Update
- September 27, 2006
"A
Comprehensive Strategy to Fight Al-Qaeda"?
Rice versus Clinton on January 2001 Clarke Memo
Washington,
D.C., September 27, 2006 - In a series of recent
public statements, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has again
denied that the
Clinton administration presented the incoming administration of
President George W. Bush with a "comprehensive strategy"
against al-Qaeda. Rice's denials were prompted by a September
22 Fox News interview with Bill Clinton in which the former president
asserted that he had "left
a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" with
the incoming Bush administration in January 2001. In a September
25 interview, Rice told the New York Post, "We
were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida,"
adding that, "Nobody organized this country or the international
community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until
9/11."
The crux of the issue is a January
25, 2001, memo on al-Qaeda from counterterrorism coordinator
Richard Clarke to National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice, the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration.
The document was central to the debate over pre-9/11 Bush administration
policy on terrorism and figured prominently in the 9/11 hearings
held in 2004. A declassified copy of the Clarke memo was first
posted on the Web by the National Security Archive in February
2005.
Clarke's memo, described
below, "urgently" requested a high-level National
Security Council review on al-Qaeda and included two attachments:
a declassified December 2000 "Strategy
for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida:
Status and Prospects" and the September 1998 "Pol-Mil
Plan for al-Qida," the so-called Delenda Plan, which remains
classified.
Below are excerpts from the recent statements of
former President Clinton and Secretary Rice:
Former President Bill Clinton on Fox News, September 22, 2006:
CLINTON:
And I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative
Republicans, who now say I didn’t do enough, claimed that
I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush’s
neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had
no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office.
All the right-wingers who now say I didn’t do enough said
I did too much — same people.
...
WALLACE:
Do you think you did enough, sir?
CLINTON:
No, because I didn’t get him.
WALLACE:
Right.
CLINTON:
But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and
some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now.
They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try.
They did not try. I tried.
So
I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror
strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got
demoted.
...
CLINTON:
What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him.
I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted
with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody
has gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d
have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.
Now,
I’ve never criticized President Bush, and I don’t
think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that
thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq.
And
you ask me about terror and Al Qaida with that sort of dismissive
thing? When all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s
book to look at what we did in a comprehensive, systematic way
to try to protect the country against terror.
And
you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think
you’re so clever. But I had responsibility for trying
to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden.
I regret it. But I did try. And I did everything I thought I
responsibly could.
The
entire military was against sending Special Forces in to Afghanistan
and refueling by helicopter. And no one thought we could do
it otherwise, because we could not get the CIA and the FBI to
certify that Al Qaida was responsible while I was president.
Condoleezza Rice Interview with New York Post Editorial
Board:
QUESTION:
By now I assume you’ve seen Bill Clinton’s performances.
How do you respond to his specific accusation that the eight
months before 9/11 the Bush Administration, in his words, didn’t
even try to go after al-Qaida?
SECRETARY
RICE: I’d just say read the 9/11 report. We went through
this. We went through this argument. The fact of the matter
is I think the 9/11 Commission got it about right. Nobody
organized this country or the international community to fight
the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11. I
would be the first to say that because, you know, we didn’t
fight the war on terror in the way that we’re fighting
it now. We just weren’t organized as a country either
domestically or as a leader internationally.
But
what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as
what the Clinton Administration did in the preceding years.
In fact, it is not true that Richard Clarke was fired. Richard
Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened and
he left when he did not become Deputy Director of Homeland Security
some several months later. We were not left a comprehensive
strategy to fight al-Qaida. For instance, big pieces were missing,
like an approach to Pakistan that might work, because without
Pakistan you weren’t going to get Afghanistan. And there
were reasons that nobody could think of actually going in and
taking out the Taliban, either the Clinton Administration or
the Bush Administration, because it’s true you couldn’t
get basing rights in Uzbekistan and that was the long pole in
the tent.
So
I would make the divide September 11, 2001 when the attack on
this country mobilized us to fight the war on terror in a very
different way. But the notion that somehow for eight
months the Bush Administration sat there and didn’t do
that is just flatly false. And you know, I think that
the 9/11 Commission understood that.
QUESTION:
So you’re saying Bill Clinton is a liar?
SECRETARY
RICE: No, I’m just saying that, look, there was a lot
of passion in that interview and I’m not going to –
I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 Commission
report on the efforts of the Bush Administration in the eight
months, things like working to get an armed Predator that actually
turned out to be extraordinarily important, working to get a
strategy that would allow us to get better cooperation from
Pakistan and from the Central Asians, but essentially continuing
the strategy that had been left to us by the Clinton Administration,
including with the same counterterrorism czar who was Richard
Clarke. But I think this is not a very fruitful discussion because
we’ve been through it; the 9/11 Commission has turned
over every rock and we know exactly what they said.
Original
Post - February 10, 2005
Bush
Administration's First Memo on al-Qaeda Declassified
January 25, 2001 Richard Clarke Memo: "We urgently
need . . . a Principals level review on the al Qida network."
Washington,
D.C., February 10, 2005 - The National Security
Archive today posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable,
January 25,
2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to
national security advisor Condoleezza Rice - the
first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The
document was central to debates in the 9/11 hearings over the
Bush administration's policies and actions on terrorism before
September 11, 2001. Clarke's memo requests an immediate meeting
of the National Security Council's Principals Committee to discuss
broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism
aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism
budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite
Clarke's request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on
al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001.
The January 25, 2001, memo, recently released to the National
Security Archive by the National Security Council, bears a declassification
stamp of April 7, 2004, one day prior to Rice's testimony before
the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004. Responding to claims that
she ignored the al-Qaeda threat before September 11, Rice stated
in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed, "No al
Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration."
Two days after Rice's March 22 op-ed, Clarke told the 9/11 Commission,
"there's a lot of debate about whether it's a plan or a strategy
or a series of options -- but all of the things we recommended
back in January were those things on the table in September. They
were done. They were done after September 11th. They were all
done. I didn't really understand why they couldn't have been done
in February."
Also attached to the original Clarke memo are two Clinton-era
documents relating to al-Qaeda. The first, "Tab
A December 2000 Paper: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from
the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects,"
was released to the National Security Archive along with the Clarke
memo. "Tab B, September 1998 Paper: Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida,"
also known as the Delenda Plan, was attached to the original memo,
but was not released to the Archive and remains under request
with the National Security Council.
Below are additional references to the January 25, 2001, memo
from congressional debates and the 9/11 Commission testimonies
of Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice.
Excerpts
from:
NATIONAL
COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES
Eighth Public Hearing
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
Chaired by: Thomas H. Kean
[See
also 9/11
Commission Staff Statement - Intelligence Policy Staff Statement
No. 7 by Alexis Albion, Michael Hurley, Dan Marcus, Lloyd
Salvetti and Steve Dunne]
Testimony
of Dan Marcus - 9/11 Commission staff member, general counsel:
In
December 2000, the CIA developed initiatives -- moving off the
Cole now -- based on the assumption that policy and
money were no longer constraints. The result was the so-called
Blue Sky memo, which we discussed earlier today. This was forwarded
to the NSC staff.
As
the Clinton administration drew to a close, the NSC counterterrorism
staff developed another strategy paper; the first such comprehensive
effort since the Delenda plan of 1998. The resulting paper,
titled "A
Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks
of Al Qaida; Status and Prospects," reviewed
the threat, the records to date, incorporated the CIA's new
ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy
choices. The goal was to roll back Al Qaida over a period of
three to five years, reducing it eventually to a rump group
like others formerly feared but now largely defunct terrorist
organizations in the 1980s. Quote,
"Continued anti-Al Qaida operations at the current level
will prevent some attacks, but will not seriously attrite their
ability to plan and conduct attacks," Clarke and his staff
wrote.
…
Asked
by Hadley to offer major initiatives, on January
25, 2001 Clarke forwarded his December
2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998 Delenda
plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
Clarke laid out a proposed agenda for urgent action by the new
Administration: Approval of covert assistance to the Northern
Alliance; significantly increase funding; choosing a standard
of evidence for attributing responsibility for the Cole
and deciding on a response; going forward with new Predator
missions in the spring and preparation of an armed version;
and more work on terrorist fundraising.
…
Clarke
asked on several occasions for early principals meetings on
these issues, and was frustrated that no early meeting was scheduled.
No principals committee meetings on Al Qaida were held until
September 4th, 2001. Rice and Hadley said this was because the
deputies committee needed to work through many issues relating
to the new policy on Al Qaida. The principals committee did
meet frequently before September 11th on other subjects, Rice
told us, including Russia, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East
peace process. Rice and Hadley told us that, although the Clinton
administration had worked very hard on the Al Qaida program,
its policies on Al Qaida, quote, "had run out of gas,"
and they therefore set about developing a new presidential directive
and a new, comprehensive policy on terrorism.
Testimony
of Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism coordinator:
TIMOTHY
ROEMER, Commission Member: OK. With my 15 minutes, let's move
into the Bush administration.
On
January 25th, we've seen a memo
that you've written to Dr. Rice urgently asking for a principals'
review of Al Qaida. You include helping the Northern
Alliance, covert aid, significant new '02 budget authority to
help fight Al Qaida and a response to the USS Cole.
You attach to this document both the Delenda Plan of 1998 and
a strategy
paper from December 2000.
Do
you get a response to this urgent request for a principals meeting
on these? And how does this affect your time frame for dealing
with these important issues?
CLARKE:
I did get a response, and the response was that in the Bush
administration I should, and my committee, counterterrorism
security group, should report to the deputies committee, which
is a sub-Cabinet level committee, and not to the principals
and that, therefore, it was inappropriate for me to be asking
for a principals' meeting. Instead, there would be a deputies
meeting.
ROEMER:
So does this slow the process down to go to the deputies rather
than to the principals or a small group as you had previously
done?
CLARKE:
It slowed it down enormously, by months. First of all, the deputies
committee didn't meet urgently in January or February. Then
when the deputies committee did meet, it took the issue of Al
Qaida as part of a cluster of policy issues, including nuclear
proliferation in South Asia, democratization in Pakistan, how
to treat the various problems, including narcotics and other
problems in Afghanistan, and launched on a series of deputies
meetings extending over several months to address Al Qaida in
the context of all of those inter-related issues. That process
probably ended, I think in July of 2001. So we were ready for
a principals meeting in July. But the principals calendar was
full and then they went on vacation, many of them in August,
so we couldn't meet in August, and therefore the principals
met in September.
…
ROEMER:
You then wrote a memo on September 4th to Dr. Rice expressing
some of these frustrations several months later, if you say
the time frame is May or June when you decided to resign. A
memo comes out that we have seen on September the 4th. You are
blunt in blasting DOD for not willingly using the force and
the power. You blast the CIA for blocking Predator. You urge
policy-makers to imagine a day after hundreds of Americans lay
dead at home or abroad after a terrorist attack and ask themselves
what else they could have done. You write this on September
the 4th, seven days before September 11th.
CLARKE:
That's right.
ROEMER:
What else could have been done, Mr. Clarke?
CLARKE:
Well, all of the things that we recommended in the plan or strategy
-- there's a lot of debate about whether it's a plan or a strategy
or a series of options -- but all of the things we recommended
back in January were those things on the table in September.
They were done. They were done after September 11th. They were
all done. I didn't really understand why they couldn't have
been done in February.
…
SLADE
GORTON, Commission member: Now, since my yellow light is on,
at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that
the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based
on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern
Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two
and a half years without any action, assuming that there had
been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that
had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there
the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?
CLARKE:
No.
GORTON:
It just would have allowed our response, after 9/11, to be perhaps
a little bit faster?
CLARKE:
Well, the response would have begun before 9/11.
GORTON:
Yes, but there was no recommendation, on your part or anyone
else's part, that we declare war and attempt to invade Afghanistan
prior to 9/11?
CLARKE:
That's right.
…
TIMOTHY
J. ROEMER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Having served on the joint
inquiry, the only person of this 9/11 panel to have served on
the inquiry, I can say in open session to some of Mr. Fielding's
inquiries that as the joint inquiry asked for information on
the National Security Council and we requested that the National
Security Adviser Dr. Rice come before the joint inquiry and
answer those questions. She refused. And she didn't come. She
didn't come before the 9/11 commission. And when we asked for
some questions to be answered, Mr. Hadley answered those questions
in a written form. So I think part of the answer might be that
we didn't have access to the January 25th memo. We didn't have
access to the September 4th memo. We didn't have access to many
of the documents and the e-mails. We're not only talking about
Mr. Clarke being before the 9/11 commission for more than 15
hours, but I think in talking to the staff, we have hundreds
of documents and e-mails that we didn't previously have, which
hopefully informs us to ask Mr. Clarke and ask Dr. Rice the
tough questions.
Debate
over the January 25, 2001 memo in Congress:
Congressional
Record: March 25, 2004 (Senate) [Page S3122-S3123]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO
Access [DOCID:cr25mr04-92]
Excerpt
from the Senate floor on March 26, 2004, Senator Mitch McConnell
(R-KY):
Also
in this August 2002 interview, Clarke noted the Bush administration,
in mid-January of 2001--before the 9/11 attack--decided to do
two things to respond to the threat of terrorism: "One,
to vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all the
lethal covert action finds which we have now made public, to
some extent; the second thing the administration decided to
do was to initiate a process to look at these issues which had
been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.''
In
other words, what Clarke was saying in 2002 to members of the
press was that the Bush administration's response to the war
on terror was much more aggressive than it was under the Clinton
years.
Now
he is singing an entirely different tune. This is a man who
lacks credibility. He may be an intelligent man, he may be a
dedicated public servant, but clearly he has a grudge of some
sort against the Bush administration. If he was unable to develop
a more robust response during the Clinton years, he would only
be able to blame himself. He was in charge of counterterrorism
during those 8 years. How could the Bush administration be to
blame in 8 months for the previous administration's failure
over 8 years to truly declare war on al-Qaida?
Congressional
Record: March 30, 2004 (Senate) [Page S3315-S3317]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO
Access [DOCID:cr30mr04-151]
Excerpt
from the Senate floor on March 30, 2004, Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD):
In
Mr. Clarke's case, clear and troubling double standards are
being applied. Last year, when the administration was being
criticized for the President's misleading statement about Niger
and uranium, the White House unexpectedly declassified portions
of the National Intelligence Estimate.
When
the administration wants to bolster its public case, there is
little that appears too sensitive to be declassified.
Now,
people around the President want to release parts of Mr. Clarke's
earlier testimony in 2002. According to news reports, the CIA
is already working on declassifying that testimony--at the administration's
request.
And
last week several documents were declassified literally overnight,
not in an effort to provide information on a pressing policy
matter to the American people, but in an apparent effort to
discredit a public servant who gave 30 years of service to the
American Government.
I'll
support declassifying Mr. Clarke's testimony before the Joint
Inquiry, but the administration shouldn't be selective. Consistent
with our need to protect sources and methods, we should declassify
his entire testimony. And to make sure that the American people
have access to the full record as they consider this question,
we should also declassify his
January 25 memo to Dr. Rice, the September 4, 2001
National Security Directive dealing with terrorism, Dr. Rice's
testimony to the 9-11 Commission, the still-classified 28 pages
from the House-Senate inquiry relating to Saudi Arabia, and
a list of the dates and topics of all National Security Council
meetings before September 4, 2001.
Congressional
Record: March 31, 2004 (House) [Page H1772-H1779]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO
Access [DOCID:cr31mr04-105])
Excerpt
from the House floor on March 31, 2004, Representative Frank Pallone
(D-NJ):
Now,
this past Sunday, Clarke said he would support the declassification
of his testimony before the joint intelligence panels if the
administration also declassifies the National Security Adviser's
testimony before the 9/11 Commission and the declassification
of the January 25, 2001, memo that Clarke sent to Rice laying
out a terrorism strategy, a strategy that was not approved until
months later.
Madam
Speaker, House Democrats really want a full accounting of the
events leading up to the September 11 attacks, including the
extent to which a preoccupation with Iraq affected efforts to
deal with the threat posed by al Qaeda. It is nice to see the
White House has finally stopped stonewalling the commission
and now says that it will provide the public testimony the commission
is requesting. But Americans need to be able to fully evaluate
the decisions of government leaders, especially when it comes
to the life and death decisions of war and peace.
Excerpts
from:
NATIONAL
COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES
Ninth Public Hearing
Thursday, April 8, 2004
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
Chaired by: Thomas H. Kean
Testimony
of national security advisor Condoleezza Rice:
MR.
BOB KERREY, Committee Member: Well, I think it's an unfortunate
figure of speech because I think -- especially after the attack
on the Cole on the 12th of August -- October 2000. It
would have been a swatting a fly. It would not have been -- we
did not need to wait to get a strategic plan. Dick Clarke had
in his memo on the 20th of January overt military operations as
a -- he turned that memo around in 24 hours, Dr. Clarke. There
were a lot of plans in place in the Clinton administration, military
plans in the Clinton administration. In fact, just since we're
in the mood to declassify stuff, he included in his January 25th
memo two appendixes: Appendix A, "Strategy for the Elimination
of the Jihadist Threat of al Qaeda;" Appendix B, "Political-
Military Plan for al Qaeda."
So
I just -- why didn't we respond to the Cole? Why didn't
we swat that fly?
MS.
RICE: I believe that there is a question of whether or not you
respond in a tactical sense or whether you respond in a strategic
sense, whether or not you decide that you are going to respond
to every attack with minimal use of military force and go after
every -- on a kind of tit-for-tat basis. By the way, in that memo,
Dick Clarke talks about not doing this tit for tat, doing this
on a time of our choosing.
…
Yes,
the Cole had happened. We received, I think, on January
25th the same assessment or roughly the same assessment of who
was responsible for the Cole that Sandy Berger talked
to you about. It was preliminary. It was not clear. But that was
not the reason that we felt that we did not want to, quote, "respond
to the Cole."
We
knew that the options that had been employed by the Clinton administration
had been standoff options. The President had -- meaning missile
strikes, or perhaps bombers would have been possible, long-range
bombers, although getting in place the apparatus to use long-range
bombers is even a matter of whether you have basing in the region.
We
knew that Osama bin Laden had been, in something that was provided
to me, bragging that he was going to withstand any response, and
then he was going to emerge and come out stronger. We --
…We simply believed that the best approach was to put in
place a plan that was going to eliminate this threat, not respond
to it, tit-for-tat.
…
MS.
RICE: The fact is that what we were presented on January the 25th
was a set of ideas -- and a paper, most of which was about what
the Clinton administration had done, and something called the
Delenda plan, which had been considered in 1998 and never adopted.
…
We
decided to take a different track. We decided to put together
a strategic approach to this that would get the regional powers
-- the problem wasn't that you didn't have a good counterterrorism
person. The problem was you didn't have approach against al Qaeda
because you didn't have an approach against Afghanistan, and you
didn't have an approach against Afghanistan because you didn't
have an approach against Pakistan. And until we could get that
right, we didn't have a policy.
…
In the memorandum that Dick Clarke sent me on January 25th, he
mentions sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation
of anything that needs to be done about them. And the FBI was
pursuing them. And usually when things come to me it's because
I'm supposed to do something about it, and there was no indication
that the FBI was not adequately pursuing the sleeper cells.
