Richard Clarke and Osama bin Laden: The Clinton Years

1998

Last May, President Clinton appointed a little-known but very senior adviser, Richard Clarke, to oversee the administration’s efforts to counter all these non-conventional challenges. His main job is to co-ordinate the 40 government agencies—ranging from the Pentagon to the Centres for Disease Control—which have some responsibility for pre-empting and countering terrorism and its effects. By 2000, he is supposed to develop a plan that protects the computer networks running America’s banking, telecommunications and utility systems. He is also trying to gear up the country’s highly decentralised public health system—designed to cope with food-poisoning outbreaks in a single city or state—to prepare for disaster on a much bigger scale. But preparing America for attacks on the homeland raises awkward legal and constitutional questions. The deployment of regular soldiers for domestic operations is virtually forbidden by law. The Pentagon has considered appointing a commander-in-chief with responsibility for the American homeland; but the idea has been dropped because of political sensitivities. - The Economist

Defense Secretary Cohen said the United States launched simultaneous airstrikes August 20 with “sufficient power” to disrupt and perhaps even destroy terrorist assets in Afghanistan and Sudan associated with a network run by anti-American extremist Usama bin Ladin. The U.S. and the rest of the community of civilized nations, he said, “have made it clear time and…again that the violence and the bloodshed and the murderous acts of international terrorism will not be tolerated.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Henry Shelton, who joined Cohen in an afternoon news conference at the Pentagon, said the U.S. action was not an effort to assassinate Usama bin Ladin, but to attack “his network of terrorist groups.” A senior intelligence official later told reporters at the Defense Department that “we are engaged in a real war against terrorism.” Cohen said the U.S. undertook the military action as threats continued to be made against U.S. embassies, American citizens, and other interests in the wake of the August 7 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds of individuals, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands of others. He also said there was evidence that Usama bin Ladin’s terror network was trying to acquire chemical weapons. While the U.S. strikes will not eliminate the terrorist threat, Cohen said, there will be “no sanctuary for terrorists, and no limit to our resolve to defend American citizens and our interests, our ideals of democracy and law, against these cowardly attacks.” - Jacqueline S. Porth

The White House sought yesterday to prepare the U.S. public for a sustained war with terrorists, saying Thursday’s strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan are virtually certain to be followed by retaliation, further American military action or both. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen refused to rule out further U.S. attacks on terrorist facilities. “We have contingency plans that we are developing and there may be more in the future,” he said. He was echoed by other top officials who were unusually blunt in warning that there are likely to be further consequences from the U.S. cruise missile attacks, which were a response to the Aug. 7 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. “The terrorist threat is a long-term one,” said Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who joined Mr. Cohen in briefing lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi whose network was targeted Thursday, was reported yesterday to have threatened new attacks against U.S. targets. “The battle has not started yet. The response will be with action and not words,” the editor of a London-based Arabic newspaper quoted a bin Laden spokesman as saying. - Warren P. Strobel

1999

There was something about the last man off the 6 p.m. ferry from Victoria, B.C., to Port Angeles, Wash., that didn’t seem right to U.S. Customs inspector Diana Dean last Tuesday. She threw a couple of routine questions at him, and he choked, claiming to be a French Canadian named Benni Noris. When officials opened the trunk of his rented Chrysler, they found what looked like the contents of a bombmaker’s shopping cart: 118 lbs. of urea; two 22-oz., three-quarters-full jars of nitroglycerine; 14 lbs. of sulfate; and four timing devices consisting of Casio watches, nine-volt batteries and circuit boards. The man bolted but didn’t make it six blocks before being captured. The arrest came at a tense time for U.S. law-enforcement agents, who are on the lookout for possible terrorism planned to coincide with the millennium celebrations. “He’s connected with someone,” said Richard Clarke, U.S. national coordinator for counterterrorism. “People don’t just walk around with that stuff in their kit bag.” One theory is that Noris—who, law-enforcement officials say, is actually an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam, 32—had been dispatched to wreak havoc at the New Year’s Eve celebration at Seattle’s Space Needle, which is close to a hotel where he had reserved a room. Some speculated, though with little hard evidence, that he was backed by the Afghanistan-based terrorist Osama bin Laden. Whatever Ressam was planning, his arrest has heightened the state of alert as the countdown to New Year’s Eve continues. - Massimo Calabresi

Much attention has focused on Mr. Bin Laden, the Saudi exile who has declared war against the US and is accused of orchestrating last year’s attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Thought to be in hiding in Afghanistan, he is eager to demonstrate that he can “reach out and touch wherever he wants whenever he wants,” says Mr. Bodansky. So far the US war on terrorism has been largely successful. According to Mr. Cronin, the US has been the site of only two confirmed international terrorist attacks in the 1990s - the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York (even though the immediate perpetrators lived in the US) and a 1992 attack on Iran’s United Nations mission. Whether or not the US gets hit by a terrorist strike this weekend, analysts say the rolling of the clocks will signal neither the beginning nor end of an ongoing war. Says Cronin: “On Jan. 2, 2000, terrorists will still be a real threat.” - Justin Brown

2000

The USS Cole is a $1 billion high-tech missile warship. But it was no match for a rubber dinghy manned by two Arabs. The explosive-laden dinghy severely damaged the Cole and inflicted 56 casualties (17 dead, 39 injured) on a once-proud U.S. Navy. The attack on the Cole showed a “great deal of sophistication,” declared Richard Clarke, a top U.S. security official with the grand title of National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism. On “60 Minutes” last Sunday, Mr. Clarke said the rubber dinghy attack was so sophisticated the U.S. is absolved of any suspicion of intelligence failure. Listening to Mr. Clarke, one got the definite impression that an attack on the USS Cole with an Exocet missile would signify sophistication beyond comprehension. There was nothing sophisticated about the attack on the Cole. Experts have pointed out that if the dinghy had been properly positioned, it would have set off the Cole’s warheads and fuel tanks and blown the warship to pieces. There can be no doubt, however, that the Arab attack was more sophisticated than the U.S. cover-up. Eight years of Clinton-Gore-Reno have proved that bald-faced lies lack consequence. Now everyone is getting in on the act. Mr. Clarke can go on national television and misrepresent an attack on a U.S. warship by a rubber dinghy as a highly sophisticated action outside the boundaries of prediction and defense. - Paul Craig Roberts

Most of these articles were found by searching for the keywords “richard,” “clarke,” and “laden.” The Porth article I found while searching for an additional source of the Strobel article.

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John Sullivan below points out that Roberts left out “with explosives” in his lambasting of Clark above. A quick search yielded what I hope is the entire quote.

It was a very large explosion and did very extensive damage and shows a great deal of sophistication with explosives. There are some similarities that we see with East Africa. There are similarities in the sophistication of the attack, the pre-planning of the attack. This is something that began long before the recent violence in the Middle East. This took months to plan and there are indications of safe houses, and planning, and moving of personnel in. - Richard Clarke

Of course, this quote does not not seem to be from the 60 Minutes interview that Roberts referenced. Clarke argues his point well enough here.

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Nicely done! Roberts's takedown of Clarke's attribution of sophistication in the USS Cole attack reminds me of James Lileks's comments on the same sort of thing with respect to the Madrid bombings:

I’m somewhat annoyed by the assertion that this act was “sophisticated,” and hence the work of those brilliant stratgerists of Al Qaeda. My definition of sophistication is somewhat different: it’s an unmanned drone flying over Pakistan, piloted by a guy in Florida, dropping a laser-guided bomb into the passenger cab of a truck full of Taliban. That’s sophistication. Synchronizing watches on detenators is not exactly all that tough.

Wow! Roberts really neeeds to head back to journalism school - or he needs to get a tape recorder so that he can get and analyze COMPLETE quotes. What Clarke ACTUALLY said was that the attack showed "a great deal of sophistication WITH EXPLOSIVES." [Emphasis mine] Clarke said this because the bombers used shaped charges. They didn't simply float up to the Cole with big red boxes labelled "TNT" as Mr. Roberts seems to believe.

Clarke also characterized the pre-planning of the attack as "sophisticated" because it involved the movement of personnel through several countries over the course of months using a number of safe houses.

Sound bites are wonderful things, Mr. Roberts, but credibility comes from reporting the ENTIRE news.

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Richard Clarke and Osama bin Laden: The Clinton Years

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