The enemy within: Al Qaeda threatened not only the security of the United States, but also the worldview of the Bush administration

Washington Monthly, May, 2004 by Peter Bergen

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, relatively few Americans had ever heard of a terrorist group called al Qaeda and its tall, bearded leader Osama bin Laden. The suicide hijackings that brought planes down that day in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania seemed to come out of nowhere. And in part because they felt taken by surprise, the vast majority of Americans cut President Bush a great deal of slack over these horrific incidents that happened on his watch. He and his administration were new on the job, and who could possibly have foreseen such attacks anyway?

Then this spring came the public hearings of the September 11 commission, and the revelations of just how much wanting the president and his top aides had. They received briefings by alarmed members of the exiting Clinton administration; detailed memos from counter-terrorism officials requesting immediate action against al Qaeda; "hair on fire" alerts delivered personally to the president by CIA director George Tenet; and a now-famous Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike ha the US."

And yet none of these warnings seemed to have made much of an impression on the Bush team. While Clinton cabinet members had met at least monthly to discuss the terror threat, the Bush administration held only one such "principals meeting" specifically devoted to al Qaeda before September 11. Instead of following the previous administration's policy recommendations on al Qaeda, they spent seven months coming up with their own (not very different) plan, one that was completed just days before September 11. President Bush took no discernable action after receiving the Aug. 6 PDB, and uttered no public words about al Qaeda until after the attacks.

What explains the gulf between the yearnings the Bush team received about al Qaeda and the scant attention they paid to the threat? That's one of the mysteries that one might hope the September 11 commission will solve in its final report, scheduled for release this summer. But there are reasons to think the mystery, will endure. First, it will be hard to get Republican and Democratic commissioners to agree on an answer. More importantly, the commission has been given a narrow mandate to look only at events and actions in the period leading up to 9/11. The truth is, one cannot begin to solve the mystery of the White House's inaction without first understanding its larger aims and worldview. And for that, there is no better place to begin than the two fascinating and much-discussed recent insider accounts of the administration's security policies before and after September 11: Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, and journalist Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack.

Beyond belief

There is a philosophical distinction between belief and knowledge. Often we can "know" all sorts of facts without quite believing them to be true. The U.S. government had comprehensive evidence that the Nazis were carrying out the Holocaust before the end of World War II, but few really believed the evidence until the liberation of the death camps. In much the stone way, the fact that al Qaeda intended to attack the United States was hardly a secret. The Aug.6 PDB warning oral Qaeda's focus on the United States was simply stating the blindingly obvious: Beginning in 1997, bin Laden had repeatedly said he was going to attack the United States in interviews with CNN, ABC News, and Time. Moreover, the al Qaeda network had already attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and had tried to blow up Los Angeles International airport in 1999. Rarely have our enemies warned us so often of their plans.

Yet al Qaeda was clearly not on the minds of Bush's chief foreign policy advisers. As The Washington Post reported, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to give a speech on Sept. 11, 2001, about the administration's national security priorities. The speech was "designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention oral Qaeda, bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups."

I did a database search of all of Rice's statements and writings between the mid-90s and September 11. She never mentioned al Qaeda publicly and referred to bin Laden only once on a Detroit radio in 2000.

Perhaps sensitive to this history, Rice testified during the September 11 inquiry that al Qaeda "was on the radar screen of any person who studied or worked in the international security field" and that in 1999, she herself "had written for an introduction in a volume on bioterrorism done at Stanford that I thought that we wanted not to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden had succeeded on our soil". But I could find no mention of al Qaeda or bin Laden in the book she referred to--The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons--either by Rice or any of the other contributors. Likewise, a search of Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz's pre-September 11 statements and writings shows he never mentioned al Qaeda, referred to bin Laden only once, and then in the context of the Saudi exile's supposed links to Saddam. A similar search for pre-September 11 statements by Vice President Dick Cheney regarding either al Qaeda or bin Laden came up empty.