1 Boring Old Man

RICHARD BEN-VENISTE, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER
interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN

…
BLITZER: So you the asked the president in the Oval Office — and the vice president — why didn’t you go after the Taliban in those eight months before 9/11 after he was president. What did he say?
BEN-VENISTE: Well, now that it was established that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing and the president was briefed in January of 2001, soon after he took office, by George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling him of the finding that al Qaeda was responsible, and I said, "Well, why wouldn’t you go after the Taliban in order to get them to kick bin Laden out of Afghanistan?" Maybe, just maybe, who knows — we don’t know the answer to that question — but maybe that could have affected the 9/11 plot.
BLITZER: What did he say?
BEN-VENISTE: He said that no one had told him that we had made that threat. And I found that very discouraging and surprising.
BLITZER: Now, I read this report, the 9/11 Commission report. This is a big, thick book. I don’t see anything and I don’t remember seeing anything about this exchange that you had with the president in this report.
BEN-VENISTE: Well, I had hoped that we had — we would have made both the Clinton interview and the Bush interview a part of our report, but that was not to be. I was outvoted on that question.
BLITZER: Why?
BEN-VENISTE: I didn’t have the votes.
BLITZER: Well, was — were the Republican members trying to protect the president and the vice president? Is that what your suspicion is?
BEN-VENISTE: I think the question was that there was a degree of confidentiality associated with that and that we would take from that the output that is reflected in the report, but go no further. And that until some five years’ time after our work, we would keep that confidential. I thought we would be better to make all of the information that we had available to the public and make our report as transparent as possible so that the American public could have that.
…

I’ve personally avoided the debate about what could have been done to avoid the 911 attack. It has seemed to me that if someone’s determined to do something like that, even the most paranoid defense probably wouldn’t protect us. I’ve been comfortable letting that "dog lie." But the Clinton interview, Richard Clarke’s book, and this interview with 911 Commissioner, Richard Ben-Veniste, make my head in the sand approach to this topic seem naive.

We knew a lot. We knew where bin Laden was. We knew what he was up to. We knew a month before Bush was inaugurated that bin Laden’s al Qaeda had been responsible for the U.S.S. Cole bombing:

BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think it’s an important subject. The issue of the Cole is an important subject, and there has been a lot of politicization over this issue, why didn’t President Clinton respond? Well, we set forth in the report the reasons, and that is because the CIA had not given the president the conclusion that al Qaeda was responsible. That did not occur until some point in December. It was reiterated in a briefing to the — to the new president in January.
BLITZER: Well, let me stop you for a second. If former President Clinton knew in December…
BEN-VENISTE: Right.
BLITZER: … that the CIA and the FBI had, in his words, certified that al Qaeda was responsible, he was still president until January 20, 2001. He had a month, let’s say, or at least a few weeks to respond. Why didn’t he?
BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think that was a question of whether a president who would be soon leaving office would initiate an attack against a foreign country, Afghanistan. And I think that was left up to the new administration. But strangely, in the transition there did not seem to be any great interest by the Bush administration, at least none that we found, in pursuing the question of plans which were being drawn up to attack in Afghanistan as a response to the Cole.
…
BLITZER: Did the vice president say anything to you? Did he know that this warning had been given to the Taliban, who were then ruling Afghanistan, if there’s another attack on the United States, we’re going to go after you because you harbor al Qaeda? And there was this attack on the USS Cole.
BEN-VENISTE: The vice president did not at that point volunteer any information about the Cole.
BLITZER: So what’s your — did the president say to you — did the president say, you know, "I made a mistake, I wish we would have done something"? What did he say when you continually — when you pressed him? And I know you’re a former prosecutor, you know how to drill, try to press a point.
BEN-VENISTE: Well, the president made a humorous remark about the fact that — asking me whether I had ever lost an argument, and I reminded him that — or I informed him that I, too, had two daughters. And so we passed that. He made his statement about the state of his knowledge, and I accepted that as a given, although I was surprised considering the number of people who continued on, including Richard Clarke. So that information was there and available, but the question of why we did not respond to the Cole, I think it was an important lapse, quite frankly. I think that we would have sent a message to the Taliban and we would have sent a message to al Qaeda. It could have conceivably — I don’t know the answer to this, but conceivably it could have had an affect on whether Sheikh Mullah and — Omar.
BLITZER: Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban.
BEN-VENISTE: Omar, right — would have continued to harbor bin Laden and al Qaeda in their country. 
…

I suppose that one might see what happened as things "falling through the cracks" in the transition between the Clinton and Bush Administrations. I’d almost like to believe that. But that isn’t what happened at all. We already know that it was something much bigger than that. The Cheney Bush Administration came into office with so much contempt for Clinton and the C.I.A. that they weren’t slightly interested in hearing those briefings, or listening to Richard Clarke or the C.I.A. Their key players had spent eight years at their A.E.I. and P.N.A.C. think tanks responding to everything the Clinton Administration said with a disdain approximating hatred. They weren’t about to listen to anything that was passed on from Clinton.

Even when 911 actually happened, they still couldn’t see the forest and kept on with their preconceived plan to invade Iraq. It was their disdain for Clinton, nurtured in their fallow years, that clouded their vision. They destroyed him with the Monica Lewinski show [and Clinton helped them along both by his womanizing and by lying about it after the fact]. They probably destroyed Al Gore’s chances of succeeding him in the process. But they worked up so much contempt along the way that they couldn’t listen to the very loud and very true warnings of what was to come – bin Laden’s big show.

It’s five years later and we can finally parse what went on back then. The secrecy, defensiveness, and "spin machine" of the Bush Administration has clouded things. Bill Clinton’s silence and neutrality hasn’t helped. Unfortunately, it is likely that he had no other choice at the point where he left power after having been impeached. His misadventures also probably fanned the flames of the Religious Right that elected Bush.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

(from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)