Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (41 page)

Preface

1.
Tim Russert, “Interview of Vice President Cheney,”
Meet the Press,
NBC Television, September 10, 2006.

2.
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Free Press, 2006), 464.

Introduction

1.
The 9/11 Commission Report
provides numerous examples of this refusal to doubt the utter perfection of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. “American [foreign] policy choices have consequences,” the commissioners wrote. “Right or wrong it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.” So far, so good, but this promising start fades into complete support for the foreign-policy status quo and the implication that Muslims are too stupid to understand what is best for them. “This does not mean U.S. policy choices have been wrong,” the commissioners continue, cementing their places in the governing elite. “It means that those choices must be integrated with America’s message of opportunity to the Arab and Muslim world…The United States must do more to communicate its message.” See Thomas H. Kean et al.,
The 9/11 Commission Report
(New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2003), 376–77.

2.
Walter A. McDougall,
Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776
(New York: Mariner Books, 1997), 206, 218.

3.
I spent nearly twenty years managing CIA covert-action operations, and when discussing whether or not to proceed with—or even to propose—a particular operation, the first question always asked by the Agency’s seniormost managers was, “Will it pass the
Washington Post
giggle test?” That is, no operation aimed at protecting Americans or furthering U.S. interests abroad could be considered if the
Post
and other media would ridicule it if it failed and became public knowledge. Again,
The 9/11 Commission Report
is helpful on this issue. Quoting a cable I wrote on the instruction of DCI George Tenet explaining why a May 1998 operation to capture bin Laden was canceled, the commissioners note that the bottom line was that the Clinton administration preferred to let the killer of Americans remain free to plan additional attacks rather than risk bad press. At Mr. Tenet’s direction I wrote that the Clinton cabinet had stopped the operation because “the purpose and nature of the operation would be subject to unavoidable misinterpretation—and probably recriminations—in the event that bin Laden, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive.” See Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report
, 114.
     Worries about what others would think seemed, at times, to be taken rather far. When planning the operation to capture bin Laden, for example, CIA engineers were required to produce an ergonomically correct chair for bin Laden to be seated in after he was captured. Likewise, well-padded restraint devices were manufactured to avoid chafing his skin, and a full medical suite was acquired in case he was wounded. The crowning glory of the Executive Branch’s tender concern for this killer of Americans was a session held at the National Security Council’s offices of lawyers from several Intelligence Community components. Their task? To examine rolls of masking, duct, and medical-adhesive tape and determine which had the right amount of stickiness to ensure that bin Laden’s face and beard would not be excessively irritated if his mouth had to be taped shut after capture.

4.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
, trans. N.H. Thompson (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1999), 79.

Author’s Note

1.
Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America,
rev. ed. (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005), and
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism
(Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2004).

2.
James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairs,
The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward—A New Approach
(New York: Vintage Books, 2006), xvii.

3.
Notwithstanding the urgent tone in which
The Iraq Study Group Report
is written—“The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” for example—the authors present the Iraq debacle as mainly a Cold War–style problem produced by Washington’s sub-standard planning and management.

This policy prescription could have been applied to almost any issue during the Cold War. The resolution in Iraq needs the help of the Iraqi regime—the
Report
stresses this—but at bottom it is up to the United States to draft and implement better policies, improve U.S. interagency coordination, teach the Iraqis to adopt less corrupt and more Western-style policies in budget planning and taxes, and train them to build a law-enforcement system that mirrors America’s. For the Baker-Hamilton commission, when Washington gets the bureaucratics right, success will be just around the corner, and it appears that the enemy will not have a voice in the outcome. Ibid., ix, x, xiii.

4.
Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report
, 108–43.

5.
Ibid., xvi.

6.
The members of each of the three investigatory panels were served by a large and competent staff. The staff of the Kean-Hamilton 9/11 Commission, however, stood head and shoulders above the others. The intellect, work ethic, determination, and integrity of that staff cannot be too highly praised. The many failings of the final 9/11 Commission report must therefore be ascribed to the political objectives of the commissioners and their most senior lieutenants—and most especially to the moral cowardice evident in their decision not to “point fingers”—and not to the work of the staffers. My impression is that the staffers found the truth but the commissioners balked at telling it.

7.
All of us recalled, for example, that then-DCI George Tenet fired a young and just-married CIA contract employee after the U.S. Air Force mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 8, 1999. The discharged employee had provided information on the target but was unaware that it was the embassy. Mr. Tenet volunteered the CIA to take the blame for the bombing, but every IC officer knew that the U.S. military was responsible for the mistake. In wartime situations the U.S. military routinely solicits target suggestions from several IC components. These suggestions are presented in files called target packages. U.S. military intelligence reviews and independently verifies them as legitimate targets, then forwards them to a senior U.S. commander for a decision on whether an attack is to be made. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was attacked, therefore, either because military intelligence failed to do its job or because the demand for targets from senior commanders was too strong to permit a complete evaluation. No target is ever attacked simply because the CIA tells the U.S. military it should do so. In the same way, in early 2004, the 9/11 commissioners indicated that they were intending to name an even younger CIA officer as the only individual to be publicly identified for a pre-9/11 failure. A group of senior CIA officers, however, let it be known that if that officer was named, information about the pre-9/11 negligence of several very senior U.S. officials would find its way into the media. The commissioners dropped the issue. For the 1999 Belgrade attack, see Alva McNicol, “NATO hits Chinese Embassy,” BBCNEWS.com, May 8, 1999.
It also should be noted that the commissioners mislead readers throughout their report by saying that the CIA withheld information from the FBI. A number of junior and senior FBI officers were assigned to the bin Laden unit after it was formed in 1996, and each had access to all of the information that came into the Agency. When I was the unit chief, the FBI officers who served there read all the mail I read, except for fitness reports for CIA officers overseas. The FBI officers were in the unit for two specific reasons: (a) so that they could cull incoming messages for information pertinent to U.S. domestic security, and (b) so that they could take action on such information because the CIA could not operate inside the United States.
In addition, one of the main reasons senior FBI officials assigned their officers to the bin Laden unit—and to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center generally—was to steal information from the CIA. On at least three occasions in which I was personally involved between 1992 and 2004, FBI officers were found to have stolen large numbers of classified CIA documents, removed them from CIA headquarters in an insecure manner, and distributed them to individuals at FBI headquarters and—at least—the FBI office in New York. On each occasion senior CIA officers refused to act to recover the documents.

8.
I make this point so starkly because I have been told by several retired IC officers that after I resigned from the Agency, several of the young officers who worked for me were subjected to very adversarial polygraph examinations. These officers were accused of passing me classified information, were recalled several times for repoly-graphing, and were delayed in taking new assignments because of the prolonged and hostile polygraph process. No serving officer has ever passed me classified information, but because the polygraph can always be used to discipline and harass employees, I want to make my sole responsibility for this book as clear as possible.

9.
A few items in the latter category provide an interesting bit of context to
The 9/11 Commission Report.
The
Report
notes that in May 1998 the government of Saudi Arabia agreed to try to purchase Osama bin Laden from the Taliban but failed to do so. Oddly enough, the Clinton administration’s decision to welcome and rely on the Saudis to do what they promised—which was criticized by some in the CIA who had seen Riyadh’s post-1995 noncooperation vis. bin Laden—precisely coincided with both DCI George Tenet’s memorandum advising Mr. Berger to let the Saudis take the lead against bin Laden, and what the former DCI has described with the phrase “I made the decision not to go ahead with the plan” to capture bin Laden, an operation that had been a year in the making and was ready to launch. Some doubt must be cast on Mr. Tenet’s assertion that he alone—not the White House—decided to terminate the operation. As related by the 9/11 Commissioners in chapter 4 of their report, Mr. Tenet told his officers that “cabinet-level officials” had turned down the plan. In addition, and at exactly the same moment, former Senator Wyche Fowler (D-Georgia), then the U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia, advised Clinton’s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to let the Saudis take the lead against bin Laden. Naturally, the Saudis did not keep their promise, and nine weeks later al-Qaeda destroyed two U.S. embassies in East Africa—killing 300 and wounding 5,100 Americans and Africans—proving both the sound advice “put not your trust in kings” and that, although the Cold War is over, U.S. governments are still desperately looking for proxies to do their dirty work. I have often wondered if the documents showing the real reason the May 1998 operation to capture bin Laden was cancelled were among the papers that Mr. Berger placed in his garments and ultimately destroyed with scissors, an act that saved Mr. Clinton’s reputation and Mrs. Clinton’s run at the presidency. See Kean and Hamilton,
9/11 Commission Report,
pp. 114–115; George Tenet,
Center of the Storm,
p. 114; “Complete 9/11 Timeline,” http://www.cooperatiivereserach.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_time line&before_911=huntforbinladen; James Risen,
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
(New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 184; and Steve Coll,
Ghost Wars,
pp. 516–518.

10.
The other two investigatory panels—the CIA inspector general’s and the Congress’s Goss-Graham—had access to complete documents, whereas the 9/11 Commission did not. I decided to pass the binder to the commission after a session in which I answered questions for Phillip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director. In the session Mr. Zelikow asked a question about a chance to eliminate bin Laden based on a CIA document he held in his hand. I could not understand the question, and when he showed me the document, the reason was clear. The CIA screeners had redacted the document in a way that made it almost incoherent. Having seen the document, I flipped through the pages in my binder and found the same but unredacted document, and we were able to compare the two and have a more cogent conversation.