http://www.juancole.com/2004_03_01_juancole_archive.html#108050808689952938
Sunday, March 28, 2004
The Difference between Clinton and Bush: The Millennium Plot
More on the Clarke controversy: The pundits and politicians who keep
saying that Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and Bush's are the same
are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The policy outline was the
same, but the implementation was very different.
Hint: The key piece of evidence is the Millennium Plot. This was an
al-Qaeda operation timed for late December 1999. Forestalling this
plot was the biggest counter-terrorism success the US has ever had
against al-Qaeda.
The plot involved several key elements:
* Los Angelese International Airport would be blown up.
* (Possibly: The Needle in Seattle would be blown up).
* The Radisson Hotel in Amman Jordan, a favorite of American and
Israeli tourists, would be blown up. A lot of the tourism for the
millennium was Christian evangelicals wanting to be in the holy land.
* Bombs would go off at Mt. Nebo, a Christian tourist site in Jordan
near Israel, associated with John the Baptist.
* The USS Sullivan would be targeted by a dinghy bomb off Yemen.
The story of how the LAX bombing was stopped on December 14 has been
told in an important series in the Seattle Times.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/terroristwithin/chapter12.html
Extra security
measures were implemented by US customs agents, leading to the
apprehension of an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, with a trunk full of
nitroglycerin, heading for LAX (he wanted to start his journey by
ferry from Port Angeles, Washington).
Ressam grew up fishing in the Mediterranean and going to discos. But
like many Algerians, he was radicalized in 1991. The government had
allowed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamist party, to
contest elections. FIS unexpectedly won, however. The military feared
that they would never allow another election, and would declare an
Islamic state. They cancelled elections. FIS went into opposition, and
the most radical members formed the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which
got money from Usama Bin Laden, then in the Sudan. Ressam seems to
have been GIA.
Ressam fought in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Then he settled in France
and became part of the terrorist Groupe Roubaix, which carried out
attacks in that city (pop. 98,000, near Lille in the north). In spring
of 1998 he flew to Afghanistan and was trained in two camps under the
direction of Palestinian-Saudi Abu Zubaida. Abu Zubaida recruited
Ressam into an Algerian al-Qaeda cell headed from London by Abu Doha
al-Mukhalif. Ressam was assigned to form a forward cell in Montreal,
from which he and several other Algerians plotted the attack on LAX.
What Clarke's book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at
Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather,
Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority
to call other key cabinet members and security officials to "battle
stations," involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and
daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton's approval in December of
1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a
break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi's cell in Amman.
Early in 2001, in contrast, Bush demoted Clarke from being a cabinet
member, and much reduced his authority. Clarke wanted the high Bush
officials or "principals" to meet on terrorism regularly. He couldn't
get them to do it. Rice knew what al-Qaeda was, but she, like other
administration officials, was disconcerted by Clarke's focus on it as
an independent actor. The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical
organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes
from the states that allegedly harbor them. That funny look she gave
Clarke wasn't unfamiliarity, it was puzzlement that someone so high in
the system should be so wrongly focused.
In summer of 2001 the chatter was much greater and more ominous than
in fall of 1999. Clarke wanted to go to battle stations and have daily
meetings with the "principals" (i.e. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell,
Tenet). He wanted to repeat the procedures that had foiled the
Millennium Plot. He could not convince anyone to let him do that.
Note that an "institution" is defined in sociology as a regular way of
getting certain collective work done. Clarke is saying that Clinton
had institutionalized a set of governmental routines for dealing with
heightened threats from terrorists. He is not saying that Clinton
bequeathed a "big think" plan to Bush on terrorism. He is saying that
he bequeathed the Bush administration a repertoire of effective
actions by high officials.
He thinks going to such a heightened level of alert and concerted
effort in 2001 might have shaken loose much earlier the information
that the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in
the US. As it is, the INS wasn't informed of this advent and did not
start looking for them until Aug. 21, 2001, by which time it was too
late. Since they made their plane reservations for September 11 under
their own names, names known to the USG, a heightened level of alert
might have allowed the FBI to spot them.
So it just is not true that Bush was doing exactly the same thing on
terrorism that Clinton was. He didn't have a cabinet-level
counter-terrorism czar; he didn't have the routine of principals'
meetings on terrorism; he didn't authorize Clarke to go to 'battle
stations' and heightened security alert in summer of 2001 the way
Clinton had done in December, 1999.
The key to understanding Clarke's argument is to understand how
exactly the Millennium Plot was foiled.