Washington — Americans may be slipping back into the ''dangerous delusion'' that the threat of another massive terrorist attack has ebbed -- the same complacency that existed before Sept. 11, 2001, former U.S. defence secretary William Cohen warned yesterday as he was grilled by a blue-ribbon panel investigating what went wrong before those attacks.
In a day of dramatic testimony from high-level officials from the past two White House administrations, a pattern with a terrible conundrum emerged: successive governments that knew of a mounting threat but felt constrained against pre-emptive action.
"We have failed to fully comprehend the gathering storm," said Mr. Cohen, a Republican who served under former president Bill Clinton. "Even now, after Sept. 11, I think it's far from clear that our society truly understands the gravity of a threat that we face or is yet willing to do what I believe is going to be necessary to counter it."
While the 10-member panel held the first of two days of open hearings, officials released a preliminary report finding that even after repeated al-Qaeda attacks, top government officials hesitated to strike at Osama bin Laden because it feared failure would only enhance the terrorist leader's reputation and cause innocent deaths. And before Sept. 11, it said, there was no willingness in the U.S. Congress or among the public to support large-scale strikes against al-Qaeda.
At a cabinet meeting yesterday, President George W. Bush defended his administration's record. "Had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted," he told reporters.
Today's hearings will include testimony from former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who served in both administrations. His newly published book alleges that Mr. Bush's administration ignored al-Qaeda after taking office and focused on Iraq instead.
But there were earlier examples of what critics have called failure to act adequately -- for instance, there was no response to the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, an attack that happened near the end of Mr. Clinton's watch.
And although Mr. Bush's incoming administration was warned that al-Qaeda posed a grave threat to the United States, it spent nearly eight months hammering out a new three-year plan on Afghanistan that focused mostly on applying diplomatic pressure to the Taliban regime -- military action was considered only as a distant option. The policy was finally completed in the days before Sept. 11, 2001.
The failure to act more aggressively and earlier has clearly perplexed some of the 10-member commission, which is formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. It has already spent months investigating alleged intelligence lapses, policy delays, and military inaction.
"One of the problems I have with this whole thing is that we were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by the same people that attacked the Cole on Oct. 12, 2000; by the same people who attempted to attack the [destroyer USS] Sullivan a few months earlier; by the same people who were responsible for multiple millennium attacks in 1999, by the same people who attacked our [African] embassies on Aug. 7, 1998, and now, as we understand it, by the same people who have had previous attacks back to the 1990s," said former senator Bob Kerrey, the panel's most aggressive questioner yesterday.
Military strikes were prepared at least three times in the late 1990s following intelligence intercepts that seemed to have located Mr. bin Laden. Each time, they were called off due to fears of civilian deaths or because the al-Qaeda leader moved. As the panel sifts through the might-have-beens and prepares to issue its final report, it was also told that al-Qaeda remains capable of striking at will.
"The fact is, a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using . . . any technique, and we can't defend everywhere at every moment against every technique. And we could have a terrorist attack anywhere in the world tomorrow," Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.
Mr. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell both told the panel that even if Mr. bin Laden had been killed in early 2001, it might not have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks. "The sleeper cells that flew the aircraft into the World Trade towers and the Pentagon were already in the United States," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
