25 January 2001

Posted on January 25, 2021May 20, 2021 by Featherproof Books

White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke sends an urgent memo to Condoleezza Rice and deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley warning that there are al Qaeda sleeper cells within the United States and of an impending terrorist attack on America soil.

In a grand strategy paper on dealing with terrorism, Clarke advocates targeting al Qaeda training camps in response to the October attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. He proposes “rolling back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years, proposes military action as well that would attack Taliban infrastructure. (At the Center of the Storm, p. 143)

Clarke writes that al Qaeda “is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy,” taking a jab at Rice’s concept of a “regional” solution to terrorism. He says that key decisions that had been deferred with the end of the Clinton administration dealing with covert aid to the Northern Alliance and the Uzbeks, to political messages to the Taliban and Pakistan, and new money for CIA operations need to be resolved regardless of larger policy.

Though the 9/11 Commission would say that Rice did not respond directly to Clarke’s memo and no principals committee meeting regarding al Qaeda took place until September 4 (911 Commission, p. 201), the truth was that Clarke’s memo presented nothing new and didn’t represent any new intelligence regarding the immediate threat. One can fail the Bush administration for not seriously engaging with the issue, but it is also the case that Clarke failed (as did CIA director George Tenet) to convince the new administration of the threat, later trumpeting so many warnings that they drowned the new administration. And in his January 25 memo, which the 9/11 Commission tartly labels “elaborate,” Clarke’s inclusion of his 2000 strategy and his 1998 plan annoyed Rice and Hadley, that it was both too stale and too narcissistic.

20 January 2001

Posted on January 20, 2021May 20, 2021 by Featherproof Books

President George W. Bush takes the oath of office. The “compassionate conservative” vows to lead “through civility, courage, compassion and character.”

The former Texas governor had been briefed by the outgoing Clinton administration about the threat from al Qaeda, and while most of the principals in the new administration thought the fixation on terrorism “odd” (Against all Enemies, p. 226), in truth, the new team had an ABC policy: “Anything But Clinton.”

During the campaign, Condoleezza Rice argued in an article in Foreign Affairs that a new foreign policy was required that “separates the important from the trivial.” She took the Clinton administration to task for having “assiduously avoided implementing such an agenda.” Terrorism, she contended, only needed attending to insofar as it was used by rogue states to advance their interests.

Richard Clarke and his counter-terrorism staff was kept on, National Security Advisor Rice admitting that the Bush team was more focused on Cold War issues. Clarke was demoted and would eventually be seen as a pest, constantly promoting warnings and crisis. By the time summer rolled in, most in the administration had grown tired of the chicken littles constantly warning of upcoming terrorist attacks.

31 December 1999

Posted on December 31, 2020January 30, 2021 by William Arkin

Y2K fever reaches its peak, having captivated the country—and particularly Washington—for the past four or five years on the uncertainty that computerdom will able to process information properly when the Year Two Thousand arrives.

The fear, worked on for months and involving billions of dollars, is to forestall the possibility that December 31, 1999 will be followed by January 1, 1900, thus disabling systems that depend upon time synchronization.

In Washington in particular, dire predictions abound of a digital Pearl Harbor, with the effects that airplane navigation systems will fail, that telecommunications will halt, that financial records will die, with trillions in assets disappearing. An entire industry forms to eradicate the problem of the Y2K bug.

Richard Clarke later writes of his experiences on New Year’s Eve: “In a vault just off the floor of the Y2K Coordination Center, we waited for midnight in Riyadh, then in Paris … I could hardly hear [FBI special agent] John O’Neill when I called his cell phone; he was at the New York Police Command Post in Time Square … At midnight I went to the roof to look down on the celebration at the Lincoln Memorial … At 3:00 a.m., we went back to the rooftop and popped open a bottle.” (Against All Enemies, p. 214)

5 December 1999

Posted on December 5, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Richard Clarke's book "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror"

A year after CIA director George Tenet’s “We Are at War” memo, White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke is still agitating for stronger action against al Qaeda, for a comprehensive strategy, for stronger covert action, for even the use of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan.

On December 4, Clarke wrote a memo to White House national security advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger. In it, he laid out a proposal to attack al Qaeda facilities again in the week before the Millennium transition. On December 5, Clarke got the memo back. In the margin, Berger wrote “no.”

28 September 2000

Posted on September 28, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

A mythical pre-9/11 event gains traction, after the first two missions of an unarmed Predator reconnaissance drone are flown over Afghanistan on September 7 and 8. In review of the videos of the flights, the CIA comes to believe that Predator drones captured images of Osama bin Laden, “a tall man dressed in white robes,” during the overflights.

The 9/11 commission says that the conclusion was made after-the-fact. The drone imaged Tarnak Farms in Kandahar, a former Soviet agricultural collective taken over by al Qaeda. “A group of 10 people gathered around him [the tall man] were apparently paying their respects for a minute or two,” the report says.

CIA director George Tenet sends the video to the White House. White House terrorism specialist Richard Clarke wrote to national security advisor Sandy Berger that there was a “very high probability” bin Laden had been located. President Clinton is then shown the video. It is a mythical event, and not provable one way or another; bin Laden is never to be sighted again in Afghanistan, not before or after 9/11. The lore associated with locating bin Laden fed acceleration of an armed version of the Predator drone and a year of covert action to come up with various schemes to capture or assassinate him while at his Tarnak Farms residence east of the city.