US: President Bill Clinton's former national security adviser, Mr Sandy Berger, said yesterday he had conveyed to his successor, Dr Condoleezza Rice, the sense of urgency he felt over the threat from al-Qaeda.
It was the number one issue, he said he told her, in handing over to the incoming Bush administration in January 2001, and one to which she would be devoting most of her time.
Mr Berger was testifying on the second day of hearings on Capitol Hill by the independent commission investigating events leading up to the 9/11 attacks. The hearings have produced unprecedented insights into US anti-terrorism decision-making in recent years, and have mainly focused on what Bush administration officials did and did not do in the nearly eight months they were in office before September 2001.
Mr Berger said he warned Dr Rice three times about the gravity of the threat. At another slide-show briefing by Mr Clarke on the al-Qaeda threat, for Dr Rice and others, he dropped by to say, "I'm here simply to underscore how important I think this is."
Mr Berger's evidence comes against the background of an allegation by former counter-terrorism adviser Mr Richard Clarke that the incoming administration did not take the warnings seriously enough. Dr Rice, who has refused to testify under oath to the commission, citing presidential privilege, has insisted that urgent attention was paid from the start to the al-Qaeda threat and she was "flabbergasted" by the implication to the contrary.
Mr Clarke testified later yesterday that he submitted a plan to deal with al-Qaeda to Ms Rice in February 2001 but it was not until early September that a new policy was formulated at cabinet level. In further embarrassment for the administration, the commission noted in a staff brief that on September 10th, 2001, Attorney General Mr John Ashcroft axed $58 million from the FBI's counter-terrorism budget.
Commission member Bob Kerrey asked Mr Berger and CIA director Mr George Tenet, who also testified yesterday, why military action was not taken against al-Qaeda after the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, which killed 17 American sailors. "Dr Rice after eight months came up with a three-part plan and the first part was to continue diplomacy," he noted sarcastically.
Mr Tenet said the CIA could not make a definite judgment that al-Qaeda was responsible until a year after 9/11. Republican committee member John Lehman noted, "It was certainly not the IRA that blew up the Cole," and asked Mr Berger why the outgoing Clinton administration had not authorised immediate retaliation against al-Qaeda. Mr Berger agreed that al-Qaeda involvement was only a "preliminary judgment" and it was not until 2002 that Osama bin Laden was directly implicated.
Mr Clarke said, however, that within two days he and his officials had concluded that most likely al-Qaeda was responsible and he made a recommendation - which was not accepted - to mount a rolling attack on Afghanistan.
Mr Berger and Mr Tenet emphasised, as did other Clinton and Bush aides on Tuesday, that before 9/11 no US president would have been able to get the approval of the American people, Congress or the world to attack Afghanistan. They also needed intelligence on where bin Laden was. "To launch a bunch of missiles to take down a $10 tent would have made bin Laden look stronger," Mr Berger said.
The former national security adviser bluntly challenged CIA claims that the agency lacked the authority to kill bin Laden in the last few years of the Clinton administration. President Clinton gave the CIA "every inch" of authorisation it asked for to assassinate the al-Qaeda leader, Mr Berger said. "If there was any confusion down the ranks, it was never communicated to me nor to the president and if any additional authority had been requested I am convinced it would have been given immediately."
Mr Tenet praised Clinton and Bush administration officials for their attentiveness to counter-terrorism and warned of another attack. "It's coming. They are still going to try and do it," he said.