9-11 Commission 23.03.2004, New World Order - 9-11

Day One Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearing

Tuesday, March 23, 2004; 5:30 PM

Following is the full transcript of Tuesday’s hearing by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States:

SPEAKERS: Thomas H. Kean, Commission Chairman

Lee H. Hamilton, Commission Vice Chair

Richard Ben-Veniste, Commission Member

Max Cleland, Commission Member

Fred F. Fielding, Commission Member

Jamie S. Gorelick, Commission Member

Slade Gorton, Commission Member

John F. Lehman, Commission Member

Timothy J. Roemer, Commission Member

James R. Thompson, Commission Member

Philip Zelikow, Commission Executive Director

Michael Hurley, Commission Senior Counsel

WITNESSES: Madeleine Albright, Former Secretary of State

Colin Powell, Secretary of State

Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State

William Cohen, Former Secretary of Defense

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense

Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense

Richard Myers, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff General

KEAN: Good morning.

As chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, I hereby convene our eighth public hearing.

This hearing is going to run over the course of two days, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today, and from 8:30 to 5:30 tomorrow.

The focus of this two-day hearing will be the counterterrorism policy of the United States. We will take as our principal focus the period between the embassy bombings of 1998 and the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In particular, this commission will review how our government responded to the increasing threat from Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida.

We’ll also examine the global war on terrorism today and seek from our witnesses perhaps some recommendations now how today we can do things to make America safer.

Over the next two days, we’ll hear from senior officials from both the Clinton and the Bush administrations on the topic of terrorism, bin Laden and Al Qaida.

We will hear from former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright; current secretary of state, Colin Powell; former secretary of defense, William Cohen; current secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld; the director of central intelligence, George Tenet; former national security adviser, Samuel Berger; and former national counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke.

This commission had invited current national security adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice to appear today, but the administration has declined that invitation. We’re disappointed that she’s not going to appear to answer our questions about national policy coordination, but in her place the administration has designated Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

We have had extended private meetings with Dr. Rice. We have received a lot of information from her and she’s been a very cooperative witness in that circumstance.

We reserve the right today to ask each of our witnesses, as well as Dr. Rice, to appear before this commission again and answer further questions.

It is not possible for this hearing to cover everything we’ve learned. We know more than we are able to present to the public today. Yet we believe that we will be able to bring before the American public a significant body today of new information. We’ll present more, of course, in our final report.

Just one additional word: Our hearing today is on policy issues leading up to 9/11, and a number of our witnesses were also involved in the events of that particular day. We’re going to hold a later hearing in June that will address in detail how our government responded to the attacks on that particular day of 9/11.

Our first panel today will examine how the U.S. government used diplomacy as an instrument of national power to try and disrupt the Al Qaida network, and in particular, what it did to persuade the Taliban regime to arrest and to hand over bin Laden and his lieutenants, or at least to expel them from Afghan territory.

As we did in January, we will precede the introduction of panels with staff statements. These statements are informed by the work of the commissioners, as well as staff, and represent the staff’s best effort to reconstruct the factual record.

Judgments and recommendations are for commissioners, and the commission will make those recommendations during the course of our work and, of course, in our final report.

I would now like to recognize Dr. Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director, who will introduce the first staff statement. And he will be followed by Mr. Mike Hurley, who directs the investigations that pertains to the topic of today’s hearing.

Mr. Zelikow?

ZELIKOW: Members of the commission, with your help, your staff has developed initial findings to present to the public on the diplomatic efforts to deal with the danger posed by Islamic extremist terrorism before the September 11th attacks on the United States.

ZELIKOW: We will specifically focus on the efforts to counter the danger posed by the Al Qaida organization and its allies. These findings may help frame some of the issues for this hearing and inform the development of your judgments and recommendations.

This report reflects the results of our work so far. We remain ready to revise our understanding of these topics as our work continues. This staff statement represents the collective effort of a number of members of our staff. Scott Allan, Michael Hurley, Warren Bass, Dan Byman, Thomas Dowling and Len Hawley did much of the investigative work reflected in this statement.

We are grateful to the Department of State for its excellent cooperation in providing the commission with needed documents and in helping to arrange needed interviews both in the United States and in nine foreign countries.

We are also grateful to the foreign governments who have extended their cooperation in making many of their officials available to us as well.

The Executive Office of the President and the Central Intelligence Agency have made a wealth of material available to us that sheds light on the conduct of American diplomacy in this period.

I’d now like to introduce Michael Hurley of our staff, noting that Michael is employed by an agency of the United States government and did three tours in Afghanistan after 9/11. He will now present an abbreviated version of the staff statement, omitting some of the historical background.

Michael?

HURLEY: Counterterrorism and U.S. foreign policy—terrorism is a strategy. As a way to achieve their political goals, some organizations or individuals deliberately try to kill innocent people, noncombatants.

The United States has long regarded such acts as criminal. For more than a generation, international terrorism has also been regarded as a threat to the nation’s security.

In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorists frequently attacked American targets, often as an outgrowth of international conflicts like the Arab-Israeli dispute. The groups involved were frequently linked to states.

After the destruction of Pan-American flight 103 by Libyan agents in 1988, the wave of international terrorism that targeted Americans seemed to subside.

The 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center called attention to a new kind of terrorist danger.

A national intelligence estimate issued in July 1995 concluded that the most likely threat would come from emerging transient terrorist groupings that were more fluid and multinational than the older organizations and state-sponsored surrogates.

This new terrorist phenomenon was made up, according to the NIE, of loose affiliations of Islamic extremists violently angry at the United States. Lacking strong organization, they could still get weapons, money and support from an assortment of governments, factions and individual benefactors.

HURLEY: Growing international support networks were enhancing their ability to operate in any region of the world.

Since the terrorists were understood as loosely affiliated sets of individuals, the basic approach for dealing with them was that of law enforcement. But President Clinton emphasized his concern about the problem as a national security issue in a presidential decision directive, PDD 39, in June 1995, that stated the U.S. policy on counterterrorism. This directive superseded the directive signed by President Reagan in 1986.

President Clinton’s directive declared that the United States, “saw terrorism as a potential threat to national security, as well as a criminal act, and will apply all appropriate means to combat it. In doing so, the U.S. shall pursue vigorously efforts to deter and preempt, apprehend and prosecute, or assist other governments to prosecute individuals who perpetrate or plan to perpetrate such attacks.”

The role of diplomacy was to gain the cooperation of other governments in bringing terrorists to justice. PDD 39 stated, “When terrorists wanted for violation of U.S. law are at large overseas, their return for prosecution shall be a matter of the highest priority and shall be a continuing central issue in bilateral relations with any state that harbors or assists them. If extradition procedures were unavailable or put aside, the United States could seek the local country’s assistance in a rendition, secretly putting the fugitive in a plane back to America or some third country for trial.”

Counterterrorism and foreign policy in practice: four examples from 1995 to 1996.

The staff statements describes the first two examples, Ramzi Yousef in 1995 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed in 1996, in more detail.

Please turn to the middle of page 3 where I will now discuss the third example, Osama bin Laden.

In 1996, he was based in Sudan. Under the influence of the radical Islamist Hassan Al Turabi, Sudan had become a safe haven for violent Islamist extremists.

By 1995, the U.S. government had connected bin Laden to terrorists as an important terrorist financier.

Since 1979, the secretary of state has had the authority to name state sponsors of terrorism, subjecting such countries to significant economic sanctions. Sudan was so designated in 1993.

In February 1996, for security reasons, U.S. diplomats left Khartoum. International pressure further increased as the regime failed to hand over three individuals involved in a 1995 attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on the regime.

Diplomacy had an effect. In exchanges beginning in February 1996, Sudanese officials began approaching U.S. officials asking what they could do to ease the pressure.

During the winter and spring of 1996, Sudan’s defense minister visited Washington and had a series of meetings with representatives of the U.S. government.

To test Sudan’s willingness to cooperate on terrorism, the United States presented eight demands to their Sudanese contact.

HURLEY: The one that concerned bin Laden was a request for intelligence information about bin Laden’s contacts in Sudan.

These contacts with Sudan, which went on for years, have become a source of controversy.

Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel bin Laden to the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer. We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim.

Sudan did offer to expel bin Laden to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him. U.S. officials became aware of these secret discussions certainly by March 1996.

The evidence suggests that the Saudi government wanted bin Laden expelled from Sudan, but would not agree to pardon him. The Saudis did not want bin Laden back in their country at all.

U.S. officials also wanted bin Laden expelled from Sudan. They knew the Sudanese were considering it. The U.S. government did not ask Sudan to render him into U.S. custody.

According to Samuel Berger, who was then the deputy national security adviser, the interagency counterterrorism security group, CSG, chaired by Richard Clarke, had a hypothetical discussion about bringing bin Laden to the United States. In that discussion, a Justice Department representative reportedly said there was no basis for bringing him to the United States since there was no way to hold him here absent an indictment.

Berger adds that in 1996 he was not aware of any intelligence that said bin Laden was responsible for any act against an American citizen. No rendition plan targeting bin Laden, who was still perceived as a terrorist financier, was requested by or presented to senior policy-makers during 1996.

Yet both Berger and Clarke also said the lack of an indictment made no difference. Instead, they said the idea was not worth pursuing because there was no chance that Sudan would ever turn bin Laden over to a hostile country.

“If Sudan had been serious,” Clarke said, “the United States would have worked something out.”

However, the U.S. government did approach other countries hostile to Sudan and bin Laden about whether they would take bin Laden. One was apparently interested. No handover took place.

Under pressure to leave, bin Laden worked with the Sudanese government to procure a safe passage and possibly funding for his departure.

In May 1996, bin Laden and his associates leased an Ariana Airlines jet and traveled to Afghanistan, stopping to refuel in the United Arab Emirates. Approximately two days after his departure, the Sudanese informed the U.S. government that bin Laden had left. It is unclear whether any U.S. officials considered whether or how to intercept bin Laden.

The fourth example, which I’ll paraphrase from the staff statement, is Khobar Towers.

HURLEY: In June 1996, an enormous truck bomb was detonated in the Khobar Towers residential complex for Air Force personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

The Khobar bombing began as a law enforcement case, but Khobar bombing also was an intelligence case.

As we state in the middle of page five, the Khobar case highlights a central policy problem in counterterrorism: the relationship between evidence and action.

Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, emphasized to us, for example, that even if some individual Iranian officials were involved, this was not the same as proving that the Iranian government as a whole should be held responsible for the bombing.

National Security Adviser Berger held a similar view. He stressed the need for a definitive intelligence judgment. “The evidence might be challenged by foreign governments. The evidence might form a basis for going to war. Therefore,” he explained, “the DCI and the director of the FBI must make a definitive judgment based on the professional opinions of their experts.”

In the Khobar case, as in some others, the time lag between terrorist act and any definitive attribution grew to months, then years, as the evidence was compiled.

I’ll now discuss the Afghanistan problem, beginning with the fourth paragraph on page six.

After suffering some disruption from his relocation to Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his colleagues rebuilt.

In August 1996, he issued a public declaration of jihad against American troops in Saudi Arabia. In February 1998, this was expanded into a public call for any Muslim to kill any American, military or civilian, anywhere in the world.

By early 1997, intelligence and law enforcement officials in the U.S. government had finally received reliable information disclosing the existence of Al Qaida as a worldwide terrorist organization. That information elaborated a command-and-control structure headed by bin Laden and various lieutenants, described a network of training camps to process recruits, discussed efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and placed Al Qaida at the center among other groups affiliated with them in its Islamic army.

This information also dramatically modified the picture of inchoate new terrorism presented in the 1995 national intelligence estimate. But the new picture was not widely known. It took still more time before officials outside the circle of terrorism specialists or in foreign governments fully comprehended that the enemy was much larger than an individual criminal, more than just one man, OBL, and his associates.

For example, in 1996, Congress passed a law that authorized the secretary of state to designate foreign terrorist organizations that threaten the national security of the United States, a designation that triggers economic, immigration and criminal consequences.

HURLEY: Al Qaida was not designated by the secretary of state until the fall of 1999.

While Afghanistan became a sanctuary for Al Qaida, the State Department’s interest in Afghanistan remained limited. Initially, after Taliban’s rise, some state diplomats were—as one official said to us—willing to give the Taliban a chance because it might be able to bring stability to Afghanistan.

A secondary consideration was that stability would allow an oil pipeline to be built through the country; a project to be managed by the Union Oil Company of California, or UNOCAL.

During 1997 working-level state officials asked for permission to visit and investigate militant camps in Afghanistan. The Taliban stalled, then refused.

In November 1997, Secretary Albright described Taliban human rights violations and treatment of women as “despicable.”

A Taliban delegation visited Washington in December. U.S. officials pressed them on the treatment of women, negotiating an end to the civil war, and narcotics trafficking. Bin Laden was barely mentioned.

U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson led a delegation to South Asia and Afghanistan in April 1998. No U.S. official of this rank had been to Kabul in decades. Ambassador Richardson used the opening to support U.N. negotiations on the civil war.

In light of bin Laden’s new public fatwa against Americans in February, Ambassador Richardson asked the Taliban to turn bin Laden over to the United States. They answered that they did not control bin Laden, and that, in any case, he was not a threat to the United States.

The Taliban won few friends. Only three countries recognized it as the government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Saudi effort and its aftermath: As we say on the middle of page eight, Saudi Arabia was a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. Yet the ruling monarchy also knew bin Laden was an enemy.

Bin Laden had not set foot in Saudi Arabia since 1991, when he escaped a form of house arrest and made his way to Sudan. Bin Laden had fiercely denounced the rulers of Saudi Arabia publicly in his August 1996 fatwa, but the Saudis were content to leave him in Afghanistan so long as they were assured he was not making any trouble for them there.

Events soon drew Saudi attention back to bin Laden. In the spring of 1998, the Saudi government successfully disrupted a major bin Laden-organized effort to launch attacks on U.S. forces in the kingdom using a variety of man-portable missiles. Scores of individuals were arrested.

HURLEY: The Saudi government did not publicize what had happened, but U.S. officials learned of it. Seizing this opportunity, DCI Tenet urged the Saudis to help deal with bin Laden.

President Clinton, in May, designated Tenet as his representative to work with the Saudis on terrorism. Director Tenet visited Riyadh a few days later, then returned to Saudi Arabia in June.

Crown Prince Abdullah agreed to make an all-out secret effort to persuade the Taliban to expel bin Laden for eventual delivery to the United States or another country. Riyadh’s emissary would be the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal. Director Tenet said it was imperative now to get an indictment against bin Laden.

A sealed indictment against bin Laden was issued by a New York grand jury a few days later: the product of a lengthy investigation.

Director Tenet also recommended that on action be taken on other U.S. options such as a covert action plan.

Vice President Gore thanked the Saudis for their efforts.

Prince Turki followed up in meetings during the summer with Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders. Employing a mixture of possible bribes and threats, he received a commitment that bin Laden would be handed over.

After the embassy bombings in August, Vice President Gore called Riyadh again to underscore the urgency of bringing the Saudi ultimatum to a final conclusion.

In September 1998, Prince Turki, joined by Pakistan’s intelligence chief, had a climactic meeting with Mullah Omar in Kandahar. Omar reneged on his promise to expel bin Laden. When Turki angrily confronted him, Omar lost his temper and denounced the Saudi government. The Saudis and Pakistanis walked out. The Saudi government then cut off any further official assistance to the Taliban regime, recalled its diplomats from Kandahar, and expelled Taliban representatives from the kingdom. The Saudis suspended relations without a final break.

The Pakistanis did not suspend relations with the Taliban.

Both governments judged that Iran was already on the verge of going to war against the Taliban. The Saudis and Pakistanis feared that a further break might encourage Iran to attack. They also wanted to leave open room for rebuilding ties if more moderate voices among the Taliban gained control.

Crown Prince Abdullah visited Washington later in September. In meetings with the president and vice president, he briefed them on these developments. The United States had information that corroborated his account. Officials thanked the prince for his efforts, wondering what else could be done.

HURLEY: The United States acted too. In every available channel, U.S. officials, led by State’s aggressive counterterrorism coordinator, Michael Sheehan, warned the Taliban of dire consequences if bin Laden was not expelled. Moreover, if there was any further attack, he and others warned, the Taliban would be held directly accountable, including the possibility of a military a...

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9-11 Commission 23.03.2004, New World Order - 9-11

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