Clinton, Bush, and the hunt for bin Laden
When former President Bill Clinton appeared on Fox News Sunday this week to discuss his climate change initiative and other issues, no one predicted a stormy forecast for the interview with host Chris Wallace. But when Wallace asked the president why he hadn't "put [Osama] bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business," Clinton began his ominous finger-wagging, always a clear indication that gale force winds were gathering on the horizon. Wallace quickly found himself in the eye of the storm as Clinton launched into a dark tirade, accusing "President Bush's neocons" and other Republicans of turning their backs on the bin Laden threat until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and criticizing Wallace for his "conservative hit job."
The former president told Wallace that he had authorized the CIA to kill bin Laden and even "contracted with people to kill him." Clinton said he also had put together a broad, comprehensive strategy to hunt the al Qaeda leader down after the bombing of the USS Cole and to attack Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban. But, said Clinton, the FBI and CIA refused to certify that bin Laden had ordered the Cole attack, and Uzbekistan had refused to allow the United States to set up a base for military operations.
In contrast, her said, Bush's team "had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months," believing Clinton had been "too obsessed" with the terrorist leader.
"They ridiculed me for trying," said Clinton. "They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried."
Clinton's rage opened up a Pandora's box of arguments about whether his administration or his successor's could or should have done more to prevent the 9/11 attacks. It revealed the festering political wounds on both sides, five years later.
"The scab on this has not healed at all," says Roger Cressey, a former senior counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush White House, "and it doesn't take much to pull it off." After the ex-president's televised tongue-lashing, Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice and other administration officials denied that Clinton had left behind a broad antiterrorism plan for his successor, as he stated.
And they raised more than a few arched eyebrows at Clinton's claim that he had a plan to counter the Cole bombing.
"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice told the New York Post, adding that "nobody organized this country or the international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11."
In a way, they were both partly right.
Tomes have been written about the failure of intelligence and the U.S. government's inability and to some extent unwillingness to deal forcefully with bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to 9/11. The national commission investigating the 9/11 attacks produced an authoritative history of these failures. But because of the recent debate, a covert operation that straddled both administrations, and was central to their strategy for killing bin Laden, may bear re-examining. The operation, which began in the twilight of the Clinton administration and culminated, tragically, only after the 9/11 attacks, was a highly classified covert CIA project known as "Night Fist" in 2000 and renamed "Positive Plot" in 2001. It involved weaponizing an unmanned reconnaissance plane called the Predator, and flying it into Afghanistan to kill bin Laden.
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