Obama: Suspicious packages are a ‘credible terrorist threat’
Washington Post
By Greg Miller, Peter Finn and Anne E. Kornblut
October 29, 2010President Obama said Friday that packages mailed from Yemen and intercepted in the last 24 hours contained explosive material and represented a "credible terrorist threat." The packages, mailed via UPS and FedEx, were addressed to two places of Jewish worship in Chicago, the president said. Obama, speaking four days before the midterm elections, did not specify any new security measures that would be taken or say that the nation’s terrorist alert level had been raised. But he described the threat as serious, and pointed once again to Yemen as the source, saying his top terrorism adviser, John Brennan, had been in touch with that country’s president.
The two packages were intercepted at different locations, one on a UPS plane at the East Midlands airport near Nottingham, England, and the other at a FedEx facility in Dubai. Officials provided no detail on the kind of explosives found. U.S. counterterrorism officials believe the foiled attack may have been orchestrated by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, which has been behind a series of recent attempts to strike the United States…
Mansoor Ijaz, an American of Pakistani origin, negotiated Sudan’s offer of counterterrorism assistance to the Clinton administration in 1996 and 1997 and jointly authored the blueprint for a ceasefire of hostilities between Indian security forces and militant Islamists in Kashmir in July and August 2000.
If new US National Security Adviser Thomas E. Donilon needs a reminder of how stark the enemy threat is, he need look no further than today’s discovery of printer cartridges rigged like explosive devices aboard UPS airliner cargo holds that left Yemen bound for Jewish Synagogues in the United States. A dry run? You bet. And not just to test the holes in air cargo security systems, but to test the reaction time and responsiveness of our national security apparatus…
History is replete with bad decisions made by men and women charged with securing America who lamely, selfishly and often purposefully politicized intelligence for narrow political objectives… During both the Clinton and Bush presidencies, political machinations repeatedly overtook good judgment in assessing the vast amounts of intelligence gathered by the most formidable surveillance apparatus the world has ever known. Bill Clinton repeatedly ignored warnings and advice from people in and out of government about the storm brewing inside Islam’s radical fringe. On September 11, 2001, the hypothetical threat – ignored and politicized for so many years–became a harsh reality. We are living with the consequences of that misjudgment today.
Much of the failure to deal with militant Islam inside the Clinton presidency came from his national security team, which [with the exception of former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke] had little practical experience with military campaigns, counterterrorism strategies, guerrilla warfare tactics or other facets so critical to ensuring modern-day security. They repeatedly, and with increasing stridency, politicized intelligence gathering, analysis and policy responses…
In February 1996 Sudan’s dictator, Omar Hasan El Bashir, pinched by US economic sanctions, offered to trade Osama bin Laden’s freedom in return for US economic sanctions on Khartoum being removed to allow development of Sudan’s oil riches. President Clinton refused the entreaty, arguing the US did not have any evidence of crimes committed by bin Laden against the United States and therefore had no grounds to arrest him or have him extradited from Sudan to the US. Yet evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in attacks against US interests prior to 1996 existed. Unfortunately, the evidence existed only in CIA files that Clinton never bothered to read with any regularity because he did not trust the intelligence community…
In 1997, the Sudanese offered up their intelligence files on bin Laden, Al Qaeda and other Muslim extremist groups to the FBI and CIA, this time without conditions. In those files, detailed data existed about men [among them Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda, and Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian trader and Al Qaeda’s accountant] who later formed the Hamburg Al Qaeda cell that sheltered Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two of the pilots that slammed US airliners into the World Trade Center on September 11th.
I negotiated that offer and hand-carried Bashir’s letter from Khartoum to Washington in April of that year. Six months later, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright accepted the offer – only to be overruled a few days later by Samuel R. Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser at the time, and Susan E. Rice, then the incoming assistant secretary of state for East Africa. That a decision resulting from an in-depth interagency government process could be overruled by a narrow White House clique [because of personal misgivings about Sudan’s veracity, or the agendas of American allies in the region that wanted to break up Sudan, or the political infighting that erupted between Berger and Albright about operational boundaries and limits on authority] clearly showed the dangers of politicizing intelligence and making policy on the basis of feel rather than fact.
In February 2003, a man of no less stature than Gen. Colin Powell got caught in the same trap when he appeared as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state in front of the world at the United Nations. He argued that Saddam Hussein was removing Mobile Production Facilities for biological weapons of mass destruction from Iraq, and that as a result of incontrovertible American "evidence", the world had a moral obligation to go in and remove Saddam from power. The trailers were later found to have no trace of biological warfare. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. The narrow clique that ruled White House policymaking at the time [Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, etc] simply bulldozed friend and foe alike into supporting the Iraq invasion because they had a world view, facts be damned to hell. A trillion dollars later, with an Iraqi nation decimated by war and mishandled in its aftermath…Is that the best we can do today with the bright minds we have in America? Internal cohesion and smooth operations of the national security team based on feel-good backhanding is no replacement for hard analysis of facts on the ground. Donilon needs to crack that whip first, not last – and he needs to do it fast…
Politicized intelligence was the Achilles heel of many a past president, with disastrous consequences emerging every single time. President Obama must insure that the principal legacy left by his outgoing national security adviser – integrity of the intelligence analysis and policy-response process, and a strategic vision for securing America against an ever growing array of threats – remains the baseline from which America makes its national-security policy decisions. If he does not, he may find one day soon that the very terrorists he was elected to thwart have come home to roost…
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