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1) Unprepared for battle By Richard Miniter THE WASHINGTON TIMES Part three of an exclusive four-part series of excerpts. Clinton Administration counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke helped develop a daring covertoperation plan. Helicopters launched from an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean would deposit Special Forces near a bin Laden camp. Hours before dawn, using night-vision scopes, the commandos would surprise bin Laden's guards and kill or capture the arch-terrorist. But the plan had to run a bureaucratic obstacle course. The first hurdle was cleared in the spring of 1998. In the middle of "Monica-gate," Clinton signed a secret memorandum of notification — informally called a "finding" — that explicitly allowed the CIA and other U.S. armed forces to take actions that might lead to bin Laden's death. Before the finding was signed, the military and the CIA were supposed to avoid any action that might, conceivably, result in the death of bin Laden or other targeted persons. Unfortunately, the finding was not a death warrant. Clinton's order did not overturn a long-standing ban on political assassinations. The legal distinction was Clintonesque: Bin Laden could be killed accidentally, but not on purpose. So, a covert team could accidentally shoot bin Laden in the crossfire, but not aim at him. At least inside America's increasingly rule-laden intelligence services, this was seen as a major bureaucratic step forward. Operatives no longer had to avoid actions that might set off a chain of events that might possibly result in bin Laden's death. If bin Laden was killed, the covert team would have little to fear from military or Justice Department lawyers. Ordinarily, if a covert operation turned lethal, a federal criminal investigation could be launched. The next bureaucratic hurdle was bigger: What if bin Laden was taken alive? CIA analysts considered that possibility remote — they believed that bin Laden would "martyr" himself rather than be taken a prisoner. But if bin Laden was captured, the policy was that he would be put on trial. Moving along a parallel track, the FBI and a New York U.S. Attorney had been preparing charges against bin Laden since January 1998. Bin Laden was accused of murdering Americans in Somalia in 1993 and in Riyadh in 1995, among other offenses. The secret charges were formally handed up by a grand jury sometime in the spring of 1998. The indictment was sealed and remained secret for months. But it was in force. Now, by summer 1998, the second hurdle was cleared. The Justice Department had a plan for putting bin Laden on trial. Meanwhile, the U.S. Special Forces Command and CIA planners continued to draft a detailed operations plan. All of the elements were in place for a bold covert operation to take bin Laden, dead or alive. But it was the plan, not bin Laden, that was soon killed. The problem was the CIA, Clarke told the author. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet asked that the plan be extensively revised, touching off another months-long cycle of meetings, drafts, and consultations. Tenet's stated reasons sounded as if he was either repeating or anticipating White House objections. Bin Laden and his band often traveled with their wives and children, raising the risk of unintended civilian deaths. That would be unacceptable to the president. (Of course, bin Laden had no qualms about civilian deaths.) Tenet wanted better safeguards for non-combatants. Yet another concern came from the Pentagon: U.S. military casualties. Once a firefight began, it would be very difficult to extract wounded or trapped soldiers. If the mission went sour, dozens of Americans would be dead and bin Laden might escape. The military wanted a war without casualties or risks. The planners went back to the drawing board. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry H. Shelton, opposed a small Special Forces operation. Rather than oppose the operation directly, the general fell back on a favorite

SOCOM Creates New Hub Far Fighting War an Terror by Harold Kennedy

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"You hunted Scuds, pinpointed high-value targets, secured oil fields, established landing strips in the desert... When we were unable to get our forces into Iraq from the nordi, special operations forces mobilized the Kurdish Peshmerga ... and helped unravel die northern front with amazing speed," Rumsfeld said at the change of command ceremony at MacDill in September, when Brown took over SOCOM. In December, special operators participated in Saddam's capture at a remote farm nearTikrit Despite die prominent role pkyed by SOF troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the overall campaigns have been planned and managed, thus far, by die U.S. Central Command, which also is based at MacDill.

Now, the commander of SOCOM, for the first time, will execute specified operations, when directed by die defense secretary to do so, Brown said.- , f Thf new center gives SOCOM die ability to 'planiand run such operations, Brown explained. The center functions much like a joint task force, which the geographic combatant commands have used for years to coordinate their operations. Headed by a major general, "the center reviews global strategies, develops courses of action and makes operational recommendations for force employment through SOCOMs commander to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and die secretary of defense," Brown said. "The center can plan, direct, monitor and assess combat operations

he U.S. Special Operations Command has reorganized its headquarters at MacDill Ak Force Base, Fla., in order to fulfill a new leadership role in the war on terrorism. The core of the reorganization is the Center for Special Operations, explained SOCOMs chief, Army Gen. Bryan D. Brown. The center "is a joint and interagency directorate diat has responsibility for all war on terrorism-related operational issues," Brown told National Defense in an e-mail interview. "We are working toward a structure that allows SOCOM to serve as a standing joint task force headquarters, offering an in-place capability for From Buck Private to Chief of SOCOM r * * "*^ * seamless planning and execution of operations diat span the spectrum of conflict," he said. en. Bryan "Doug" Brown-who became head of the U.S. Special Operations Command in;Sep-tember—joined the Army as a private in 1967. ."Essentially, [the center] serves as SOCOMs Once he completed Airborne School and the Special Forces Qualifications Course, he began his 'war-fighting' hub," Brown said. "Free of administrative functions, die center's sole special operations career as a Green Beret sergeant on a Special Forces A Team. "" After a tour in Vietnam, Brown attended officer candidate school. He was commissioned as a responsibility is for planning, supporting and executing special operations in the second lieutenant and returned to Vietnam as a helicopter pilot war on terrorism." Since then, Brown said, he has commanded at all levels, including three companies, two battalDefense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ions and the US. military's only special operations aviation brigade. He also headed the Joint Special directed SOCOM take the lead in planOperations Command and tfie U.S. Army Special Operations Command. In addition to Vietnam, Brown's combat experience indudes the 1983 invasion of Grenada as a ning and leading future U.S. counter-terror operations, rather dian Gen. Bryan 0. Brown member of the JSOC During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he commanded a battalion of the 160th merely supporting other combatant comSpecial Operations Aviation Regiment mands, as it has in die past. From 1994 to 1996, Brown was assistant division commander (maneuver) of the 1st Infantry DiviSince 2001, special operators have played major sion.—Harold Kennedy roles, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. 16 National Defense February 2004

6. Rice Faults Past Administrations on Terror DAVID E. SANGER New York Times

President Bush's national security adviser said on Thursday that the Clinton and other past administrations had ignored evidence of growing terrorist threats and that despite repeated attacks on American interests, "until Sept. 11, the terrorists faced no sustained, systematic and global response" from the United States. "They became emboldened," the adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said of Al Qaeda, "and the result was more terror and more victims." With these comments, in a speech in New York on Thursday evening to the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, Ms. Rice waded into what has become a central theme of the early days of the 2004 presidential race. In recent weeks, most Democratic candidates have sharpened their arguments, contending that Mr. Bush's with-us-or-against-us approach — an approach embodied in the "National Security Strategy of the United States" that Ms. Rice drafted — has made the United States more vulnerable and alienated allies. While never naming Mr. Clinton or other past presidents, she argued that Mr. Bush had no choice but to take a far more muscular approach to American security, given the world he inherited, one in which she said the biggest threats to America were never taken seriously enough. She spoke more bluntly later Thursday night on "The Charlie Rose Show" on PBS. "It wasn't working with North Korea," she said. "No, it wasn't working with Iran. No, having Iraq for 12 years defy the United Nations on 17 different resolutions — it wasn't working. And we had to confront that." Parts of Ms. Rice's speech could also be read as being critical of the Reagan administration and the administration of the president's father, George H. W. Bush, for not connecting the dots on earlier attacks. "It is pQwunoVg^iahle that the terrorists declarer! war on America and on the civilized world many year^bifore Sept. 11,"2001," she said in remarks delivered to the legal center at the WaldorfAstoria. "The attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988, the World Trade Center in 1993, the attacks on American installations in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000: These and other atrocities were part of a sustained, systematic campaign to spread devastation and chaos. Yet until Sept. 11, the terrorists faced no sustained, systematic and global response." Ms. Rice's comments make no reference to what the Bush administration itself did between Mr. Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001, and the Sept. 11 attacks. In the past she has said that a detailed plan to counter Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups was on her desk, approved, when the attacks occurred. That plan became the basis for thejlecisiojvto drive Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and topple the Taliban?"" '

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But Mr. Bush himself madejittle reference to the threat of Al Qaeda, the need to topple the Taliban or other terrorism-related issues prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. _ Similarly, asked in an interview with The New York Times the week before his inauguration whether Iraq had "bedeviled" his father's administration, he said, referring to Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi ruler: "I wouldn't say it bedeviled the past Bush administration. I think the past Bush administration dealt with it very firmly and left a regime in place that isolated Saddam." Ms. Rice appears to have a slightly different take on history. She said it had been clear for 12 years that Mr. Hussein was killing his own people, setting up torture centers and posing a threat to the Middle East. "Let us be clear," she said. "Saddam was not going to go away of his own accord. For 12 years, he gave every indication that he would never disarm and never comply with the Security Council's just demands. In fact, he mocked those demands and made every effort to circumvent them through a massive program of denial and deception." Her speech to the legal center dwelt at some length on what she views as mistakes of the 1990's, and she was specifically critical of Mr. Clinton's approach to North Korea and to Iran. She argued that Mr. Bush is now succeeding at forcing the countries to roll back their nuclear programs. "The path of least resistance would have been for the United States to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea," she said, failing to add that the State Department had advised that the Bush administration do exactly that. "But this would have simply repeated the failed experience of the past, when North Korea accepted — and then systematically violated — an agreement offered in good faith by the United States." Ms. Rice referred to the 1994 accord that froze, but did not dismantle, North Korea's nuclear program. Democrats note that in the case of both Iran and North Korea, it appears that weapons-making has accelerated in the first two and a half years of the Bush presidency.

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'REVIEW: Showstoppers

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From the January 26,2004 issue: Nine reasons why we never sent our Special Operations Forces after al Qaeda before 9/11. by Richard H. Shultz Jr. 01/26/2004, Volume 009, Issue 19

SINCE 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly declared that the United States is in a new kind of war, one requiring new military forces to hunt down and capture or kill terrorists. In fact, for some years, the Department of Defense has gone to the trouble of selecting and training an array of Special Operations Forces, whose forte is precisely this. One president after another has invested resources to hone lethal "special mission units" for offensive—that is, preemptive~counterterrorism strikes, with the result that these units are the best of their kind in the world. While their activities are highly classified, two of them—the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team 6—have become the stuff of novels and movies. Prior to 9/11, these units were never used even once to hunt down terrorists who had taken American lives. Putting the units to their intended use proved impossible—even after al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. As a result of these and other attacks, operations were planned to capture or kill the ultimate perpetrators, Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, but each time the missions were blocked. A plethora of self-imposed constraints—I call them Showstoppers—kept the counterterrorism units on the shelf. I first began to learn of this in the summer of 2001, after George W. Bush's election brought a changing of the guard to the Department of Defense. Joining the new team as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict was Bob Andrews, an old hand at the black arts of unconventional warfare. During Vietnam, Andrews had served in a top-secret Special Forces outfit codenamed the Studies and Observations Group that had carried out America's largest and most complex covert paramilitary operation in the Cold War. Afterwards, Andrews had joined the CIA, then moved to Congress as a staffer, then to the defense industry. I'd first met him while I was writing a book about the secret war against Hanoi, and we hit it off. He returned to the Pentagon with the new administration, and in June 2001 he called and asked me to be his consultant. I agreed, and subsequently proposed looking into counterterrorism policy. Specifically, I wondered why had we created these superbly trained Special Operations Forces to fight terrorists, but had never used them for their primary mission. What had kept them out of action?

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