DIE AND LEARN:

Legal Disputes Over Hunt Paralyzed Clinton's Aides (Steve Coll, February 22, 2004, Washington Post)

Clinton's covert policy against bin Laden pursued two goals at the same time. He ordered submarines equipped with cruise missiles to patrol secretly in waters off Pakistan in the hope that CIA spotters would one day identify bin Laden's location confidently enough to warrant a deadly missile strike.

But Clinton also authorized the CIA to carry out operations that legally required the agency's officers to plan in almost every instance to capture bin Laden alive and bring him to the United States to face trial.

This meant the CIA officers had to arrange in advance for detention facilities, extraction flights and other contingencies -- even if they expected that bin Laden would probably die in the arrest attempt. These requirements made operational planning much more cumbersome, the CIA officers contended.

In fashioning this sensitive policy in the midst of an impeachment crisis that lasted into early 1999, Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, struggled to forge a consensus within the White House national security team. Among other things, he had to keep on board a skeptical Attorney General Janet Reno and her Justice Department colleagues, who were deeply invested in law enforcement approaches to terrorism, according to senior officials involved.

As the months passed, Clinton signed new memos in which the language, while still ambiguous, made the use of lethal force by the CIA's Afghan agents more likely, according to officials involved. At first the CIA was permitted to use lethal force only in the course of a legitimate attempt to make an arrest. Later the memos allowed for a pure lethal attack if an arrest was not possible. Still, the CIA was required to plan all its agent missions with an arrest in mind.

Some CIA managers chafed at the White House instructions. The CIA received "no written word nor verbal order to conduct a lethal action" against bin Laden before Sept. 11, one official involved recalled. "The objective was to render this guy to law enforcement." In these operations, the CIA had to recruit agents "to grab [bin Laden] and bring him to a secure place where we can turn him over to the FBI. . . . If they had said 'lethal action' it would have been a whole different kettle of fish, and much easier."

Berger later recalled his frustration about this hidden debate. Referring to the military option in the two-track policy, he said at a 2002 congressional hearing: "It was no question, the cruise missiles were not trying to capture him. They were not law enforcement techniques."

The overriding trouble was, whether they arrested bin Laden or killed him, they first had to find him.

Flawed Ally Was Hunt's Best Hope: Afghan Guerrilla, U.S. Shared Enemy (Steve Coll, February 23, 2004, Washington Post)

Members of the Bush Cabinet met at the White House on Sept. 4. Before them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Massoud.

It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush administration's senior national security team had not begun to focus on al Qaeda until April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a policy approach until July. Then they took still more weeks to schedule a meeting to ratify their plans.

Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame-duck Clinton White House -- and rejected -- nine months earlier. The stated goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. The plan called for the CIA to supply Massoud with a large but undetermined sum for covert action to support his war against the Taliban, as well as trucks, uniforms, ammunition, mortars, helicopters and other equipment. The Bush Cabinet approved this part of the draft document.

Other aspects of the Bush administration's al Qaeda policy, such as its approach to the use of armed Predator surveillance drones for the hunt, remained unresolved after the Sept. 4 debate. But on Massoud, the CIA was told that it could at least start the paperwork for a new covert policy -- the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of the Afghan war.

In the Panjshir Valley, unaware of these developments, Massoud read Persian poetry in his bungalow in the early hours of Sept. 9. Later that morning he finally decided to grant an interview to the two Arab journalists visiting from Kabul.

As one of them set up a television camera, the other read aloud a list of questions he intended to ask. About half of them concerned bin Laden.

A bomb secretly packed in the television equipment ripped the cameraman's body apart. It shattered the room's windows, seared the walls in flame and tore Massoud's chest with shrapnel.

Hours later, after Massoud had been evacuated to Tajikistan, his intelligence aide Amrullah Saleh called the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. He spoke to Rich, the bin Laden unit chief. Saleh was sobbing and heaving between sentences as he explained what had happened.

"Where's Massoud?" the CIA officer asked.

"He's in the refrigerator," said Saleh, searching for the English word for morgue.

Massoud was dead, but members of his inner circle had barely absorbed the news. They were all in shock. They were also trying to strategize in a hurry. They had already put out a false story claiming that Massoud had only been wounded. Meanwhile, Saleh told the Counterterrorist Center, the suddenly leaderless Northern Alliance needed the CIA's help as it prepared to confront al Qaeda and the Taliban.

On the morning of Sept. 10, the CIA's daily classified briefings to Bush, his Cabinet and other policymakers reported on Massoud's death and analyzed the consequences for the United States' covert war against al Qaeda.

'This is war,' Rumsfeld told Bush an excerpt from Rumsfeld's War by Rowan Scarborough (Washington Times, 2/23/04)

Donald H. Rumsfeld sat in a vault-like room studded with video screens and talked with President Bush as the Pentagon burned.

"This is not a criminal action," the secretary of defense told Bush over a secure line. "This is war."

The word "war" meant more than going after the al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan, the fault line of terrorism. Bush said he wanted retaliation.

The setting was the Pentagon's Executive Support Center, where Rumsfeld held secure video teleconferences with the White House across the Potomac or with ground commanders 10,000 miles away.

The time was 1:02 p.m., less than four hours after terrorists steered American Flight 77 into the Pentagon's southwest wall.

Rumsfeld at first had dashed to the impact site. In his shirt and tie, he helped transport the wounded.

Finally convinced to leave the scene, Rumsfeld entered the closely guarded ESC, where whiffs of burned rubble penetrated the ventilation system. The video monitor in front of him was blank, but there was an audio connection with the president at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

Rumsfeld's instant declaration of war, previously unreported, took America from the Clinton administration's view that terrorism was a criminal matter to the Bush administration's view that terrorism was a global enemy to be destroyed.

"That was really a breakthrough strategically and intellectually," recalls Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. "Viewing the 9/11 attacks as a war that required a war strategy was a very big thought, and a lot flowed from that."

Rumsfeld wanted a war that was fought with ruthless efficiency: special forces, high-tech firepower, a scorecard for killing or capturing terrorists. He had no desire to become the world's jailer. And he refused to be stymied by bureaucracy.

Rumsfeld quickly shared his views in a meeting of his inner circle, the so-called Round Table group including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This would be a global war, Rumsfeld said, and he planned to give Special Operations forces -- Delta Force, SEALs and Green Berets -- unprecedented powers to kill terrorists.

In retrospect it seems obvious that we were at war with al Qaeda all along. But there also seems little point in castigating Bill Clinton or George Bush for not pursuing a policy that we'd not have tolerated had they tried it. The country's barely on board now for the pursuit of a war strategy--imagine trying to sell us on it in the booming 90s?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 23, 2004 3:05 PM