Wolfowitz and Pals

Richard Clarke writes in "Against All Enemies" that,

On the morning of the 12th D.O.D.'s focus was already beginning to shift from Al Qaeda. C.I.A. was explicit now that Al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor — Iraq must have been helping them.

I've been doing more Lexis-Nexis searches on the Pentagon hawks' reaction to 9/11. Once again, they provide strong circumstantial evidence that Clarke is telling the truth.

1. "Iraq could be aiding bin Laden; Experts believe complex operation would require Hussein's knowledge," Dallas Morning News, 9/15/01.

Several terrorism analysts are asking whether Osama bin Laden may be only a figurehead for a terror campaign mounted by Iraq in a continuing war with the United States.

The case is made most forcefully by Laurie Mylroie of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

"How likely is it that Osama bin Laden, or through him any other group, carried out these attacks alone, unassisted by a state?" she asked at a Friday press conference. "It is extremely unlikely - next to impossible. These attacks speak of a high degree of sophistication and organization."

2. "Saddam link to attacks", Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), 9/23/01

"His view is shared by American academic and Iraqi affairs expert Laurie Mylroie.

"Bin Laden is said to be the man behind the attack, but even if he did have a hand in it, his role was clearly a very minor one," Mr(sic) Mylroie said."

(Mylroie is not in the administration, obviously--I excerpted these because:

a) Clarke mentions Paul Wolfowitz citing her work in their meeting before 9/11, and

b) sometime in October 2001, Wolfowitz apparently sent former CIA Director James Woolsey to London to investigate some of her theories and get evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombings--which would serve as circumstantial evidence that Saddam was involved in 9/11. Read on...)

3."Saddam may be target Americans are looking for," by R. James Woolsey, The Daily Telegraph, 9/17/01

IN THE immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, attention has focused on the terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible. But intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the case would do well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks - whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others - were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.

To this end, investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. A few years ago, the facts in that case seemed straightforward: the mastermind behind the bombing, who went by the alias Ramzi Yousef, was in fact a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Basit.

But late last year, AEI Press published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a careful book about the bombing by the AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie.

The book's startling thesis is that the original theory of the attack, advanced by James Fox (the FBI's chief investigator into the 1993 bombing until his replacement in 1994) was correct: that Yousef was not Abdul Basit but rather an Iraqi agent who had assumed the latter's identity when police files in Kuwait (where the real Abdul Basit lived in 1990) were doctored by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation of Kuwait.

If Mylroie and Fox (who died in 1997) are right, then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Centre last time, which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again....

As yet, there is no evidence of explicit state sponsorship of the Sept 11 attacks. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Does it not seem curious that bin Laden issues fatwas, pushes videotapes, quotes poems, and orders his followers to talk loudly and often about his role in attacks on us? Does someone want our focus to be solely on bin Laden's hard-to-reach self, and not on a senior partner?

If we hope to answer that question, the 1993 WTC bombing is a good place to start looking.

4. "Pentagon officials search for an Iraqi connection in attacks", USA Today, 10/11/01.

Pentagon officials, frustrated by the anti-terrorism campaign's focus on Afghanistan, have quietly gone around the intelligence establishment and asked a former CIA director to look for an Iraqi connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, government sources say.

The sources say James Woolsey, CIA director under President Clinton from 1993 through 1994, is seeking evidence that would justify U.S. attacks on Iraq, an action some appointed Pentagon officials have been advocating without success.

Woolsey, who quit his CIA post amid charges of poor performance, would not confirm or deny the report. "I am on record as saying that I believe the U.S. government should look into the issue of Iraqi government involvement in terrorism," he said Wednesday. He added, "I do not work for the U.S. government for pay."

The unorthodox role assigned to Woolsey is the latest salvo in a policy battle between the Pentagon and State Department since Sept. 11. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith, among others, have argued that the anti-terrorism campaign should target the regime of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

5. "A NATION CHALLENGED: SADDAM HUSSEIN; Some Pentagon Officials and Advisers Seek to Oust Iraq's Leader in War's Next Phase," NY Times, 10/12/01

On Sept. 19 and 20, the Defense Policy Board, a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon, met for 19 hours to discuss the ramifications of the attacks of Sept. 11. The members of the group agreed on the need to turn to Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war against Afghanistan and Mr. bin Laden and his organization is over, people familiar with the meetings said. Both Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz took part in the meetings for part of both days.

But while the group agreed on the goal of ousting Mr. Hussein, they presented a range of views, including a discussion of the many political and diplomatic obstacles to military action.

"If we don't use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster," Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a member of the group, said in an interview.

Richard Perle, who shares Mr. Wolfowitz's view that the Iraqi regime should be overthrown quickly with military force, said, "This has never been a fringe issue."

6. "Divisions: Hawks try to damn Iraq by hunting for evidence in UK: Ex-CIA man's mission reveals split over extending war", The Guardian, 10/13/01

A row has broken out in the Bush administration after it was revealed that hawks in the Pentagon had sent an ex-CIA director, James Woolsey, to Britain, behind the backs of the state department and the current CIA leadership, to look for evidence implicating Iraq in terrorism.

News of Mr Woolsey's travels have exposed a deep fissure inside the administration over whether to extend the war against terrorism to Iraq.

Last month, the state department, led by Colin Powell, convinced President Bush that there was no clear evidence of Baghdad's involvement in the attacks and that Iraq should not be included on the target list as such action might destroy the fragile coalition.

However, hawks in the administration grouped around the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, are determined to use the national consensus behind military action to topple Saddam Hussein.

According to several sources in the US, Mr Wolfowitz paid for Mr Woolsey to travel to Britain last month to look for evidence of prior Iraqi involvement in terrorism.

Mr Woolsey, director of the CIA in 1993-95 and generally regarded as a maverick, is convinced that Iraq has orchestrated terrorist attacks on US interests in recent years.

The state department and the CIA are furious at Mr Woolsey's freelance sleuthing and Mr Wolfowitz's role. "This is a group of people pursuing their own political agenda to bomb Iraq," said one US source with close links to intelligence.

A British official said yesterday that the police and British intelligence were "bemused" by Mr Woolsey's activities and had been unsure whether he represented the US government.

One thing I'm trying to figure out as I read all this: did they honestly believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks? Or did they want to depose Saddam for independent reasons, and figure this was a golden opportunity? There are indications of both, and I suppose they're not mutually exclusive.

I'm left, as I often have been with this administration's behavior towards Iraq, with the analogy of the prosecutor who knows the guy is guilty. And if the DA can't find the evidence of guilt, that just shows how devious the criminal is--it's certainly no reason not to convict him.

Comments

[bob mcmanus]

Professional. Excellent and enlightening.

I can't see into Wolfowitz or Woolsey's hearts to know whether they were sincere or simply using Mylroie. My guess is that they always publicly granted her credibility(I don't) , and I certainly have always respected their intelligence. I think the people who blow off the Iraq speculation in Sept 2001 are being a little unfair. It wasn't that clear.

But I have opinions. You have evidence.

[spc67]

Katherine get the book. Read pages 30 and 31. I takes all of six paragraphs for the "wandering" to arrive at going after the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Given people were trying to figure out just what the hell was going on? Less than 24 hours seems like a reasonable time to get to the right answer.

Read the book, not the press reports.

[Katherine]

That doesn't surprise me, and that's what the Guardian piece I first linked to got wrong--after the early hours it wasn't whether to go after Iraq instead of Afghanistan, but whether to go after Iraq in addition to Afghanistan, and how to allocate resources between the two.

I didn't get this when I wrote the first post, but I thought the update cleared that up. I should probably edit it to be more explicit. For now, though--bedtime.

[James Casey]

I wonder how many people there are left who don't accept the decision to go into Iraq was at least almost immediate after Sept. 11... several right-wingers now do, although they say that the administration believed it was necessary as part of the broader strategy against terrorism.

This is a reasonable/reasoned argument; I think anyone who denies Iraq was in the sights so soon is in serious danger of losing credibility.

[Thorley Winston]

spc67 wrote:

Katherine get the book. Read pages 30 and 31. I takes all of six paragraphs for the "wandering" to arrive at going after the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Given people were trying to figure out just what the hell was going on? Less than 24 hours seems like a reasonable time to get to the right answer.

Agreed, there does not appear to be any constructive purpose in trying to second-guess every conversation had after 9/11 among the POTUS’ advisors in which one would expect people to ask questions and make suggestions some of which would inevitably be either rejected or put on the back burner.

This seems to be more of a fishing expedition in the hopes of “shudder” finding out what we all already know – that the policy of the US government since 1998 was to support regime change in Iraq, that when the Bush administration took office the bipartisan and global consensus based on the best available intelligence at the time was that Iraq still had and was trying to restart its WMD programs contrary to the terms of the 1991 cease-fire agreement, that containment was a mixed-bag at best (the UN got its graft, Saddam got his palaces, and the Iraqi people got starvation), and that Iraq was a known sponsor and harborer of terrorism (even with religious groups) which was complicit in the earlier attacks on the WTC.

Shocking that someone might have thought at the time (even though the administration never really made the claim) that Iraq might have been involved in 9/11. Even more shocking that after 9/11 the paradigm changed and they may have come to the conclusion that something needed to be done about Iraq before rather than after another attack.

[Edward]

there does not appear to be any constructive purpose in trying to second-guess every conversation had after 9/11 among the POTUS’ advisors

hmmm...I'll remind you of that the next time you second guess the Prime Minister elect of Spain, Thorley.

The White House defenses against Clarke grow weaker by the minute, depite their best efforts:

From Marshall, where there's a transcript of this yesterday's gaggle,

McCLELLAN: [Clarke] was involved in our counterterrorism efforts up until October 9th of 2001, when that position was separated, something that he actually suggested, as well.

Doesn't this counter any "sour grapes" accusations that Clarke was somehow miffed that he had been demoted?

[Katherine]

As to the pre-9/11 stuff, and the Fox transcript that someone is probably bring up as I type this:

this Time Magazine article is the best account I've found of the strategy towards Al Qaeda from late 2000 to September 10, 2001.

It's interesting. You could use it to support both Clarke's carefully worded defense of Bush when he still worked for the White House, and the angry criticisms in his recent interviews (and book, but I haven't gotten a chance to look at that yet). It's all about what you choose to emphasize.

One thing that seems beyond dispute is that Clarke's at the center of things--"out of the loop" indeed.

[Slartibartfast]

This...oh, this just kills me. This just reminded me of Jesurgislac:

One thing that struck me was Clarke's claim to being a mind reader. Okay, Clarke didn't claim to actually be able to read minds; no Clarke simply implied quite strongly that he could tell what a person was thinking (with a fairly high degree of accuracy) by looking at ones face.

While hammering Condoleezza Rice as completely incompetent Clarke claims in his book that when he warned Rice in early 2001 about the threat from al-Qaeda she appeared to never have heard of the terrorist organization. Clarke writes, “Her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before."--link

Well thanks to the indefatigable Henry Hanks we now know this is quite possibly another lie on Clarke's part.

On Oct. 4, 2000, Condoleezza Rice was asked by WJR radio host David Newman what a Bush administration would do about the Osama threat... Rice spoke at length about the threat, and what needed to be done to deal with it... She said that we don't want to wake up one day and find that Osama has been successful on our own territory.

Ooopsie. Of course, this is just simple Clarke bashing according some of the more dimwitted journalists. Never mind that it actually contradicts one of Clarke's claims. Nevermind that it now appears Clarke is engaging in the very same behavior that these journalists decry in others. It is okay for Clarke to make factually inaccurate claims about Condolezza Rice, but for somebody to make an accurate claim the debunks Clarke why that is simply partisan character assassination.

Read the whole thing. It's telling that Clarke's recent statements are completely and totally contradicted by a briefing he gave in August 2002. The question is, which Clarke do you think is credible?

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"I wonder how many people there are left who don't accept the decision to go into Iraq was at least almost immediate after Sept. 11... several right-wingers now do, although they say that the administration believed it was necessary as part of the broader strategy against terrorism."

I don't understand this. A huge number of right wingers have been arguing that even if Iraq was not involved in 9-11 that dealing with it was still a necessary part of the war. We have been arguing this for years at this point. It isn't some new revelation. Clarke has 'revealed' the very thing that we have been publically arguing for more than two years now. Look at the 2002 State of the Union Address. You know, the one that specifically denies the need for an imminent threat. It talks about the broad need to deal with all sorts of things, including Al Qaeda and separately Iraq. That was TWO YEARS AGO.

[Slartibartfast]

One more thing: an Instapundit reader noted from this transcript:

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you're saying is that there was no — one, there was no [Clinton] plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That's right.

Is it redundant to point out that this disagrees completely with what he's been saying lately? Which Clarke is the one we ought to believe?

[von]

Good shoe-leather work, Katherine. But, as been noted, whatever the Administration wanted to do w/r/t Iraq, it did go after the Taliban first.

So, this doesn't quite fit:

the analogy of the prosecutor who knows the guy is guilty. And if the DA can't find the evidence of guilt, that just shows how devious the criminal is--it's certainly no reason not to convict him.

Rather, the prosecutor looked at his usual suspect, cleared him, found and prosecuted the actual guilty party, and then returned to the usual suspect and convicted him on the usual grounds.

One thing that seems beyond dispute is that Clarke's at the center of things--"out of the loop" indeed.

Yeah. I think we can safely say that, whatever Cheney's other merits, he has a distant and uncomfortable relationship with the truth.

[Katherine]

Slarti--shortest answer possible: it wasn't a Clinton plan, it was a Clarke plan.

I was going to explain how you can use the Time story to reconcile the two accounts, but he described it today as "somewhat sensationalist", so I'm working my way through his testimony.

He comes off very, very well to me. Far better than O'Neill.

[Slartibartfast]

Katherine, if you follow the little linky-thing to the Clarke brief, he says this:

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

So, no plan at all was transmitted from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. Alles klar?

If not, maybe this:

CLARKE: There was never a plan, Andrea. What there was was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table.

QUESTION: So there was nothing that developed, no documents or no new plan of any sort?

CLARKE: There was no new plan.

QUESTION: No new strategy — I mean, I don't want to get into a semantics ...

CLARKE: Plan, strategy — there was no, nothing new.

will take care of that.

[Katherine]

From the Clinton adminstration, as such, no. From Richard Clarke, the individual, who does not personify the Clinton administration, yes.

Is this a rather artificial, technical distinction? Yes. That's what spin is all about, though. To keep your job, you sometimes have to present your boss in the best possible light to the outside world, and say things that are only technically true. It's not even something isolated to the White House or Washington--I've had real jobs for all of two years, and I understand this.

(This is why that the "I'm just a midwesterner, I don't understand your tricksy Washington ways" comment from the former governor of Illinois was just laughable to me. I can't remember his name, but I'll always think of him as Commissioner Keyrock, in honor of SNL's old "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer skit...)

"The Age of Sacred Terror," one of the authoritative books on the subject, tells more or less the exact same story as Clarke in his book. So does that Time article. So does his sworn testimony.

[Slartibartfast]

From the Clinton adminstration, as such, no. From Richard Clarke, the individual, who does not personify the Clinton administration, yes.

Call me overly inclusive, but I imagine that Clarke's being part of the Clinton administration sort of cancels out that entire distinction. Maybe it doesn't work that way for you, though.

Katherine, something about the idea that Clarke is the sole vehicle of transmission of the action plan from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration, and the reliance of that theory on the sole word of Clarke, rubs me the wrong way. So I'm picky. But ordinarily there's a paper trail in these matters; even if it's classified its existence can be verified or...not.

I still find it odd that in Clinton's final address to Congress on National Security Policy in December 2000, he didn't mention Al Qaeda even once. UBL got a couple of mentions, as did the Taliban. But the whole sense of plan, mission and urgency utterly failed to communicate. So, in this matter, I'm from Missouri.