I have little to say about the whole controversy, except this: Clinton was right.
Hirsch explains:
[W]hen Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace gently asked the former president “why didn’t you do more” to put Al Qaeda “out of business,” he sparked an unexpected blast. Clinton, who had granted Wallace an interview at his signature Global Initiative Forum in New York last week, accused the host of being a conservative hit man. The former president said his anti-bin Laden efforts had far exceeded those of the Bush administration before 9/11. “At least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now,” Clinton said, thrusting his face into the mild-mannered Wallace’s. “They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try.”
For the record, that is mostly true. Clinton and his national security advisor, Sandy Berger, who is ridiculed in the ABC mini-series for allegedly shrinking from efforts to assassinate bin Laden, regularly discussed the Al Qaeda problem and repeatedly pressed the U.S. military for more options against bin Laden. It was mainly the military, which feared another Desert One debacle, when eight U.S. commandoes died in a botched effort to rescue the American hostages in Tehran, that shrank from taking more aggressive action than cruise missile strikes. “No operation that was ever recommended to the president was ever turned down,” says Jim Steinberg, Berger’s former deputy and now dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.
And for the record, the Bush administration barely paid attention to bin Laden before 9/11, as documented by the 9/11 Commission and other inquiries. On Jan. 26, 2001—six days after Bush’s inauguration—an FBI report for the first time conclusively tied the USS Cole bombing in Yemen to Al Qaeda. A few weeks later, CIA Director George Tenet raised the stakes, calling bin Laden’s global terror network "the most immediate and serious threat" to U.S. national security. Yet there was no retaliation for the Cole or any other Al Qaeda attack for eight months—the “principals” did not even hold a meeting on how to deal with the terrorist group—despite Tenet’s increasingly urgent warnings about an Al Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001. Even today, the Bush administration is spending more time, resources and energy on supposed state sponsors of terror, like Iraq, than on the terrorists themselves.
Rice, by the way, is lying here when she says:
"What we did in the [first] eight months [of the Bush Administration] was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years"
No, dear. On August 6, 2001, Bush received this Presidential Daily Briefing [PDF format]. The memo specifically warns:
- a large attack was planned
- the attack would be on United States soil
- target cities of attacks included New York City and Washington, D.C.
- the World Trade Center bombing was explicitly mentioned
- hijacked plane missions were anticipated
- people living in, or traveling to, the United States were involved
- recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York by al Qaeda
Something was in the wind, and the President was warned. What did you do, Condi? Nothing. And why? Let’s see what you told Congress:
"It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States."
No new threat information? A "historical" document? It talks about "recent" surveillance of building in New York as well as "anticipated" hijackings of planes.
Now, Condi — obviously you might not have been able to know precisely when and where the 9/11 events would take place. But you did nothing in response to this memo — you didn’t even have a meeting (whereas Clinton held a meeting on Al Qaeda every week of his presidency, whether or not there was new information or not).
So to say that the Bush Administraion was "just as aggressive" as Clinton is a flat-out, bald-faced lie.
UPDATE: Wow. This TIME story from 2002 is worth a re-read. The title alone, which refers to the Clinton Administration, says it all — "They Had A Plan":
Berger attended only one of the briefings–the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I’m coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject."
The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House’s point man on terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive–just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000–an attack that left 17 Americans dead–he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing [the Bush Administration] a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn’t going to happen." Now it was up to Rice’s team to consider what Clarke had put together.
Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke’s materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke’s proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble–Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen–would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we’ve done since 9/11."
And that’s the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11–that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know–the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries–were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn’t averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington’s national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.
MORE OF THE SAME FROM THINK PROGRESS:
In her interview with the New York Post, Condoleezza Rice claims that the Clinton Administration did not develop a strategy to fight al Qaeda:
The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton’s claim that he “left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy” for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.
“We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” Rice responded during the hourlong session.
Here’s what the 9/11 Commission Report has to say about it:
As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA’s new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. Clarke and his staff proposed a goal to “roll back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years …[including] covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States.” [p. 197]
Clarke, who also worked for the Bush administration, wrote Condoleezza Rice a memo as soon as the Bush administration took office, stating, “[W]e urgently need…a Principals level review of the al Qida network.” His request was denied.
YET EVEN MORE:
[Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft] also sent a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities. Counter-terrorism was not on the list. He turned down an FBI request for hundreds more agents to be assigned to tracking terrorist threats.
***
According to yesterday’s edition of Newsweek, he had a showdown on counter-terrorism with the outgoing FBI director, Louis Freeh, in the spring of last year in Quantico, Virginia, at an annual meeting of special agents.
People at the meeting said the two disagreed fundamentally on their priorities.
Mr Ashcroft’s agenda comprised "basically violent crime and drugs" and when Mr Freeh began to talk about his concern about the terrorist threat facing the country, "Ashcroft didn’t want to hear about it".