March 23, 2004

9/11 Panel Preliminary Report: Red Hot.

The Panel’s preliminary report vindicates the Bush approach of using military action to combat terrorism.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Lacking the intelligence information they needed to strike directly at Osama bin Laden, Clinton and Bush administration officials fruitlessly sought a diplomatic solution to get the al-Qaida leader out of Afghanistan, a federal panel said Tuesday.

Not until the day before the Sept. 11 attacks did U.S. officials settle on a strategy to overthrow the Taliban Afghan government if a final diplomatic push failed. That strategy was expected to take three years, the independent commission investigating the attacks said in one of two preliminary reports. U.S. officials feared that a failed attempt on bin Laden could kill innocents and would only boost bin Laden’s prestige. And the American public and Congress would have opposed any large-scale military operations before the September 2001 attacks, the report said. In the end, it said, pursuing diplomacy over military action allowed bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders to elude capture.

So the Kerry approach, of using diplomacy and police action to oppose terrorism, led to 9-11:

The Clinton administration had early indications of terrorist links to bin Laden and future Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as early as 1995, but let years pass as it pursued criminal indictments and diplomatic solutions to subduing them abroad, the commission’s report said.

And this appears to throw out Richard Clarke’s claim that he was all over Al-Qaeda prior to the Bush administration taking office.

Pentagon counterterrorism officials prepared a strategy urging the Defense Department in September 1998 “to take up the gauntlet that international terrorists have thrown at our feet.” But the paper was rejected by a deputy undersecretary as “too aggressive.”

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Categories: Counter-Terrorism

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