FORCING AMERICA TO GO JACKSONIAN

THE SEARCH FOR OSAMA: Did the government let bin Laden?s trail go cold? (JANE MAYER, 2003-07-28, The New Yorker)

[Richard Clarke, the country's first counter-terrorism czar,] said that in October, 2000, when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, off the coast of Yemen, Clinton demanded better military options. The Department of Defense prepared a plan for a United States military operation so big that it was dismissed as politically untenable; meanwhile, General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that, without better intelligence, a smaller-scale attack would be too risky. (Indeed, according to the Congressional Report on September 11th, Shelton said, "You can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are worthless without intelligence.") The Navy tried stationing two submarines in the Indian Ocean, in the hope of being able to shoot missiles at bin Laden, but the time lag between the sighting of the target and the arrival of the missiles made it virtually impossible to pinpoint him accurately.

The first promise of an intelligence breakthrough came in the fall of 2000, when Clarke, and a few allies in the C.I.A. and the military, recognized the potential of the Predator, a nine-hundred-and-fifty-pound unmanned propeller plane being tested by General Johnny Jumper, the Air Force's head of air combat at the time. It could supply live video surveillance-day or night, and through cloud cover. Clarke said that the plane, which was tested in Afghanistan, supplied "spectacular" pictures of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, including one of a tall, white-robed man who closely resembled bin Laden and was surrounded by security guards as he crossed a city street to a mosque. At the C.I.A.'s Global Response Center, analysts who were used to receiving fuzzy satellite photographs and thirdhand reports were now able to watch as live video feeds captured the daily routines inside Al Qaeda training camps. They watched as men did physical exercises, fired their weapons, and practiced hand-to-hand combat. Two or three times that fall, intelligence analysts thought they might have spotted bin Laden himself. The man in question was unusually tall, like bin Laden, and drove the same model of truck that bin Laden preferred, the Toyota Land Cruiser. (The images weren't clear enough, however, to allow analysts to discern facial features.) The C.I.A. rushed the surveillance tapes over to the White House, where the President, like everyone else, was stunned by their clarity. Later that fall, however, fierce winds in the Hindu Kush caused the Predator to crash. The accident led to recriminations inside the C.I.A. and the Air Force and quarrels about which part of the bureaucracy should pay for the damage.

By early 2001, Clarke and a handful of counter-terrorism specialists at the C.I.A. had learned of an Air Force plan to arm the Predator. The original plan called for three years of tests. Clarke and the others pushed so hard that the plane was ready in three months. In tests, the craft worked surprisingly well. In the summer of 2001, an armed Predator destroyed a model of bin Laden's house which had been built in the Nevada desert. But Clarke said, "Every time we were ready to use it, the C.I.A. would change its mind. The real motivation within the C.I.A., I think, is that some senior people below Tenet were saying, `It's fine to kill bin Laden, but we want to do it in a way that leaves no fingerprints. Otherwise, C.I.A. agents all over the world will be subject to assassination themselves.' They also worried that something would go wrong-they'd blow up a convent and get blamed."

On September 4, 2001, all sides agree, the issue reached a head, at a meeting of the Principal's Committee of Bush's national-security advisers, a Cabinet-level group that includes the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the director of the C.I.A., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Attorney General, and the national-security adviser. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also attended that day. As Clarke, who was there, recalled, "Tenet said he opposed using the armed Predator, because it wasn't the C.I.A.'s job to fly airplanes that shot missiles. The Air Force said it wasn't their job to fly planes to collect intelligence. No one around the table seemed to have a can-do attitude. Everyone seemed to have an excuse."

"There was a discussion," the senior intelligence official confirmed. "The C.I.A. said, `Who's got more experience flying aircraft that shoot missiles?' But the Air Force liked planes with pilots." In looking back at the deadlock, Roger Cressey, Clarke's deputy for counter-terrorism at the N.S.C., told me, "It sounds terrible, but we used to say to each other that some people didn't get it-it was going to take body bags."

We'd all like to have someone to blame for 9-11, but the brutal reality is that it does take the body bags to focus all our attention. The question is: given the lethality of our response once you get it, who would want our attention? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 28, 2003 9:05 PM