The Longest War (10 page)

Bin Laden certainly expected
some
retaliation for the attack on the
Cole
, after having only narrowly escaped the U.S. cruise missile strikes that had rained down on his training camps in eastern Afghanistan in August 1998. On September 27, 2000, two weeks before the
Cole
attack, bin Laden told a group of al-Qaeda members about the “
possibility of a missile attack
by the infidels” on their training camps. Around the time of the
Cole
bombing, the al-Qaeda leader evacuated everyone from his compound at Kandahar airport and
split up
from his senior advisers Mohammed Atef and Ayman al-Zawahiri so that all three would not be killed together in the event of a retaliatory American strike. But bin Laden’s precautions were unnecessary; the United States never retaliated for the
Cole
attack.

By the time the Bush administration was sworn into office in January 2001, it was obvious that al-Qaeda was responsible for the
Cole
bombing. On February 9, Vice President
Cheney was briefed
that the attack was the work of bin Laden’s men. At the end of March, Clarke’s deputy Roger Cressey wrote the deputy national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, an email saying, “
We know all we need to
about who did the attack to make a policy decision.” Cressey recalls that by the spring of 2001 “there was no disagreement about who was culpable. And yet there was
no enthusiasm, no interest
in doing anything about it, because it didn’t happen on their watch.”

In June 2001, al-Qaeda released a propaganda videotape
strongly implying its responsibility
for the
Cole
operation and calling for more anti-American attacks, something that Clarke pointed out to Rice in an email. If the Bush administration needed a casus belli, here it was broadcast around the world. The attack on the
Cole
was an act of war, plain and simple, and it merited an American military response. As we have seen, Michael Sheehan, the ambassador for counterterrorism under Clinton, had told Taliban leaders in early 2000 that they would be held responsible for future attacks against American targets because they were harboring al-Qaeda. Responding to the
Cole
attack by launching cruise missile strikes at key Taliban government buildings and military installations would have been relatively easy to do and might have
put some pressure on the Taliban to expel bin Laden. Instead, the Bush administration did nothing.

Stephen Hadley says the lack of response to the
Cole
was largely due to the fact that the Clinton administration’s cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s Afghan camps in 1998 were “
inadequate, ineffective responses
” and the Bush team “wanted a much more robust response to al-Qaeda generally, rather than just a response to the
Cole
. And that’s what we set about trying to develop, in the first 6–9 months up to 9/11.”

Ali Soufan, the FBI agent leading the
Cole
investigation, later interrogated a number of detainees held at Guantánamo, including Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s driver. Soufan says the lack of American response to the
Cole
bombing came up often during his interrogations: “Not only Hamdan—a lot of other people said the same thing: ‘You want to know who is responsible for 9/11, you’re responsible for 9/11, you didn’t retaliate after the Cole and it emboldened bin Laden so he felt that
we are untouchables
.’”

The feckless response to the
Cole
attack was a bipartisan failure, but one that reflects especially poorly on the Bush administration. When members of the 9/11 Commission asked Bush about the lack of response to the
Cole
bombing, he said that he wasn’t aware of the Clinton administration’s warnings to the Taliban, warnings that his own ambassador to Pakistan, William B. Milam,
had renewed in June 2001
when he told his Taliban counterpart that his government would be held responsible for attacks against American targets by al-Qaeda.

During the summer of 2001, CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that the American intelligence “system was
blinking red
” because of a series of credible intelligence reports about al-Qaeda’s plans for attacks on American targets. Below is
a representative sampling
of the threat reporting that was distributed to Bush officials, which gathered intensity during the spring and reached a crescendo during that summer.

CIA, “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations,” April 20

CIA, “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent,” June 23

CIA, “Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays,” July 2

CIA, “Threat of Impending al-Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely,” August 3

Warren Bass, a historian in his mid-thirties, was one of the 9/11 Commission staffers who reviewed National Security Council documents going to
and from Rice during the commission’s investigation. Bass found that Clarke
repeatedly warned
her and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, of the volume of alarming information about possible al-Qaeda plots during the summer of 2001.

On July 10, Tenet took the unusual step of calling Rice and asking her with some urgency for a meeting that same day to discuss the al-Qaeda threats. Barely fifteen minutes later, Tenet and two of his deputies were in Rice’s White House office. One of Tenet’s staff members got everyone’s attention when he predicted, “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the next weeks or months. …
Multiple and simultaneous attacks
are possible and they will occur with little or no warning.” Rice asked her counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke if he shared this assessment and he gave an exasperated “Yes.” Tenet and his staff thought he had finally gotten Rice’s attention, but she did nothing following the meeting. This was especially surprising because Rice would later publicly testify before the 9/11 Commission that the Bush administration was at “
battle stations
” during this period. The historical record does not reflect this.

During August, Bush was at his vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, clearing brush, doing some competitive bicycling, and attending to some of the business of government.
On August 6
he was given an intelligence briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” The brief had been prepared in part by the veteran CIA analyst “Barbara S.,” an Agency official who had tracked al-Qaeda for years. Bush later said the contents of the brief were
only “historical”
and told him nothing new about the danger from al-Qaeda.

Barbara S., now revealed to be Barbara Sude, says the president did not understand the intention of the briefing, which was to warn of a possible attack in America, not to rehash history: “
Was the piece historical
? No … So did the analysts think that something would happen in the United States? We did assess there was a major attack coming. We couldn’t say definitively where. We had threats all year about various locations.” Sude says that the CIA briefing was particularly influenced by the fact that just two month earlier, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian on the fringes of al-Qaeda, had pleaded guilty to charges that he had planned to detonate a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of the Christmas season of 1999. According to the briefing, there were
seventy ongoing investigations
by the FBI into supposed al-Qaeda cells inside the United States during the summer of 2001 and the Bureau had also come across information indicating “preparations for hijackings or other
types of attacks.” The number of FBI investigations was, in fact, exaggerated, but the briefing to Bush clearly made the point that there were several ongoing inquiries into possible al-Qaeda activities inside the United States.

Following the August 6 briefing, President Bush
never publicly discussed
the threat posed by al-Qaeda until after 9/11, and chose not to interrupt the
longest presidential vacation
in more than three decades, only returning to Washington from Texas as planned after Labor Day. The 9/11 Commission also found
no evidence
that he had any further discussion with his advisers about possible al-Qaeda attacks on the United States until after they had happened.

Despite Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission that the Bush administration was at battle stations during the summer of 2001, in a
wide-ranging and emblematic interview
with Fox News the night of August 6—the same day that President Bush had been briefed that there were dozens of investigations into possible al-Qaeda cells in the United States—Rice chose to discuss the troubled situation in Israel, the administration’s missile defense plans, and its relations with Russia. The threat from al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and terrorism went unmentioned.

There is also no evidence that Rice did anything to “pulse” the national security system for additional information about the presence of jihadist militants in the United States. Might that have caused the information about Zacarias Moussaoui, a jihadist militant then in FBI custody in Minnesota who was keen on practicing flying a 747, to have been more widely distributed? Might that have caused the wider dissemination of the names of the al-Qaeda soon-to be-hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were known to be in the United States? It is worth contrasting Rice’s lackadaisical approach with that of Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, who held almost
daily meetings
of the National Security Council from mid-December 1999 as the new millennium approached and similar fears of a terrorist attack gripped the national security establishment.

For Donald Rumsfeld the most pressing threat in the summer of 2001 was not al-Qaeda but the Department of Defense itself, which he felt was blocking his efforts at “transformation” of the military into a lighter, more nimble force. During a speech on September 10, Rumsfeld described the Pentagon bureaucracy as “
an adversary that poses a serious threat
to the security of the United States.” A day later Rumsfeld would be helping the victims of al-Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon.

The fact that al-Qaeda and its allies intended to attack the United States, and indeed had already done so before 9/11, was hardly a secret. The CIA briefing to President Bush headlined “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” was simply stating the blindingly obvious. Al-Qaeda’s leader had repeatedly said he was going to attack the United States, starting in 1997 in an interview with CNN, and he reiterated this threat over the next two years in interviews with ABC News and
Time
.

Rarely have the enemies of the United States publicly warned so often of their plans. Imagine for a moment that starting in 1937, Japanese government officials had repeatedly told American radio and newspaper correspondents that they were planning to strike the United States. Might not the events of Pearl Harbor have played out rather differently than they did on the morning of December 7, 1941?

The problem, then, was not a lack of information about al-Qaeda’s intentions and capabilities, but the Bush administration’s inability to comprehend that an attack by al-Qaeda on the United States was a real possibility, much more so than attacks by traditional state antagonists such as China or Iraq. Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 assaults seemed especially surprising to senior Bush officials because the world’s only superpower was bloodied by an organization, not a state. It should have been less surprising than it was; after all, bin Laden had declared war on the United States years earlier and he had followed through on that promise with the attacks on the two American embassies in Africa and the bombing of the
Cole
.

The 9/11 attacks were not the beginning of al-Qaeda’s campaign against the United States. They were its climax.

This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient.

—President Bush to reporters on September 16, 2001

O
n the morning of September 11, Bush was visiting a kindergarten class in Sarasota, Florida, when he was informed that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. A little later Andrew Card, his chief of staff, whispered in the president’s right ear: “
A second plane
hit the second tower. America is under attack.” An hour later, Bush, by now flying on Air Force One, spoke with Dick Cheney in the White House, telling the vice president, “We’re going to find out who did this and we’re going to
kick their asses
.” Exactly whose asses to kick and how would consume much of the rest of Bush’s presidency.

At eight-thirty that night Bush addressed tens of millions of Americans from the Oval Office in a speech that laid out a key doctrine of his administration’s future foreign policy: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” While this was a reasonable rationale for the coming war against the Taliban, it also helped set the stage for the subsequent war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which the administration would repeatedly say was allied with al-Qaeda, although the evidence for that assertion was nonexistent.