America Fights Back
Clinton raises the stakes in the war against terrorism
Small group. All the while, only select military planners and the top one or two officials from the Defense Department, CIA, State Department, and National Security Council were aware of the imminent attack. The "small group," as it was called, amounted to only about a dozen senior officials. One reason manned jets were not used was that putting pilots on alert and repositioning aircraft could have tipped off news organizations--and bin Laden--that a military operation was afoot. Officials said the secrecy was required to make sure bin Laden did not accelerate plans for terrorist attacks and to catch him as off guard as possible.
National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said that one reason the attack occurred on August 20 was that intelligence sources predicted a sort of terrorist convention at the Afghanistan camp on that day, involving many of bin Laden's far-flung deputies. Reports indicated that several of the Tomahawks targeted at the camps carried cluster munitions, designed to disperse shrapnel-like bomblets over a large area. That suggests a U.S. effort to kill as many of the suspected terrorists as possible. One source familiar with the planning says that if a missile packed with cluster bombs exploded over the middle of a football field, it would kill anybody standing on the field. "Collateral damage was just not an issue" in Afghanistan, says another official. Government lawyers had determined that rules prohibiting assassinations did not apply to the attacks, because they were carried out as acts of self-defense and did not target a specific individual.
The shroud of secrecy persisted well after the attacks, with President Clinton and his advisers much more reluctant than is typical after military action to describe exactly how the strikes occurred, who was involved, and even, officially, what weapons were used. One explanation was that by keeping information from the press, the United States was also keeping bin Laden in the dark. If a follow-up strike were deemed necessary, that would make it harder for him to know what defenses to put in place. Military officials also hoped that confusion would force bin Laden to get information from his associates via faxes and satellite phones--instead of CNN--which would let U.S. spies continue to monitor his activities. "If they have to check around with each other, that's a good kind of intelligence thing for us," says a defense official.
Republicans waver. But a scarcity of information also fueled speculation about a Wag the Dog scenario, based on the movie in which advisers to a president hounded by sexual scandal manufacture a phony war to focus attention elsewhere. Shortly after the attacks, Republican Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana expressed skepticism at the raid's timing, suggesting it was motivated by Clinton's desire for favorable publicity. But after a top-secret briefing on Operation Infinite Reach, he said, "There does appear to be credible evidence to suggest that targeting an Osama bin Laden terrorist training site was necessary." Then he canceled plans to appear on weekend talk shows to criticize the president. Other politicians, of both parties, generally supported the strikes. And defense and intelligence officials also said that evidence of bin Laden's culpability was growing so clear that military action was a logical response.
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