Ashcroft blames Clinton

2004-04-14 08:03

Washington - US Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday laid the blame for the September 11 attacks on the Clinton administration as the official inquiry into the al-Qaeda strikes highlighted flaws in FBI action.

Ashcroft hit back after he was also accused of rejecting an Federal Bureau of Investigation request for extra funds the day before Osama bin Laden's followers flew hijacked airliners into New York and Washington in 2001.

The head of the Department of Justice faced intense questioning from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

President George W Bush's administration has come under intense scrutiny over its counter-terrorism strategy in the months before the attacks which left nearly three thousand dead.

But the attorney general said the fault lay with the administration of President Bill Clinton that left office in January 2001.

Blind to enemies

"The simple fact of September 11 is this, we did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to its enemies," Ashcroft told the commission.

"The old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail," he said.

Ashcroft claimed that when he carried out a review in February 2001, he found there was no order for US agents to kill bin Laden, despite previous attacks carried out by al Qaeda on American targets.

"My thorough review revealed no covert action programme to kill bin Laden," he said.

He said that even the order to capture bin Laden "was crippled by a snarled web of requirements, restrictions and regulations that prevented decisive action by our men and women in the field."

"Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden's training camps they would have needed a battery of attorneys to approve the capture."

Clinton ordered a Cruise missile strike against suspected bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan in 1998.

And Clinton's national security advisor Samuel Berger told the panel last month: "I assure you, they were not delivering an arrest warrant. The intent was to kill bin Laden."

Kill or capture

Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, also told the commission on Tuesday that the administration's intention was to "kill or capture" bin Laden.

Ashcroft also shrugged off accusations made in a preliminary report by the commission that he had not made a priority of fighting terrorism.

"These are things about which I care deeply," Ashcroft told the commission, saying he was focused on the threat right up September 11.

He said he told a Senate committee in the summer of 2001 "that my number one priority was the attack against terror - that we would protect Americans against terror."

Spurned warnings

However former acting FBI director Thomas Pickard told the panel Ashcroft spurned his warnings about a possible al-Qaeda attack in the months before the attacks.

The preliminary report quoted Pickard as saying that after two briefings highlighting the al-Qaeda danger, "the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information anymore."

Ashcroft also came under fire for an decision to reject an increase in the FBI's counter-terrorism budget, which was made one day before the al-Qaeda plot was carried out.

The commission was highly critical of the FBI, saying it was ill-prepared to pre-empt the al-Qaeda attacks.

"The FBI doesn't work very well. It hasn't worked well for a long, long time," panel chairman, Thomas Kean, told the hearing.

"We can't afford that in this country," said Kean. "We can't afford to have an FBI that doesn't work." Limited intelligence

The commission report said the FBI had "limited intelligence collection and strategic analysis capabilities, a limited capacity to share information both internally and externally, insufficient training, an overly complex legal regime and inadequate resources."

Current FBI director Robert Mueller is to testify on Wednesday on improvements made by the bureau to fix the systemic problems. Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet will also be among the witnesses.

On Tuesday, Louis Freeh, who led the FBI from 1993 to 2001, cautioned the panel against making a harsh judgement too quickly.

"We had a very effective programme given the resources that we had," he said.

Freeh reaffirmed the evidence of other officials who said the United States was not on "a war footing" against bin Laden.

War footing

"A war footing means we seal borders. A war footing means we detain people that we're suspicious of," Freeh said.

"We were using grand jury subpoenas and arrest warrants to fight an enemy that was using missiles and suicide boats to attack our warships."

The Bush administration has spent weeks fending off accusations by former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke that the president did not pay enough attention to the al-Qaeda threat after he took office.

Bush told a press conference late on Tuesday that US intelligence agencies have changes to make to counter a repeat of the September 11 attacks.

"Our government has changed since the 9/11 attacks. We're better equipped to respond, Bush told a White House press conference. "We're better at sharing intelligence. But we've still got a lot of work to do.

- AFP