OBL and Drones

Frenzy should start sometime between now and 0900 tomorrow. Lisa Myers (NBC) just did a piece on how drones spotted OBL in October of 2000 and the Clinton Admin did not act. Below is her piece. I find it interesting that just now the obviously leaked video found its way to a reporter's hands who has a history of slanting stories to the right. She plans on doing a 3-parter, so we'll have to see how she handles the other two parts. Following her piece is another that will likely make up at least part of her follow-up.

(I would remind people that Bush still hasn't agreed to terms with the 9-11 Commission while Clinton and Gore will meet with the entire committee with no set time limits.)
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Osama bin Laden: missed opportunities
The CIA had pictures. Why wasn’t the al-Qaida leader captured or killed?
By Lisa Myers
Senior investigative correspondent
NBC News

Updated: 7:01 p.m. ET March 16, 2004As the 9/11 commission investigates what Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush might have done to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, one piece of evidence the commission will examine is a videotape secretly recorded by a CIA plane high above Afghanistan. The tape shows a man believed to Osama bin Laden walking at a known al-Qaida camp.

The question for the 9/11 commission: If the CIA was able to get that close to bin Laden before 9/11, why wasn’t he captured or killed? The videotape has remained secret until now.

Over the next three nights, NBC News will present this incredible spy footage and reveal some of the difficult questions it has raised for the 9/11 commission.

In 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing killed six people.

In 1998, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa killed 224.

Both were the work of al-Qaida and bin Laden, who in 1998 declared holy war on America, making him arguably the most wanted man in the world.

In 1998, President Clinton announced, “We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes.”

NBC News has obtained, exclusively, extraordinary secret video, shot by the U.S. government. It illustrates an enormous opportunity the Clinton administration had to kill or capture bin Laden. Critics call it a missed opportunity.

In the fall of 2000, in Afghanistan, unmanned, unarmed spy planes called Predators flew over known al-Qaida training camps. The pictures that were transmitted live to CIA headquarters show al-Qaida terrorists firing at targets, conducting military drills and then scattering on cue through the desert.

Also, that fall, the Predator captured even more extraordinary pictures — a tall figure in flowing white robes. Many intelligence analysts believed then and now it is bin Laden.

Why does U.S. intelligence believe it was bin Laden? NBC showed the video to William Arkin, a former intelligence officer and now military analyst for NBC. “You see a tall man…. You see him surrounded by or at least protected by a group of guards.”

Bin Laden is 6 foot 5. The man in the video clearly towers over those around him and seems to be treated with great deference.

Another clue: The video was shot at Tarnak Farm, the walled compound where bin Laden is known to live. The layout of the buildings in the Predator video perfectly matches secret U.S. intelligence photos and diagrams of Tarnak Farm obtained by NBC.

“It’s dynamite. It’s putting together all of the pieces, and that doesn’t happen every day.… I guess you could say we’ve done it once, and this is it,” Arkin added.

The tape proves the Clinton administration was aggressively tracking al-Qaida a year before 9/11. But that also raises one enormous question: If the U.S. government had bin Laden and the camps in its sights in real time, why was no action taken against them?

“We were not prepared to take the military action necessary,” said retired Gen. Wayne Downing, who ran counter-terror efforts for the current Bush administration and is now an NBC analyst.

“We should have had strike forces prepared to go in and react to this intelligence, certainly cruise missiles — either air- or sea-launched — very, very accurate, could have gone in and hit those targets,” Downing added.

Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, says the White House required the CIA to attempt to capture bin Laden alive, rather than kill him.

What impact did the wording of the orders have on the CIA’s ability to get bin Laden? “It reduced the odds from, say, a 50 percent chance down to, say, 25 percent chance that we were going to be able to get him,” said Schroen.

A Democratic member of the 9/11 commission says there was a larger issue: The Clinton administration treated bin Laden as a law enforcement problem.

Bob Kerry, a former senator and current 9/11 commission member, said, “The most important thing the Clinton administration could have done would have been for the president, either himself or by going to Congress, asking for a congressional declaration to declare war on al-Qaida, a military-political organization that had declared war on us.”

In reality, getting bin Laden would have been extraordinarily difficult. He was a moving target deep inside Afghanistan. Most military operations would have been high-risk. What’s more, Clinton was weakened by scandal, and there was no political consensus for bold action, especially with an election weeks away.

NBC News contacted the three top Clinton national security officials. None would do an on-camera interview. However, they vigorously defend their record and say they disrupted terrorist cells and made al-Qaida a top national security priority.

“We used military force, we used covert operations, we used all of the tools available to us because we realized what a serious threat this was,” said President Clinton’s former national security adviser James Steinberg.

One Clinton Cabinet official said, looking back, the military should have been more involved, “We did a lot, but we did not see the gathering storm that was out there.”

Wednesday: What more could the Bush administration have done to get bin Laden?
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Tue, June 24, 2003


Officials: Drones spotted Osama

By TED BRIDIS, JOHN SOLOMON - Associated Press


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the U.S. administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months and was still refining a plan to use one armed with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader when Sept. 11 unfolded, current and former U.S. officials say.

The military successfully tested an armed Predator throughout the first half of 2001, and top administration officials discussed such a mission at a White House meeting just one week before the suicide attacks. But they failed to resolve a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators and whether the missiles would be sufficiently lethal, officials told The Associated Press.

The months-long disappearance in 2001 of U.S. Predators from the skies over Afghanistan is discussed in classified sections of Congress' report into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and is expected to be examined by an independent commission appointed by the president and Congress, officials said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days, and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror.

In November 2001, an armed drone helped confirm a high-level al-Qaida meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan, and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the attack.

Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP the extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using an armed Predator to kill bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the information.

These officials said that within days of President George W. Bush taking office in January 2001, his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights to track down bin Laden, citing the successes of late 2000.

The drones were one component of a broader plan that Clarke, a career government employee, had devised in the final days of the Clinton administration to go after al-Qaida after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton officials decided just before Christmas 2000 to forward the plan to the incoming Bush administration rather than implement it during Clinton's final days, the officials said.

Propeller-driven Predators first flew for the military in July 1995 over Bosnia, but early versions couldn't transmit high-quality live video. The Air Force gradually improved camera resolution and first successfully fired a Hellfire missile from a Predator on Feb. 16, 2001.

By summer 2001, the Predator was armed for another test in the Nevada desert that destroyed a mock-up of a home bin Laden was suspected of using in Afghanistan, Clarke told executives in a recent speech at a technology conference.

Some U.S. officials, however, worried that an anti-tank missile with just a 12-kilogram warhead might not be powerful enough to kill everyone inside a building, and the military worked to modify the warhead to be more lethal, officials said.

Cruise missile warheads, by comparison, weigh 450 kilograms, and traditional bombs typically range from 225 to 900 kilograms.

Hellfire missiles were attached to the drone after unarmed Predators flown by the CIA from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan spotted a man that several U.S. intelligence analysts believed was bin Laden, or his trademark Japanese truck, as many as three times in September and October 2000, the officials said.

"They were operating them before the United States military was involved ... and doing a good job," U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said, explaining why CIA operated the armed drones in Afghanistan. "And so rather than changing that, we just left it."

During the fall 2000 sightings, the United States was unable to launch a strike with submarine-based cruise missiles in time to kill bin Laden, officials said.

With powerful winter winds over the mountains affecting the drones' flights, the Predators were taken out of action in Afghanistan after October 2000 and retrofitted with weapons. One was repaired after it crashed on landing, sparking debate whether CIA or the Pentagon would pay the damage. Officials said they planned to put the drones back into the air as early as March 2001 after the winds subsided.

Of 11 successful Predator flights sent across the mountains from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan in September and October 2000, three spotted a person that several U.S. intelligence analysts concluded was bin Laden.

"Different people came to different conclusions. You couldn't see facial characteristics. But there were several who concluded it was bin Laden," one senior U.S. official said, explaining those assessments were based on size, clothing, a beard and human intelligence.

The Predators, however, were not put back in the air before Sept. 11.

Officials said the delay was due in part to arming the Predator with enough lethal force and resolving the debate over which agency was legally and practically best equipped to carry out an attack.

Another official said the CIA was opposed in the interim to running too many unarmed Predator flights for fear that would lead Afghan and al-Qaida leaders to be on the lookout for the drones and to flee sites before bombs or missiles could be launched.

"The agency wanted to keep it under wraps and catch them by surprise once they were armed," the official explained.

That official noted that during one of the unarmed 2000 Predator flights, MiG jets were scrambled by Afghanistan's then-ruling Taliban government and they tried unsuccessfully to shoot down one of the drones. Another time, al-Qaida operatives spotted a drone and pointed to it, officials said.

A former administration official said U.S. officials watched some of the Predator missions live on a television screen inside CIA headquarters, including the one in which Taliban pilots roared past.

After Clarke's briefing in January, the drone plan was discussed again in late April by national security deputies and the test on the mock-up of bin Laden's home was conducted in July. A Bush administration official said Rice was generally supportive of the idea as part of a broader strategy.

At a White House meeting of Bush's national security principles on Sept. 4, 2001, senior officials discussed several ideas, including use of the drones, as they finalized a plan to accelerate efforts to go after al-Qaida amid signs of a growing threat of a domestic attack.

Among those present were Rice, CIA Director George Tenet, soon-to-be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Clarke, then Bush's anti-terrorism chief inside the White House.

Though CIA had operated the unmanned Predators in Afghanistan in 2000, Tenet expressed strong reservation about his agency running the armed drones for an attack mission, suggesting it was the purview of the military, according to officials who witnessed or were briefed about the meeting.

"Generally it was understood (inside CIA) that aircraft firing weapons is the province of the military. This was a discussion about what the appropriate agency was to carry out the mission, but it was not a matter of the technology," said one official familiar with Tenet's comments at the meeting.

Defence officials suggested they be given an objective, kill bin Laden, and be left to make their own decisions about whether to use a drone or other weapons like cruise missiles and B-1 bombers, officials said.

Targeting bin Laden was legally permitted under secret orders and presidential findings that Clinton had signed.

Officials at the Sept. 4 meeting put off recommending the armed drone as a solution. Instead, they finalized a series of other measures to rout al-Qaida from its base in Afghanistan, including re-arming the rebel Northern Alliance.

Those recommendations were being forwarded from Rice to Bush when the Sept. 11 hijackers struck, officials said.

 

On Countdown, Myers said late October.

 

Clinton didn't do enough, Bush did less.