9/11 Panel Looks at Military

While missteps by the CIA and FBI have come under harsh public scrutiny by a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the independent panel is quietly amassing evidence of a decade of failures by a third institution: the Pentagon.

The nation’s military has so far largely escaped criticism for its counter-terrorism performance in the years leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

But sources familiar with the commission’s inner workings said the panel increasingly believes the Pentagon failed to adequately respond to the growing military threat of Al Qaeda. They said Pentagon ineffectiveness in both the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration was as much to blame for permitting the Sept. 11 attacks as inept law enforcement and intelligence efforts, a conclusion shared by many current and former U.S. officials and counter-terrorism experts.

When the commission releases its findings in late July, it is expected to conclude that both administrations failed on a wide array of military fronts, not just in the use of conventional force but in the sharing of intelligence and creation of special operations and technology to respond to the new threat posed by stateless terrorism.

Outright military action against terrorists would have to be ordered by the president. But critics fault military leaders for discouraging such actions and failing to present alternatives.

In private, the commission also is raising questions about the Defense Department’s apparent lack of readiness on Sept. 11 to protect Americans from a military-style attack on the homeland.

On that day, a hijacked commercial jetliner was able to crash into the Pentagon building, despite months of elevated indications of an Al Qaeda attack and long-standing criticism that the military lacked a domestic security plan, the sources said.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, senior Pentagon officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations have defended their counter-terrorism efforts, saying they were hamstrung by a lack of “actionable” intelligence from the CIA, indecision by political leaders in the White House and Congress and reluctance by policymakers to spend money and take risks associated with a military response to Al Qaeda.

Commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator and decorated Navy veteran, said he could not comment on unpublicized commission findings. But he confirmed that the investigation to date has raised serious concerns about the Pentagon’s pre-Sept. 11 counter-terrorism efforts, including its inability to carve out a substantial role for itself even after terrorists killed 36 military personnel in bombings of a military housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and a Navy warship, the Cole, in 2000.

“How come the Department of Defense didn’t have a primary role?” Kerrey asked in an interview Thursday. “I’m guessing they didn’t want it, that they said, ‘We don’t do terrorism.’ ”

Many of the Pentagon’s shortcomings must be viewed as part of a larger, collective failure of both administrations to treat Al Qaeda as a deadly army that had declared war on the United States, as opposed to a band of criminals requiring court prosecution, said Ivo H. Daalder, a counter-terrorism and military expert on Clinton’s National Security Council.

But, Daalder said, “I think the military can do and should have done a lot more to deal with this threat. Not just going out and killing bad guys overseas, but also here at home.”

A commission on terrorism headed by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman proposed in early 2001 a host of counter-terrorism reforms for the military, including improvements in both its “expeditionary capabilities” to seek out and destroy nimble cells of international terrorists and in its strategy for countering a sudden military-style attack on U.S. soil.

But many of the reforms were never implemented, particularly those relating to gaps in homeland security, said Daalder, an adjunct member of the 2001 commission.

The U.S. government first asked the armed forces to develop capabilities for combating terrorism in the 1970s, but the Pentagon remained a bit player until the mid-1990s, according to a report by the staff of the 9/11 commission.

In June 1995, President Clinton issued a directive declaring that terrorism was no longer a law enforcement problem but a threat to national security requiring “all appropriate means to combat it.”

After terrorists bombed the Khobar Towers, the military apartment complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the military increased its efforts. But still, it focused mostly on defending U.S. interests overseas from attack.

The same year, an Al Qaeda operative named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl walked into a U.S. Embassy overseas and told authorities that his former boss, Osama bin Laden, was amassing a large army of trained recruits and already waging war against the United States.

The 9/11 commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, has recently concluded that Bin Laden’s military “war” against the United States began as early as 1993, when he assisted guerrillas in Somalia who shot down U.S. Black Hawk helicopters, killing 18 soldiers in a firefight that lasted several days.

In May 1996, Bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan and reestablished his training camps on a larger scale. That August, the Saudi-born millionaire also issued a public declaration of jihad, urging all Muslims to oust American troops from Saudi Arabia.

Soon, U.S. intelligence officials began to hear descriptions of Al Qaeda as an “Islamic army” with a worldwide network of soldiers led by Bin Laden and various lieutenants using a military-style command-and-control structure.

The camps, easily observable by U.S. satellites, ultimately trained as many as 120,000 fighters in the use of conventional weapons and guerrilla warfare techniques. Al Qaeda also was trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

In 1997, Bin Laden’s protector, Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Taliban regime, was refusing U.S. officials access to the camps. By the spring of 1998, Saudi authorities thwarted an Al Qaeda plot to launch shoulder-fired missiles at U.S. troops in the Gulf kingdom.

Still, the Pentagon’s major role in fighting Al Qaeda was in protecting troops and transporting terrorists caught by the CIA and FBI, the 9/11 commission investigators say.

Later in 1998, terrorists detonated truck bombs at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing at least 224 people, including 12 Americans. Suspecting Al Qaeda, Clinton ordered military strikes against Bin Laden and his organization.

The Aug. 20 missile attacks didn’t kill any senior Al Qaeda members, and Clinton sought more military action. That never happened, in part because the CIA said it did not have enough good intelligence to guarantee that Bin Laden would be killed.

One Pentagon official noted the growing threat of international terrorism but complained, “We have not fundamentally altered our philosophy or our approach ... nor, unfortunately, [do] we have a plan,” according to the 9/11 commission.

Clinton wanted the military to consider other options besides cruise missiles and manned aircraft strikes, including the possible use of ground forces that could kill or capture Bin Laden, or take out the camps and Al Qaeda’s infrastructure.

Soon, two separate military proposals were initiated, but both got bogged down. Senior Pentagon officials have told the 9/11 commission staff that the military was often frustrated by the overly simplistic demands of civilian policymakers.

“For their part, White House officials were often frustrated by what they saw as military unwillingness to tackle the counter-terrorism problem,” the commission report concludes.

One of the plans was from Clinton’s national coordinator for counter-terrorism, Richard Clarke, and known as “Delenda,” from the Latin “to destroy.” That plan called for dismantling the terrorist network through regular strikes against its camps and other targets. Top Pentagon officials dismissed it, saying the training camps were worthless targets for expensive missiles, the report said.

Clinton then focused on killing Bin Laden and ordered attack submarines off the coast of Pakistan on standby to fire more missiles, but his advisors felt they never had a clear shot. Also, senior Clinton aides worried that another unsuccessful missile strike would only increase Bin Laden’s stature.

Meanwhile, a second plan within the Pentagon was rejected by military leaders who decided it was “too aggressive,” the Sept. 11 report said.

The Al Qaeda camps remained in place, and fledgling efforts to deploy special forces against the terror network elsewhere went nowhere, mostly because of conflicts between two Pentagon factions.

The CIA and Pentagon also sparred over who would lead efforts to use unmanned drones over Afghanistan. And much of the intelligence collected by the Defense Department’s military branches was never disseminated to the CIA, a joint congressional inquiry found last year.

At home, the military’s role continued to be one of supporting state and local authorities in dealing with the consequences of a terrorist attack, and providing security at special events like the Olympics.

During the transition, Bush administration officials began to develop new policies toward Al Qaeda. But like their predecessors, they too didn’t retaliate for the Cole bombing, saying they lacked definitive proof Al Qaeda leaders were personally involved.

Clarke continued to push his plan, and efforts to arm unmanned drones with missiles were accelerated.

“But there is no evidence of new work on military capabilities or plans against this enemy before Sept. 11,” the commission report concludes.

Bush administration officials also didn’t deploy the military against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or cells elsewhere, saying they were waiting to formulate a more comprehensive strategy rather than “swatting flies.”

The commission has concluded that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his team appeared to have given little thought to Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Pentagon’s outgoing assistant secretary for counter-terrorism never briefed Rumsfeld, and his position was left open during the entire seven months preceding the attacks, the commission report said.

The Pentagon’s lower-level counter-terrorism officials “told us that they thought the new team was focused on other issues and was not especially interested in their counter-terrorism agenda,” it concluded.

Rumsfeld “said that DOD, before 9/11, was not organized or trained adequately to deal with asymmetric threats” like Al Qaeda, the report said.

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld told the commission staff, “He did not recall any particular counter-terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11, other than the development of the Predator unmanned aircraft system for possible use against Bin Laden.”

Clarke’s plan ultimately formed the framework of the Al Qaeda strategy that the Bush administration implemented after the Sept. 11 attacks.