Who's tougher on terror?

The tenor of this journalistic prosecution was epitomized by a deceptive account in the Washington Times of a Clinton speech at Georgetown University almost two months after the attack. By cutting and pasting from Clinton's text, the Moonie daily falsely reported that the former President had blamed America for the terrorist attack. "Clinton calls terror a U.S. debt to past," blared the front-page headline on November 8. Yet there was nothing in the speech -- or even in reporter Joseph Curl's misleading story -- to justify that headline. Clinton's speech had made passing references to American slavery and to the brutality of the Crusades against Islam. But the thrust of his speech was that "we have to win the fight we're in." And he went on to say, "I am just a citizen, and as a citizen I support the efforts of President Bush, the national security team, and our allies in fighting the current terrorist threat. I believe we all should."

The Washington Times report was instantly regurgitated on talk radio and right-wing Web sites, which distorted his remarks into an assertion that "America got what it deserved." Among the many mindless parrots was Andrew Sullivan, who then read the text of the Clinton speech and had to grudgingly admit that the Moonie paper's version had been "appallingly slanted." But that was only the beginning of a continuing effort to transform the tragedy of 9/11 into "Clinton's legacy."

Any honest examination of the roots of the September 11 attack would necessarily begin several years before Clinton was elected President -- when the Central Intelligence Agency provided up to a billion dollars in aid to the Afghan mujahideen. Those resources, controlled by the Islamist generals who ran Pakistan's Interservice Intelligence agency, were used to build the militant jihadist movements that later formed the Taliban and al-Qaida. According to Yossef Bodansky, former director of the Congressonal Task Force on Terrorism and author of "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," U.S. taxpayers unwittingly financed the training of Islamist terrorists under Pakistani auspices.

None of that ancient history was of much concern to conservatives who had supported Reagan's Afghan adventure. For them, the history of Islamist terror began with the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center. That was when Clinton supposedly ought to have declared war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, as Sullivan and others insisted, because "the investigation found links to Osama bin Laden."

In fact, however, no clue to the Saudi millionaire's alleged involvement with the WTC bombing emerged until at least three years later. In 1993 U.S. authorities were scarcely aware of bin Laden's existence. Conservative journalists, such as the New Republic's Fred Barnes, were then suggesting that the likeliest perpetrator of the World Trade Center bombing was Iran. Hard evidence linking bin Laden to that attack still remains scanty.

The indictment of Clinton by Sean Hannity, Sullivan and other conservatives relies heavily on a fable about attempts by the government of Sudan to "hand over bin Laden to the United States" in 1996. That story, attested by an American businessman who represents Sudanese interests, is designed to expunge the Khartoum regime's many atrocities against its own people as well as its close relationship with Islamist terror organizations. Authoritative reporting in the Washington Post and in "The Age of Sacred Terror" by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon shows that the Sudanese offered only to "arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody."

Post reporter Barton Gellman detailed the efforts by the Clinton White House and the State Department to induce the Saudis to accept custody of bin Laden, a request that the authorities in Riyadh adamantly refused. There was no offer to hand bin Laden over to the United States before the Sudanese deported him back to Kabul.

The Sudanese have always had their own agenda, by the way, which Clinton's antagonists never mention. They promised to cooperate against terrorism only if the United States ended economic sanctions imposed to punish their genocidal campaign of bombing and enslavement against black Christians. Frequently during those years, Sudanese officials would promise copious intelligence about the Islamist terror network. But after many meetings, neither the FBI nor the CIA believed that Khartoum was providing anything valuable on bin Laden or al-Qaida. In their eagerness to indict Clinton and their inexperience in dealing with matters of foreign intelligence, propagandists like Hannity have served as useful idiots in a disinformation gambit by the Sudanese intelligence service.

The Clinton critics like to dismiss his administration's efforts to stop bin Laden as a couple of missiles fired at an empty tent. Yet there was no lack of zeal in Clinton's hunt for the Saudi terrorist. In 1998 Clinton signed a secret National Security Decision Directive that authorized an intensive, ongoing campaign to destroy al-Qaida and seize or assassinate bin Laden. Several attempts were made on bin Laden's life, aside from the famous cruise missile launches that summer, which conservatives falsely denounced as an attempt to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal.

In 1999, the CIA organized a Pakistani commando unit to enter Afghanistan on a mission to capture or kill bin Laden. That operation was aborted when General Pervez Musharraf seized the Pakistani government from Nawaz Sharif, the more cooperative civilian Prime Minister. A year later, bin Laden was reportedly almost killed in a rocket-grenade attack on his convoy. Unfortunately, the missiles hit the wrong truck.

Simultaneously, the White House tried to persuade or coerce the Taliban regime into expelling bin Laden from Afghanistan. Clinton signed an executive order freezing $254 million in Taliban assets in the United States, while the State Department kept the Taliban internationally isolated. But there was nothing the United States could have done, short of full-scale military action, to separate al-Qaida from the Taliban. And there was also no guarantee that such action would lead to the apprehension of bin Laden, as the Bush administration discovered when American forces helped to overthrow the Taliban after September 11.

On Clinton's watch, the CIA and the National Security Council instituted a special al-Qaida unit that thwarted several deadly conspiracies, including a scheme to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on Millennium Eve, and plots to bomb the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels in New York City as well as the United Nations building. Timely American intelligence also prevented a deadly assault on the Israeli embassy in Washington. Meanwhile, the State Department and the CIA neutralized dozens of terrorist cells overseas through quiet prosecutions, extraditions, and executions undertaken by allies from Albania to the Philippines.

A month before Clinton left office -- and nine months before the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- the nation's most experienced diplomats in counterterrorism praised those efforts. "Overall, I give them very high marks," said Robert Oakley, former Ambassador for Counterterrorism in the Reagan State Department. "The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama, which has made him stronger." Paul Bremer, who had served in the same post under Reagan and later was chosen by congressional leaders to chair the National Commission on Terrorism, disagreed slightly with his colleague. Bremer told the Washington Post he believed that the Clinton administration had "correctly focused on bin Laden." (He has since been chosen to lead the Bush administration team in Iraq.)

Following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the new president sent stringent antiterrorism legislation to Congress as part of his first crime bill. The passage of that legislation many months later was the last time he would enjoy real cooperation against terrorism from congressional conservatives. When he sought to expand those protections in 1995 after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, he was frustrated by a coalition of civil libertarians and antigovernment conservatives, who argued that his "overreaction" posed a threat to constitutional rights. Among that bill's most controversial provisions were new powers to turn away suspect immigrants, swifter deportation procedures, and a new deportation court that could view secret evidence. (During his 2000 campaign, George W. Bush won support from American Muslims by denouncing that provision.)

Thanks to an increasingly obstreperous Republican majority on both sides of the Capitol, law enforcement officials were denied new authority for roving wiretaps and new powers to monitor money laundering. All that would have to wait until after September 11, when the Republicans suddenly reversed position with a vengeance.

Indiana Representative David McIntosh, a leading conservative ideologue in Congress, enunciated the typical partisan reaction to Clinton's counterterror proposals. McIntosh insisted on steering the debate back to a phony White House scandal. "We find it very troubling that you're asking us for additional authority to wiretap innocent Americans," he declared, "when you have failed to explain to the American people why you abuse their civil liberties by having FBI files brought into the White House."

Among the most conspicuous opponents of counterterrorist action was former Senator Phil Gramm, who blocked an administration bill to close loopholes that let terrorist groups launder money through offshore banks. The Texas Republican denounced that legislation, since endorsed by the Bush White House as essential in dismantling al-Qaida, as "totalitarian."

Clinton persevered, even as his adversaries on Capitol Hill prosecuted the right-wing harassment campaign against the White House. While politicians and journalists fanned the scandal frenzy, he and his appointees tried to prepare for the serious threats they anticipated. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, they began a nationwide initiative to improve home front security.

Between 1996 and 2001, federal spending on counterterrorism increased dramatically, to more than $12 billion annually. The FBI's counterterrorism budget rose even more sharply, from $78 million in 1996 to $609 million in 2000, tripling the number of agents assigned to such activities and creating a new Counter-terrorism Center at the Bureau's Washington headquarters.

Whether FBI Director Louis Freeh properly used that gusher of funding is another question. In retrospect, Clinton must be blamed for appointing Freeh, a truly inept administrator. The Republican Freeh, always favored by conservatives in Congress, never concealed his contempt for the president who had appointed him, and after he aligned himself with Clinton's adversaries in Congress and in the media, the President had no real power to remove him. But the degree of the Bureau's deterioration didn't become clear until near the end of Clinton's second term.

Besides strengthening law enforcement, the Clinton administration sponsored a series of sophisticated simulations to improve the response of local, state, and federal officials to possible assaults with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The President himself became obsessed with the potential threat of anthrax and other biological weapons.

Before he left office, the federal Centers for Disease Control issued a $343 million contract to manufacture 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine, as part of a wide-ranging research and development program of defense against biological weapons. Altogether, spending on "domestic preparedness" rose from $42.6 million in 1997 to more than $1.2 billion in 2000. The foresight represented by those appropriations gave Bush an important head start, though the White House press corps will never hear about that from his press secretary.

None of this means that Clinton's record is free of blemish. Could he have done more to reform the intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracy? Did he fail to resolve the ongoing rivalries that fractured the FBI, the CIA, and the other intelligence services? Was he distracted by domestic concerns and scandals, including the Lewinsky affair that he so foolishly and selfishly brought upon himself?

The answer to all those questions is yes. But instead of smearing Clinton, his antagonists might ask themselves what they and their political allies did in the early years of the war against terrorism. Sullivan, for one, would have to scour his own scribblings in vain for any mention of Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida before September 11. He was hardly alone in his obliviousness and obstructionism. With few exceptions, the record of Clinton's critics on this issue compares poorly with that of the man they vilify.

But the campaign undertaken by Hannity, Sullivan, Horowitz, and other conservatives to arraign Clinton for September 11 has a more sinister, explicitly political aim. Their rhetoric is redolent of the old stab-in-the-back theories once used to discredit FDR and JFK. And of course they are attempting to deflect blame from Bush (whose vow to get bin Laden, "dead or alive," has been consigned to the same White House memory hole as the balanced budget).

Does George W. Bush deserve responsibility for the failures that led to September 11? The independent commission that the President so reluctantly approved in late 2002 is likely to provide complex and nuanced answers to that question. Perhaps the commission will explain why members of the bin Laden family were spirited out of the United States on orders from the White House before they could be questioned by the FBI. Perhaps the commission will explore why FBI terror expert John O'Neill, who died in the World Trade Center conflagration, believed that the Bush administration was soft on Saudi cooperation with al-Qaida.

What is clear already from the public record is that the Bush administration received ample warning from Clinton's national security officials -- and from CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover -- that al-Qaida posed the most significant, immediate threat to American security.

Departing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and the National Security Council's counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, who was held over by Bush, gave Condoleezza Rice a series of urgent briefings on terrorism during the presidential transition in January 2001. "You're going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and al-Qaida specifically than any issue," Berger told his successor. Clarke delivered similar emphatic briefings to Vice President Cheney and to Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy. But the supposedly competent national security managers in the new administration, including Rice, Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were too preoccupied with other matters (such as national missile defense) to pay heed to the most serious threat since the end of the Cold War.

The failure of Bush's national security team to recognize the threat of al-Qaida, even after they were clearly warned, will rank among the most serious mistakes ever made by U.S. government officials. They had billed themselves as "the grown-ups," condescending to the Democrats they replaced and asserting that their experience would return steady guidance to American policy. Instead, these veterans of previous Republican administrations fumbled and fooled around with ancillary issues while an elusive new enemy prepared to strike. They weren't prepared. They had no plan. They hadn't seen what was coming. They had ignored the warnings. Their judgment was as deluded as their self-image.

• View blog reactions