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shawa
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Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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 Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 1:24 pm Post subject: Richard Clarke Interview-2002 |
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In light of the recent Able Danger story and Bill Clinton's recent statement that he would have launched an attack on Bin Ladin in Afghanistan after the Cole attack, I thought this 2002 interview with Richard Clarke was very interesting.
The interview was about John O'Neill, a "think out of the box" FBI agent who died in the 911 attack on which Frontline's excellent documentary "THE MAN WHO KNEW" was based.
Clarke, who was Clinton's Counterterrorism Advisor throughout the 90's made the recommendations but Clinton would not act!!
| Quote: | (Emphasis mine)
~SNIP~
What did he understand that nobody else understood?
I think he understood, first of all, that Al Qaeda wasn't a nuisance -- that what Al Qaeda said in its documents and bin Laden's speeches was the truth. He said to me once, "You know, it's like Mein Kampf. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf when Hitler was just a jerk. No one took him seriously, so no one read the book, or if they read the book, they didn't believe he would try to do what was in the book. [John] said, "Bin Laden's just like this. When you read what this guy says he's going to do, he's serious. He is going to try to do it in the Middle East, and there are a lot of people who support him. A lot of people are giving this guy money. We have to take him seriously, because what he says he's going to do is to go to war with the United States."
Was he, were you, listened to?
Yes, slowly. Certainly after the embassy bombing in Africa in 1998, it was very obvious that what John was saying, what I was saying, was right: that this was more than a nuisance; that this was a real threat. But I don't think everyone came to the understanding that it was an existential threat. The question was, "This group is more than a nuisance, but are they worth going to war with? After all, they've only attacked two embassies. Maybe that's a cost of doing business. This kind of thing happens. Yes, we should spend some time some energy trying to get them, but it's not the number one priority we have."
Let's talk about connecting the dots, which he seemed to be very good at. Explain the inability or the ability of some to connect those dots early on.
I think if you ask most terrorism experts in the mid-1990s, "Name the major terrorist organizations that might be a threat to the United States," they would have said Hezbollah, which had a relationship with Iran. They would have said Hamas, which is a Palestinian group. Most people would not have said Al Qaeda. Most people wouldn't have known that there was an Al Qaeda.
If you ask them, "Well, what about this man bin Laden?" most people in the mid-1990s would have said, "Ah, yes, the terrorist financier." What O'Neill said was, "No, this man is not a financier. Yes, he's got some of his own money, and he's very good at raising money from other people. But that's not all he's about. The money is money for a purpose. The purpose is building a worldwide terrorist network based out of Afghanistan, initially based out of Sudan, but then moved to Afghanistan. A worldwide terrorist network, the point of which is going after the United States, after governments friendly to the United States, particularly in the Arab world." So O'Neill did see early on that this was more than just another terrorist group. It was a serious threat it was in the process of building.
When did they recognize that?
By the time 1998 the embassy bombings occurred, I think everyone in the Clinton Cabinet would have said that Al Qaeda is a serious threat. In fact, if you look in retrospect at what the Clinton administration did after those embassy bombings through to the end of that administration -- since now most of it is public knowledge, lot of it was highly classified at the time -- if 9/11 had not happened, most Americans looking at what the Clinton administration did about bin Laden would have said, "What an overreaction. Why were they so preoccupied with bin Laden?"
There was an enormous amount of activity that was carried on if you look at the predicate, prior to the attack on the Cole destroyer in October 2000. The predicate was Americans killed at two embassies in Africa. Yet there was this massive program that was initiated to go after bin Laden. It didn't succeed, but it tried very hard. It did prevent some attacks, and it delayed others. But looked at in vacuum, the Clinton administration activities, 1998 to the end of the administration against bin Laden -- if you look at that without knowing in advance that 9/11 is going to happen, if you can separate that in your mind, the Clinton administration activities against bin Laden were massive.
So the frustration that a lot of us had, that people weren't paying enough attention, largely ended with the 1998 embassy bombings.
Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken. In your eyes?
The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat -- we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved....
But didn't you push for military action after the Cole?
Yes, that's one of the exceptions.
How important is that exception?
I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated Al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn't have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier.
So that's a pretty basic mistake that we made?
Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. None of these decisions took place in isolation. There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals.
~SNIP~
I think the intelligence community, the FBI, were unanimous, certainly throughout the year 2000 into 2001, that there was in fact a very widespread Al Qaeda network around the world in probably between 50-60 countries -- that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan; that we didn't really know who those people were. We didn't have names for very many of them, and we didn't know where they were; but since bin Laden kept saying the United States was the target, the United States was the enemy, that we had to expect an increasing rate of sophistication of attacks by this large Al Qaeda network against the United States.
As John O'Neill kept saying, there was no reason to think they're always going to go after us in Saudi Arabia or Africa or Yemen. They tried to go after us, O'Neill would say, in 1993, in the first World Trade Center attack. O'Neill was convinced, in retrospect -- and it took the FBI others a long time to realize it, many years actually -- but O'Neill was convinced by the year 2000, certainly probably earlier than that, that the 1993 attack was in fact a bin Laden-led attack. We hadn't heard the phrase Al Qaeda at the time.
We now know, going back through historical documents, that there was an Al Qaeda [back then]. It had just been formed, just been given that name. It was small. But O'Neill would say the attack of 1993 was Al Qaeda. The attempted attack at the millennium in the United States was Al Qaeda.
Whatever deterrents we had that said "you should never try to attack us in the United States," that hadn't worked. Therefore, he would say -- and I think everyone in the FBI leadership and the CIA leadership was saying -- "The attack is going to be big. It could be in Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. It could also be in the United States."
Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this? If you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been?
Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole "Come to Afghanistan where you'll be safe and you'll be trained," well, that wouldn't have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That's the one thing that we recommended that didn't happen -- the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened. |
Text of interview at: FRONTLINE
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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Frogg
Ensign
Joined: 20 Aug 2004
Posts: 64
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 3:51 am Post subject: |
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| Clarke should have been a whistle-blower of the Clinton Admin. Instead he came out obviously covering up for them. I think there is more to it. I think he was covering his own buttock. |
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Beatrice1000
Resource Specialist
Joined: 10 Aug 2004
Posts: 1179
Location: Minneapolis, MN
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| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 8:10 am Post subject: Re: Richard Clarke Interview-2002 |
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| shawa wrote: | | ... The interview was about John O'Neill, a "think out of the box" FBI agent who died in the 911 attack on which Frontline's excellent documentary "THE MAN WHO KNEW" was based. |
Shawa, I'm glad you posted this - I've previously watched, read everything at the link you posted. The interview with Clarke is good and there's also an interview with Mary Jo White, whom O'Neill worked with closely, and others - and if you click "home," you can watch the entire program "The Man Who Knew" -- there are 9 videos, but well worth watching. Also, there is a timeline on all the data as to "what" we knew -- and the more we find out now, the more anguish I have every time I hear the FBI (in NY) was not notified about something -- knowing how very much it would have helped O'Neill, as he was so far along in understanding bin laden's network.
There is also a good book about him that has so much more information, especially the problems he encountered in trying to investigate the Cole -- the way the State Dept. blocked the investigation with the idiot Barbara Bodine* (US Amb./Yemen) literally throwing O'Neill out of the country. (the Frontline link addresses this a bit in "What If.."). The book is: "The Man Who Warned America" (the life and death of John O'Neill, the FBI's embattled counterterror warrior) by Murray Weiss.
(*Bodine was the first Amb. in Baghdad after the war, but when Bremer came in, he tossed her out -- and that pleased me no end...)
From the book, pp. 275-276: "...he (O'Neill) testified before the National Commission on Terrorism, which was created by Congress in 1998 after the Africa bombings to examine the failure of the intelligence community and was chaired by J. Paul Bremer. O'Neill did not recycle old arguments for the board, complaining of a lack of federal agents or poor cooperation from foreign countries. Instead, he zeroed in on a significant obstacle that could be easily solved: "We need more translators,"* he told the commission. "There is a lot of information that we simply can't get to." ..... Although the commission adopted O'Neill's recommendations, none were implemented by the Clinton administration. Yet again, O'Neill was disappointed that an opportunity was lost to change the bureaucratic culture and marshal more resources for his war on terrorism. "They just don't get it," he would say. O'Neill's frustration with the Clinton administration's inadequacy in fighting international terrorism always centered on his conviction that Clinton had let his turbulent personal life interfere with the mission of being president and commander in chief."
*(From the Timeline at the Frontline link: Post-9/11: "It is also later reported that the National Security Agency had intercepted telephone conversations between Mohamed Atta and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed before Sept. 11, but had not “properly” translated them at the time. Officials quoted in one story refused to describe the content of those conversations.")
John O'Neill made it out of one of the Towers but went back in to help people and perished. He was a great loss for this country.
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