Seperation of Church and State

February 2, 2003

But not everyone has the same moral beliefs Rob. Wouldnt some parents not agree with teachers teaching their beliefs?

February 2, 2003

IF they are sending their kids to a christian based private school, they kow what is being taught.

--Rob

February 2, 2003

Young children have caregivers regardless of whether the mother works or not. It's absurd to imply that a working mother means a child in the formative years (at the very least, until four or so, before he heads off to school) won't be parented.

(Day care is different, because day care is entirely privatized. The premise of day care is not to educate but to provide socialization and care, and so sure, teach morality in a day care as if it were a private school)

February 2, 2003

The official religion has always been christianity and no dude, the pope is just for catholics.

I see this a lot around the Internet, is it an American thing? Since when were Catholics not Christians? Just because the Catholic Church is the single biggest Christian organisation doesn't make it separate from Christianity itself. Its not like there are any vast differences. Anyhoo, Church and State was sorted out by the British centuries ago during the Reformation. State consumes and dominates the Church. What is being advocated by Rob = teh suck.

Catholics are Christians, Christians are not necessarily Catholics.

I don't think religion should have anything to do with the US government, even though I'm Christian.

In Canada it is a little different story because the Queen is both the head of our country and our Church.

Also, most Christians aren't conversion freaks aside from a few screaming banshees and Mormons.

February 2, 2003

I'd like to start out my post with a quick quote... It's one everyone seems to be throwing around a lot.

Amendment [ I ]

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This states that, by law, Congress cannot pass resolution that would be construed as endorsement of a single religion. Creating a law requiring schools to put the Ten Commandments up is unconstitutional, because not only are they trying to favor one religion (Christianity) over others, it could be argued that they are prohibiting the free exercise of religion in a school setting. Congress cannot pass laws that curb our speech, and our ability to gather in groups. These are also key in the study of religion, whatever that religion may be.

Could the states seperately do it by passing law? No. That's also unconstitutional, according to the Tenth Amendment:

Amendment [ X ]

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Guess what? Any laws in regards to religion that Congress can't pass, the states can't either. Separation of church and state is complete and, barring Constitutional Amendment, impossible to change. And this was from the beginning of the country's existence, folks! There was never meant to be any argument. This was, from the beginning, a country founded on the principles of freedom, diversity, and non-oppression. Has it been perfect? No. But as the Constitution is written, freedom of religion was one of the foundations this country was built on.

Now, privatizing of schools may not be unconstitutional... To my knowledge, there's no amendment against it. But from what I'm seeing so far, you want to privatize the schools to teach children 'morals'. I ask you:

Whose 'morals'?

It's a very simple question. Will they let people choose which 'morals' they follow? Or will a set of 'morals' be forced upon them? Again, up comes the question of Constitutionally-mandated religious freedom. If Congress or the states allow schools to be privatized, and questions begin to come up about religious segregation, hazing, and the like... The First and Tenth Amendment will certainly come into play. It will be argued that these schools were allowed to be privatized so they could 'force' a religion upon people, and they would be declared unconstitutional.

I will admit, though, that having different religions in schools is an interesting concept. After all, it's about time people were allowed to learn about \/\/icca in 'public'.

Rob E Dangerously · February 2, 2003

Rob E, ok let's forget about the U.S.S Cole. What about the american embassys bombings in kenya? What about that?

You mentioned the USS Cole, not the bombings in Kenya. You realized how much of an idiot you looked like by just mentioning Cole and you're trying to change the subject now.

I'm sure that establishing a Christian-based theocracy would have stopped the angry Muslims. :lol: Rob, could killing their leaders and converting them have stopped this terrorism?

Atlas · February 2, 2003

Because, society is different than it was before. Not a bad thing but harded to teach morals because instead of women being homemakers they are out working. So you have more 2 income houses, and less time for parents to teach morals. THat is why I believe it needs to be taught in the schools.

--Rob

the literacy rate would go up easily if parents made kids stop watching television and did something crazy like, I don't know, MAKE THEM READ.

Parents shouldn't be communists. Eliminating the TV and throwing a book in a childs hands is not the way to bring up the literacy rate because it doesn't work. The kid won't read unless he wants to. He'd rather stare out the window, daydreaming about the action hero he saw in a movie, or the cartoon he was watching. Unless the child wants to read on his own, he won't do it. The way to get him to WANT to read, is to raise him right form the beginning - and that's the major problem these days.

Because, society is different than it was before. Not a bad thing but harded to teach morals because instead of women being homemakers they are out working. So you have more 2 income houses, and less time for parents to teach morals. THat is why I believe it needs to be taught in the schools.

Now you're taking away the parents' influence over their child. Who says that the morals the state teaches are the morals that parents feel their kids should learn? And which morals are these anyway, Christian morals? What if Mr and Mrs. Schwartzberg don't want their jewish child to be taught those morals, but can't afford to send him to a jeshiva? And what if they support abortion, and maybe believe that killing an unborn baby is, in fact, ok?

Government has no place teaching morality, period.

Atlas · February 2, 2003

IF they are sending their kids to a christian based private school, they kow what is being taught.

Your profile says that you're around 20, so you should be fairly familiaar with the dynamics of what goes on in a school. Would you say that the greatest lessons you've leaarned have come from teachers? I doubt it. As far as I can tell, the most important knowledge that I came away with came from the other students there. From friends, enemies, arguments, etc. And that's how most people, and I, learned my morals.

The stuff your parents tell you when you're young is one thing. They have a direct responsibility to keep you out of harm's way, from casing harm to others, and raise a moral person. During the teen years, you learn that a lot of it is bullshit, from the experiences you have. In no way does a state-run, tax-funded organization such as a school influece that. People just don't view school with the kind of respect that you want them to. It's an anti-establishment mentality, and in my opinion, it's completely warranted. If we trusted our government to teach us morals, we could, in time, have a nazi-germany situation, if the morals taught were of that nature. (Not the best example, but it backs the point).

I tihnk you're giving both the church and state too much credit. These two institutions screw us up enough on their own. Both of them together is certain death. (George Carlin, I believe)

February 2, 2003

Hm. Seems everyone (Rob Johnstone) agrees with separation of church and state. Even those who are Christian are for separation.

February 2, 2003

Well, it's not like Rob's position is in conflict with normal reasoning abilities. His view of the Bible puts forth a specific code of morals, and if (as Rob obviously believes) that's the One True Code, then there's no reason for it not to be taught in schools.

Of course, there's a certain level of uncertainty involved, and that particular view is not supported by the Constitution, which in the United states is the Supreme Law of the Land.

The only real factual issue, as opposed to an issue which can be debated, is with Rob's insistence that Christianity is the official religion of the United States. If I recall correctly, most of the framers were deists - that is, nonchristians who believed on purely rational grounds in a Creator, not necessarily the JudeoChristian God. If they had intended for Christianity to be an official religion, they would have made it explicit.

February 3, 2003

Rob E, ok let's forget about the U.S.S Cole. What about the american embassys bombings in kenya? What about that?

You mentioned the USS Cole, not the bombings in Kenya. You realized how much of an idiot you looked like by just mentioning Cole and you're trying to change the subject now.

I'm sure that establishing a Christian-based theocracy would have stopped the angry Muslims. Rob, could killing their leaders and converting them have stopped this terrorism?

Rob E, you missed the point. If clinton would have went after Osama then, we would not have had 9/11.

--Rob

February 3, 2003

Clinton did go after Osama, he simply didn't get the support to use the vast resources that Bush got.

Get. Your. Facts. Straight.

February 3, 2003

Oh, and by the way, how's Osama doing?

Did we find him yet?

For having vastly unlimited resources to find him, he sure seems elusive, huh?

February 3, 2003

Clinton did go after Osama, he simply didn't get the support to use the vast resources that Bush got.

Get. Your. Facts. Straight.

I must have missed that. Maybe it's because he never mentioned it. Please get your facts straight.

--Rob

February 3, 2003

Clinton's War On Terror

Your personal ignorance does not work as support in a debate.

February 3, 2003

I for one don't see where the argument is here, besides in Rob's head.

I agree that the founding fathers probably assumed that all religions would be based somehow on original christianity, they weren't exposed to ANYTHING else. So they used the word "God." However, this does not mean that they were particularly advocating christianity. Idiots act like there is theism in the constitution, and there really isn't. They used the words God and creator to show that they believed that all men, because they were born, deserve certain inalienable rights. They did not mean that they advocated the christian religion. As was previously stated they recalled that many people came to America avoiding government enforcement of a religion. That is what the seperation of church and state means, IMO. I don't agree with the uber-left who state that there cannot be any religion in schools, I believe people have thicker skins than that. I mean, if the majority believes a certain thing, they really shouldn't have to hide it. I think people like the ACLU pretend to be horrified by the word "Christmas" yet not by the word "Roshashana(sp)"

In terms of private schools, I feel that people should have to have their tax dollars go towards public schools no matter what. Guess what, they're PUBLIC SCHOOLS, they were designed so that every child in America could have a free and excellent education, so that means every person in America needs to be taxed. If you choose to send your kid to another school, that's fine. But you have to pay for schools, they're a public service.

February 3, 2003

For the next two years, Clinton pursued a policy of economic sanctions against the Taliban and sent numerous messages to the de facto government of Afghanistan requesting bin Laden's delivery for trial.

Frustrated by the Taliban's lack of cooperation, Clinton's emissaries took on a more menacing tone in the spring of 2000. But though the administration deliberately raised the specter of military confrontation, it chose in the end to step back.

Wow economic sanctions, we know how well those work. You really proved me wrong. haha. Even the left minded Washington Post couldn't make that sound good.

--Rob

February 3, 2003

For the next two years, Clinton pursued a policy of economic sanctions against the Taliban and sent numerous messages to the de facto government of Afghanistan requesting bin Laden's delivery for trial.

Frustrated by the Taliban's lack of cooperation, Clinton's emissaries took on a more menacing tone in the spring of 2000. But though the administration deliberately raised the specter of military confrontation, it chose in the end to step back.

Wow economic sanctions, we know how well those work. You really proved me wrong. haha. Even the left minded Washington Post couldn't make that sound good.

--Rob

And really, you've shown us all your facts. Wait, you don't have facts. You just go on what you THINK is right. I'm sorry, I mistook you for someone who actually cited sources and such.

February 3, 2003

What sources do I need jerky? He didn't do anything, that is fact. No sources needed and it cost us in the end.

--Rob

February 3, 2003

Abstract:
The CIA's directorate of operations recruited, trained, paid or equipped surrogate forces in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and among tribal militias inside Afghanistan, with the common purpose of capturing or killing bin Laden. The Pakistani channel, disclosed previously in The Washington Post, and its Uzbek counterpart, which has not been reported before, never bore fruit. Inside Afghanistan, tribal allies twice reported to their CIA handlers that they fought skirmishes with bin Laden's forces, but they inflicted no verified damage.

More than once, according to people with direct knowledge, [bill Clinton] asked [Henry H. Shelton], a former Special Operations commander, whether he could drop a small ground combat team into an al Qaeda training camp to engage bin Laden directly. Some of his advisers supposed this would reduce the most stringent demands on intelligence. To hit bin Laden with a missile, the CIA had to be able to place him inside the explosive radius of a warhead at a precise time at least six hours in the future. Special Forces, they said, might find him at a camp without having to forecast his movements inside it.

According to two sources, the CIA's clandestine service recruited and maintained communication with an informant in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. The informant had ties to an office of Taliban internal security, and sometimes learned there of bin Laden's plans or whereabouts. Though valued and frequently proved accurate after the fact, the information was twice removed from its source. The Taliban knew something of bin Laden's movements, and the informant knew something of what the Taliban knew.

Full Text:

Copyright The Washington Post Company Dec 19, 2001

First of two articles

Two years ago, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet phoned the White House. The agency had a lead, he said, on Osama bin Laden.

Reports linked the al Qaeda leader to a temporary encampment in southern Afghanistan. Overhead photographs showed a well-equipped caravan of the sort used by hunters, a commanding figure at its center, and an entourage of escorts bearing arms.

National security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger canvassed the Small Group, as they had come to call themselves, of Cabinet-rank decision-makers on the most sensitive terrorist matters. President Bill Clinton gave the go-ahead to begin preparations for cruise missiles to launch.

Amid the urgent engagement of the White House came an unwelcome status call from U.S. Central Command. One of two submarines designated to fire the missiles, if so ordered, had left its Arabian Sea cruising grounds. "Well, get it back in the box!" urged a duty officer, according to a person who was present.

Clinton, said people familiar with the episode, waited impatiently as the CIA searched for confirmation. Finally, Tenet called back. The camp was not bin Laden's, he said. It was a falconing expedition of a wealthy sheik from the United Arab Emirates -- and bin Laden had never been part of it.

Thus dissolved another moment of hope in a covert war of long shots and near misses that most Americans did not yet know their country was fighting. Unfolding in the last two years of his presidency, long before the events of Sept. 11, Clinton's war was marked by caution against an enemy that the president and his advisers knew to be ruthless and bold. Reluctant to risk lives, failure or the wrath of brittle allies in the Islamic world, Clinton confined planning for lethal force within two significant limits. American troops would use weapons aimed from a distance, and their enemy would be defined as individual terrorists, not the providers of sanctuary for attacks against the United States.

Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.

In addition to a secret "finding" to authorize covert action, which has been reported before, Clinton signed three highly classified Memoranda of Notification expanding the available tools. In succession, the president authorized killing instead of capturing bin Laden, then added several of al Qaeda's senior lieutenants, and finally approved the shooting down of private civilian aircraft on which they flew.

The Clinton administration ordered the Navy to maintain two Los Angeles-class attack submarines on permanent station in the nearest available waters, enabling the U.S. military to place Tomahawk cruise missiles on any target in Afghanistan within about six hours of receiving the order.

Three times after Aug. 20, 1998, when Clinton ordered the only missile strike of his presidency against bin Laden's organization, the CIA came close enough to pinpointing bin Laden that Clinton authorized final preparations to launch. In each case, doubts about the intelligence aborted the mission.

The CIA's directorate of operations recruited, trained, paid or equipped surrogate forces in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and among tribal militias inside Afghanistan, with the common purpose of capturing or killing bin Laden. The Pakistani channel, disclosed previously in The Washington Post, and its Uzbek counterpart, which has not been reported before, never bore fruit. Inside Afghanistan, tribal allies twice reported to their CIA handlers that they fought skirmishes with bin Laden's forces, but they inflicted no verified damage.

Operatives of the CIA's Special Activities Division made at least one clandestine entry into Afghanistan in 1999. They prepared a desert airstrip to extract bin Laden, if captured, or to evacuate U.S. tribal allies, if cornered. The Special Collection Service, a joint project of the CIA and the National Security Agency, also slipped into Afghanistan to place listening devices within range of al Qaeda's tactical radios.

The lines Clinton opted not to cross continued to define U.S. policy in his successor's first eight months. Clinton stopped short of using more decisive military instruments, including U.S. ground forces, and declined to expand the reach of the war to the Taliban regime that hosted bin Laden and his fighters after 1996.

Not until the catastrophe of Sept. 11 -- when terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon -- did President Bush obliterate those boundaries.

More than once, advisers recall, Clinton sounded out Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the prospect of using Special Forces to surprise bin Laden's fighters on the ground. But Clinton declined to authorize the large-scale operation that Shelton said would be required, and he chose not to order a less ambitious option to which the general would have objected.

Though his government came to believe that the Taliban was inextricably tied to bin Laden, Clinton never seriously entertained the use of military force against the Islamic fundamentalist regime, still less the kind of broad campaign that removed the Taliban from power 10 days ago.

At least twice, Clinton dispatched senior emissaries to the Taliban with threats no less stark than the formula Bush laid out in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20. Bin Laden, they said, was an enemy of the United States, and a regime that provided him sanctuary should be prepared for the consequences.

Clinton administration officials believed the Taliban would interpret the warning as a military threat.

The administration never made good on it. Put baldly, several principal advisers said recently, the political and diplomatic market would not bear such a war.

"Until September 11th," said Karl F. Inderfurth, who was assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, "there was certainly not any groundswell of support to mount a major attack on the Taliban. This is just a reality."

Within days of the August 1998 embassy bombings, the combined efforts of the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency pinned responsibility on bin Laden's organization.

With only Attorney General Janet Reno dissenting, Clinton directed two retaliatory strikes on Aug. 20. One, near the Afghan town of Khost, was timed to kill bin Laden and his associates in their beds at 10 p.m. local time. It missed, the CIA said afterward, by a few hours. The other demolished a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that the CIA had linked to attempted production of chemical weapons for bin Laden.

Domestically and globally, Clinton National Security Council staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon lamented recently, the missile attack came to be regarded -- wrongly, they argued -- "as the greatest foreign policy blunder of the Clinton presidency." Apart from the "public relations battering," Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's deputy counterterrorism chief at the time, wrote later, the episode inflicted a "broader blow . . . on the perceived integrity of U.S. intelligence and U.S. counterterrorist efforts generally."

Badly burned, Clinton and his national security cabinet turned their emphasis to detecting, disrupting and arresting members of terrorist cells in quiet cooperation with friendly foreign security services. This had been an ongoing project of the FBI and CIA since the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

At the CIA's counterterrorism center in Langley, wall maps the size of Renaissance tapestries depicted the agency's growing knowledge of the al Qaeda network in an intricate web of crisscrossed lines. On occasion Tenet would ask aides to roll them up and carry them, sealed in tubular cases, to brief Clinton or the Small Group in Berger's office.

Beginning in 1996, the Clinton team made increasing use of what Berger described as "a new art form" in the international commerce in terror suspects. Scores of times in the next five years, they persuaded allies to arrest members of al Qaeda and ship them somewhere else. Frequently, somewhere else was not the United States.

Such a transfer without legal process was called "rendition." Most took place in secret and have yet to be disclosed. A State Department accounting of extraditions and renditions in the 1990s, published in April, named only 13. At least 40 more, according to sources, were removed forcibly from one foreign country to another on behalf of the United States.

Most remain unknown. One episode took place in Albania the week after the embassy bombings. After foiling a truck bomb plot against the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, American intelligence officers guided Albanian authorities to five arrests of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members. The Americans flew the five men to Egypt, where they were executed after a military trial.

In one briefing, Tenet said of bin Laden's network that the arrests were "breaking the organization brick by brick," but warned: "He's going to beat us again."

Clinton never launched another military strike against al Qaeda, but he invoked his authority as commander in chief to prosecute a subterranean campaign that intensified through the remainder of his presidency.

Immediately after the embassy bombings, he issued a "finding" under the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment enabling intelligence agencies to fund covert operations against bin Laden. The finding's primary directive was to track and capture the al Qaeda leader, though it authorized use of lethal force in the attempt.

Within months Clinton amended the finding three times, using a form of presidential authority known as a Memorandum of Notification. Each was classified as sensitive compartmented information, Top Secret/Codeword.

The first change, almost immediate, was to broaden the authority of U.S. officers or their recruited agents to use lethal force, enabling them to engage bin Laden and the fighters around him without any prospect of taking him into custody.

"It became evident," said a party to the deliberations, "that there was no way to avoid killing him if we were going to go after him, and we shouldn't worry about it."

Clinton's second Memorandum of Notification expanded the target of the covert campaign. It named a handful of close lieutenants -- sources said fewer than 10 -- to be captured or killed if found separately from bin Laden.

As the hunt progressed, national security officials began to worry that bin Laden might flee Afghanistan. Some State Department officials believed fissures in the Taliban might drive him out, and bin Laden told an ABC News producer on Dec. 28, 1998, that "when a Muslim migrates repeatedly, he is doubly rewarded."

"We just decided early on that he wasn't going to get out of Afghanistan if we could help it," said an official familiar with the discussions. Bin Laden was believed to have helicopters at his disposal, and "there was also a concern he could get a Gulfstream" jet.

Berger and Tenet brought Clinton a third Memorandum of Notification. Clinton signed off on direct authority to shoot down private aircraft in which bin Laden traveled. Because such a flight would probably be deemed civil aviation in international law, and people unconnected to bin Laden might die, this was regarded in the White House as a significant step.

The CIA did not give up entirely on capturing bin Laden. Later in 1999, the Directorate of Operations dispatched a covert reconnaissance mission to a disused southern desert airstrip in Afghanistan. Flying fast and low, and departing undetected after a ground survey, the specialized team assessed the characteristics of the airstrip and its facilities to design a detailed plan for securing the perimeter.

Details of the location could not be learned. But U.S. Marines this month occupied a remote airfield 55 miles southwest of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and have used it as a base of operations.

According to sources, the CIA contemplated using the airstrip if the occasion arose to evacuate someone -- either bin Laden, if he fell into friendly hands, or recruited agents in danger of being overrun.

Through the first year of the Clinton team's effort, the White House and Pentagon pressed to shorten the fuse on a military strike against bin Laden.

In the days after the embassy bombings, the Joint Staff informed the National Security Council that it would need 24 to 36 hours' notice to place munitions on target in Afghanistan. Because of Arab sensitivities, the administration assumed it could not use the nearest U.S. air bases in the Persian Gulf. The only alternatives were redeployment of Navy ships armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles or B-2 stealth bombers flying from the continental United States.

Dissatisfied with this answer, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen ordered the Navy to place two nuclear-powered attack submarines on permanent station in the nearby waters of the northern Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. This brought the "strike window" down to about six hours. The two Los Angeles-class boats were packed entirely with slow-flying Tomahawk land-attack missiles, which would need as much as 90 minutes to reach Afghanistan.

Planners also considered the deployment of AC-130 gunships, equipped with powerful cannon and chain guns. They can be refueled in flight, and are employed by Air Force Special Operations teams trained for stealthy entry and exit. Some officials believed there was a chance of obtaining permission from Uzbekistan to use the former Soviet air base at Khanabad.

More than once, according to people with direct knowledge, Clinton asked Shelton, a former Special Operations commander, whether he could drop a small ground combat team into an al Qaeda training camp to engage bin Laden directly. Some of his advisers supposed this would reduce the most stringent demands on intelligence. To hit bin Laden with a missile, the CIA had to be able to place him inside the explosive radius of a warhead at a precise time at least six hours in the future. Special Forces, they said, might find him at a camp without having to forecast his movements inside it.

In the Small Group, Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright asked repeatedly about what they came to call the "boots on the ground" option, using the Delta Force. Shelton, reacting privately at the Pentagon, considered the proposals naive.

In an interview, the former Joint Staff chairman said the government never had good enough information on bin Laden's whereabouts half a day ahead, and little prospect of getting it. Even with a target, it would take at least twice as long for a ground team to get there as a missile.

"You ought to have some pretty good intelligence or you have to keep the special operators there 365 days a year, betting on the come," Shelton said. "If you lean that far forward, you probably have tipped your hand about what you are getting ready to do. You've got a footprint. You have to keep a surface ship off the Pakistani coast, and the Pakistanis had started patrolling out in that area, and that would be a sure giveaway."

Risks to the exposed ground troops, Shelton said, meant a much larger operation than his colleagues had in mind. "The greatest risk is that you would have a helicopter or a [special operations] aircraft that would encounter mechanical problems over those great distances, or you have an accident," he said. "You want to have the capability if that happens to go in and get them, which means a combat search and rescue capability, and if you want to send those people in, you have to have an air refueling operation."

Shelton, a senior colleague said, "wanted nothing to do" with a tiny incursion known in the Special Forces community as "going Hollywood." And the political leadership, the colleague said, wanted nothing to do with something larger.

"Absolutely nothing prevented us from running the kind of operation we're running now, if there had been a commitment to do that," Shelton said.

There is, even now, no satisfying answer to the central mystery of the Clinton administration's covert war. How is it possible that the president had intelligence good enough to launch missiles at bin Laden within 13 days of the embassy bombings, yet never had it again? Did the intelligence task grow that much harder, or did the president and his national security apparatus grow less tolerant of risk?

In Small Group meetings, Albright compared the hunt to one of those arcade games in which the player, tantalized, tries to grasp a coin with a claw controlled clumsily from outside. In light moments, some of the president's advisers began referring to the problem in terms of a picture puzzle for children: "Where's Waldo?"

"I can tell you where he's been, I can tell you where he's going," Tenet said in one such gathering, succinctly defining the requirements of "actionable" intelligence. "The problem is, can I tell you where he'll be for the next six to 10 hours?"

Within the limits of the military's operational plans, what Tenet had was not enough.

"We did on numerous occasions provide information on where we thought he was at any given moment, but it's impossible for anyone to tell you where someone is going to be with absolute certainty half a day away," said an intelligence official. "Cruise missiles are excellent weapons for shooting at fixed targets, but they're not so good at targets that have a mind of their own."

A person standing 100 yards away might survive the strike of a Tomahawk's standard warhead, officials said. And Clinton refused to authorize use of "area weapons" -- one is a warhead of cluster bombs - - that would have killed women and children around bin Laden.

The Joint Staff and especially the Navy, meanwhile, tired of driving circles under the Arabian Sea.

"There was a growing sense over time," said Brian Sheridan, who was assistant secretary of defense for special operations, that the national leadership should "get off the pot" and decide whether it had a target. "There was a great willingness to support the mission if the mission is going to be real, but otherwise, let's not disrupt normal mission and training cycles."

Clinton declined to be interviewed for this story. Those closest to his thinking said he did not change his main criterion for approving a strike, which remained "a substantial probability of success."

All Clinton's senior advisers feared an error, convinced that shooting and missing would glorify bin Laden and expose the United States to ridicule.

"We consumed all the intelligence we had," Albright said. "It's so easy to finger-point. We tried everything we could, everything we could."

Former officials said bin Laden, already careful to disguise his movements, became considerably more elusive after the near-miss at Khost. And the intelligence on Khost, they said, had been "a unique opportunity," as a senior official put it. "It gave detailed notice of a forthcoming gathering, and you just don't see that kind of stuff often at all."

Those explanations do not fully account for the lack of results. People familiar with the changing intelligence mosaic said the CIA continued to obtain "all source" information about bin Laden throughout Clinton's presidency, some of it of very high quality. "All source" refers to the combination of electronic intercepts, photographs with visible and infrared light, imaging radar, tips from foreign intelligence liaisons and reports of human agents on the ground.

According to two sources, the CIA's clandestine service recruited and maintained communication with an informant in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. The informant had ties to an office of Taliban internal security, and sometimes learned there of bin Laden's plans or whereabouts. Though valued and frequently proved accurate after the fact, the information was twice removed from its source. The Taliban knew something of bin Laden's movements, and the informant knew something of what the Taliban knew.

The information never arrived in time to mount a strike, officials said. And the U.S. agent was neither willing nor able to attack bin Laden himself.

Near the end of 1999, according to people familiar with the discussions on both sides, Saudi Arabian officials notified their CIA liaisons that bin Laden's mother had requested a travel permit to leave the country. Hoping she would lead to her son, they offered to assist the placement of a homing beacon in her luggage.

The Saudis later complained they were not taken seriously. Americans familiar with the episode said they never received sufficiently specific information on the woman's travel plans.

For all the difficulties, there were three occasions after August 1998 when Clinton's top advisers came close to concluding they had "actionable intelligence." Each time the president directed preparations to fire.

One of the potential targets turned out to be the gulf sheik's falconing party. Another was a tent in a desert encampment. The third was a stone compound, built around a central courtyard full of al Qaeda operatives.

The last of these occasions came on an autumn weekend in the final weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign. It ended with a telephone call from Tenet to Berger. "We just don't have it," Tenet said, according to someone briefed on the conversation. Berger called the president and the Small Group, and once again Tomahawk gyroscopes spun down in silent waters 7,400 miles away.

To supplement direct military efforts, the CIA's clandestine service recruited three separate proxy forces for the bin Laden hunt.

One came at Pakistan's initiative. Throughout the first nine months of 1999, the Pakistani government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif -- caught between its restless pro-Taliban military and its desire to curry Western economic aid and assistance -- resisted U.S. pressure to cut support for the Taliban. With tensions with India high over the disputed territory of Kashmir, the Sharif government regarded a friendly Afghan border as crucial.

Sharif offered Washington an alternative. Pakistan would create a small commando force, trained and equipped by the CIA, to cross the Afghan border and try to kill or capture bin Laden.

Some of the project's American sponsors thought it had a chance. Others in government doubted it. Sources familiar with their positions in NSC meetings said Berger, Albright, deputy national security adviser James Steinberg and Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering believed Sharif was playing for time, deflecting American pressure with a dramatic proposal he knew could come to nothing. Sharif was toppled by a coup in October 1999 led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, now a key ally of the Bush administration in the Afghan war.

The National Security Agency reported that the commando planning had been compromised in the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate of the Pakistan Military. That service, known as ISI, had close ties not only to the Taliban but also, indirectly, to al Qaeda itself.

"We had evidence that the ISI was penetrated," an official said. "People were very skeptical about it, but there wasn't a down side unless it's spending a lot of time and effort on something that has no chance of succeeding."

In Uzbekistan, to the north, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, chief of the U.S. Central Command, cultivated a growing military-to-military relationship. Uzbek commanders wanted arms and training for a counter- insurgency unit to put down their own rebel Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. In secret negotiations, they intimated that in return they would make the unit available to hunt bin Laden if the opportunity presented itself. It did not.

The only known covert operation inside Afghanistan involved the supply and lavish funding of a militia element that was hostile to both the Taliban and al Qaeda. In Small Group meetings, participants called this force "the tribals."

Eager to please, the tribals twice reported that they had exchanged fire with motorcades in which bin Laden had been traveling. On one occasion, they said they laid an ambush with land mines and a crossfire of automatic weapons. On another, they said the skirmish involved small arms only. The CIA could not verify either claim.

"We all looked forward to the phone call in which they said, 'We have him,' " said one person who was briefed on the reports. "But you never knew whether they really were telling you the truth, because clearly there was money paid."

In Clinton's last year as president, the Small Group drafted a memorandum that brought together all the efforts to hunt down bin Laden.

Clinton, sources said, returned it with a handwritten reply: "Not enough. Unsatisfactory."

White House impatience and the military's fatigue with keeping its submarines "on a string," as Shelton put it, gave impetus to a new idea -- to send the Predator intelligence drone into Afghanistan.

The gossamer-weight unmanned aircraft, with a 49-foot wingspan, has the horsepower and top speed of a motorbike. But in the Balkans, where it got its first use in 1996, the drone had proved immensely valuable.

Flying at medium altitude, it took full-motion video by day and night and still images through clouds using synthetic aperture radar.

But Afghanistan would push its limits, requiring overflight of much greater distances with hostile airspace on all sides. Vice Adm. Scott A. Fry, who led the Joint Staff's operations directorate, pressed hard for the Predator over objections in the Air Force and the CIA's operations directorate.

When the drone finally flew a "proof of concept" mission for several weeks in August and September last year, the results were stunning. Tenet brought a two-minute video clip to the White House and played it for Clinton and Berger.

According to people who saw it later, it showed a tall bearded man in flowing robes -- bin Laden is well over six feet -- crossing a city street toward a mosque. A security team of more than a dozen armed men, moving with professional dispatch, cleared a forward perimeter as he moved.

The trial period ended when a Predator crash-landed. But it had spurred something new. In their final months in office, the Clinton national security team launched a controversial effort to arm the Predator with a Hellfire missile, ordinarily used by attack helicopters.

State Department lawyers maintained for a time that such a hybrid would fall under restrictions of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.

The Air Force and CIA argued over who would fund and operate it. Opponents scoffed at the notion of a 950-pound aircraft laboring aloft with a 100-pound missile. Richard A. Clarke, National Security Council senior director, "broke a lot of china," as one colleague put it, in ramming the program forward. Not long after Clinton left office, the Air Force tested a working prototype.

Armed Predators began flying in the present Afghan war and have fired a number of missiles at Taliban and al Qaeda command posts.

The Clinton administration had defined its enemy as narrowly as its military instruments. Bin Laden and his aides were targets, but not the Taliban regime that gave them sanctuary. For a time in Clinton's final year in office, it appeared that might change.

American policy toward the Taliban had been ambivalent at first when the fundamentalist militia led by Mohammad Omar conquered the eastern city of Jalalabad and Kabul, the Afghan capital, in September 1996.

It shifted to hostility the next year over the regime's treatment of women. After the 1998 embassy bombings, bin Laden became the primary issue for Washington.

For the next two years, Clinton pursued a policy of economic sanctions against the Taliban. He sent numerous messages to the de facto government of Afghanistan requesting bin Laden's delivery for trial.

Frustrated by the Taliban's lack of cooperation, Clinton's emissaries took on a more menacing tone in the spring of 2000. But though the administration deliberately raised the specter of military confrontation, it chose in the end to step back.

The new approach began on April 4, 2000. Pakistan's intelligence chief and leading Taliban supporter, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed, had come to Washington. Pickering, the State Department's third-ranking official, summoned him unexpectedly for a blistering message intended equally for the Taliban leadership.

Ahmed spoke of bin Laden with what Pickering later called "the hospitality gambit." Bin Laden was the Taliban's guest, honored in the tradition of Afghanistan's Pashtun community. But the general offered to find a solution that both parties could accept.

Pickering told him the Taliban's guest had killed Americans and intended to do so again. "People who do that are our enemies," he said, "and people who support those people will also be treated as our enemies."

He urged Pakistan "not to put itself in that position." An American in the room said Malia Lodhi, Pakistan's U.S. ambassador, appeared to be shaken by the implicit threat. Zamir Akram, Pakistan's deputy chief of mission, said his delegation emphasized that "Pakistan was in no way supporting or condoning the activities of al Qaeda" and reminded Pickering of their joint work against suspects in the 1998 embassy bombings.

About the same time, Assistant Secretary of State Michael A. Sheehan, the department's counterterrorism coordinator, delivered the new message directly to the Taliban. He telephoned Foreign Minister Ahmed Waqil and read him a formal declaration known as a demarche.

"If bin Laden or any of the organizations affiliated with him attacks the United States or United States interests," he told Waqil, "we will hold you, the leadership of the Taliban, personally accountable. Do you understand what I am saying? This is from the highest level of my government."

When Waqil demurred, Sheehan added: "If you have an arsonist in your basement, and he leaves your basement every night and burns your neighbors, and you're protecting him, you become responsible for his crimes."

The next month, Pickering arrived in Islamabad. On the evening of May 26, he met with Mullah Ahmed Jalil, Taliban deputy foreign minister, at the Pakistani Interior Ministry in Islamabad.

Pickering formally presented him with bin Laden's indictment in the Southern District of New York for the embassy bombings. "We don't think your evidence is persuasive," Jalil replied. Even if there were proof, he said, bin Laden should be subject to judgment under sharia, or Islamic law.

Pickering told him, as Sheehan had told his boss, that "people who are helping other people kill Americans are our enemies and should consider themselves as such."

In Washington, however, Clinton's national security cabinet stopped short.

"There were verbal scoldings, but that was about it," Shelton said. "There never was any consideration of going after the Taliban. When discussions came up of what are we going to do, the military focus stayed on Osama bin Laden himself and his outfit."

No threat or inducement short of all-out war, Clinton's advisers concluded, would move Omar, the supreme Taliban leader. A limited bombardment would destroy the hard-won consensus behind U.N. sanctions against Afghanistan. And the first casualty would be the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which consumed Clinton's final months in office.

"The hard part for everybody now is to keep yourself in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and not 2001," Albright said. "For what we knew, and what we had to operate with, I think we did the right thing."

Thanks, come again.

February 3, 2003

Care to dispute that one, Robby boy?

February 3, 2003

Copyright The Washington Post Company Dec 20, 2001

Second of two articles

In his last year as CIA station chief in Sudan, Paul Quaglia lived no more than a mile from Osama bin Laden.

It was 1995. The al Qaeda leader's residence was not on the way to the U.S. Embassy, but Quaglia preferred to vary his daily commute. Sometimes he drove right past the three-story brick and stucco home, sport utility vehicles standing sentry outside. When the two men crossed paths at the airport, Quaglia gazed with frank curiosity at the tall Saudi Arabian in the VIP lounge, "surrounded by security guys, openly armed, wearing those long white flowing robes."

The face of international terror had begun a dangerous transformation in the early 1990s, and the U.S. government knew but little of bin Laden's part in it yet. Terrorism was still, by presidential directive, a third-tier national security issue.

President Bill Clinton and his advisers reached a pivot point in their grasp of the terrorist threat by the end of 1995. In his second term, the president reshaped his government in response. By degrees the national security establishment shifted its view of terrorism from tactical nuisance to strategic challenge, sharpening its focus on bin Laden after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.

By any measure available, Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him. His government doubled counterterrorist spending across 40 departments and agencies. The FBI and CIA allocated still larger increases in their budgets and personnel assignments. Clinton devoted some of his highest-profile foreign policy speeches to terrorism, including two at the U.N. General Assembly. An interagency panel, the Counterterrorism Strategy Group, took on new weight in policy disputes from the Justice Department to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the foreign policy cabinet, by the time it left office, had been convening every two to three weeks to shape a covert and overt campaign against al Qaeda.

But neither Clinton nor his administration treated terrorism as their top concern, because it was not. Without the overriding impetus provided by Sept. 11, the war on terror in the 1990s lost as many struggles inside government as it won. Steps to manage risk moved forward readily. Some of the harder initiatives, hurried through these past three months by President Bush, foundered then on money, bureaucratic turf, domestic politics and rival conceptions of national interest.

The Treasury Department declined to monitor money transfers outside the formal banking system, such as the hawala network used by bin Laden's operatives, and opposed funding for a White House- sponsored National Terrorist Asset Tracking Center. The department strongly cautioned against proposals for covert action against bin Laden's financial accounts, arguing that the United States should be the foremost defender of the norm that cyberattacks on banks are themselves acts of terror.

FBI investigators, who knew as much then as they do now about some domestic fundraising sources for foreign terror, were prevented from opening criminal or national security cases for fear that they would be seen as "profiling" Islamic charities.

In two of the countries of central concern -- Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- terrorism seldom rose higher than third place on the agenda when Clinton and his Cabinet secretaries sat down with their counterparts.

Even in Afghanistan, a country that otherwise held no strategic interest for the United States, the Clinton administration chose not to exhaust its available carrots and sticks with the Taliban regime that sheltered bin Laden from 1996. To induce the Taliban to hand over bin Laden, Clinton offered neither the incentive of normal relations nor the threat that he would back armed opponents of consolidated Taliban rule.

Beneath every trade-off lurked the incontestable fact that terrorism on the grand scale remained a hypothetical danger through Clinton's final day in office. In the 1980s and 1990s, 871 Americans died in terrorist attacks at home and overseas, an average of not quite 44 a year. In actuarial terms, chicken bones were deadlier. Colleagues told Paul R. Pillar at the CIA's counterterrorism center, he wrote later, that "fewer Americans die from it than drown in bathtubs."

That was not, said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, Clinton's second national security adviser, the view from the top. "Terrorism didn't start in 1993 with the World Trade Center," he said. "We had the Lebanon Marine barracks, the Lebanon embassy, hijackings, the Achille Lauro and Pan Am 103" in the 1980s. "I think the Clinton administration was the first administration to undertake a systematic anti-terrorist effort -- organizationally, in terms of resources and in terms of anti-terrorist activity."

Presidential Decision Directive 35, which remains classified, set out the Clinton administration's intelligence collection priorities on March 2, 1995. Terrorism came in the third tier, after support for ongoing military operations and analysis of potential enemies in Russia, China, Iraq and Iran.

This actually represented an elevation in status for a danger that had seldom been granted much respect. At the time, James B. Steinberg held one of the few senior posts in government charged with thinking about national security on a horizon measured in years. As director of policy planning in the State Department, he commissioned a series of cables on what threats the United States might face after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Drugs, crime, terrorism and weapons proliferation emerged in these cables, he said, as "the dark side of globalization." Analysts called them the "transnational threats."

"From 1995 and 1996 on, you can see this rising curve of urgency and attention," Steinberg recalled.

Terrorists, and terrorism, were changing. Some of the secular, leftist radicals that made their names in the 1970s -- Red Brigades, Direct Action, the Communist Combatant Cells -- had faded away.

But if less numerous, terrorists grew more lethal. No longer was it true, as Brian Jenkins wrote in the Futurist in 1987, that they "want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead."

It took 267 attacks in the United States to kill 23 people in the 1980s. The 10 years that followed saw many fewer attacks -- only 60 - - but nearly nine times the casualties -- 182. A single bombing on April 19, 1995, which ripped the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, accounted for 168 of the dead. The same trend held overseas: fewer attacks, more lives lost.

Most commonly driven by religious zeal, the new terrorists sought to inflict mass casualties. Those who studied them, including Bruce Hoffman at the Rand Corp., tracked a corresponding improvement in their operational competence. Islamic extremists had come to dominate the 10-year war that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in 1989. Hard on their victory, they characterized the Persian Gulf War of 1990 and 1991 as a second invasion of the Islamic world by an infidel superpower.

Jihadist terror, as government experts began to call it, came to America just as Clinton took office in 1993.

Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted of plotting that June to bomb the United Nations, the FBI's New York office and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, provided a window into the new adversary's intent. Trial evidence described his instructions to "break and destroy the morale of the enemies of Allah" with attacks on "their high world buildings . . . and the buildings in which they gather their leaders."

Ramzi Yousef, a follower, killed only six people when he bombed the World Trade Center five weeks after Clinton reached the White House. He had spent $400 on ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to fashion the Feb. 26, 1993, truck bomb. But little-noted testimony of the building's engineers suggested later that, with two or three times the budget, Yousef might have killed tens of thousands in the towers' sudden collapse.

Former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence until early last year, said of the attitude inside the committee: "We thought we were pretty hot. I mean, [the 1993 truck bombers] went back to Ryder to ask for their deposit back! How stupid are they? We were just too complacent."

The United Nations celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1995. Clinton devoted his marquee address on Oct. 22 to the cross-border threats his advisers kept talking about, including terrorists who had "plotted to destroy the very hall we gather in today."

He named all four horsemen, not perhaps of apocalypse, but of America's new unease: "international organized crime, drug trafficking, terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction." The list came roughly in order of his attention. Money laundering took center stage, and Clinton's only concrete move that day was to seize assets of the Cali drug cartel in Colombia.

At the Warwick Hotel a few blocks away, Richard A. Clarke of the National Security Council staff briefed reporters. The mafia had its FBI, and the drug war had its czar. As yet the war on terror had no such central command. But Clarke had begun to create one in the Old Executive Office Building.

Clinton's first guiding directive on terrorism, a few months before, had given lead responsibility to the FBI for hunting terrorists. To coordinate the scores of offices elsewhere that had some claim to a counterterrorist role, Clinton also named an alphabet soup of interagency panels. A congressional report noted that these panels had to "operate on a consensus basis, do not have decision- making authority, and do not establish government-wide resource priorities."

No one appeared to have told Clarke any of that. By force of personality, he used his gavel in the Counterterrorism Strategy Group to hammer unusually rapid change through large government organizations. In the next five years, he would roll over a formidable array of bureaucratic foes, interjecting himself in programming and personnel decisions that the executive departments saw as sovereign.

"Dick gets things done," Berger said. "He is a pile driver."

Three weeks after Clinton's U.N. speech, on Nov. 13, 1995, a powerful explosion destroyed an American-leased office building in Riyadh where U.S. soldiers trained the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Five Americans died. Next came a much larger bomb, this one fabricated into a Saudi tanker truck. Reverberating audibly as far away as Bahrain, the June 25, 1996, detonation killed 19 Americans at the Khobar Towers dormitory for servicemen assigned to the King Abdul Aziz Air Base.

These episodes, and a set of near-catastrophes just before them, raised new alarms in Washington.

Yousef, the World Trade Center bomber, had been caught in Pakistan, but not before reaching advanced stages of planning for the synchronized destruction of a dozen commercial airliners over the Pacific. In Tokyo about the same time, the Aum Shinrikyo cult killed 12 subway passengers with sarin nerve gas that, dispersed effectively, would have killed many of the 5,700 who fell ill.

"Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail," Clinton told an Aug. 5 audience at George Washington University. But he added a proviso: "While we can defeat terrorists, it will be a long time before we defeat terrorism." Clinton did not foresee decisive victory. The task was to manage terrorism as an unavoidable feature of the global landscape.

"In light of September 11th, we ought to do some soul-searching," said Michael A. Sheehan, who served as Clinton's last assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism. "That's what I'm doing. But it has to be said that it was the collective judgment of the American people, not just the Clinton administration, that the impact of terrorism was at a level that was acceptable."

To prevent an unbearable increase would require fresh resources to match the ambitions of the new jihadist threat. Clarke oversaw the infusion.

Spread over so many departments and agencies, the aggregate spending on terrorism was hard to sort out. But the best estimates of the Office of Management and Budget showed an increase from $5.7 billion in fiscal 1996 to $9.7 billion in 1999 and $11.1 billion in 2001.

The money went to hundreds of programs from pathogen research and medical stockpiling to training of "first responders" to biological and chemical attacks. Large increases went to law enforcement and intelligence gathering.

Terrorism accounted for less than 4 percent of the FBI's resources at the start of the Clinton administration and more than 10 percent at the end, according to unpublished Justice Department data. The CIA's counterterrorism center nearly tripled in budget and personnel, sources said, though its managers complained that the numbers changed capriciously with the ebb and flow of White House and congressional urgency.

In the aftermath of twin truck bombs that destroyed U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on Aug. 7, 1998, the most urgent priority for the Clinton administration was hunkering down.

"Really, this was the first thing you thought about in the morning," said James Bodner, one of Defense Secretary William S. Cohen's top policy aides. "If it was the morning, and you hadn't been woken up [by a call], you knew there had not been an attack." Everyone involved, he said, saw the need to take the offensive because defense was so hard: "You've got to bat a thousand, whereas the other guy only needs to get one single every year."

But fully half of the counterterrorist budget in Clinton's last 29 months went to increased security at overseas posts, military or diplomatic. Counting comparable measures domestically, the proportion surpassed three-fourths.

Long after the embassy bombings, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright held daily 8 a.m. meetings at Foggy Bottom with her chief of diplomatic security. David Carpenter, who had come to State from the Secret Service presidential detail, walked Albright through more than 650 threat reports in the seven months after the Aug. 7 attacks. "Our analysts believe that about 33 percent of these threats are 'viable' threats," he reported in March 1999.

Carpenter and Albright dispatched Emergency Security Assessment Teams, Security Augmentation Teams, Mobile Training Teams. They hired more than 1,000 new guards and built countless vehicle barriers and blast walls. They deployed 53 bomb detection units, 98 "back- scatter" X-ray systems, 200 closed-circuit recording cameras and 600 metal detectors.

The State Department also mandated "duck-and-cover practice drills," as recommended by retired Adm. William Crowe's Accountability Review Board after the embassy bombings, "in order to reduce casualties from vehicular bombs."

These defensive improvements, in the State Department alone, cost twice the combined spending of the FBI and CIA counterterrorism programs. The Pentagon's defensive improvements were nearly three times again as expensive as State's.

In the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there was a counterterrorism directorate, but its mission was not to hunt and kill terrorists. No one on the Joint Staff had that as a primary mission. The directorate managed efforts to make U.S. troops abroad more difficult to strike.

Joint Publication 2000.12H gave the authoritative direction to all military services on "defensive measures taken to reduce vulnerability to terrorist attacks." Uniformed services bought window laminates engineered to withstand explosive blasts without sharding, armored tactical rescue vehicles, portable tire deflation systems. They ordered body armor for their security dogs.

The Clinton administration felt obliged to buy all this protection for employees it dispatched around the world, but it had little confidence in the strategy. Steinberg, who had become deputy national security adviser, said later that "the adversary can see what you're hardening and directs his efforts somewhere else." It is, he said, a "horrible game where offense always outstrips defense."

No issue frustrated Clarke more than his inability to open an effective financial front in the war on terror, according to regular participants in his Counterterrorism Strategy Group.

"He wanted to identify assets and freeze them," a colleague said. "He couldn't get the interagency process to move."

A central irritant was the government's antiquated approach to tracking money. On the day of his 1995 U.N. speech, Clinton had directed Treasury to lead an initiative to disrupt new techniques of illicit financial transfer. Three years later, there had been no progress.

Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Center, known as FinCEN, geared itself to 1980s-style money laundering. It took reports from chartered banks on large cash transactions and suspicious activity by customers. But for years, it had put off writing regulations to give it comparable oversight of other money service businesses.

William Wechsler, who chaired Clarke's working group on terrorist finances, said that by January 1999, his group identified informal, unregulated money transfers "as being a really significant problem." The principal concern was a type of channel originating in the Middle East and South Asia, called hawala, from the Arabic word for "change" and the Hindi word for "trust."

Hawala offered a method of transferring money across international borders without physically moving it, relying on trusted partners on each side. To send money to Pakistan, for example, a person could hand cash dollars to a tea shop owner in Brooklyn. The shop owner would call a relative in Pakistan with instructions, and the relative would pay out the sum in rupees at the other end.

Hawala appeared to create a vulnerable point of entry for al Qaeda operational funds into the United States. White House officials could find no government agency willing to police it.

As it happened, FinCEN had one of the world's preeminent experts. Patrick Jost, a jazz musician whose Virginia vanity license tag reads "HAWALA," spoke Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu. He had teamed with Interpol's senior authority to write a primer on alternative remittance systems. But when U.S. law enforcement agencies approached him for advice on monitoring the shadowy transactions, Jost's managers instructed him to decline.

Director James Sloan and chief of operations Connie Fenchel, he said, "did not want FinCEN to pursue this line of work." Made to feel unwelcome, Jost left government in June 2000.

"It was infuriating," Wechsler said.

(The Bush administration shut down two hawala operators in the United States as part of a crackdown on al Qaeda financial assets on Nov. 8.)

One member of the Counterterrorism Strategy Group remembers Clarke "pounding on tables and railing about the Holy Land Foundation," a Texas-based charity whose accounts were seized this month after years of government debate. FBI eavesdropping at a Marriott Courtyard hotel in Philadelphia as long ago as 1993 linked the foundation to Hamas, the most active Palestinian terrorist group against Israel.

But investigators at the bureau felt handcuffed. After preparing the case, one of them said, they were refused permission to take the next steps. The Texas charity, like the Hamas political leadership, maintained it concerned itself only with social services.

"There was a lack of political will to follow through and allow investigators to proceed on the case, despite the fact that all of the i's were dotted and the t's were crossed," said a government analyst who reviewed it. "You have a front organization that you know is contributing to terrorists, with extremely solid intelligence information, but it is also making charitable contributions, and that is its ostensible purpose. When I say political, I mean we can't have the public come out and say we're bashing Muslims."

During 1999, Clarke persuaded Clinton to establish an interagency terrorist asset tracking center, headquartered at Treasury. With no role in law enforcement, it could draw from and feed to intelligence arms such as the CIA's Illicit Finance Group. At the Coast Guard Academy on May 17, 2000, Clinton announced its creation. He was premature.

It was not until this September -- the week of the hijacking calamity -- that a reluctant enforcement division at Treasury was persuaded to form the new team.

In meetings of Clinton's Cabinet-rank national security officials, Defense Secretary Cohen and Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained repeatedly that the government was not bringing its financial leverage to bear on bin Laden's network.

"We knew where the front organizations were," Shelton said in an interview. "We know today. If we allowed the money to continue to pour in, that was something we were giving them as a freebie."

According to sources, the two Pentagon leaders favored an aggressive campaign of covert action against financial accounts and centers owned by al Qaeda.

The government was capable of manufacturing "all the indices of authentication" needed to make a validated withdrawal from a terrorist account, said one person who participated in the internal debates. It was also capable, some advocates believed, of raining electronic havoc on a business or financial institution as a whole.

Participants in the debate recall it as largely hypothetical, with doubters wondering whether such an attack could be launched to good effect.

But Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin took a strong stand against the idea in principle. As the world's preeminent financial center, he said, the United States had the strongest interest in maintaining a global norm that cyberattacks on banking systems are acts of war. The United States could not defend that principle if it engaged in such attacks, and its own vulnerabilities would be substantial.

Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, arrived in the job not long after the 1998 embassy bombings. He concluded almost immediately that al Qaeda could not be defeated cell by cell.

A 1977 West Point graduate, Sheehan had been counterinsurgency adviser in El Salvador and a leader of U.S. Special Forces teams in Panama. He saw law enforcement and intelligence as essential tools but argued that on their own, they made for "a defensive, marginal strategy, like swatting mosquitoes." Sheehan's image later entered the public idiom of the terror debate. Washington, he wrote, needed a strategy to "drain the swamp."

Terrorists could not operate without sanctuary and state support. To remove them, he wrote in a classified 30-page cable, would require substantial changes of behavior by five key states: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Only the top leaders of those countries could make the necessary political decisions, he wrote, and only the highest-ranking American leaders could engage them.

What Sheehan proposed in effect was to place terrorism at or near the top of the agenda whenever Clinton, Albright or Cohen spoke to their counterparts. That is what happened under Bush after Sept. 11. But for Clinton, in the times in which he governed, the proposal was out of the question.

Shelton, the retired Joint Staff chairman, said, "If you didn't talk to the emir or the king, it was probably not going to happen." The only way to have stopped the flow of money from the Persian Gulf to al Qaeda, he said, was to say, " 'If you're not with us you're against us,' and not from some deputy secretary or some third assistant going to the finance ministry."

Clinton's overarching priority in the Middle East, and the animating foreign policy goal of his presidency, was peace between Israel and its neighbors. Martin Indyk, who advised him at the White House and as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, described terrorism's inverse relationship to success at the bargaining table.

"After the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a very real sense of a window of opportunity to achieve a comprehensive peace in the Middle East," he said. "That became the priority. The assumption was that if you could achieve that kind of breakthrough, it would have a transforming effect on the whole region." That, in turn, would "deal a blow to those who opposed the peace process, particularly using terrorism to do so."

The Saudis gave direct financial aid to the Taliban, but the royal family held no brief for bin Laden. He had been stripped of his Saudi citizenship for, among other things, accusing King Fahd of inviting crusaders to defile the land of the two holy mosques.

Washington hoped that Riyadh would use its influence to drive a wedge between the Taliban and bin Laden's network, the easiest course. When that did not work, the Clinton administration urged the royal family to cut two kinds of financial ties: direct Saudi aid to the Taliban, and the thick web of contributing relationships from charities, religious schools known as madrassas and influential princes to al Qaeda.

"The most we got out of them was that they stopped the direct funding in 1999 and downgraded their relations" with the Taliban from ambassador to charge d'affairs, Indyk said. When Americans asked for information about private contributions to al Qaeda, another senior American said, "the Saudis wanted account numbers" before they would answer.

Clinton flew to Islamabad, over vehement Secret Service objections, on March 25, 2000. The Secret Service assumed that bin Laden's network, based across the border in Afghanistan, still had the shoulder-fired Stinger missiles the United States had provided to the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in the 1980s. Air Force One flew ahead of Clinton as a decoy. The president slipped into Pakistan in an undignified tactical landing that bounced him hard in the seat of his unmarked jet.

Pakistan held the key to bin Laden. It had pressure points and hopes of better ties with Washington, it shared a long, porous border with Afghanistan, and it had some interests even stronger than its considerable investment in the Taliban. Without Pakistan, the Taliban would have no meaningful ally left. Without the Taliban, bin Laden might be finished.

Clinton was arriving in a political maelstrom. The previous October, Gen. Pervez Musharraf had seized power from the elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who was a friend of the United States. Critics in Congress were livid at any visit at all, calling it legitimation for a coup.

Apart from that, there was a war on between Pakistan and India in Kashmir, a potentially explosive mix of nationalism and religion. And not least, they were the world's newest nuclear powers -- the only ones sharing a hostile border.

How to choose among democracy, war, terrorism and nuclear miscalculation -- in a meeting with Musharraf lasting an hour and 40 minutes? Clinton did not choose. He spoke of them all, according to records and recollections of those present. Two participants said separately that terrorism came third.

Contacts with Pakistan over the Taliban, known formally as demarches, had been much the same for a long time. The United States would ask Pakistan to use its influence to deliver bin Laden. Pakistan would say it was trying. Critics inside the Clinton administration called these "demarche-mallows" -- soft and insubstantial.

In person, Clinton told Musharraf that "he thought terrorism would destroy Pakistan from within" if the government did not take firm control of al Qaeda, said an American in the room. But Clinton, the American said, expected no substantial reply: "It just wasn't in the cards." Because of mandatory congressional sanctions against Pakistan, "our carrots were pretty chewed up," and "there wasn't much left that we could cut off."

The Clinton administration had much the same analysis of the Taliban after cutting off its air links and winning U.N. backing for limited sanctions. In demanding custody of bin Laden, Clinton's advisers found themselves with little to offer or threaten the Islamic fundamentalist regime.

After visiting an Afghan refugee camp in northern Pakistan in late 1997, Albright had described the Taliban regime as "despicable" in its treatment of women and girls. Hillary Rodham Clinton joined the attack, and the human rights issues far eclipsed bin Laden in most commentary about the regime. When Taliban representatives asked Americans what would happen if the bin Laden problem were resolved, the best the Americans could do was say "a boulder would be removed" from the path to better ties.

"I did say, and I was absolutely right, that what they were doing to the women was despicable," Albright said recently. "We decided that they could not be recognized because of all the things they were doing to suppress their own people."

During much of this period, the Taliban was struggling to complete its conquest of Afghanistan, with the Northern Alliance hanging on to about one-third of the territory. The Clinton administration joined the "six plus two" process in which Afghanistan's neighbors, together with Moscow and Washington, tried to broker an end to the civil war.

Though trying to bring pressure on the Taliban, Clinton's advisers rejected proposals to interfere with the regime's consolidation of power. The United States maintained its position in favor of what Assistant Secretary of State Karl F. Inderfurth called "a broad- based, multiethnic government" long after it was clear the Taliban had the will and the means to win a victory outright.

Interceding on the side of the Northern Alliance would have meant backing the losing side and casting lots with corrupt and brutal militias, a former official said -- not "white knight versus black knight" but "dark gray knight against black knight."

Albright said the idea was unworthy of serious thought.

"We all were operating with the history of Afghanistan and the unintended consequences of getting involved" in the 1980s, Albright recalled. "We armed all those people and provided them with the Stingers. For us to get involved in a civil war on behalf of the Northern Alliance would have been insane."

Researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.

This one?

Rob E Dangerously · February 3, 2003

Hey Rob, what would you have done if you were President after the embassy bombings?

February 3, 2003

Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.

So what does this article prove again?

--Rob

February 3, 2003

Jeez, enough filibustering Tyler. Who are you, Strom Thurmond?

February 3, 2003

Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.

So what does this article prove again?

--Rob

That Tyler was right? I mean, you just sorta proved it with that quote.

February 3, 2003

That article is propaganda, it means shit. I saw none of this on the news. Did any of you? Didn't think so.

--Rob

February 3, 2003

That article is propaganda, it means shit. I saw none of this on the news. Did any of you? Didn't think so.

--Rob

You didn't see any of it in the news because it's a covert operation, you moron. I like how you try to dismiss facts as propganda and assert your own opinion as fact. You are a man of contradiction, Rob Johnstone.

February 3, 2003

That you're a fucking idiot and are taking the "NAH NEE NAH NEE BOO BOO" approach, denying facts and saying "Because I said so, it's not true!" Face it, you're getting owned. Step off.

That quote is the entire point of the debate, which you're completely overlooking in your blatant conservative slanted head.

Clinton DID do things, he was being... in wrestling terms... HELD DOWN by a government who didn't give a fuck about terrorism.

Wanna back up your dumbass comments with some real logic, or just play the "I R 6 adn i dunt caree whut joo sai!!!!" game?

February 3, 2003

Obviously they did not accomplish much buddy, if anything at all. So you see, CLinton did nothing at all. Plus you cannot prove any of these "covert ops" happened.

--Rob

Seperation of Church and State

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