[Update: Note that the Seattle Times itself makes the exactly the same point that I do (hat tip to Instapundit)]
Fred Kaplan takes on Condi Rice in Slate. I’m not enough of a judge of inside-the-beltway baseball to have a sense whether Rice is a good bureaucracy wrangler or not. I do fully accept that doing so is a critical part of her job, and is a big part of what she’ll ultimately be judged for, which means in part that I’m reserving final judgment on how she’s done in the job for a bit.
Kaplan makes some arguments about why she isn’t, and you ought to read them and make your own decision.
But before you, do, let me alert you to a large steaming prairie platter set in the middle of his argument.He says:
This was one of Clarke’s most compelling points. In his book, testimony, and several TV interviews, Clarke has argued that the Clinton administration thwarted al-Qaida’s plot to set off bombs at Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium because intelligence reports of an impending terrorist attack were discussed at several meetings of Cabinet secretaries. Knowing they’d have to come back and tell the president what they were doing to prevent an attack, these officials went back to their departments and “shook the trees” for information. When Bush came to power, Rice retained Clarke and his counterterrorism crew, but she demoted their standing; terrorism was now discussed (and, even then, rarely) at meetings of deputy secretaries, who lacked the same clout and didn’t feel the same pressure.
This is a key point, and is, in fact the only fact-based argument he makes.
And, from all the information I’ve seen, it’s completely full of it.
I haven’t read Clarke’s book (yet), but I do remember the news accounts both at the time and afterward of the arrest of Ahmed Ressam, was that he had acted hincky when at the border checkpoint, and a normal border patrol officer hunch caused them to pull him in for close inspection. They searched his car – for drugs – and he tried to run and was chased down.
I missed the part in this story where – like at Waco – senior government officials stood by an open phone line and communicated closely with the troops on the ground. No one took credit for it in 2000, when it would have made a difference in an election.
And I’ve got to believe that if Clarke is taking credit for it now – claiming that good senior staff work foiled the Millennium Plot – either he’s puffing like a freaking blowfish, or there’s some data out there that hasn’t made it to the public record.
Here’s the story from the Seattle Times:
The Coho arrived in Port Angeles in the dark, just before 6 p.m., the last boat of the day. Customs inspector Diana Dean stopped each car as it rolled off, asking the drivers a few basic questions and wishing them a good trip.
The last car in line was a green Chrysler 300M with British Columbia plates.
“Where are you going?” “Sattal.”
“Why are you going to Seattle?” “Visit.”
“Where do you live?” “Montreal.”
“Who are you going to see in Seattle?” “No, hotel.”
The driver was fidgeting, jittery, sweating. His hands disappeared from sight as he began rummaging around the car’s console. That made Dean nervous.
She handed him a customs declaration to fill out, a subtle way of stalling while she took a closer look. He filled out the form and handed it back. By this time, Dean observed, he was acting “hinky.”
She asked him to turn the car off, pop open the trunk and step outside. Noris was slow to respond but complied.
At this point, the other customs inspectors were finished and waiting to go home. They came over to help process the last car of the day. Dean told them this might be a “load vehicle” … code for one used for smuggling. Inspector Mark Johnson took over the interrogation.
“Habla español?” he asked.
“Parlez-vous français?” the man replied, handing over his ID. Not a passport or driver’s license, but his Costco card.
“So you like to shop in bulk? You know, the 120-roll pack of toilet paper?” Johnson joked. He escorted Noris to a table, where he asked him to empty his pockets.
Inspector Mike Chapman searched the suitcase in the trunk. As he was doing that, inspector Danny Clem reached in and unscrewed the fastener on the spare-tire compartment. He opened the panel, looked inside and called out to Johnson.
Johnson, grabbing Noris by the shoulders, led him over to the trunk. At a hefty 240 pounds, Johnson had no trouble maneuvering the slim Noris. They peered in and saw no spare tire. In its place were several green bags that appeared to filled with white powder, as well as four black boxes, two pill bottles and two jars of brown liquid. A drug dealer, perhaps?
Johnson felt Noris shudder. He escorted Noris back to the table and patted him down for weapons. Inside Noris’ camel’s-hair coat was a bulge. As Johnson was slipping off the coat to take a closer look, he was suddenly left holding an empty garment. Noris was fleeing.
By the time it sank in, Noris was nearly a block away. Johnson and Chapman took off on foot, yelling, “Stop! Police!”
With his head start, Noris escaped. The inspectors couldn’t find him. Then Chapman noticed movement under a pickup parked in front of a shoe store. He squatted down, saw Noris, drew his gun and ordered him to come out with his hands up.
Noris stood up, arms raised, and looked at Chapman, just 20 feet away with his gun drawn. Then he turned and ran. “Stop! Police!”
Johnson joined Chapman on Noris’ tail. Noris bounced off a moving car but continued running. When he got to the middle of a busy intersection, he reversed direction, headed for a car stopped at the light and grabbed the driver’s door handle. The woman behind the wheel, startled, stepped on the gas, ran the red light and sent Noris spinning. Chapman and Johnson swarmed him.
They took him back to the terminal and handed him over to the Port Angeles police, who put him in the back seat of a patrol car.
Johnson took a sample of the white powder from the trunk to test. Was it heroin, speed, cocaine? Negative on each. As he shook the jars of brown liquid, Noris, who could see Johnson from the patrol car, ducked down to the floor.
Within a couple of days, the inspectors would learn that the brown liquid Johnson had shaken was a powerful, highly unstable relative of nitroglycerin that could have blown them all to bits.
Funny, I don’t see Richard Clarke’s name anywhere in that story.
Fred, care to shed some light on it for us?
I think the point is that after capturing Ressam, they swung into action and were able to foil the plot, not that shaking the trees caught Ressam.
praktike – help me out then. I haven’t heard of any actions planned except the bombing of LAX; what, exactly, got foiled?
I understand that Ressam has been v. cooperative, and has helped with recruiters and trainers.
But who else, exactly, got arrested?
A.L.
Is there some reason to think that the Rice NSC wouldn’t have “swung into action”?
Clarke appears to be suffering from the centralizing mania that infects all high government officials.
A.L.;
I think you might want to do a little research of your own to find out whether Clarke did in fact make this specific claim (that Clinton “thwarted” an Al Qaeda bomb plot in LA) before railing against Kaplan’s comments.
I am reading Clarke’s book now (highly recommended; Chapter 1 covers the events of 9/11 from the WH situation room and is riveting) and there are a number of other examples of terrorism prophylaxis from Clinton’s tenure that are cited. The one you chose to focus on here, even if dubious, does not fatally undermine the idea that Clinton paid a lot of executive attention to terrorism. Go read it.
But this article is not about Richard Clarke’s veracity, it’s about Rice’s (and by proxy, Bush’s) leadership.
Have you heard/read Rice’s 9/11 commission testimony and compared it to the recently released 8/6/01 PDB? I can see why one might want to withold final judgment, but what is your provisional opinion of her performance as NSA based on what you already know?
I would say that the following passages based on this testimony illustrate the key point in Kaplan’s article, not the passage you cite (“…large steaming prairie platter set in the middle of his argument…”, which occurs at the end of his argument, BTW):
“Responding to Ben-Veniste, Rice acknowledged that Clarke had told her that al-Qaida had “sleeper cells” inside the Untied States. But, she added, “There was no recommendation that we do anything” about them. She gave the same answer when former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a Republican and outspoken Bush defender restated the question about sleeper cells. There was, Rice said, “no recommendation of what to do about it.” She added that she saw “no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing” these cells.
Here Rice revealed, if unwittingly, the roots—or at least some roots—of failure. Why did she need a recommendation to do something? Couldn’t she make recommendations herself? Wasn’t that her job? Given the huge spike of traffic about a possible attack (several officials have used the phrase “hair on fire” to describe the demeanor of those issuing the warnings), should she have been satisfied with the lack of any sign that the FBI wasn’t tracking down the cells? Shouldn’t she have asked for positive evidence that it was tracking them down?”
Whether Richard Clarke is relating the history accurately or not (and I believe he is, why not) has little relevance, since all the top-level Bush people are saying they were fully aware of the Al Qaeda terrorist threat prior to 9/11. There are serious questions about whether the Bush administration gave sufficient attention to domestic terrorism prior to 9/11, independent of his predecessor’s efforts. For example, what specifically did they do in response to the PDB?
Clarke appears to be suffering from the centralizing mania that infects all high government officials.
I fear that it’s even smaller than this–it’s pique. He’d effectively been demoted and it was pretty clear he wasn’t rising any higher.
I have no particular information that supports this–it’s just intuition.
VT – I’m criticising Fred Kaplan in my post; but I’ll point out that the Seattle Times (pretty Democratic paper AFAIK) is making strong criticisms of Clarke on this specific point – which all we’re talking about right now.
A.L.
Just for the record I’m not particularly a Rice fan, either. I don’t doubt that she’s a bright, conscientious, capable woman.
But she’s a Soviet specialist. Her actual credentials for the job she’s in right now aren’t a great deal better than mine are and goodness knows I don’t have much in the way of credentials.
Then by that standard Dave, Clarke has nothing to tell us at all.
A.L.;
OK, then tell me why this narrow point you are trying to make is a “key point” in Kaplan’s article, which, as I’ve noted, is about Rice’s testimony, not Clarke.
It seems to me that you are instead trying to criticize Clarke here. Before you do that perhaps you want to check whether Kaplan and the Seattle Times are reporting this accurately.
AL
I might point out that the Seattle Times, while not nearly as conservative as I am, is substantially more so than the Seattle P-I, and in fact endorsed Bush in 2000.
They’re still too liberal for me, but not knee-jerkingly so.
Robin Roberts:
Then by that standard Dave, Clarke has nothing to tell us at all.
Precious little, I’m afraid. Judging by his testimony he had the impression that the Clinton Administration considered fighting terrorism a priority and the Bush Administration–to which he had substantially less access–didn’t. As I’ve said before Clarke impresses me as a career bureaucrat who believes that having meetings is the key to real accomplishment. President Clinton, apparently, was always up for a meeting.
Exactly, Dave.
As I recall this wasn’t her only justification. She also said (though I’m paraphrasing) that there wasn’t anything “actionable.” There are terrorist cells in the US, which had long been known, and there were 70 investigations going on. In hindsight I suppose she might have sent memos and arranged for meetings, but it would be difficult to make those 70 investigations more effective or competent with a single top-down initiative.
From what I’ve heard the only genuinely incompetent actions during the period at that level of responsibility were by Louis Freeh, who called off some investigations in Yemen, for no apparent reason beyond a bureaucratic “turf war.” Freeh was, in my opinion, shockingly incompetent.
IIRC, didn’t the US ambassador to Yemen put up serious obstacles to the investigation? FBI can do all it needs to do so, but if you’ve got an ambassador who will do anything to keep FBI from moving around the capital shaking trees (or the desert equivalent), there isn’t much else one can do. Sure, complain to the US president about that annoying ambassador, would this have worked?
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AL, David Neiwert has done some reporting on this.
Take it for what you will.
I’m just wondering how effective a National Security Adviser would be if, on hearing there were terrorist cells somewhere in America, she advised the President to tell the security services to “shake some trees.”
The objective, and it is an ongoing objective, is to develop the intelligence to know which trees to shake. If there was an intelligence failure pre-9/11 it was that different parts of the security apparatus had information which was only useful when paired up with other information.
Naively, I would think the job of the counter-terrorism co-ordinator would be to work at matching up the information already in hand so as to provide “actionable” intelligence for the President, ie. shake this tree and any number of monkeys will fall out.
As it was Clarke’s job to do this co-ordination and as this co-ordination on his own admission was not done under either Clinton or Bush I was rather surprised that the 9/11 commission didn’t hand him his head.
Very relevant link, praktike, and worth the read (again).
It’s not only the bike that wins or loses races but the way it is ridden. Bush wants to blame Clinton’s “machine” but won’t admit that he backed off the throttle a bit because he didn’t trust it.
Bush blames Al Qaeda, not the Clinton Machine.
Another point. Cofer Black says that the Counterterrorism center ran out of money running up to the millenium threat, and Tenet told them to “blow it out.”
Just read the Niewert piece, and agree that it’s a good one. I think he makes one leap of faith, however, which is crucial; he assumption that it was ‘high-level coordination’ led by Clarke et al that made the Millenium arrest so successful, and the absence of it that made the Zacarias Moussaoui areest so obviously unsuccessful.
I’ll suggest that the simple fact that Ressam started singing like a bird immediately on his arrest, while Moussaoui lawyered – and clammed – up may have made some difference.
Having said that, I’ll freely acknowledge here – as I have in the past – that the runup to 9/11 was a trail of missed opportunities to unwind the plot.
This presents us with three issues: first that many of the missed opportunities stemmed from a barrier between domestic criminal and international ‘diplomatic’ investigations which we put into place for good reasons (as we’re seeing in some of the Ashcroft detentions); second, that we have to broad choices in how to emphasize our response to 9/11 – we can strengthen the ‘catch them in the process’ part, or the ‘step them from growing’ part. One of those seems far more important to me than the other; and, third, I’m still unconvinced that we would have been able to prevent 9/11 – although we might have changed the date on which it happened – if we had woven the picture together in August of that year.
A.L.
Just an FYI: today’s hearings are much more interesting and revealing than the Clarke/Rice testimonies. Black and Pickard are very interesting, especially Black. I’ll have to read the transcripts to sort it all out, as it looks like there are some contradictions between their accounts and those of Ashcroft and Reno in places. This is good stuff, and its lower profile means that it will ultimately be more useful. I had no idea, by the way, how closely Black and Rove resemble one another.
As to your point, maybe I’m missing something, but I’m having trouble with this:
second, that we have to broad choices in how to emphasize our response to 9/11 – we can strengthen the ‘catch them in the process’ part, or the ‘step them from growing’ part
My position is that you do all you can with the former while you’re working on the latter. Simple statistics, no?
Your efforts on the former shouldn’t inhibit your ability to accomplish the latter. That is, one must ensure that “catch them in the process” doesn’t lead you to create more terrorists.
By the way, I heartily recommend “Ghost Wars,” which is reading like a thriller. And the author doesn’t have any axes to grind.
I concur with you A.L. The fact that Ressam had with him the hard evidence, an explosive materials, would have people taking him more seriously than a man having nothing to prove except of his past record, involving with AQ. David Niewert wrote a very lucid article but that article is based on 2 incomparable events, hard evidence and admission of Ressam to infer a comparable outcome of the 2nd event, no evidence and no admission from Moussaoui. Too bad, it’s good and coherent writing to deliver a message but it rests on a shaky premise.
One very interesting event at today’s hearing involved the author of the document which set up the policy of not letting gained in the course of intelligence information be used in criminal prosecution. This policy was describe by several witnesses as being a big roadblock to possibly stopping 9-11 (big emphasis on possibly, I’m trying not to make a judgement). Apparently, the author is one of the commisioners, Jamie Gorelick, former deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno. Maybe instead of being one of the questioners, she should be one of the questionee’s?