Bush
Administration Had Clinton Al-Qaeda Attack Plans Before 9/11
NEW YORK, August 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. President George W. Bush’s aides pondered a plan to attack Al-Qaeda prepared under former president Bill Clinton, but did not act until after the September 11 attacks.
The plan, developed in the last days of the Clinton administration, was passed along to the Bush administration in January 2001 by Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, and Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism, according to the Monday, August 5, issue of Time magazine.
The plan had been approved by heads of intelligence, but Berger and others did not feel it was appropriate to launch a war with just a month to go in the Clinton administration, the magazine reports.
“We would be handing [the Bush administration] a war when they took office on January 20,” the magazine quoted a senior Clinton aide.
“That wasn’t going to happen.”
“If we hadn’t had a transition,” a senior official in the
Clinton administration told the magazine, “probably in late October or early November 2000, we would have had [the plan to go on the offensive] as a presidential directive.”
Instead, incoming National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice would have to make the call, Time said.
“The plan became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials,” according to Time.
Time said Clinton was furious over the lack of information on Osama bin Laden, who had already launched attacks against U.S. targets.
Clinton scribbled on one memo: “We’ve got to do better than this,” and “This is unsatisfactory,” Time reported. Bin Laden is the leader of Al-Qaeda, believed to have launched the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed more than 3,000.
Bush officials, however, denied that it was handed a formal plan by the Clinton administration, Time said.
“This idea that there was somehow a kind of - some sort of full-blown plan for going after Al-Qaeda is just incorrect,” said a senior Bush administration official that did not want to be identified to CNN.
One Bush official said Clarke’s materials were more general in nature, suggesting a “contained rolling back of Al-Qaeda” over a period of three to five years, while Rice told Time through a spokeswoman that she recalled no briefing that Berger attended.
CNN reports the president’s top advisers received the plan August 14, 2001, and approved it September 4, the official said. On September 11, the proposal was on Rice’s desk, waiting to go to Bush for his final approval, which the Bush team disclosed months ago.
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