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| The question of intelligence failures prior to 9/11. |
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JONATHAN CHAIT
Senior Editor, The New Republic
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Posted 04.22.04 | 9:35 AM
Ramesh,
By harping on this meta-debate we seemed to be engaged in a contest of stubbornness: which of us is least willing to let go of a small point, even at the cost of appearing annoyingly petty and obsessive. It's a race to the bottom. But it's the sort of race I seldom lose.
So, onward (or, more precisely, downward) to the meta-debate. I'm surprised that you would deny that conservatives have assailed Clinton's record on terrorism in contrast with Bush's pre-9/11 record. Conservatives have churned out thousands of words, including entire books, dedicated to this point. Obviously, Bush's post-9/11 response was more vigorous than anything Clinton did. But that tells you nothing: the murder of 3,000 Americans completely changes the political dynamic. Bush's defenders tried to elide this point by suggesting the real change wasn't 9/11, but the replacement of a "weak" Clinton with a "strong" Bush. But the disclosures about Bush's pre-9/11 response to terrorism has largely forced conservatives to abandon that argument. Now they're maintaining that everybody was negligent prior to 9/11. As I wrote, I think that's largely true. But I do think the Bushies were slightly more negligent, at least if you compare them with the Clintonites at the end of their term.
The comparison is important because it gives us a standard by which to judge Bush. If his defense is, say, that nobody would have taken action in response to such "vague" threats, it's notable to point out that Clinton did. Whether or not that action directly foiled the threat isn't the point. The point is that, given similar warnings, Clinton mobilized his administration and Bush did not.
Your view of Ashcroft and his suspicion of bureaucracies makes my point for me. Ashcroft's anti-terrorism instincts were hobbled by traditional conservative hostility to government. If you're really concerned with fighting terrorism, you would worry more about depriving your agents of resources than the prospect that some of their funding will go to waste. Suppose Kerry is elected and vetoes a defense bill because he fears it contains boondoggles for defense contractors. Even if he's right, that would show that he's less concerned about defense than is Bush, wouldn't it?
This Ashcroft/Gorelick debate has, I'm sure you'll admit, gotten pretty tiresome. You've already conceded the main point: Ashcroft's policy was extremely similar. Maybe you say extremely similar while I say essentially identical. Whatever. The point is, this hardly shows an area where Bush was distinctly more vigorous than Clinton before 9/11.
I'm not a big fan of Kerry's foreign policy instincts, either. I didn't bring up Tora Bora to defend Kerry's foreign policy instincts. I brought it up to rebut your suggestion that a Democratic president would have shied away from using force in Afghanistan.
Surely we're better off with al Qaeda on the run than operating with a friendly government. But wouldn't we be better off still with al Qaeda dead?
I've enjoyed this debate. Maybe our next debate can be over which of us won the last debate.
Jonathan
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RAMESH PONNURU
Senior Editor, National Review
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Posted 04.22.04 | 3:35PM
Jonathan,
You're surprised that I would deny that conservatives have favorably compared Bush's pre-9/11 terrorism record to Clinton's; I'm surprised that you're surprised. It seems to me that what most conservatives have been saying is not that Bush was more worried about terrorist attacks than Clinton was, or more devoted to finding out about their plots and thwarting them. I think their records are pretty similar on those points, as do you (although you give an edge to Clinton). Conservatives have been saying, rightly, that Bush has been more vigorous in his response to terrorism than Clinton was. To the extent that there's a purely pre-9/11 comparison involved, it would be this limited one: Clinton reacted weakly to pre-9/11 terrorist acts, and Bush did not. With this corollary: Clinton's weak reactions to the attacks on the first WTC, the Khobar Towers, the embassies, and the USS Cole emboldened terrorists; Bush did nothing comparable to embolden them.
Of course, Bush had no opportunity to react to pre-9/11 attacks because none occurred on his watch. The counterfactual question then is: If Bush had been president when the Cole was attacked, how would he have responded? It is hard to believe that he would have responded as weakly as Clinton in fact did.
If Bush had been president in the 1990s — to extend the counterfactual — there would never have been an intel/law enforcement "wall"; different judges would have been on the FISA court; the law-enforcement-first approach would have been abandoned years earlier (possibly after Manila Air, likely after Khobar, unquestionably after the embassies); the war against Islamist terrorism would have been launched no later than 1998, and many of the Patriot Act improvements would have been enacted by 1996 (when Congress was of a mind to, and did, pass sweeping changes to counterterrorism law). If he would not have accomplished these things, it would largely have been because of the opposition of liberals (and, on Patriot, a few conservatives).
There is plenty to fault this administration for. It has sometimes suggested, over the last few weeks, that it did enough to fight terrorism before 9/11, which is manifestly untrue. Even post-9/11, I am not at all sure that Bush has done enough to change the culture of the FBI and CIA. Shouldn't some heads have rolled after 9/11? It could be that we still have legal changes to make to fight terrorism. Maybe Bush's border-security policy needs to be improved. A very tough critique could, I'm sure, be made that Bush has not done enough to make us safer. Democrats have sometimes tried to make that critique. I believe that your magazine has done a number of features arguing that Bush has failed to spend enough on homeland security needs.
But too often the political critique of Bush has consisted of cheap attacks on his pre-9/11 record. Democrats have wanted, for example, to go after John Ashcroft rather than George Tenet: the guy associated with conservatives rather than the guy with the most direct counter-terrorist responsibilities. And those attacks, whether about intelligence priorities or counter-terrorism budgets, just aren't very persuasive.
Thanks for joining me here. I look forward to next time too.
Ramesh
Note: Ramesh Ponnuru's response concludes this debate.
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PONNURU
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Posted 04.21.04 | 4:10PM
Jonathan,
The very first opinionduel debate seems to have gotten stuck in a meta-debate about itself. Not that there's anything wrong with that! If you can't be self-referential on the web, where can you be? To recap: You started this debate by gloating that conservatives had been forced, during the 9/11 Commission hearings, to abandon the claim that Bush had stronger antiterrorism policies than Clinton did. I pointed out that when conservatives said that Bush had done better than Clinton, they were talking about the contrast between Clinton's non-response to the USS Cole attack and other incidents, on the one hand, and Bush's response to 9/11. They were not talking about the ways intelligence was gathered and responded to. So the claim of Bush's superiority has not been abandoned.
You went on to say that Bush's pre-9/11 errors still limit the effectiveness of his administration's policies. I don't mind debating that point. I don't see why you mind my bringing up the way the Democrats' pre-9/11 errors affect it still when it comes, for example, to the Patriot Act. The whole point of debating pre-9/11 failures is, after all, to learn what we can about what we should do now to prevent their recurrence.
Richard Clarke's after-action report indicated that it was luck, not a high-alert status, that foiled a millennium attack (although you may have a point about the Boston and Brooklyn cells, with which I am not familiar).
Regarding Thomas Pickard, I don't think I have committed myself to the view that anyone who leaves the administration with a critique of it is not to be trusted. I do think that when he makes assertions that seem implausible on their face and are contradicted by others, it is best to reserve judgment. If Ashcroft thought that budget requests might not be used for their originally stated purpose — which is not unknown in government bureaucracies — that changes how we should think about his response to them.
I was unimpressed by that Washington Post editorial smearing Ashcroft as a smearer. According to the Post, the FISA Court of Review said that the "wall" originated in the 1980s. That court did indeed say that "the exact moment" that the FISA law began to be misinterpreted is "shrouded in historical mist" — that's what the Post quoted. The next sentence, unquoted by the Post: "What is clear is that in 1995 the Attorney General adopted" procedures that (skipping ahead another sentence) "limited contacts between the FBI and the Criminal Division." In other words, the wall. The officials responsible? Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick's own memo from that year makes it clear that she did not think of herself as sticking with the status quo of the 1980s but going beyond it. See Andrew McCarthy's article on NRO today for more.
Regarding Tora Bora, I think Kerry was right to say what he did (as NR said at the time). It doesn't change my view of his foreign-policy instincts in general, especially at moments when hawkishness does not look as though it will have a political payoff. I do think that we are better off with al Qaeda on the run than with it able to use a secure base provided by a friendly government.
Ramesh
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CHAIT
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Posted 04.21.04 | 9:18 AM
Ramesh,
Look, I don't want to be difficult here. I raised the comparison of Clinton and Bush because we're debating pre-9/11 intelligence failures. The best way to get a comparison is to look at how Clinton and Bush did pre-9/11. Comparing a pre-9/11 response to a post-9/11 response is an apples/oranges comparison. You may well be correct that debating post-9/11 responses would make for a more interesting debate topic. You could probably persuade me to move on to that debate topic. But I don't see how you can maintain that it is the debate topic. Again, just look at the top of the screen.
I'm not "sure" that more high-level meetings would have prevented the 9/11 attacks, either. I think that they might well have, and the fact that they prevented a millennium attack is pretty good evidence for my view. I also think it's extremely strong evidence that the Clinton administration by the end of its tenure took terrorism more seriously than did the Bush administration pre-9/11.
As are the disclosures about Ashcroft. Some people have faulty memories, but faulty memories rarely cause them to imagine conversations that never happened, especially when they're testifying under oath. I don't doubt that he wants to hurt Ashcroft. Maybe that's because Ashcroft told him to stop bothering him about terrorism shortly before terrorists conducted the deadliest attack on American soil in our history. But this seems to be the circular logic by which the administration discredits its internal critics. Loyal bureaucrats become disgusted with Bush due to his negligence or irresponsibility, and they feel compelled to speak out against him. The fact that they speak out against him turns them ipso facto into anti-Bush partisans, who therefore lack credibility. And, needless to say, those who haven't been in the administration don't know anything about its internal deliberations, so they lack credibility as well. Therefore, the only people who do have credibility to discuss Bush's internal policymaking are those who are in the administration and still support Bush.
Okay, that was a digression. Back to the topic. This Washington Post story explains how, before 9/11, Ashcroft turned down an FBI request to "hire 54 translators and 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff." Frankly, I think this business about Gulfstream jets is a desperate red herring dragged out by Ashcroft's spinners. As for the "wall," the Post editorial page — which, on legal matters, usually stakes out a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans, yesterday called Ashcroft's charge a "smear." The facts they raise seem persuasive: "The memo by Ms. Gorelick that Mr. Ashcroft branded as the culprit is not even mentioned in the history of impaired information-sharing that Mr. Ashcroft's department gave to the special court that finally lifted the barriers after Sept. 11, 2001. … In fact, Ms. Gorelick was an advocate of increased collaboration between spies and cops, not greater separation. She pushed to give the court power to authorize physical searches as well as electronic monitoring, and surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act more than doubled during the Clinton administration. The department was criticized by civil libertarians and others on the left and right alike — us included — for the changes that she advanced."
If you want to discuss Afghanistan, let's. I notice you didn't respond to my point that Kerry advocated ground troops at Tora Bora, which Bush failed to do. In your first response, you imply that maybe a Democrat would conduct operations against Al Qaeda but spare the Taliban. Well, Bush in fact did first demand that the Taliban turn over Al Qaeda. When they refused, he took them out. You really think a Democratic president would have accepted that refusal, after 3,000 Americans were murdered? In any case, assume for the sake of argument that you're correct. Bush deposed the Taliban, but he allowed most of Al Qaeda to escape. If your imaginary Democrat had somehow taken out Al Qaeda but left the Taliban in place, would that really have been worse?
Jonathan
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PONNURU
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Posted 04.20.04 | 3:40PM
Jonathan,
I didn't concentrate strictly on pre-9/11 intelligence for two reasons. First, you raised the issue of how Bush's record on terrorism compared to Clinton's. Second, we basically agree that there were failures in gathering and responding to intelligence under both Clinton and Bush. So we can make a big deal out of minor debates within that consensus, or we can debate the larger context: how these failures should affect our evaluation of Clinton, Bush, Kerry, and the Patriot Act.
It is true that the famous (and depressingly shoddy) Aug. 6, 2001, PDB was headlined "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike In US." It is also true that most of the threat intelligence that summer concerned overseas threats. I am not sure that more high-level meetings would have prevented September 11, as I am not sure that they were instrumental in 1999. (It was also easier to focus on threats that were building up in an easily identified period of time, around the turn of the millennium.) If we praise Clinton because some terrorist plots were foiled that year, we must also praise Bush: The 9/11 Commission reported that in the summer of 2001 antiterrorism officials "identified 30 possible overseas targets and launched disruption operations," and that "at least one planned terrorist attack in Europe may have been successfully disrupted." By the end of July, however, both George Tenet and Richard Clarke were saying that the near-term threat of terrorism had passed its peak. Here we had not a failure to take warnings seriously but a lack of actionable warnings.
I am not sure why Pickard said what he did about Ashcroft. Maybe his memory is faulty. Maybe he is correct. But you had mentioned his statement as fact, without noting Ashcroft's denial. Pickard could have reasons to want to hurt Ashcroft. Meetings between them were tense — understandably given that during his brief tenure the FBI was dealing with fallout from the Hanson, McVeigh, and Lee cases — and Pickard was passed over for FBI chief.
In the days before Sept. 11, the Ashcroft Justice Department was preparing a budget that gave the FBI, and its counterterrorism operations specifically, less than it wanted but more than it previously had. It got less than it wanted in all eight Clinton years too, by the way. The FBI had asked, among other things, for a Gulfstream jet. It had asked for $8.8 million to hire intelligence analysts. The department went with $7.7 million, providing funding for all the positions requested. The agency then said that it would rather spend the money on something else. Louis Freeh told the commission that he sent 400 agents to east Africa following the embassy bombings. Maybe the agency needed more money; maybe it needed better management.
Regarding the intel/law-enforcement wall: A Justice Department spokesman says that officials went to meet with Senate Intelligence Committee members in 2001 seeking statutory changes and were rebuffed. The Thompson memo was also an attempt, however pitifully inadequate, to address the problem. The Gorelick memo, on the other hand, explicitly said that it was going beyond what the law of the time required to separate intelligence and law enforcement.
Finally, I do not think that the fact that John Kerry (or Powell, for that matter) backed the invasion of Afghanistan is evidence that he would have undertaken it himself. Kerry voted for the Iraq war, but few would maintain that a President Kerry would have started it.
Ramesh
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CHAIT
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Posted 04.20.04 | 8:25AM
Ramesh,
You begin by invoking Afghanistan, and end by invoking the Patriot Act. I think you need to look at the top of the page: We're debating "intelligence failures prior to 9/11." If you want to implicitly concede defeat and change topics, I'll be glad to do so. Before I do that, though, let me address your claims that pertain to the topic at hand.
You insist that intelligence during the Summer of 2001 was "vague" and "stressed threats overseas." The first point is debatable at best - what are you looking for, a precise itinerary along with a signed confession? The second point is weaker. The intelligence came from overseas, but I'd say a memo entitled "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO ATTACK INSIDE THE UNITED STATES"--to take just one example--is pretty clearly stressing a domestic threat.
But even granting that the intelligence was vague, there's a pretty good comparison to consider. In 1999, the Clinton administration received no less vague threat intelligence. In response they mobilized, alerting the public and convening principles of the National Security Council every day for a month. Result: They broke up Islamic terror cells in Boston and Brooklyn, according to the 9/11 Commission. Bush's response in 2001 was far less robust.
Next, you say you don't believe former FBI acting director Thomas Pickard's testimony that Ashcroft asked not to be pestered about terrorism. Well, okay, it's possible he's lying. But Ashcroft has a clear personal and political motive to deny the story. What's Pickard's motive? Is he yet another of the embittered spotlight-grabbing, back-stabbing, anti-Bush partisans who seem to be ubiquitous in this administration?
I think the fact that Ashcroft vetoed counterterrorism funding makes Pickard's charge more plausible--it shows terrorism was a low priority for Ashcroft. You argue that it shows Ashcroft's good sense "given its [the FBI's, I assume] record on previous requests." I'm afraid I don't follow the logic. Yes, the FBI had done an inadequate job, but how was the answer to starve it of funds needed to bolster its undermanned staff and update its dilapidated equipment? Is there some conservative argument I'm missing to the effect that getting the FBI out of the way would unleash market forces to fight terrorism?
You say Ashcroft was trying to "lower the wall" before 9/11. What's your evidence? His deputy, Larry Thompson, wrote a memo affirming the policy of his predecessor, Jamie Gorelick. Now, you could make a good argument that Gorelick was trying to lower the wall, too, and therefore so was Thompson, but that hardly helps your case.
Finally, a brief response on post-9/11. You argue, non-falsifiably, that a Democratic president wouldn't have overthrown the Taliban. But then why did the supposedly partisan Democrats all back Bush's invasion? Moreover, Bush refused to use U.S. ground troops at Tora Bora when we had bin Laden surrounded, a failure that John Kerry criticized at the time. (As did TNR.) While the Taliban is gone, al Qaeda still operates in chaotic Afghanistan. Is this really the example you want to pick?
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PONNURU
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Posted 04.19.04 | 3:57PM
Jonathan,
Thanks for the kind words. I suppose I will now have to reciprocate by saying that The New Republic is the smartest and most interesting liberal magazine in America and that you are one of its best writers. But since these compliments are true, I don't mind delivering them.
I think, however, that you overestimate the extent to which the debate has shifted. It is true that conservatives have lately been emphasizing important continuities between Presidents Bush and Clinton: Fighting terrorism was not a high-enough priority for either man (or for other political actors); and both of them ignored much of Richard Clarke's advice. But almost all conservatives continue to believe that Bush's response to terrorism has been stronger and better than Clinton's was. In that sense, we are all "bitter-enders."
The president could have chosen to bomb some camps a few days after September 11. Or he could have decided to conduct military operations against al Qaeda but to spare the Taliban--the option preferred by the State Department. President Bush chose regime change. I am not at all sure that President Clinton would have. I am quite sure that Clinton would not have embarked on an effort to change the political culture of the Middle East in a way that makes future terrorist acts less likely.
You write that Bush's negligence in the summer of 2001 surpassed that of Clinton earlier given that the amount of terrorism chatter went up. But the warnings were still vague, they stressed threats overseas, and steps were in fact taken to address those overseas threats. You credit the claim that John Ashcroft asked not to be regularly briefed on terrorism threats. It's an improbable assertion, and Ashcroft denied it under oath. Nor do I think it terrible that Ashcroft turned down some FBI requests for counterterrorism money, given its record on previous requests.
Ashcroft deserves better than he has been getting. Even before September 11 he was
trying to lower the wall between intelligence and law enforcement. If there has
been a point of consensus in the 9/11 Commission hearings, it is the
indispensability of the Patriot Act. Democrats, including John Kerry, have pandered
to the act's largely ignorant opposition. Ashcroft has been the act's most
prominent defender.
You have recently argued that conservatives should not criticize liberals for viewing the fight against terrorism mostly as a matter of law enforcement. You're right. Liberals don't take law enforcement all that seriously either, and we should call them on it.
Ramesh
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CHAIT
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Posted 04.19.04 | 7:15AM
Ramesh,
I'm genuinely excited to be taking part in this project. I've long believed that our political discourse needs more places where liberals and conservatives can engage each other without merely preaching to the choir. We've found a perfect partner in the staff of National Review — by far the smartest, most honest, best-written conservative magazine published today. (Trust me, that's not just a sop--my colleagues can attest I've been saying that around the office for a while.)
What strikes me most about the debate over the charges that have emanated from Richard Clarke and the 9/11 hearings is how far the terrain has shifted in this debate. After September 11, 2001, all the momentum was behind the Bush administration's preferred narrative of things: under Bill Clinton we had followed a feckless policy of appeasing terrorists, but under Bush we got tough. There were always facts in the public domain that poked some holes in this narrative, but they received very little attention until now. Today, conservatives (except for a few bitter-enders) have mostly retreated to arguing that, before September 11, 2001, nobody took terrorism seriously. Whereas before it was liberals who emphasized the continuity between Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and Bush's, today it's conservatives.
In my view, the continuity model is mostly correct — which is to say, in retrospect, neither Clinton nor Bush did enough to fight terrorism before 9/11. But I also think that Clarke and the 9/11 Commission have uncovered plenty of evidence that, even by the more forgiving standards of the pre-9/11 world, Bush's approach to terrorism was wanting — probably weaker than what a third Clinton term (or a first Gore term) would have done, and quite possibly deficient in ways that could have prevented the attacks.
Here, in my opinion, is the strongest evidence that the administration was negligent in ways that surpassed the negligence of the Clintonites. First, as we have discovered recently, the intensity and specificity of threat warnings in the summer of 2001 exceeded anything produced by intelligence agencies monitoring Al Qaeda before. Second, the Bush administration was far more resistant than the Clinton administration to pleas that they focus on terrorism. Clarke's revelations, while receiving more attention, are probably less damning than the revelations that surfaced this week about John Ashcroft. The attorney general, we discovered, instructed his subordinates to cease bothering him with their tiresome warnings about terrorism, and he slashed a proposed increase in the counterterrorism budget. (Speaking of which, it came out in the hearings that FBI agents investigating terror are still abysmally underfunded — some, for instance, have to share one Internet terminal per floor.)
Why would Bush be weaker on terrorism than Clinton, when Clinton was, at best, a sporadic hawk? Two reasons. First, conservatives saw the world as a function of states, and were ideologically unequipped to confront non-state actors like Al Qaeda. Second, conservative hostility to government spending led them to turn down necessary counterterrorism expenditures. Despite the myth that 9/11 utterly transformed the Bush presidency, both these factors have continued to inhibit the administration's efforts against terrorism even after 2001.
I have a lot more to say about this, but I've run up against the word limit. (Shouldn't have wasted space on opening pleasantries.)
Jon
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