Officials Try to Explain Lapses to 9/11 Panel

Finding fault with both the Clinton and Bush administrations, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks released findings Tuesday that cited years of diplomatic failures, bureaucratic inertia and meager military responses as factors that contributed to the emergence of Al Qaeda as the nation’s most serious security threat.

The commission released its preliminary findings during a day of politically charged hearings in which top national security officials from the Bush and Clinton White Houses took turns defending their own performance and decrying the counterterrorism record of the other.

Against the backdrop of a presidential election that could turn on voters’ views of how the war on terrorism should be prosecuted, Bush officials in particular sought to deflect fresh criticism that the administration ignored Al Qaeda after taking office in 2001 and was too eager to turn its attention to Iraq, even after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said terrorism was a top priority of President Bush’s from the day he took office, and that the administration took eight months to put together a counterterrorism plan because it had to overhaul a Clinton administration approach Powell described as inadequate.

“We wanted the new policy to go well beyond tit-for-tat retaliation,” Powell said. “We felt that lethal strikes that largely missed the terrorists if you don’t have adequate targeting information, such as the cruise missile strikes in 1998, led Al Qaeda to believe we lacked resolve. We wanted to move beyond the rollback policy of containment, criminal prosecution and limited retaliation for specific terrorist attacks. We wanted to destroy Al Qaeda.”

Despite Powell’s barbed remarks, the findings of the commission reinforced criticism that the Bush administration spent much of its first year in office holding meetings on counterterrorism, but taking no significant action.

The commission’s report lists a series of meetings of deputies in the Bush administration as they sought to work out a new counterterrorism strategy.

The result was a three-phase plan that called for overthrowing the Taliban, a step the Clinton White House never embraced. But the Bush plan envisioned an ouster of the Taliban only if a new series of diplomatic efforts failed -- efforts comparable to those pursued by the Clinton administration.

The Bush plan was to unfold over three years, and was agreed upon by deputy national security officials exactly one day before the Sept. 11 attacks. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Powell both said the plan laid the groundwork for the successful invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Tuesday’s session marked the first time that top Cabinet secretaries from the two administrations testified in one setting about their counterterrorism efforts. In addition to Powell and Rumsfeld, the panel also heard from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen.

The 10-member commission has conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed thousands of documents, and is expected to produce its final report in July. Tuesday’s hearing was more partisan in tone than previous sessions, with members posing pointed questions about Iraq and other politically sensitive topics. The interim reports were prepared by commission staff, leaving policy recommendations and judgments to the five Democrats and five Republicans on the panel.

The hearing comes as the Bush administration struggles to fend off fierce criticism from a former top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, who has written a book accusing Bush of ignoring the Al Qaeda threat until it was too late.

In its report, the commission notes that Clarke “pushed urgently” for immediate steps against Al Qaeda, including an infusion of U.S. military assistance to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, which was fighting a civil war with the Taliban. But Clarke’s recommendations were not carried out before the attacks, the report said.

Bush offered his first public response to Clarke’s criticism in remarks to reporters after a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. “Had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted,” he said. “We have been chasing down Al Qaeda ever since the attacks. We’ve captured or killed two-thirds of their known leaders. And we’re still pursuing them.”

Clarke also has said the invasion of Iraq undermined the war on terrorism by diverting intelligence and other resources from Al Qaeda, and by inflaming anti-American sentiment in the Arab world.

Albright echoed those criticisms in her testimony, saying “major components of America’s foreign policy are either opposed or misunderstood by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, and by unprecedented numbers of Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans and Africans.” The resulting “unpopularity has handed [Osama] bin Laden a gift that he has eagerly exploited,” Albright said.

But there was ample criticism for both Clinton and Bush officials in commission findings that portrayed consecutive administrations struggling to find the will or way to confront Al Qaeda.

The commission describes repeated efforts by the Clinton administration to persuade Saudi Arabia to put pressure on the Taliban to expel Bin Laden and shut down the terrorist camps in Afghanistan.

At one point, the Saudis extracted a promise from Taliban leader Mullah Omar that Bin Laden would be handed over. But after a “climactic meeting” between Omar and Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal in September 1998, Omar reneged on his promise, “lost his temper and denounced the Saudi government.”

The United States also leaned on two Pakistani regimes to clamp down on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But as a commission official said, the United States could never find enough “carrots or sticks” to get a regime that had deep ties to the Taliban to turn on the Islamic extremist government.

Meanwhile, Clinton and his senior counterterrorism advisors repeatedly pressed for new military options for catching Bin Laden, rooting out terrorist camps, and, if necessary, toppling the Taliban.

But the plans were beaten back by an array of forces. Policymakers doubted they could win congressional or public support for a military intervention in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence agencies consistently failed to come up with “actionable intelligence” telling where Bin Laden would be and when. And top military officials saw little chance that inserting U.S. forces could succeed.

Albright indicated she was frustrated that the military often seemed reluctant to take risks. But in his testimony, Cohen rejected criticism, and said such plans were simply unfeasible.

“We have 13,500 troops in Afghanistan right now, and we can’t find Bin Laden today,” Cohen said. “The notion that you’re going to put a small unit or a large unit into Afghanistan and track down Bin Laden, I think, is folly.”

The United States was left only with the option of launching cruise missiles from submarines off the coast of Pakistan in the Arabian Sea. But even that option was only used once, in August 1998, in retaliation for the Al Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa.

The commission described three instances in which U.S. intelligence had information on Bin Laden’s location, but Clinton officials decided against launching missiles, usually because of doubts about the accuracy of the information and concerns about civilian casualties.

In December 1998, Bin Laden was reportedly in Kandahar, Afghanistan. But, as Clarke told the commission, there was just “50% confidence” in the intelligence and concern that the strikes could lead to as many as 300 casualties.

Two months later, in February 1999, the United States got intelligence that Bin Laden was visiting a hunting camp in the Afghan desert. Officials thought they might finally have a chance to target Bin Laden in a remote area removed from civilians.

But this time the White House confronted another problem: Aerial surveillance spotted an official United Arab Emirates jet at the camp, and it became clear that senior UAE officials were there hunting and apparently meeting with Bin Laden. “Policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike might kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials,” the commission’s report said.

A commission official said the panel was still investigating why senior officials from the UAE, considered an American ally, were meeting with Bin Laden.

In one passage, the commission’s report says the United States uncovered evidence that the Taliban “was trying to extort cash from Saudi Arabia and the UAE with various threats and that these blackmail efforts may have paid off.” Commission officials declined to elaborate on the nature of those threats.

The final chance to target Bin Laden came in May 1999, when “sources” -- an apparent reference to Afghans working as CIA informants -- provided intelligence on Bin Laden’s location in Kandahar over five nights. But again, military commanders deemed the intelligence suspect, and didn’t pull the trigger.

The commission is scheduled to hold a second day of hearings today, with testimony from CIA Director George J. Tenet and former counterterrorism advisor Clarke. Hearings also are planned for April and May. Several commissioners repeated complaints Tuesday that national security advisor Condoleezza Rice had refused to testify before the panel.