The Hindu : 9/11 panel chief sees `systematic failure' in dealing with threats

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Mar 26, 2004

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International

9/11 panel chief sees `systematic failure' in dealing with threats

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

Washington MARCH 25. The Chairman of the National Commission looking into the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and the terror threat perceptions prior to that day, has taken the position that there has been a "systematic failure" and that neither the Bush nor the Clinton administration had a "systematic approach" to dealing with terrorist threats.

"There was poor communication between law enforcement and intelligence and there was poor communication within the FBI", Thomas Kean remarked at a press briefing, pointing to what the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, said: "We raced from threat to threat to threat."

The assessment of Mr. Kean, a Republican, was straightforward: "There was not a system in place to close the seams. We did not develop a systematic approach".

For his part, the Democratic Co-Chair, Lee Hamilton, said the bi-partisan panel had learned a number of things from the two days of high profile hearings on Capitol Hill that saw several prominent personalities of the current and past administrations testify under oath. Among the things that the Commission `learned', Mr. Hamilton listed the reluctance of policy makers to use force; senior officials wanting to use force only when intelligence was good enough and actionable; and that the "clarity of a single policy choice for Pakistan — you are with us or against us in the war against terrorism — did not emerge until after 9/11."

One of the things stressed by Mr. Hamilton was that the departments of State and Defence in the Bush and Clinton administrations took many actions to address terrorism; but that the Commission is also "left with the impression that the national security priorities of both administrations were to a large extent focussed elsewhere."

On Wednesday, the Commission heard from Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar, whose service included the Clinton and the Bush administrations. Mr. Clarke set off an uproar last week in the political establishment when he publicly took the position that this Republican administration had not done enough to address the issue of terrorism in the first months after it took office in January 2001. Mr. Clarke asserted that in the aftermath of 9/11, senior Cabinet officials were desperately looking for Iraq and Saddam Hussein connections even as everything pointed to the Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Clarke told the panel that the Bush administration toned down the intensity on the Al-Qaeda and even rejected suggestions of retaliation for the bombing of the USS Cole, saying that the incident happened "on the Clinton administration's watch". The top counter-terrorism official maintained that the Clinton administration had "no higher priority" than taking on terrorists; but that the Bush administration, while keeping it as an "important issue", had not made it into an "urgent issue".

The White House, which has been leading the attack on Mr. Clarke over the last few days, kept up the pace yesterday as well with senior officials taking the unusual step of saying that it was Mr. Clarke who had showered praise on the anti-terrorism efforts of President, George W. Bush, in an anonymous briefing for the media one year after the attacks. "He needs to get his story straight", remarked the President's National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

One of the things that Mr. Clarke told panel members was that early on in the Bush administration, he had tried to impress upon officials the need for a policy of eliminating the Al-Qaeda only to be told that this was overly ambitious and that the language should be "significantly erode". But after the attacks of 9/11 "we were to go back to my language of eliminate, rather than significantly erode", Mr. Clarke said.

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