Those who say Clinton didn't try anything and those who say Bush get's
the job done.

Truth is Clinton Adminstration did try to do something but, in a letter
he admitted defeat and failure.

So this Memorandum of my own desk i am posting for you all..

Bush Administration's First Memo
on al-Qaeda .

January 25, 2001 Richard Clarke Memo:
"We urgently need . . . a Principals level
review on the al Qida network."

"A Comprehensive Strategy to Fight Al-Qaeda"?
Rice versus Clinton on January 2001 Clarke Memo

Washington, D.C., September 27, 2006 - In a series of recent public
statements, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has again denied that
the Clinton administration presented the incoming administration of
President George W. Bush with a "comprehensive strategy" against
al-Qaeda.

Rice's denials were prompted by a September 22 Fox News interview with
Bill Clinton in which the former president asserted that he had "left a
comprehensive anti-terror strategy" with the incoming Bush
administration in January 2001.

In a September 25 interview, Rice told the New York Post, "We were not
left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida," adding that, "Nobody
organized this country or the international community to fight the
terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11."

The crux of the issue is a January 25, 2001
A memo on al-Qaeda from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the first terrorism strategy
paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to the debate
over pre-9/11 Bush administration policy on terrorism and figured
prominently in the 9/11 hearings held in 2004. A declassified copy of
the Clarke memo was first posted on the Web by the National Security
Archive in February 2005.

Clarke's memo, described below, "urgently" requested a high-level
National Security Council review on al-Qaeda and included two
attachments: a declassified December 2000 "Strategy for Eliminating the
Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects" and
the September 1998 "Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida," the so-called Delenda
Plan, which remains classified.

Below are excerpts from the recent statements of former President
Clinton and Secretary Rice:


Former President Bill Clinton on Fox News, September 22, 2006:

CLINTON: And I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative
Republicans, who now say I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was too
obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neo-cons thought I was
too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine
months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn’t
do enough said I did too much — same people.

...

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough, sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right.

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some,
including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed
me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror
strategy and the best guy in the country, **** Clarke, who got demoted.

...

CLINTON: What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him.
I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with
people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten
since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops
there trying to kill him.

Now, I’ve never criticized President Bush, and I don’t think this is
useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is
only one-seventh as important as Iraq.

And you ask me about terror and Al Qaida with that sort of dismissive
thing? When all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at
what we did in a comprehensive, systematic way to try to protect the
country against terror.

And you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think you’re so
clever. But I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I
tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it. But I did try. And I
did everything I thought I responsibly could.

The entire military was against sending Special Forces in to Afghanistan
and refueling by helicopter. And no one thought we could do it
otherwise, because we could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that
Al Qaida was responsible while I was president.


Condoleezza Rice Interview with New York Post Editorial Board:

QUESTION: By now I assume you’ve seen Bill Clinton’s performances. How
do you respond to his specific accusation that the eight months before
9/11 the Bush Administration, in his words, didn’t even try to go after
al-Qaida?

SECRETARY RICE: I’d just say read the 9/11 report. We went through this.
We went through this argument. The fact of the matter is I think the
9/11 Commission got it about right. Nobody organized this country or the
international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us
until 9/11. I would be the first to say that because, you know, we
didn’t fight the war on terror in the way that we’re fighting it now. We
just weren’t organized as a country either domestically or as a leader
internationally.

But what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what
the Clinton Administration did in the preceding years. In fact, it is
not true that Richard Clarke was fired. Richard Clarke was the
counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened and he left when he did not
become Deputy Director of Homeland Security some several months later.
We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida. For
instance, big pieces were missing, like an approach to Pakistan that
might work, because without Pakistan you weren’t going to get
Afghanistan. And there were reasons that nobody could think of actually
going in and taking out the Taliban, either the Clinton Administration
or the Bush Administration, because it’s true you couldn’t get basing
rights in Uzbekistan and that was the long pole in the tent.

So I would make the divide September 11, 2001 when the attack on this
country mobilized us to fight the war on terror in a very different way.
But the notion that somehow for eight months the Bush Administration sat
there and didn’t do that is just flatly false. And you know, I think
that the 9/11 Commission understood that.

QUESTION: So you’re saying Bill Clinton is a liar?

SECRETARY RICE: No, I’m just saying that, look, there was a lot of
passion in that interview and I’m not going to – I would just suggest
that you go back and read the 9/11 Commission report on the efforts of
the Bush Administration in the eight months, things like working to get
an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily
important, working to get a strategy that would allow us to get better
cooperation from Pakistan and from the Central Asians, but essentially
continuing the strategy that had been left to us by the Clinton
Administration, including with the same counterterrorism czar who was
Richard Clarke. But I think this is not a very fruitful discussion
because we’ve been through it; the 9/11 Commission has turned over every
rock and we know exactly what they said.


NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES
Eighth Public Hearing
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
Chaired by: Thomas H. Kean

Testimony of Dan Marcus - 9/11 Commission staff member, general counsel:

In December 2000, the CIA developed initiatives -- moving off the Cole
now -- based on the assumption that policy and money were no longer
constraints. The result was the so-called Blue Sky memo, which we
discussed earlier today. This was forwarded to the NSC staff.

As the Clinton administration drew to a close, the NSC counterterrorism
staff developed another strategy paper; the first such comprehensive
effort since the Delenda plan of 1998. The resulting paper, titled "A
Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of Al
Qaida; Status and Prospects," reviewed the threat, the records to date,
incorporated the CIA's new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed
several near-term policy choices. The goal was to roll back Al Qaida
over a period of three to five years, reducing it eventually to a rump
group like others formerly feared but now largely defunct terrorist
organizations in the 1980s. Quote, "Continued anti-Al Qaida operations
at the current level will prevent some attacks, but will not seriously
attrite their ability to plan and conduct attacks," Clarke and his staff
wrote.

…

Asked by Hadley to offer major initiatives, on January 25, 2001 Clarke
forwarded his December 2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998
Delenda plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
Clarke laid out a proposed agenda for urgent action by the new
Administration: Approval of covert assistance to the Northern Alliance;
significantly increase funding; choosing a standard of evidence for
attributing responsibility for the Cole and deciding on a response;
going forward with new Predator missions in the spring and preparation
of an armed version; and more work on terrorist fundraising.

…

Clarke asked on several occasions for early principals meetings on these
issues, and was frustrated that no early meeting was scheduled. No
principals committee meetings on Al Qaida were held until September 4th,
2001. Rice and Hadley said this was because the deputies committee
needed to work through many issues relating to the new policy on Al
Qaida. The principals committee did meet frequently before September
11th on other subjects, Rice told us, including Russia, the Persian Gulf
and the Middle East peace process. Rice and Hadley told us that,
although the Clinton administration had worked very hard on the Al Qaida
program, its policies on Al Qaida, quote, "had run out of gas," and they
therefore set about developing a new presidential directive and a new,
comprehensive policy on terrorism.

Testimony of Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism
coordinator:

TIMOTHY ROEMER, Commission Member: OK. With my 15 minutes, let's move
into the Bush administration.

On January 25th, we've seen a memo that you've written to Dr. Rice
urgently asking for a principals' review of Al Qaida. You include
helping the Northern Alliance, covert aid, significant new '02 budget
authority to help fight Al Qaida and a response to the USS Cole. You
attach to this document both the Delenda Plan of 1998 and a strategy
paper from December 2000.

Do you get a response to this urgent request for a principals meeting on
these? And how does this affect your time frame for dealing with these
important issues?

CLARKE: I did get a response, and the response was that in the Bush
administration I should, and my committee, counterterrorism security
group, should report to the deputies committee, which is a sub-Cabinet
level committee, and not to the principals and that, therefore, it was
inappropriate for me to be asking for a principals' meeting. Instead,
there would be a deputies meeting.

ROEMER: So does this slow the process down to go to the deputies rather
than to the principals or a small group as you had previously done?

CLARKE: It slowed it down enormously, by months. First of all, the
deputies committee didn't meet urgently in January or February. Then
when the deputies committee did meet, it took the issue of Al Qaida as
part of a cluster of policy issues, including nuclear proliferation in
South Asia, democratization in Pakistan, how to treat the various
problems, including narcotics and other problems in Afghanistan, and
launched on a series of deputies meetings extending over several months
to address Al Qaida in the context of all of those inter-related issues.
That process probably ended, I think in July of 2001. So we were ready
for a principals meeting in July. But the principals calendar was full
and then they went on vacation, many of them in August, so we couldn't
meet in August, and therefore the principals met in September.

…

ROEMER: You then wrote a memo on September 4th to Dr. Rice expressing
some of these frustrations several months later, if you say the time
frame is May or June when you decided to resign. A memo comes out that
we have seen on September the 4th. You are blunt in blasting DOD for not
willingly using the force and the power. You blast the CIA for blocking
Predator. You urge policy-makers to imagine a day after hundreds of
Americans lay dead at home or abroad after a terrorist attack and ask
themselves what else they could have done. You write this on September
the 4th, seven days before September 11th.

CLARKE: That's right.

ROEMER: What else could have been done, Mr. Clarke?

CLARKE: Well, all of the things that we recommended in the plan or
strategy -- there's a lot of debate about whether it's a plan or a
strategy or a series of options -- but all of the things we recommended
back in January were those things on the table in September. They were
done. They were done after September 11th. They were all done. I didn't
really understand why they couldn't have been done in February.

…

SLADE GORTON, Commission member: Now, since my yellow light is on, at
this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the
recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda,
based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had
been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any
action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance
missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th,
year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented
9/11?

CLARKE: No.

GORTON: It just would have allowed our response, after 9/11, to be
perhaps a little bit faster?

CLARKE: Well, the response would have begun before 9/11.

GORTON: Yes, but there was no recommendation, on your part or anyone
else's part, that we declare war and attempt to invade Afghanistan prior
to 9/11?

CLARKE: That's right.

…

TIMOTHY J. ROEMER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Having served on the joint
inquiry, the only person of this 9/11 panel to have served on the
inquiry, I can say in open session to some of Mr. Fielding's inquiries
that as the joint inquiry asked for information on the National Security
Council and we requested that the National Security Adviser Dr. Rice
come before the joint inquiry and answer those questions. She refused.
And she didn't come. She didn't come before the 9/11 commission. And
when we asked for some questions to be answered, Mr. Hadley answered
those questions in a written form. So I think part of the answer might
be that we didn't have access to the January 25th memo. We didn't have
access to the September 4th memo. We didn't have access to many of the
documents and the e-mails. We're not only talking about Mr. Clarke being
before the 9/11 commission for more than 15 hours, but I think in
talking to the staff, we have hundreds of documents and e-mails that we
didn't previously have, which hopefully informs us to ask Mr. Clarke and
ask Dr. Rice the tough questions.

GPO Access:DOCID:cr25mr04-92


Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

Also in this August 2002 interview, Clarke noted the Bush
administration, in mid-January of 2001--before the 9/11 attack--decided
to do two things to respond to the threat of terrorism: "One, to
vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all the lethal covert
action finds which we have now made public, to some extent; the second
thing the administration decided to do was to initiate a process to look
at these issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and
get them decided.''

In other words, what Clarke was saying in 2002 to members of the press
was that the Bush administration's response to the war on terror was
much more aggressive than it was under the Clinton years.

Now he is singing an entirely different tune. This is a man who lacks
credibility. He may be an intelligent man, he may be a dedicated public
servant, but clearly he has a grudge of some sort against the Bush
administration. If he was unable to develop a more robust response
during the Clinton years, he would only be able to blame himself. He was
in charge of counterterrorism during those 8 years. How could the Bush
administration be to blame in 8 months for the previous administration's
failure over 8 years to truly declare war on al-Qaida?


Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD):

In Mr. Clarke's case, clear and troubling double standards are being
applied. Last year, when the administration was being criticized for the
President's misleading statement about Niger and uranium, the White
House unexpectedly declassified portions of the National Intelligence
Estimate.

When the administration wants to bolster its public case, there is
little that appears too sensitive to be declassified.

Now, people around the President want to release parts of Mr. Clarke's
earlier testimony in 2002. According to news reports, the CIA is already
working on declassifying that testimony--at the administration's
request.

And last week several documents were declassified literally overnight,
not in an effort to provide information on a pressing policy matter to
the American people, but in an apparent effort to discredit a public
servant who gave 30 years of service to the American Government.

I'll support declassifying Mr. Clarke's testimony before the Joint
Inquiry, but the administration shouldn't be selective. Consistent with
our need to protect sources and methods, we should declassify his entire
testimony. And to make sure that the American people have access to the
full record as they consider this question, we should also declassify
his January 25 memo to Dr. Rice, the September 4, 2001 National Security
Directive dealing with terrorism, Dr. Rice's testimony to the 9-11
Commission, the still-classified 28 pages from the House-Senate inquiry
relating to Saudi Arabia, and a list of the dates and topics of all
National Security .


Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ):

Now, this past Sunday, Clarke said he would support the declassification
of his testimony before the joint intelligence panels if the
administration also declassifies the National Security Adviser's
testimony before the 9/11 Commission and the declassification of the
January 25, 2001, memo that Clarke sent to Rice laying out a terrorism
strategy, a strategy that was not approved until months later.

Madam Speaker, House Democrats really want a full accounting of the
events leading up to the September 11 attacks, including the extent to
which a preoccupation with Iraq affected efforts to deal with the threat
posed by al Qaeda. It is nice to see the White House has finally stopped
stonewalling the commission and now says that it will provide the public
testimony the commission is requesting. But Americans need to be able to
fully evaluate the decisions of government leaders, especially when it
comes to the life and death decisions of war and peace.



NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES
Ninth Public Hearing
Thursday, April 8, 2004
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC
Chaired by: Thomas H. Kean

Testimony of national security advisor Condoleezza Rice:

MR. BOB KERREY, Committee Member: Well, I think it's an unfortunate
figure of speech because I think -- especially after the attack on the
Cole on the 12th of August -- October 2000. It would have been a
swatting a fly. It would not have been -- we did not need to wait to get
a strategic plan. **** Clarke had in his memo on the 20th of January
overt military operations as a -- he turned that memo around in 24
hours, Dr. Clarke. There were a lot of plans in place in the Clinton
administration, military plans in the Clinton administration. In fact,
just since we're in the mood to declassify stuff, he included in his
January 25th memo two appendixes: Appendix A, "Strategy for the
Elimination of the Jihadist Threat of al Qaeda;" Appendix B, "Political-
Military Plan for al Qaeda."

So I just -- why didn't we respond to the Cole? Why didn't we swat that
fly?

MS. RICE: I believe that there is a question of whether or not you
respond in a tactical sense or whether you respond in a strategic sense,
whether or not you decide that you are going to respond to every attack
with minimal use of military force and go after every -- on a kind of
tit-for-tat basis. By the way, in that memo, **** Clarke talks about not
doing this tit for tat, doing this on a time of our choosing.

…

Yes, the Cole had happened. We received, I think, on January 25th the
same assessment or roughly the same assessment of who was responsible
for the Cole that Sandy Berger talked to you about. It was preliminary.
It was not clear. But that was not the reason that we felt that we did
not want to, quote, "respond to the Cole."

We knew that the options that had been employed by the Clinton
administration had been standoff options. The President had -- meaning
missile strikes, or perhaps bombers would have been possible, long-range
bombers, although getting in place the apparatus to use long-range
bombers is even a matter of whether you have basing in the region.

We knew that Osama bin Laden had been, in something that was provided to
me, bragging that he was going to withstand any response, and then he
was going to emerge and come out stronger. We --
…We simply believed that the best approach was to put in place a plan
that was going to eliminate this threat, not respond to it, tit-for-tat.

…

MS. RICE: The fact is that what we were presented on January the 25th
was a set of ideas -- and a paper, most of which was about what the
Clinton administration had done, and something called the Delenda plan,
which had been considered in 1998 and never adopted.

…

We decided to take a different track. We decided to put together a
strategic approach to this that would get the regional powers -- the
problem wasn't that you didn't have a good counterterrorism person. The
problem was you didn't have approach against al Qaeda because you didn't
have an approach against Afghanistan, and you didn't have an approach
against Afghanistan because you didn't have an approach against
Pakistan. And until we could get that right, we didn't have a policy.

…

In the memorandum that **** Clarke sent me on January 25th, he mentions
sleeper cells. There is no mention or recommendation of anything that
needs to be done about them. And the FBI was pursuing them. And usually
when things come to me it's because I'm supposed to do something about
it, and there was no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing
the sleeper cells




Operative Agent: BlackBird Signing out

p.s Don't try to contact me I politically don't exisit

Good sources, whoever you are. I checked all scholarly papers

Scholarly articles for In a September 25 interview, Rice told the New
York Post, "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight
al-Qaida," adding that, "Nobody organized this country or the
international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us
until 9/11."

Breakdown: how America's intelligence failures led to ... - Gertz -
Cited by 11
International Voluntary Services in Vietnam: War and the ... - Rodell -
Cited by 3
Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments ... - Pfiffner -
Cited by 11

great post. people are stepping up to the plate and everyone this is
great. I hope we see more posts here like this last one. And for my 2
cents worth think about the New York posts questions to Dr. Rice when
they knew what Clinton had said yet they did not press her. Why? This
poster knew and showed it clearly. Way to go (do no exist) My hats off
to YOU