counterterrorism task force around the country," said Clarke, whose testimony about the briefing of Shelby in February 2000 was partially blacked out because of national security concerns.
The release of Clarke's 2002 testimony stems from Republican attempts to undermine his criticism of the Bush administration.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Clarke's recently declassified testimony from 2002 is effusive in its praise of the Bush administration's efforts targeting al-Qaida before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The declassified version neither criticizes nor strongly praises the Bush administration. It focuses instead primarily on the Clinton administration.
"I believed it was important to recognize that Mr. Clarke's character was unfairly attacked for political purposes," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee to have the testimony released. "A detailed review shows that his testimony is not inconsistent with his testimony before the 9/11 Commission."
In his 2002 testimony, Clarke did defend the Bush administration's delay in acting on two CIA memoranda aimed at al-Qaida and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan.
He said the two documents drafted in late 2000 were to be finalized as part of a plan to finance a full-bore campaign to destroy al-Qaida. The president signed the documents six days after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"What had not been determined in early September of 2001 was how much money to give to the implementation ... and where that money would come from and in what fiscal year," Clarke said.
Clarke testified:
The intelligence in 2000 about the two plots "was an eye-opening thing for those of us informed and we began to think that just because you are an American citizen doesn't mean you shouldn't be subject to some scrutiny if you show up having connections to these people."
In the Clinton years, "there were people in the administration who were very seized with this issue, beginning with the president. ... It is very rare in my experience when the president of the United States picks an issue after his administration has begun, because the world has changed, and says, this is a priority, guys. ... If 9/11 hadn't happened, I think historians could go back and look at what the Clinton administration did ... and say, 'boy, were those guys overreacting."' Clarke's qualified praise for the Clinton administration mirrors his more recent testimony to the Sept. 11 panel and the account he gave in his book,
"Against All Enemies."
Other governments helped break up terrorist cells in 20 to 25 countries during the Clinton administration. "I would say that hundreds of people were arrested and detained either by a host country where cells were broken up."
One of Clarke's nightmares was that the CIA would have been ordered, over internal protests, to use an unmanned, armed aircraft known as a Predator to kill bin Laden. Clarke backed such an operation, but feared his opponents would say: "Look what Clarke did. He assassinated bin Laden and in retaliation for that they blew up the World Trade Center."
Government officials knew, beginning in 1997, that if they "decapitated al-Qaida, that it would grow other heads." Officials had to be ready to accept the negative criticism for killing bin Laden and then having al-Qaida terrorism continue.
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The Real Target?
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Wednesday 17 November 2004
New intelligence suggests that Al Qaeda was planning to attack London, not U.S. financial centers, in the run-up to the presidential election. A Kerry adviser blames politics for the timing of the government's summer alert.
The latest analysis of evidence that led to last summer¹s Code Orange alert suggests that Al Qaeda operatives were plotting a "big bomb" attack against a major landmark in Britain - but had no active plans for strikes in the United States, U.S. intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK.
The reassessment of Al Qaeda plans is the latest indication that much of the Bush administration¹s repeatedly voiced concerns about a pre-election attack inside the United States was based in part on an early misreading of crucial intelligence seized months ago in Pakistan.
The new view is that there was indeed an active Al Qaeda plot underway earlier this year - one that involved coded communications between high-level operatives in Pakistan and a British cell headed by a longtime associate of September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
The plot was aimed at setting off a large bomb at a prestigious economic or political target inside the United Kingdom - in effect to make a political statement against the British government. Among the targets considered in detail by the plotters, sources say, was London¹s Heathrow Airport, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.
But little, if any, any evidence has turned up suggesting that the plotters had taken any steps to attack U.S. financial targets as Bush administration officials had initially suggested. The failure to find any such evidence was a key reason the Department of Homeland Security last week relaxed the terror alert and downgraded the threat level from Orange (elevated) to Yellow (high) for financial buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Officials also said that another reason for downgrading the alert was that security at the buildings had been enhanced.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge first announced the financial-buildings alert on Sunday, Aug. 1, just three days after Sen. John Kerry gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention in Boston. Ridge¹s references to what he called "very specific" and "alarming" intelligence about Al Qaeda surveillance of such buildings as the World Bank in Washington and the New York Stock Exchange set off a new wave of fears about a possibly imminent terrorist attack and, in the view of some, had the effect of substantially suppressing Kerry¹s "bounce" in the polls.
The disclosure days later that most of the intelligence that Al Qaeda had been "casing" the buildings was several years old prompted some Democrats at the time to express concerns that the Bush administration was hyping terror threats to promote the president¹s campaign themes and frighten American voters. The Orange alert "was one of the most crimping factors that took away from whatever bounce from the convention there was," says Rand Beers, Kerry's chief foreign-policy adviser during the campaign and a former top counterterrorism aide in the Bush White House. In an interview this week, Beers also noted that there were legitimate "operational" reasons not to go public with the terror alert when Ridge announced it - namely, so that ongoing investigations into the intelligence about the financial-building surveillance could proceed in Pakistan and Great Britain. In light of that, Beers adds: "There is a plausible case to be made for political gain being the primary motivation" behind the timing of the announcement.
But Ridge, who in his original Aug. 1 announcement said the new intelligence about the financial buildings was "result of the president's leadership in the war against terror," strongly denied the allegation, saying repeatedly, "we don't do politics" in Homeland Security. Moreover, administration officials insisted throughout the campaign that the alert regarding the financial buildings was justified by the extraordinary discovery of a valuable computer archive in the possession of Mohammed Noor Khan, a suspected Al Qaeda communications operative who was arrested by Pakistani authorities. Khan is believed by Britain's M.I.-5 counterintelligence agency to have close connections at the highest levels of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden himself.
In the computer's hard drive, U.S. and Pakistani investigators discovered elaborate surveillance reports - including, NEWSWEEK has learned, original video footage - of prominent U.S. financial buildings. These included the New York Stock Exchange, Prudential Insurance headquarters in Newark, N.J., and World Bank and International Monetary Fund buildings only blocks from the White House in Washington.
Initial analysis by American investigators of the computer data suggested that most of the information in the surveillance reports was collected when suspected Al Qaeda operatives visited the U.S. - on the apparent instructions of leading Al Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - some time before the 9/11 attacks.
Intelligence officials said at the time that some of the surveillance reports on the U.S. financial targets may have been updated as recently as last winter and may have been accessed, or viewed by at least one computer user, as recently as last June or July. These hints that Al Qaeda operatives may have revisited the surveillance reports recently - coupled with intelligence from informants indicating Al Qaeda wanted to commit some kind of spectacular attack in the U.S. before the November election - were cited by administration officials to justify their decision to announce the public alert regarding a possible current threat to the financial buildings.
But subsequent analysis of the Pakistani computer evidence - and other evidence gathered in related raids in Britain - now puts much of that intelligence in a different light. While follow-up investigations have produced little corroboration for the idea that operatives in the United States were still working on an attack against the financial targets, the evidence gathered in Pakistan and Britain has shed important new clues to Al Qaeda¹s intentions.
Evidence gathered in the two countries included messages between suspects in Pakistan and Britain in an elaborate and initially opaque makeshift code. One break in the case came when a captured suspect agreed to help investigators decipher that code. They concluded that suspects in Britain - including a key figure who is believed to have been previously involved in the surveillance of the U.S. financial buildings - were working with a computer and communications expert in Pakistan on an active plot against targets in the London area.
According to a source familiar with evidence in the investigation, the alleged plotters' plans for possible action in Britain were very elaborate and flexible. Some of the alternative targets - including Heathrow Airport and Westminster Abbey - were considered in detail by the plotters, though the evidence suggests they never settled on their final objective.
After the arrest of Khan in Pakistan, British authorities rounded up several of his suspected contacts and cohorts, including the cell's leader, Dhiren Barot, a stocky self-described former instructor in jihadi camps in Afghanistan who used the alias Esa al-Hindi, and charged them with terrorist offenses - including one which related to possible use of weapons of mass destruction. Barot is referred to in last summer¹s report by the September 11 commission as an operative who was dispatched by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to New York to carry out surveillance on possible targets in this country. Britain's case against him and his alleged co-conspirators is still in pretrial stages, but lawyers for the suspects have proclaimed their innocence. British authorities have declined comment.
Some U.S. law-enforcement officers based in London, NEWSWEEK has learned, have become extremely concerned about evidence regarding possible active Al Qaeda plots to attack targets in Britain. According to a U.S. government official, fears of terror attacks have prompted FBI agents based in the U.S. Embassy in London to avoid traveling on London's popular underground railway (or tube) system, which is used daily by millions of commuters. While embassy-based officers of the U.S. Secret Service, Immigration and Customs bureaus and the CIA still are believed to use the underground to go about their business, FBI agents have been known to turn up late to cross town meetings because they insist on using taxis in London's traffic-choked business center.
The indications that plotters linked to a big election-season terror alert actually were actively planning to attack Britain rather than the United States is at least the second revelation which seems to partly undermine administration assertions that the U.S. homeland faced a heightened risk of attack during the presidential campaign.
Shortly before the election, administration officials quietly acknowledged that at least one informant who last winter had provided lurid intelligence about a possible pre-election attack in the U.S. had apparently fabricated his allegations. Yet given the importance that waging the war on terror had assumed during the presidential campaign, administration officials apparently were reluctant to announce a lowering of the Orange-alert threat until after the election. "They would have been a laughing stock if they lowered it before the election," says Beers. Still, many U.S. officials think the threat of possible Al Qaeda attacks remains relatively high - at least until after George W. Bush's second Inauguration in January.
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Clarke: C.I.A. Had Low-level Spies inside Al Qaeda
Reuters
Wednesday 17 November 2004
Washington - The CIA had some low-level spies inside al Qaeda in the three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, but none who could provide advance information about the group's movements, according to testimony released on Wednesday from a closed-door intelligence briefing in 2002.
The CIA did not have spies inside the network run by Osama bin Laden until 1999, but "none of them very high-level," Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official, told the joint congressional committee investigating Sept. 11.
In a rare move, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 103-page declassified transcript of the June 11, 2002, closed-door briefing on its Web site late on Wednesday. Most of the information had been made public during subsequent open hearings and in the final report of the joint inquiry.
The CIA "never had anyone in position to tell us what was going to happen in advance, or even where bin Laden was going to be in advance," Clarke told lawmakers.
On the three occasions when they thought they knew bin Laden's location, the CIA opposed taking military action, saying its sources were not good enough, he said.
"I think it is very difficult to place human sources high up in al Qaeda. I think it is possible to develop low-level sources. I think it is possible to develop technical means of collection that may provide us with information," Clarke said.
Several times in the 1990s the Pentagon was asked "snatch" terrorism suspects overseas, but the main message to the White House from uniformed military leadership was that they did not want to do this, Clarke said.
He said a leading al Qaeda operative had been pinpointed in Khartoum. "We knew what hotel he was in. We knew what room he was in the hotel."
The CIA did not have snatch capability and the military leadership told the White House that it would never work, while telling subordinates who had planned an operation that the White House had stopped it, Clarke said.
Asked how much information was obtained from hundreds of terrorism suspects held by other countries in the late 1990s, Clarke replied: "That depends on the country. If they were held in a West European democracy, we didn't get very much information."
He said the National Security Agency does not gather intelligence in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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