28 December 2000

Posted on December 28, 2020January 30, 2021 by William Arkin

President Bill Clinton announces that he will not travel to North Korea before the end of his term, citing “insufficient time to complete the work at hand.”

White House national security adviser Sandy Berger and other White House officials were hesitant to have the president leave the country during the ongoing election dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Berger called it a “potential Constitutional crisis.”

Whether Clinton’s trip to North Korea would have achieved anything anyhow is questionable, but the precedent had also been set for an outgoing president not to leave new and pressing national security business for their successors. Hence the real reason behind not “retaliating” for the October attack in Yemen on the USS Cole: that the reverberations might have locked the new administration into some specific action.

17 November 1998

Posted on November 17, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

The CIA produces a top-secret intelligence report, “Usama Bin Ladin’s Finances: Some Estimates of Wealth, Income, and Expenditures,” that is unable to estimate the al Qaeda head’s wealth, nor where he was getting money from or how he moved it. The report said that bin Laden was getting financial support from his family in Saudi Arabia and other rich Gulf-based individuals.

In discussing the report, a National Security Council working group on terrorist finances asks the CIA to push again for access to a former al Qaeda official, Madani al Tayyib, who is in Saudi custody. The 9/11 Commission requests that the CIA use its back channels to see “if it is possible to elaborate further on the ties between Usama [sic] bin Ladin and prominent individuals in Saudi Arabia, including especially the Bin Ladin family.” (911 Commission, p. 122).

In September, Vice President Al Gore made a personal appeal to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for direct access to al Tayyib. Richard Clarke writes: “Upon learning that much of al Qaeda’s financing came from Saudi Arabia, both from individuals and from quasi-governmental charities, ‘We decided that we needed to have a serious talk with the Saudis as well as with a few of the financial centers in the region. We recognized that the Saudi regime had been largely uncooperative on previous law enforcement-focused investigations of terrorism … so we wanted a different approach … So we asked Vice President Gore to talk to the Crown Prince … We wanted to avoid a typical pattern of Saudi behavior we had seen: achingly slow progress, broken promises, denial, and cooperation limited to specific answers to specific questions … The Saudis protested our focus on continuing contacts between Usama and his wealthy, influential family, who were supposed to have broken off all ties with him. “How can you tell a mother not to call her son,” they asked. (Against all Enemies, pp. 194–195)

The United States never obtained direct access.

9 November 2000

Posted on November 9, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

George W. Bush’s lead over Al Gore in all-or-nothing Florida presidential race slips beneath 300 votes in a suspense-filled recount. Vice President Gore telephones Bush to concede but then calls back about an hour later to retract his concession.

Bush’s camp presses Gore to concede without pursuing multiple recounts. The unofficial tally gives Bush a 327-vote lead. A statewide recount begins in Florida the next day. Over the next two weeks, some 19,000 votes were disqualified.

Gore then takes the presidential election to the courts, claiming “an injustice unparalleled in our history.” Bush’s team goes to court, seeking an order to block manual recounts. When Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris announces she would end the recounting at 5 p.m. on November 14, it prompts an immediate appeal by Gore lawyers.

6 November 2000

Posted on November 6, 2020November 6, 2020 by William Arkin

On Election Eve in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi take their instrument rating airplane test at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Atta receives a score of 90 in 122 minutes and al-Shehhi receives a score of 75 in 89 minutes. Two weeks later, they each receive an FAA Temporary Airman Certificate, qualifying them as “private pilots.”

With their temporary licenses, the two were then able to sign out airplanes for solo flights. They did so on a number of occasions, often returning at 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., after logging four or five hours of flying time. They would also begin training simulations to fly larger commercial airliners, though neither would pilot or even co-pilot a commercial jet before September 11.

22 October 2000

Posted on October 22, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

The government in Yemen stonewalls after the attack on the USS Cole (see October 12), thereby confusing the collection of “evidence” that al Qaeda is responsible and impeding retaliation. There are many reasons—the election voting standoff between Bush and Gore, an impending change in administrations, disbelief in al Qaeda, and skepticism about the value of cruise missile attacks—that also ultimately stand in the way of an American “response,” but Yemen’s foot-dragging, and even lying, has a major impact.

Within the first weeks after the Cole attack, the Yemenis arrest two key figures in the attack. But they forbid the FBI investigators on the ground from participating in the interrogations. President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and CIA Director George Tenet all intervene to try to help but Yemen doesn’t budge. Ultimately, the 911 Commission concludes that because information from the suspects comes in that is secondhand, the U.S. could not make its own assessment of its reliability (911 Commission, p. 192).

Yemen would continue to be a haven for al Qaeda, even after 9/11. It would take the Arab Spring—and not anything about the American global war on terror—to finally unseat the first and only president of the country, Ali Abdullah Saleh. That has been followed by a never-ending civil war and Saudi (and Gulf state) intervention, turning the country into a humanitarian disaster and a basket case. Saleh was killed by a sniper in December 2017.

12 October 2000

Posted on October 12, 2020October 12, 2020 by William Arkin

In Aden, a small bomb-laden boat approaches the destroyer USS Cole at midship and the two suicide bombers detonate their explosives, killing 17 sailors and injuring at least 40 others.

The destroyer, en route to the Persian Gulf, was making a prearranged fuel stop, part of a Central Command (CENTCOM) initiative to improve relations with the Yemen government. The blast ripped a hole in the side of the USS Cole approximately 40 feet in diameter. The attack occurs without warning, and the Navy vessel was never warned to expect a terrorist attack.

The subsequent FBI investigation revealed that the USS Cole bombing followed an unsuccessful attempt on January 3, 2000, to bomb another U.S. Navy ship, the USS The Sullivans. In this earlier incident, the boat sank before the explosives could be detonated. The boat and the explosives were salvaged and refitted, and the explosives were tested and reused in the USS Cole attack.

The “story” of the aftermath, favorable to a supposedly do-no-wrong FBI, is later told in Lawrence Wright’s Looming Tower, and the attack becomes an emotional debating point in the Bush-Gore presidential election. The outgoing Clinton administration is reluctant to retaliate against al Qaeda—the clear perpetrator—because an election is just a month away. But the Bush administration also does not take any military action, told by the CIA that it did not have enough “proof” of al Qaeda direction.

Yemeni authorities establish that Tawfiq bin-Atash (known as Khallad), who had been a trainer at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and worked as an Osama bin Laden bodyguard, was not only one of the commanders but that he had been present at the January 2000 meeting of al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the San Diego duo who would go on to be “musclemen” on 9/11, were also present.

According to the 911 Commission Report (p. 191), back in Afghanistan, bin Laden anticipated U.S. military retaliation and ordered the evacuation of al Qaeda installations, fleeing to the desert area near Kabul, then to Khowst and Jalalabad, and eventually back to Kandahar. In Kandahar, he rotated between five to six residences, spending one night at each residence. In addition, he sent his senior advisor, Mohammed Atef, to a different part of Kandahar and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, to Kabul so that all three could not be killed in one attack.

In writing his autobiography, George Tenet says that “neither our intelligence nor the FBI’s criminal investigation could conclusively prove that Usama bin Ladin and his leadership had had authority, direction, and control over the attack. This is a high threshold to cross… What’s important from our perspective at CIA is that the FBI investigation had taken primacy in getting to the bottom of the matter.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 128).

11 October 2000

Posted on October 11, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

Bush and Gore engage in their second debate, at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and covering foreign policy, focused very much on Iraq.

Bush calls for a less interventionist foreign policy, saying, “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us.” Gore responds, “I think we also have to have a sense of mission in the world.”

Bush says that America’s leaders “…must be… humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” He says that U.S. should “reach out to moderate Arab nations, like Jordan and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”

He says that “the coalition against Saddam has fallen apart or it’s unraveling” and that “sanctions are being violated.”

“We don’t know whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction,” Bush says, adding, “He better not be or there’s going to be a consequence should I be the president.”

Citing the absence of inspectors, a fractured coalition, and Iraqi meddling in the Middle East, he says that “it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him,” never actually voicing regime change as a prerequisite for an Iraq policy. But he aligns himself with the Clinton administration, saying that what he is basically proposing is no different than what is current policy.

4 October 2000

Posted on October 4, 2020October 3, 2020 by William Arkin

Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush engage in their first presidential debate, a 90-minute match at the Clark Athletic Center of the University of Massachusetts.

George Bush, considered a lightweight, probably won by not losing, many would later write. But Vice President Gore, while more knowledgeable about the issues, came off as smug and condescending. The New York Times would later write that this seminal debate lost Vice President Gore the presidency, with a rich oral history of those involved speaking in 2016 of the lessons to be learned before the first Clinton-Trump debate.

“We felt the first debate would be his moment—that people would see two candidates on stage, but only one president,” said Tad Devine, Gore senior advisor. But as the debate got underway, Gore showed his contempt and impatience for Bush. “Gore was … sighing and reacting to Bush, and there were lots of reaction shots. It was somewhat inexplicable —as if the things that Gore had been told not to do became his to-do list,” said Robert Shrum, one of Gore’s senior advisors. “I didn’t think Gore’s sighs were a really big deal until I got to the spin room,” Shrum said. The Gore campaign soon found out that many thought Gore had blown it.