I remember hearing the warnings in December 1999 about the imminent possibility of millennial terrorist attacks on American soil. And I remember, as most Americans who think back probably would, giving the warnings about eight seconds' thought.
Fortunately for all of us, I wasn't one of the people being paid to think about such things. And, fortunately, the people who were being paid to think about such things were thinking about them pretty obsessively. It's interesting today to read back over the coverage that December of the arrest of Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian national who was arrested by U.S. border guards as he tried to enter Washington state from Canada with a trunkful of explosives.
The press took the matter seriously -- The New York Times ran more than two dozen stories in December about Ressam's arrest and the potential for attacks. And so did the Clinton administration. As Richard Clarke tells the tale in Against All Enemies, Ressam's arrest was a pivotal moment in the administration's successful thwarting of at least one and possibly several planned terrorist attacks for New Year's Eve. The State Department issued two separate warnings.
Jordan arrested 13 men who might have been involved in planning potential attacks. And most of all, as we know from Clarke, once the warnings from intelligence sources became more frequent and more ominous, the administration's highest-level Cabinet and counter-terrorism officials met on a daily basis, which meant that every day, they had to show up in front of Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, and report on what new steps they'd taken in the past 24 hours.
All of which is to say: The government acted. The scope of what it prevented, we may not know for a long time, until the day that related documents are leaked or declassified. It must have been painful to Clinton at the time as it would have been to any pol, knowing that his administration had quite possibly averted a national tragedy but aware that he couldn't brag about it for security reasons. But all those who spent years whining about how Clinton put p.r. ahead of substance should note that his administration did its job.
December 1999 is starkly relevant as Condoleezza Rice gets set to testify to the 9-11 panel this week. Because the central question she needs to be asked is this: When the Bush administration started hearing more intelligence noises in June and July of 2001, why didn't it -- and Rice specifically, since this was her bailiwick -- convene the same kind of daily meetings the Clinton administration had when it heard similar noise? The obvious answer, whatever she chooses to say Thursday, is that it wasn't a high priority and that facts could not make it so. And a model existed, then not even two years old, for how to avert catastrophe.
A quick data-retrieval search helps prove the point. Clarke and others have asserted that the administration was far more consumed with missile defense than with counter-terrorism. Type in "Condoleezza Rice" and "missile defense," and you'll find 56 citations in The New York Times for stories containing those two phrases between January 20 and September 11 of 2001. Do the same for "Condoleezza Rice" and "terrorism" and you'll turn up 14 Times citations. Seven of those are about the Israelis and the Palestinians, a couple others about India and Pakistan, and one about Moammar Qadafi. Since newspapers (especially the newspaper of record) tend to write about what a sitting administration is talking about, this is pretty fair indication of where the Bush administration ranked al-Qaeda as a priority.
Then there are Rice's own inconsistencies in her public statements, the transcripts of which are a gold mine of contradiction and pettifoggery. Did Clarke give the administration a counter-terrorism plan in January or not? One Condi says yes, the other says no. Did that plan include military options? Again, yes and no. Was the plan the administration finally drafted substantially different from what Clarke recommended, or about the same? On all these questions, Rice has contradicted either herself or explanations given by other administration officials. Whether Rice is asked to explain these inconsistencies, and to account for why the administration didn't kick into gear as their Clinton predecessors had done, will depend largely on 9-11 commission members Tim Roemer and Richard Ben-Veniste, who thus far have been the toughest Democratic questioners. Rice is usually a cool cucumber, and such are the ways of Washington that she'll probably receive more deference than she deserves.
The very definition of the commission's mandate is at issue here. Bush people always signal through their rhetoric that the commission's job is to see what we can do to make sure such attacks don't happen again. That should be the main thrust. But if the people we voted into -- I mean, if the people who held office at the time of the attacks were uniquely negligent, I'd think most Americans would want to know that in a big way.
Meanwhile, remember two words: Sibel Edmonds. On March 30, Salon's excellent Eric Boehlert interviewed this former FBI translator, who told him that she had told the 9-11 commission in closed testimony that clear warnings were received throughout the spring and summer of 2001 (Bush's watch, not Clinton's) that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted. Her name has not yet crept its way into the major American newspapers (with the interesting exception of The Washington Times). But there are many mentions in the international press, so the Washington bureaus should wake up eventually.
If Edmonds's testimony is credible -- and Republican Senator Charles Grassley has described her with exactly that word -- it's one more piece of a puzzle that Richard Clarke began to solve for us two weeks ago. Somehow, his story just keeps being corroborated. Funny thing.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
