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9/11 hearings focus on interagency coord
Posted by Jeff (Guest) jeff@attoz.com - Wednesday, March 24 2004, 13:54:00 (EST)
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9/11 hearings focus on interagency coordination
Berger says he stressed al Qaeda's significance to Rice

Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Posted: 1:42 PM EST (1842 GMT)
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Former National Security Adviser Samuel Berger testifies Wednesday before the 9/11 commission.
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ON CNN TV
Watch now: Live testimony from former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke at the September 11, 2001, attacks commission hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington.
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• Audio Slide Show: Testimony
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA did not believe it had the authority to kill terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden -- even though senior legal advisers in the Clinton administration believed otherwise, the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks said Wednesday.

The commission later heard from Samuel Berger, who was national security advisor to former President Clinton. Berger said he was unaware of any confusion the CIA may have had about what it could do.

The testimony and report highlight a long-standing criticism about national policy coordination before 9/11 -- that interagency rivalries and poor communication impeded the effort to fight terrorism.

"Senior legal advisers in the Clinton administration agreed that, under the law of armed conflict, killing a person who posed an imminent threat to the United States was an act of self-defense, not an assassination," the staff statement on intelligence policy said. "... But if the policy makers believe their intent was clear, every CIA official interviewed on this topic ... told us they heard a different message."

Specifically, the CIA believed they could only kill bin Laden -- who would be alleged to have orchestrated the 9/11 attacks -- in the context of a capture, according to the staff statement.

Other agency differences were on display Wednesday.

Berger told the panel that the FBI believed there was "not a significant al Qaeda presence in the United States" before 9/11 and that the agency believed, "we have it covered."

Berger urged the panel to examine the FBI's role. "I hope you will look at this, I know you will because I think that there was a sclerosis here," he said.

Berger also made a point of stressing his advice to his successor, Condoleezza Rice.

He said he told her that "she'd be spending more time on terrorism and al Qaeda than any other issue."

"I did my best to emphasize the urgency I felt," he said.

"Getting" Osama bin Laden and stopping the al Qaeda network was a "top priority" of the Clinton administration, Berger said.
Ongoing hearings

Wednesday is the second day on which the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, has heard such testimony from key figures in the Bush and Clinton administrations.

On Tuesday, commission members grilled Cabinet secretaries past and present, and faulted both administration for not taking aggressive enough steps to thwart terrorism before 9/11.

Panel member Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat, told Berger his appearance was "asymmetrical" because Rice will not appear publicly before the panel.

Rice and White House officials have said there is a standing policy against top Cabinet officials offering such public testimony.
Tenet testifies

Earlier, CIA Director George Tenet told the commission that both the Clinton and Bush administrations took the threat of terrorism seriously and worked actively to disrupt Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization.

"There was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced," Tenet said.

In a a staff statement on intelligence released Wednesday, the commission said "no agency did more to attack al Qaeda" than the CIA, but said there was an absence of a "robust, offensive, engagement across the entire U.S. government."

Tenet said the CIA, working with other agencies around the world, disrupted a number of terror plots during the alert leading up to January 1, 2000, celebrations.

But he said that the United States was "not systemically protected" against terrorism before the September 11 attacks.

Tenet said antiterror efforts were complicated because of the failure of various intelligence agencies to integrate data.

If intelligence had been shared among various agencies, "we might have had a chance" to prevent the attacks, he said.

However, Tenet said he didn't think U.S. capture or killing of bin Laden would have prevented the attacks because the plot was already in place.

The failure to prevent the attacks was not purely a matter of intelligence sharing, he said.

"We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was, we didn't recruit the right people or technically collect the data, notwithstanding enormous effort to do so," Tenet said.

Tenet told the panel that the CIA began focusing on bin Laden in the early 1990s, even before bin Laden emerged as a leader of Islamic terrorist planning. Tenet said the CIA set up a special unit in 1996 to track bin Laden.

The CIA director testified that the terrorism threat changed fundamentally after bin Laden moved his operation in 1996 to Afghanistan, where he was sheltered by the country's Taliban rulers.

He said that in 1999 -- after bin Laden issued a 1998 fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans -- the CIA began developing a new plan to develop human and technical resources to use against bin Laden.
Clarke to appear

Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief in the Bush White House, is to testify Wednesday afternoon before the commission.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage will follow Clarke's testimony.

Clarke has ignited a firestorm with his assertions that the Bush administration failed to recognize pending terror attacks against the United States and that the president focused too much on Iraq after September 11 -- charges that the White House has vigorously disputed.
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Commission member James R. Thompson reads a copy of Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," on Wednesday in the hearing room.

The release this week of Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," coincided with the public hearings in Washington, adding a new layer of political intrigue to the sessions. The hearings come roughly eight months before the general election. Bush is already lauding his stewardship of the nation's security, while Democrats are questioning it.

At Tuesday's hearing, new light was shed on military strikes that were considered but never executed against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, along with failed diplomatic efforts to thwart terrorism.

Under tough questioning, key figures in the Bush and Clinton administrations testified they did everything they could to protect the United States against terrorism.

That stand was challenged by some commission members, who suggested neither administration was willing to take tough steps until after September 11.



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