[lbo-talk] Clarke & the Millennium Plot that was foiled

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Mar 29 09:49:00 PST 2004


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.



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