Clinton, Bush, and the hunt for bin Laden
"We were waiting," the former military official says, "for the thumbs up or thumbs down."
It was a thumbs down. After Tenet made his presentation on the results of the Hellfire testing and described the probability of killing bin Laden with a missile as low, Rice expressed concerns that the warheads still weren't as lethal as they needed to be to ensure that any attack on bin Laden would be guaranteed successful. The Summary of Conclusions approved at the end of the meeting recommended that the Air Force continue to work on that problem, according to the former defense official who detailed the Bush administration effort. In the meantime, Rice asked the CIA and the military to resolve any outstanding funding issues, so that the agency could quickly fly the unarmed Predators to Uzbekistan, to resume reconnaissance missions against bin Laden in Afghanistan, until the lethality issues were resolved. Tenet made a firm commitment to "fly the hell" out of the Predators, for reconnaissance, the former military official says. Rice also directed the CIA and the military to commence an information operations campaign against al Qaeda and to have the CENTCOM and the SOCOM, the Special Forces command, continue to prepare options other than the Predator to act against bin Laden, if the CIA developed "targetable intelligence."
The former intelligence official says that even after 9/11, the Air Force said the Predator was still not ready. "The CIA said, 'screw that,'" the official said, "We'll test it in Afghanistan."
Looking back, the Bush administration arguably missed perhaps the most important deadline in modern American history. "We were so close, and we were disappointed when the principals committee decided not to send the Predator with Hellfires," says the former senior military official. "But by midmorning of September 11, we knew that the Predator would be armed and flying over Afghanistan."
And that's exactly what happened. Once the September 11 attacks took place, all of the funding issues and the ethical issues and moral quandaries dissolved. The technical doubts about whether the Predator could perform, though laudable at the time, became laughable after 9/11, as the Predator turned into a lethal superstar, with a very high probability of killing the enemy, and became the weapon of choice, decimating Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. Why did the government so badly underestimate the Predator's effectiveness? It turns out that the buildings in Afghanistan were far less sturdy than what U.S. officials had planned for.
With Carol Hook, Danielle Burton, and Stephanie Salmon in the U.S. News library
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