Jan. 9, 2002 | To raise the question of former President Bill Clinton's record on terrorism in the wake of Sept. 11 is to invite a chorus of disapproval. For bringing the subject up, you will be accused of pathological "Clinton hatred," a vendetta, and so on and so forth. Whatever. Let's just go to the tape, shall we? What follows is a chronology of Bill Clinton's response to terrorism, as reported and compiled by major news organizations, in particular the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Sunday Times and the New Yorker. I cite nothing here that isn't already in the public record. Any defense of Clinton has to deal with these facts. So deal with them.
Clinton got his warning about Islamist terrorism very early on. Almost as soon as he got into office, terrorists struck at the World Trade Center in New York. Six people were killed and hundreds injured. Although the investigation found links to Osama bin Laden and a burgeoning network of Islamist terrorists, no commensurate response from the United States was unearthed by any of the major newspapers investigating the record. Was the danger conveyed to the president? "Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Leon Panetta told the New York Times. The president preferred to focus on the economy. "In retrospect, the wake-up call should have been the 1993 World Trade Center bombing," Michael Sheehan, counter-terrorism coordinator at the Clinton State Department, conceded to the New York Times. Some immigration laws were tightened marginally. But that was it. Why wasn't the threat taken more seriously? According to George Stephanopoulos, the White House ignored the implications of the first WTC attack because "it wasn't a successful bombing." Clinton never even paid a visit to the site.
If six dead and hundreds more injured were not enough to galvanize the new commander in chief, neither was the murder of 18 American soldiers in Somalia shortly afterward. The State Department confirmed that bin Laden had helped train the terrorists who killed these soldiers and dragged the body of one through the streets of Mogadishu. Clinton did nothing to retaliate after the incident, blamed Gen. Colin Powell privately for the mess and, indeed, according to administration sources, learned from the fracas only the importance of staying out of dangerous foreign entanglements. For his part, bin Laden learned that the United States was not serious about countering the public murder of its own soldiers abroad or civilians at home.
By the end of Clinton's first term, the government began to stir. The CIA finally set up a special unit to monitor al-Qaida. In the years since 1993, the network had gained traction and organization in its African client state of Sudan. Then the administration got an amazingly lucky break. The Sudanese government offered to hand over bin Laden to the United States, just as it had handed over Carlos the Jackal to the French in 1994. The Sudanese also offered to provide the United States with a massive intelligence file on al-Qaida's operations in Sudan and around the world. Astonishingly, the Clinton administration turned the offer down. They argued that there was no solid legal proof to indict bin Laden in the United States. This was despite the fact that internal government documents had fingered bin Laden for ties to the first WTC bombing, the murders in Mogadishu and the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen. For all this, the administration still viewed al-Qaida as a matter for domestic civil and criminal law enforcement. Instead of seizing the terrorist, the administration wanted Saudi Arabia or some other third party to seize him. The Saudis demurred. "In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia,'" a Sudanese negotiator told the Washington Post. "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.'" The administration didn't even use the negotiations with the Sudanese to disable bin Laden's financial assets in the Sudan. He was able to transfer them to his new base, where he used them essentially to buy the Taliban regime.
Within a month, al-Qaida struck again in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers with a 5,000-pound bomb. Even senior Clinton officials concede that allowing bin Laden to go free was a massive mistake. "Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference," a "U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counterterrorism," told the Washington Post last October. "We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11." Read that sentence again: We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11. That's from someone working in the Clinton administration.
