If we're serious about avoiding past mistakes and improving national security, we can't duck some serious questions about Mr. Clinton's presidency.
Osama bin Laden already had the blood of Americans on his hands before Sept. 11. He was reportedly behind the World Trade Center bombing that killed six; the killing of 19 soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; the bombings of the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed 226 people, including 12 Americans; and the attack on the USS Cole at Aden, Yemen, killing 17 seamen.
Mr. Clinton and his former national security adviser, Sandy Berger, said after Sept. 11 that they had come within an hour of killing bin Laden when they launched cruise missiles against his camps in 1998. (Mr. Clinton also ordered the destruction of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.) Many saw this attack as a diversion from domestic embarrassments, because it took place only three days after his grand jury testimony in the Paula Jones case.
On Sept. 24, National Review Online published a report by Byron York that added considerable weight to this last charge.Mr. York spoke recently to retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been U.S. commander in the region. Although he supported the cruise missile attack, the general revealed it was a "million-to-one-shot." "There was a possibility [bin Laden] could have been there. . . . My intelligence people did not put a lot of faith in that."
His recollection is a far cry from the version of Messrs. Clinton and Berger. Which is accurate?
On Sept. 13, the Associated Press disclosed that "in the waning days of the Clinton presidency, senior officials received specific intelligence about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and weighed a military plan to strike the suspected terrorist mastermind's location. The administration opted against an attack." The possible attack was discussed at a meeting last December, which was prompted by "eyes-only intelligence" about bin Laden's location.
A military strike option was presented at the meeting. There was debate about whether the intelligence was reliable. In the end, the president decided against it.
The day after AP's story, Hillary Clinton gave a different explanation of events to CNN. She said that in the last days of her husband's administration, he planned to kill bin Laden, but that his location couldn't be pinpointed: "It was human assets, that is, people on the ground, who provided the information. My memory is that those assets proved unreliable and were not able to form the basis of the plan that we were considering launching."
Exactly what "eyes-on intelligence" was provided to Mr. Clinton in December? And just how reliable did the information have to be to merit a military strike? When Mr. Clinton ordered an attack on bin Laden's camps in August 1998, Gen. Zinni said that it was a "million-to-one shot."
A partial answer can be found in a Sept. 27 report by Jane's Intelligence Digest, whose sources "suggested that previous plans to capture or kill [bin Laden], which were supported by Moscow, had been shelved by the previous U.S. administration on the grounds that they might end in humiliating failure and loss of U.S. service personnel."
As a Jane's source put it: "Before the latest catastrophe there was a distinct lack of political will to resolve the bin Laden problem and this had a negative impact on wider intelligence operations."Jane's claimed that the fundamental failure to deal with al Qaeda was due "to a political reluctance to take decisive action during the Clinton era, mainly because of a fear that it might derail the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This was "combined with a general complacency in Washington towards warnings that the U.S. itself (as opposed to U.S. facilities and personnel abroad) might be targeted."
President Bush is now leading a world-wide war against terrorism, focused presently on bin Laden, al Qaeda, and their Taliban sponsors. It has been widely noted that the U.S. is handicapped in this war by a lack of good "Humint"--human intelligence--about the terrorists. Here again the Clinton administration is culpable.
In 1995 CIA Director John Deutsch imposed complex guidelines that made it more difficult to recruit informants who had committed human-rights violations. Therefore, while the Justice Department has been able to use former mobsters to get mobsters (e.g. Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, who killed 19, was the government's key witness against John Gotti), the CIA has been discouraged from recruiting former terrorists to get terrorists. This has made infiltrating groups like al Qaeda virtually impossible.
We have no choice but to address the policies and decisions, made at the very highest level of our government, which helped bring us to this point. To do otherwise is to be irresponsible and unprepared in the face of a ruthless enemy, whose objective is to kill many more Americans
